Short Stories
southward to the beach and stealing a canoe in which to go
home to Port Adams. But the fever got him, and he was cap-
tured and brought back more dead than alive.
A second time he ran away, in the company of two Malaita
boys. They got down the coast twenty miles, and were hidden
in the hut of a Malaita freeman, who dwelt in that village. But
in the dead of night two white men came, who were not afraid
of all the village people and who knocked seven bells out of
the three runaways, tied them like pigs, and tossed them into
the whale-boat. But the man in whose house they had hidden
seven times seven bells must have been knocked out of him
from the way the hair, skin, and teeth flew, and he was dis-
couraged for the rest of his natural life from harboring runa-
way laborers.
For a year Mauki toiled on. Then he was made a house-boy,
and had good food and easy times, with light work in keeping
the house clean and serving the white men with whiskey and
beer at all hours of the day and most hours of the night. He liked
it, but he liked Port Adams more. He had two years longer to
serve, but two years were too long for him in the throes of home-
sickness. He had grown wiser with his year of service, and, be-
ing now a house-boy, he had opportunity. He had the cleaning
of the rifles, and he knew where the key to the store-room was
hung. He planned the escape, and one night ten Malaita boys
and one boy from San Cristoval sneaked from the barracks and
dragged one of the whale-boats down to the beach. It was Mauki
who supplied the key that opened the padlock on the boat, and
it was Mauki who equipped the boat with a dozen Winchesters,
an immense amount of ammunition, a case of dynamite with
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