ingle file, the children who
were carrying the axes falling behind. And then suddenly, and almost
without a sound, thirty or more stalwart savages, led by the young
Kaibuka and his uncle, leapt on the unsuspecting white men, who in a few
seconds were clubbed to death before even they could utter a cry.

"Now for the two on the ship," cried the renegade to young Raibuka; "go,
one of you women, down to the shore, near the ship, and cast a stone
into the water as if at a fish, and the women on board, who are
watching, will kill them as easily as we have killed these."

As he turned, an axe was raised and buried in his brain, and he pitched
head foremost down the bank into the well--dead.

"Let him lie there," said one of the leaders; "throw the others after
him, and wait for two more."

The two poor seamen on board the ship were ruthlessly slaughtered by the
women in a similarly treacherous manner, their bodies brought on
shore, thrown down into the well with those of their shipmates and the
renegade, and the whole depression filled with sand and coral slabs,
till it was level with the surrounding soil.

Whilst this was being done by one lot of savages, another was looting
the vessel of her cargo of trade goods, which was rapidly transferred
in canoes to the mainland. Then, as her capturers feared to set fire to
her, knowing that the blaze would be seen by the natives of Apaian, ten
miles away, they managed to slip her cable, after cutting a large hole
in her side at the water-line. Long before sunset she was still in
sight, drifting on a smooth sea to the westward; then she suddenly
disappeared, and nothing was ever known of her fate, and of the awful
ending of her hapless captain and crew, except what was known by the
perpetrators of the massacre themselves.

Such was Niabon's story of _Te Mata Toto_, and both Lucia and myself
were glad to get away from the immediate vicinity of the tragedy, and
return to our camping place near the boat, where we found both Tematau
and Tepi awaiting us with some fine mullet, which I supplemented later
on by a few plover. In the afternoon, whilst the women slept, the two
men and myself cleaned our firearms, and attended to various matters
on the boat. At sunset the breeze came away freshly from the old
quarter--the south-east--and by dark we were at sea again, heading due
north for Makin, the most northerly of the Gilbert Group, which was
eighty miles distant, and which island I wan