as averted, and the comedy began.

Rifles and spears were dropped or flung aside in a wild scramble for the
protection of the cocoanut palms. Satan multiplied himself. Never had
he been free to tear and rend such a quantity of black flesh before, and
he bit and snapped and rushed the flying legs till the last pair were
above his head. All were treed except Telepasse, who was too old and
fat, and he lay prone and without movement where he had fallen; while
Satan, with too great a heart to worry an enemy that did not move, dashed
frantically from tree to tree, barking and springing at those who clung
on lowest down.

"I fancy you need a lesson or two in inserting fuses," Sheldon remarked
dryly.

Joan's eyes were scornful.

"There was no detonator on it," she said. "Besides, the detonator is not
yet manufactured that will explode that charge. It's only a bottle of
chlorodyne."

She put her fingers into her mouth, and Sheldon winced as he saw her
blow, like a boy, a sharp, imperious whistle--the call she always used
for her sailors, and that always made him wince.

"They're gone up the Balesuna, shooting fish," he explained. "But there
comes Oleson with his boat's-crew. He's an old war-horse when he gets
started. See him banging the boys. They don't pull fast enough for
him."

"And now what's to be done?" she asked. "You've treed your game, but you
can't keep it treed."

"No; but I can teach them a lesson."

Sheldon walked over to the big bell.

"It is all right," he replied to her gesture of protest. "My boys are
practically all bushmen, while these chaps are salt-water men, and
there's no love lost between them. You watch the fun."

He rang a general call, and by the time the two hundred labourers trooped
into the compound Satan was once more penned in the living-room,
complaining to high heaven at his abominable treatment. The plantation
hands were dancing war-dances around the base of every tree and filling
the air with abuse and vituperation of their hereditary enemies. The
skipper of the _Flibberty-Gibbet_ arrived in the thick of it, in the
first throes of oncoming fever, staggering as he walked, and shivering so
severely that he could scarcely hold the rifle he carried. His face was
ghastly blue, his teeth clicked and chattered, and the violent sunshine
through which he walked could not warm him.

"I'll s-s-sit down, and k-k-keep a guard on 'em," he chattered. "D-d-dash
it all, I alway