ut saves
his.'

"And again the club swung, and Lauati, my Either, died too, and as he
fell his blood mixed with that of Taulaga.

"And then Uluvao and Manini, placing some little faith in his mocking
words, knelt, and their blood too poured out on the ground, and the
three women and my father lay in a heap together.

"Now I, Felipe, was but a child, and when my mother had gone to kneel
under the club she had placed me under a _fetan_ tree near by. The
chiefs eye fell on me, and a man took me up and carried me to him.

"Then the white man said, 'Hurt not the child, O chief, or I curse thee
before I die, and thou wastest away.'

"So Tuialo spared me.

"Then the chief came to the white man, and the two who held his hands
pulled them well apart, and Tuialo once more swung his blood-dyed club.
It fell, and the white man's head fell upon his breast."

MRS. LIARDET: A SOUTH SEA TRADING EPISODE

Captain Dave Liardet, of the trading schooner _Motutakea_, of Sydney,
was sitting propped up in his bunk smoking his last pipe. His very last.
He knew that, for the Belgian doctor-naturalist, his passenger, had just
said so; and besides, one look at the gaping hole in his right side,
that he had got two days before at La Vandola, in the Admiralties, from
the broad-bladed obsidian native knife, had told him he had made his
last voyage. The knife-blade lay on the cabin table before him, and his
eye rested on it for a moment with a transient gleam of satisfaction as
he remembered how well Tommy, the Tonga boy, who pulled the bow oar, had
sent a Snider bullet through the body of the yellow-skinned buck from
whom the knife-thrust had come. From the blade of obsidian on the table
his eye turned to the portrait of a woman in porcelain that hung just
over the clock. It was a face fair enough to look at, and Liardet, with
a muttered curse of physical agony, leant his body forward to get a
closer view of it, and said, "Poor little woman; it'll be darned rough
on her." Then Russell, the mate, came down.

*****

"Joe," said Liardet, in his practical way, which even the words of the
doctor and the face of the clock before him could not change, "cock your
ears and listen, for I haven't got much time, and you have the ship to
look to. I want you to tell the owners that this affair at La Vandola
wasn't my fault. We was doing fair and square trading when a buck drives
his knife into me for no apparent reason beyond the simple damned fu