hat was worth all
that money.

When the soldiers reached the knife-edged passage, he was prompted to
warn them. But his gaze fell upon the body of the murdered maid, and he
kept silent. When six had ventured on the knife-edge, he opened fire.
Nor did he cease when the knife-edge was bare. He emptied his magazine,
reloaded, and emptied it again. He kept on shooting. All his wrongs
were blazing in his brain, and he was in a fury of vengeance. All down
the goat-trail the soldiers were firing, and though they lay flat and
sought to shelter themselves in the shallow inequalities of the surface,
they were exposed marks to him. Bullets whistled and thudded about him,
and an occasional ricochet sang sharply through the air. One bullet
ploughed a crease through his scalp, and a second burned across his
shoulder-blade without breaking the skin.

It was a massacre, in which one man did the killing. The soldiers began
to retreat, helping along their wounded. As Koolau picked them off he
became aware of the smell of burnt meat. He glanced about him at first,
and then discovered that it was his own hands. The heat of the rifle was
doing it. The leprosy had destroyed most of the nerves in his hands.
Though his flesh burned and he smelled it, there was no sensation.

He lay in the thicket, smiling, until he remembered the war guns. Without
doubt they would open upon him again, and this time upon the very thicket
from which he had inflicted the danger. Scarcely had he changed his
position to a nook behind a small shoulder of the wall where he had noted
that no shells fell, than the bombardment recommenced. He counted the
shells. Sixty more were thrown into the gorge before the war-guns
ceased. The tiny area was pitted with their explosions, until it seemed
impossible that any creature could have survived. So the soldiers
thought, for, under the burning afternoon sun, they climbed the
goat-trail again. And again the knife-edged passage was disputed, and
again they fell back to the beach.

For two days longer Koolau held the passage, though the soldiers
contented themselves with flinging shells into his retreat. Then Pahau,
a leper boy, came to the top of the wall at the back of the gorge and
shouted down to him that Kiloliana, hunting goats that they might eat,
had been killed by a fall, and that the women were frightened and knew
not what to do. Koolau called the boy down and left him with a spare gun
with whic