come down to see
the strange visitors from the ship. The four men sculled the boat
on to the edge of the reef and then rested on their oars as Patteson
swung himself over the side into the cool water. He waded across the
reef between the hosts of savages, and in every hand was a club or
spear or a six-foot wooden bow with an arrow ready to notch in its
bamboo string.

Patteson had come to make friends with them. So he entered a dark
wattled house and sat down to talk. The doorway was filled with
the faces of wondering men. As he looked on them a strange gleam of
longing came into his eyes and a smile of great tenderness softened
the strength of his brown face--the longing and the tenderness of
a shepherd looking for wandering sheep who are lost on the wild
mountains of the world.

Then he rose, left the house, and went back to the boat. The water was
now one seething cauldron of men--walking, splashing, swimming. Some,
as Patteson climbed into his boat, caught hold of the gunwale and
could hardly be made to loosen their hold. The four young fellows in
the boat swung their oars and got her under way, but they had made
barely half a dozen strokes when, without warning, an arrow whizzed
through the air into the boat. A cloud of arrows followed.

Six canoes were now filled with savage Santa Cruzans, who surrounded
the boat and joined in the shooting. Patteson, who was in the stern
between his boys and the bowmen, had not shipped the rudder, so
he held it up, as the boat shot ahead of the canoes, to shield off
arrows.

Turning round to see whither his now rudderless boat was being pulled,
he saw that they were heading for a little bay in the reef, which
would have wrecked their hopes of safety.

"Pull, port oars, pull on steadily," shouted Patteson; and they made
for _The Southern Cross_.

As he called to them he saw Pearce, the young British sailor, lying
between the thwarts with the long shaft of an arrow in his chest, and
a young Norfolk Islander with an arrow under his left eye. The
arrows flew around them in clouds, and suddenly Fisher Young--the
nineteen-year-old Polynesian whom he loved as a son--who was pulling
stroke, gave a faint scream. He was shot through the left wrist.

"Look out, sir! close to you," cried one of his crew. But the arrows
were all around him. All the way to the schooner the canoes skimmed
over the water chasing the boat. The four youths, including the
wounded, pulled on bravely and st