rt and Kingsmill groups. As I drew
near I saw that there were about twenty men seated inside, smoking, card
playing, or making cinnet for fishing lines by twisting up the strands
of coco-nut fibre on their naked thighs. As they heard my footsteps on
the gravel, their conversation dropped a little, but they all gave me
_Tiakapo!_ as usual, invited me to enter and sit down and smoke, and
then went on with either their work or their pastime.

"Now," I thought, as I sat down on the mat brought to me, "I shall
get these fellows to tell me the meaning of all this reticence about the
disposal of Krause's body."

For some minutes I smoked in silence and took the opportunity of looking
at my hosts. They were all either middle-aged or old men, and were all
known to me personally, especially one old bald-headed fellow named
Kaibuka--"The Ship."

In his younger days this Kaibuka had acquired an evil reputation for
being the instigator and leader of cutting-off attacks on whaleships and
trading vessels, and his performances had gained him such _kudos_ and
respect from his savage associates that now in his old age he was the
most influential of the three principal head men of the whole lagoon.
Like all the others present, he wore but the usual _airiri_, or girdle
of grass, round his loins, and his dark reddish-brown body was covered
from head to waist with the scars of wounds received in earlier years.
Each of his ear-lobes, pierced in infancy, had from long years of
continuous distention by means of rolls of pandanus leaf, become so
pendulous that they now hung loosely upon his shoulders in two great
bights of thin flesh as thick as a lead pencil, though one of them had
twisted in it a long stick of tobacco and a spare pipe. He was not,
however, a bad-looking old ruffian, and his shining bald head, still
perfect teeth, and extremely Jewish cast of features gave him quite a
distinctive appearance from the younger men, whose long coarse hair, cut
away across the forehead and hanging loosely down on their shoulders and
backs, made their fierce, savage faces appear as if they looked at you
from a moving frame of black. They certainly were a wild-looking lot,
but their appearance somewhat belied their dispositions--at least as
far as I was personally concerned. We had always got along very well
together both socially and in business, and I was well aware that whilst
they disliked and mistrusted Krause they placed implicit confidence in