d, he would
have been in a quandary, for his tambo would not have permitted him to
lay hands on her.

The house deserted, he entered the sleeping room, where the trader lay
in a doze. Mauki first removed the revolvers, then placed the ray fish
mitten on his hand. Bunster's first warning was a stroke of the mitten
that removed the skin the full length of his nose.

"Good fella, eh?" Mauki grinned, between two strokes, one of which swept
the forehead bare and the other of which cleaned off one side of his
face. "Laugh, damn you, laugh."

Mauki did his work throughly, and the kanakas, hiding in their houses,
heard the "big fella noise" that Bunster made and continued to make for
an hour or more.

When Mauki was done, he carried the boat compass and all the rifles and
ammunition down to the cutter, which he proceeded to ballast with cases
of tobacco. It was while engaged in this that a hideous, skinless thing
came out of the house and ran screaming down the beach till it fell in
the sand and mowed and gibbered under the scorching sun. Mauki looked
toward it and hesitated. Then he went over and removed the head, which
he wrapped in a mat and stowed in the stern locker of the cutter.

So soundly did the kanakas sleep through that long hot day that they
did not see the cutter run out through the passage and head south,
close-hauled on the southeast trade. Nor was the cutter ever sighted on
that long tack to the shores of Ysabel, and during the tedious head-beat
from there to Malaita. He landed at Port Adams with a wealth of rifles
and tobacco such as no one man had ever possessed before. But he did
not stop there. He had taken a white man's head, and only the bush could
shelter him. So back he went to the bush villages, where he shot old
Fanfoa and half a dozen of the chief men, and made himself the chief
over all the villages. When his father died, Mauki's brother ruled
in Port Adams, and joined together, salt-water men and bushmen, the
resulting combination was the strongest of the ten score fighting tribes
of Malaita.

More than his fear of the British government was Mauki's fear of the
all-powerful Moongleam Soap Company; and one day a message came up
to him in the bush, reminding him that he owed the Company eight and
one-half years of labor. He sent back a favorable answer, and then
appeared the inevitable white man, the captain of the schooner, the
only white man during Mauki's reign, who ventured the bush and ca