Short Stories
On the way back to New Georgia, the schooner dropped
anchor in Marau Sound, which lies at the southeastern extrem-
ity of Guadalcanar. Mauki swam ashore with handcuffs on his
wrists and got away to the bush. The schooner went on, but
the Moongleam trader ashore offered a thousand sticks, and to
him Mauki was brought by the bushmen with a year and eight
months tacked on to his account. Again, and before the
schooner called in, he got away, this time in a whale-boat ac-
companied by a case of the trader's tobacco. But a northwest
gale wrecked him upon Ugi, where the Christian natives stole
his tobacco and turned him over to the Moongleam trader
who resided there. The tobacco the natives stole meant anoth-
er year for him, and the tale was now eight years and a half.
"We'll send him to Lord Howe," said Mr. Haveby. "Bunster
is there, and we'll let them settle it between them. It will be a
case, imagine, of Mauki getting Bunster, or Bunster getting
Mauki, and good riddance in either event."
If one leaves Meringe Lagoon, on Ysabel, and steers a course
due north, magnetic, at the end of one hundred and fifty miles
he will lift the pounded coral beaches of Lord Howe above the
sea. Lord Howe is a ring of land some one hundred and fifty
miles in circumference, several hundred yards wide at its widest,
and towering in places to a height of ten feet above sea-level. In-
side this ring of sand is a mighty lagoon studded with coral
patches. Lord Howe belongs to the Solomons neither geograph-
ically nor ethnologically. It is an atoll, while the Solomons are
high islands; and its people and language are Polynesian, while
the inhabitants of the Solomons are Melanesian. Lord Howe has
been populated by the westward Polynesian drift which contin-
ues to this day, big outrigger canoes being washed upon its
79