Short Stories
and gibbered under the scorching sun. Mauki looked toward
it and hesitated. Then he went over and removed the head,
which he wrapped in a mat and stowed in the stern-locker of
the cutter.
So soundly did the kanakas sleep through that long hot
day that they did not see the cutter run out through the pas-
sage and head south, close-hauled on the southeast trade. Nor
was the cutter ever sighted on that long tack to the shores of
Ysabel, and during the tedious head-beat from there to Ma-
laita. He landed at Port Adams with a wealth of rifles and to-
bacco such as no one man had ever possessed before. But he
did not stop there. He had taken a white man's head, and only
the bush could shelter him. So back he went to the bush-
villages, where he shot old Fanfoa and half a dozen of the
chief men, and made himself the chief over all the villages.
When his father died, Mauki's brother ruled in Port Adams,
and, joined together, salt-water men and bushmen, the result-
ing combination was the strongest of the ten score fighting
tribes of Malaita.
More than his fear of the British government was Mauki's
fear of the all-powerful Moongleam Soap Company; and one
day a message came up to him in the bush, reminding him that
he owed the Company eight and one-half years of labor. He sent
back a favorable answer, and then appeared the inevitable white
man, the captain of the schooner, the only white man during
Mauki's reign who ventured the bush and came out alive. This
man not only came out, but he brought with him seven hundred
and fifty dollars in gold sovereigns—the money price of eight
years and a half of labor plus the cost price of certain rifles and
cases of tobacco.
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