Short Stories
rifles that shot very rapidly many times, things of iron and
brass that made the schooners go when there was no wind,
and boxes that talked and laughed just as men talked and
laughed. Ay, and he had heard of one white man whose par-
ticular devil-devil was so powerful that he could take out all
his teeth and put them back at will.
Down into the cabin they took Mauki. On deck, the one
white man kept guard with two revolvers in his belt. In the
cabin the other white man sat with a book before him, in
which he inscribed strange marks and lines. He looked at
Mauki as though he had been a pig or a fowl, glanced under
the hollows of his arms, and wrote in the book. Then he held
out the writing stick and Mauki just barely touched it with his
hand, in so doing pledging himself to toil for three years on
the plantations of the Moongleam Soap Company. It was not
explained to him that the will of the ferocious white men
would be used to enforce the pledge, and that, behind all, for
the same use, was all the power and all the warships of Great
Britain.
Other blacks there were on board, from unheard-of far
places, and when the white man spoke to them, they tore the
long feather from Mauki's hair, cut that same hair short, and
wrapped about his waist a lava-lava of bright yellow calico.
After many days on the schooner, and after beholding more
land and islands than he had ever dreamed of, he was landed on
New Georgia, and put to work in the field clearing jungle and
cutting cane grass. For the first time he knew what work was.
Even as a slave to Fanfoa he had not worked like this. And he
did not like work. It was up at dawn and in at dark, on two
meals a day. And the food was tiresome. For weeks at a time
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