Short Stories
they were given nothing but sweet potatoes to eat, and for weeks
at a time it would be nothing but rice. He cut out the cocoanut
from the shells day after day; and for long days and weeks he
fed the fires that smoked the copra, till his eyes got sore and he
was set to felling trees. He was a good axe-man, and later he was
put in the bridge-building gang. Once, he was punished by be-
ing put in the road-building gang. At times he served as boat's
crew in the whale-boats, when they brought in copra from dis-
tant beaches or when the white men went out to dynamite fish.
Among other things he learned b†che-de-mer English,
with which he could talk with all white men, and with all re-
cruits who otherwise would have talked in a thousand differ-
ent dialects. Also, he learned certain things about the white
men, principally that they kept their word. If they told a boy
he was going to receive a stick of tobacco, he got it. If they told
a boy they would knock seven bells out of him if he did a cer-
tain thing, when he did that thing seven bells invariably were
knocked out of him. Mauki did not know what seven bells
were, but they occurred in b†che-de-mer, and he imagined
them to be the blood and teeth that sometimes accompanied
the process of knocking out seven bells. One other thing he
learned: no boy was struck or punished unless he did wrong.
Even when the white men were drunk, as they were frequent-
ly, they never struck unless a rule had been broken.
Mauki did not like the plantation. He hated work, and he
was the son of a chief. Furthermore, it was ten years since he had
been stolen from Port Adams by Fanfoa, and he was homesick.
He was even homesick for the slavery under Fanfoa. So he ran
away. He struck back into the bush, with the idea of working
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