Short Stories
getting rid of him, it was the most out-of-the-way place to be
found. That the Company did not get rid of him was due to
the difficulty of finding another man to take his place. He was
a strapping big German, with something wrong in his brain.
Semi-madness would be a charitable statement of his condi-
tion. He was a bully and a coward, and a thrice-bigger savage
than any savage on the island. Being a coward, his brutality
was of the cowardly order. When he first went into the Com-
pany's employ, he was stationed on Savo. When a consump-
tive colonial was sent to take his place, he beat him up with his
fists and sent him off a wreck in the schooner that brought
him.
Mr. Haveby next selected a young Yorkshire giant to re-
lieve Bunster. The Yorkshire man had a reputation as a bruiser
and preferred fighting to eating. But Bunster wouldn't fight.
He was a regular little lamb—for ten days, at the end of which
time the Yorkshire man was prostrated by a combined attack
of dysentery and fever. Then Bunster went for him, among
other things getting him down and jumping on him a score or
so of times. Afraid of what would happen when his victim re-
covered, Bunster fled away in a cutter to Guvutu, where he
signalized himself by beating up a young Englishman already
crippled by a Boer bullet through both hips.
Then it was that Mr. Haveby sent Bunster to Lord Howe, the
falling-off place. He celebrated his landing by mopping up half a
case of gin and by thrashing the elderly and wheezy mate of the
schooner which had brought him. When the schooner departed,
he called the kanakas down to the beach and challenged them to
throw him in a wrestling bout, promising a case of tobacco to the
one who succeeded. Three kanakas he threw, but was promptly
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