of defenseless people made him sick
at the stummick, it did.

The launch came bumping into shallow water, blowing off clouds of steam
as her crew jumped out with their rifles and waded ashore, while the
Tanumafili boats, dashing up in quick succession, amid a furious and
ever-deepening uproar, discharged in their turn cargo upon cargo of
shrieking warriors. In the indescribable commotion that followed there
seemed to be no prearranged plan nor any settled order of operation. The
Tanus scattered in a dozen noisy parties, looting and burning the
houses, barking the breadfruit trees, shooting the pigs and horses,
devastating with diabolical thoroughness the inland plantations that
sustained the village. The Americans, fearful of ambuscades, stuck to
the shore and systematically destroyed the boats, which for a mile or
two were drawn up on the edge of the beach. These boats, in a country
without roads, are as much a necessity to a man as the house which
shelters him. They often represent the hoardings of years, and are not
seldom the result of a stern frugality and self-denial; they constitute,
indeed, the only wealth of Samoa, and in them is invested the united
savings of the whole population. In Oa these boats numbered perhaps a
hundred, or a hundred and twenty in all, which, under the direction of a
red-faced boatswain with a package of dynamite sticks, were one by one
blown to pieces, and the shattered boards drawn into heaps and fired.
That day the whole of Oa went up in smoke and flame. Nothing was spared,
not even the church, nor the school, nor the pastor's house; not a canoe
nor a dugout; not a net, nor a fish trap, nor a float; not a pig, a
horse, nor a chicken. The boundary walls, emerging black and desolate
above the embers of the village, alone survived the universal waste.

Jack's boat, being the nearest, was the first to be singled out; and as
the blue-jackets began to bore it with auger holes in which to place the
dynamite, he walked down to the petty officer and roughly bade him leave
it alone. "Hold on, there!" he said. "That's my boat!"

The boatswain looked him up and down. "You get out of this!" he said.

Jack twitched the auger from one of the seamen and flung it into the
lagoon. Then, seizing a rifle from the heap lying on the ground, he
whirled it round his head like a club and advanced furiously on the
boatswain, who pulled out a six-shooter and leveled it at his head. Even
as he did so, one of t