trails where men must
creep, one by one. I, alone, Koolau, who was once a cowboy on Niihau,
can hold the trail against a thousand men. Here is Kapalei, who was once
a judge over men and a man with honour, but who is now a hunted rat, like
you and me. Hear him. He is wise."

Kapalei arose. Once he had been a judge. He had gone to college at
Punahou. He had sat at meat with lords and chiefs and the high
representatives of alien powers who protected the interests of traders
and missionaries. Such had been Kapalei. But now, as Koolau had said,
he was a hunted rat, a creature outside the law, sunk so deep in the mire
of human horror that he was above the law as well as beneath it. His
face was featureless, save for gaping orifices and for the lidless eyes
that burned under hairless brows.

"Let us not make trouble," he began. "We ask to be left alone. But if
they do not leave us alone, then is the trouble theirs and the penalty.
My fingers are gone, as you see." He held up his stumps of hands that
all might see. "Yet have I the joint of one thumb left, and it can pull
a trigger as firmly as did its lost neighbour in the old days. We love
Kauai. Let us live here, or die here, but do not let us go to the prison
of Molokai. The sickness is not ours. We have not sinned. The men who
preached the word of God and the word of Rum brought the sickness with
the coolie slaves who work the stolen land. I have been a judge. I know
the law and the justice, and I say to you it is unjust to steal a man's
land, to make that man sick with the Chinese sickness, and then to put
that man in prison for life."

"Life is short, and the days are filled with pain," said Koolau. "Let us
drink and dance and be happy as we can."

From one of the rocky lairs calabashes were produced and passed round.
The calabashes were filled with the fierce distillation of the root of
the _ti_-plant; and as the liquid fire coursed through them and mounted
to their brains, they forgot that they had once been men and women, for
they were men and women once more. The woman who wept scalding tears
from open eye-pits was indeed a woman apulse with life as she plucked the
strings of an _ukulele_ and lifted her voice in a barbaric love-call such
as might have come from the dark forest-depths of the primeval world. The
air tingled with her cry, softly imperious and seductive. Upon a mat,
timing his rhythm to the woman's song Kiloliana danced. It w