the
white man's curse. In the night I heard the cries of the Hanavave
and Hanahouua men who had lowered themselves down the precipice and
were using their war-clubs on the sleeping.

"I was one man. I could do nothing but die, and I was full of life.
In the darkness I smashed with a rock all the canoes on the beach
save mine. In my ears were the groans of the dying, and the war-cries.
I saw the torches coming. I put the fish back in my canoe, and
pushed out.

"They were but a moment late, for I have a hole in my head into
which they shot a nail, and I have this crack in my head upon which
they flung a stone. They could not follow me, for there were no
canoes left. I paddled to Oomoa after a day, during which I did what
I have no memory of."

"They had guns?" I asked him.

"They had a few guns, but they used in them nails or stones, having
no balls of metal. Their slings were worse. I could sling a stone as
big as a mango and kill a man, striking him fair on the head, at the
distance those guns would shoot. We made our slings of the bark of
the cocoanut-tree, and the stones, polished by rubbing against each
other, we carried in a net about the waist."

"But if that stone broke your head, why did you not die?"

"A _tatihi_ fixed my head. The nail in my leg he took out with a
loop of hair, and cured the wound."

"Did you not lie in wait for those murderers?"

Tutaiei hemmed and cast down his eye.

"The French came then with soldiers and made it so that if I killed
any one, they killed me; the law, they call it. They did nothing to
those warriors because the deed was done before the French came. I
waited and thought. I bought a gun from a whaler. But the time never
came.

"All my people had died at their hands. Six heads they carried back
to feast on the brains. They ate the brains of my wife. I kept the
names of those that I should kill. There was Kiihakia, who slew
Moariniu, the blind man; Nakahania, who killed Hakaie, husband of
Tepeiu; Niana, who cut off the head of Tahukea, who was their
daughter and my woman; Veatetau should die for Tahiahokaani, who was
young and beautiful, who was the sister of my woman. I waited too
long, for time took them all, and I alone survive of the people of Oi,
or of those who killed them."

"The vendetta between valleys--called _umuhuke_, or the Vengeance of
the Oven,--thus wiped out the people of Oi," commented Pere Olivier.
"The skulls were kept in banian-trees, or in the