Short Stories
of ammunition. Now there were no salt-water men living at
Suo, and it was there that the bushmen could come down to
the sea. The ketch did a splendid traffic. It signed on twenty
recruits the first day. Even old Fanfoa signed on. And that
same day the score of new recruits chopped off the two white
men's heads, killed the boat's crew, and burned the ketch.
Thereafter, and for three months, there was tobacco and trade-
goods in plenty and to spare in all the bush-villages. Then
came the man-of-war that threw shells for miles into the hills,
frightening the people out of their villages and into the deeper
bush. Next the man-of-war sent landing parties ashore. The
villages were all burned, along with the tobacco and trade-
stuff. The cocoanuts and bananas were chopped down, the ta-
ro gardens uprooted, and the pigs and chickens killed.
It taught Fanfoa a lesson, but in the meantime he was out of
tobacco. Also, his young men were too frightened to sign on
with the recruiting vessels. That was why Fanfoa ordered his
slave, Mauki, to be carried down and signed on for half a case of
tobacco advance, along with knives, axes, calico, and beads,
which he would pay for with his toil on the plantations. Mauki
was sorely frightened when they brought him on board the
schooner. He was a lamb led to the slaughter. White men were
ferocious creatures. They had to be, or else they would not make
a practice of venturing along the Malaita coast and into all har-
bors, two on a schooner, when each schooner carried from fif-
teen to twenty blacks as boat's crew, and often as high as sixty or
seventy black recruits. In addition to this, there was always the
danger of the shore population, the sudden attack and the
cutting off of the schooner and all hands. Truly, white men must
be terrible. Besides, they were possessed of such devil-devils—
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