hose eyes, shining from a
blue background of tattooing, were signals to make one step aside
did one meet him on the trail. They had madness in them, but they
were a revelation of wickedness.

Some men, without a word or gesture, make you think intently. There
is that in their appearance which starts a train of ideas, of wonder,
of guesses at their past, of horror at what is written upon their
faces. This man's visage was seamed and wrinkled in a network of
lines that said more plainly than words that he was a monster whose
villainies would chill imagination. The brain was a spoiled machine,
but it had been all for evil.

"That man," said Le Brunnec, "is the worst devil in the Marquesas."
Between blows of the axe, the trader told me something of his history:

The madman was Mohuho, whose name means Great Moth of the Night. He
is the chief whom Lying Bill saw shoot three men in Tahuata for
sheer wantonness. He was then chief of Tahuata, and the power in that
island, in Hiva-oa and Fatu-hiva. He slew every one who opposed him.
He was the scourge of the islands. He harried valley after valley
for lust of blood and the terrible pride of the destroyer. It was
his boast that he had killed sixty people by his own hand, otherwise
than in battle.

He was a man of ceaseless energy, a builder of roads, of houses, and
canoes. At Hapatone he had constructed several miles of excellent
road with the enforced labor of every man in the valley for a year.
It is all lined with _temanu_ trees, is almost solid stone, and
endures. Its blocks are cemented with blood, for Great Moth of the
Night drove men to the work with bullets.

His arsenal was stocked by the French, whose ally he was, and to
whom he was very useful in furnishing men for work and in upholding
French supremacy. In Hapatone he was virtually a king, and the fear
of him extended throughout the southern Marquesas.

One day he came as a guest to a feast in Taaoa. There was a blind man,
a poor, harmless fellow, who was eating the pig and _popoi_ and
saying nothing. Great Night Moth had a new gun, which he laid beside
him while he drank plentifully of the _namu enata_, until he became
quite drunk.

At last the blind man, scared by his threats, started to walk away
in the slow, halting way of the sightless, and attracted Great Night
Moth's attention. He picked up his new gun and while all were
petrified with fear of being the target, he shot the blind man so
that his body f