itch of the wall his helplessness overcame him and he fell
back.

"It would be better to kill him," said Koolau to Kapahei, who still sat
in the same place.

"Twenty-two," Kapahei answered. "Yes, it would be a wise thing to kill
him. Twenty-three--twenty-four."

The idiot whined sharply when he saw the rifle levelled at him. Koolau
hesitated, then lowered the gun.

"It is a hard thing to do," he said.

"You are a fool, twenty-six, twenty-seven," said Kapahei. "Let me show
you."

He arose, and with a heavy fragment of rock in his hand, approached the
wounded thing. As he lifted his arm to strike, a shell burst full upon
him, relieving him of the necessity of the act and at the same time
putting an end to his count.

Koolau was alone in the gorge. He watched the last of his people drag
their crippled bodies over the brow of the height and disappear. Then he
turned and went down to the thicket where the maid had keen killed. The
shell-fire still continued, but he remained; for far below he could see
the soldiers climbing up. A shell burst twenty feet away. Flattening
himself into the earth, he heard the rush of the fragments above his
body. A shower of hau blossoms rained upon him. He lifted his head to
peer down the trail, and sighed. He was very much afraid. Bullets from
rifles would not have worried him, but this shell-fire was abominable.
Each time a shell shrieked by he shivered and crouched; but each time he
lifted his head again to watch the trail.

At last the shells ceased. This, he reasoned, was because the soldiers
were drawing near. They crept along the trail in single file, and he
tried to count them until he lost track. At any rate, there were a
hundred or so of them--all come after Koolau the leper. He felt a
fleeting prod of pride. With war guns and rifles, police and soldiers,
they came for him, and he was only one man, a crippled wreck of a man at
that. They offered a thousand dollars for him, dead or alive. In all
his life he had never possessed that much money. The thought was a
bitter one. Kapahei had been right. He, Koolau, had done no wrong.
Because the _haoles_ wanted labour with which to work the stolen land,
they had brought in the Chinese coolies, and with them had come the
sickness. And now, because he had caught the sickness, he was worth a
thousand dollars--but not to himself. It was his worthless carcass,
rotten with disease or dead from a bursting shell, t