ulled for all we were worth just as "Flash Harry" dropped on
one knee and fired.

Poor Te Manu swayed to and fro for a few moments and then cried out, "He
has broken my hand, sir! But go on, pull, pull hard!"

Under a spattering fire from the beachcomber's drunken companions we
pulled out into deeper water and safety, and then, shipping my oar, I
sprang to Te Manu's aid. The bullet had struck him in the back of the
right hand and literally cut off three of the poor fellow's knuckles.
I did what I could to stop the loss of blood, and told him to sit
down, but he refused, and although suffering intense pain, insisted on
steering with his left hand. As soon as we reached the cutter I at
once hove up anchor and stood along the coast before a strong breeze
to Matautu Harbour, where I was able to have the man's hand properly
attended to. He never recovered the use of it again except in a slight
degree.

I never saw "Flash Harry" again, for a few months later I left Samoa
for the Caroline Group, and when I returned a year afterwards I was told
that he had at last found the country too hot for him and had left the
island in a German "blackbirder" bound to the Solomon Islands.

*****

Quite six years had passed, and then I learnt, in a somewhat curious
manner, what became of him. One day in Sydney, New South Wales, three
captains and myself met for lunch at the Paragon Hotel, on Circular
Quay. We were all engaged in the South Sea trade, and one of the
company, who was a stranger to me, had just returned from the Solomon
Islands, with which group and its murderous, cannibal people he was very
familiar. (He was himself destined to be killed there with his ship's
company in 1884.) He was a young man who had had some very narrow
escapes and some very thrilling experiences, some of which he narrated.

We were talking of the massacre of Captain Ferguson and the crew of the
Sydney trading steamer _Ripple_, by the natives of Bougainville Island
in the Solomon Group, when our friend remarked--

"Ah, poor Ferguson ought to have been more careful. Why, the very
chief of that village at Numa Numa--the man who cut him down with a
tomahawk--had killed two other white men. Ferguson knew that, and yet
would allow him to come aboard time after time with hundreds of his
people, and gave him and them the run of his ship. I knew the fellow
well. He told me to my face, the first time I met him, that he had
killed and eaten two white men."