fast in the fish's mouth.

"It may be," I said remorselessly. "You no fright long ago. You plenty
fright now along that fella trader."

"Yes, plenty fright," he confessed, with an air of dismissing the
subject. For half an hour we pulled up our lines and flung them out in
silence. Then small fish-sharks began to bite, and after losing a hook
apiece, we hauled in and waited for the sharks to go their way.

"I speak you true," Oti broke into speech, "then you savve we fright
now."

I lighted up my pipe and waited, and the story that Oti told me in
atrocious bech-de-mer I here turn into proper English. Otherwise, in
spirit and order of narrative, the tale is as it fell from Oti's lips.

"It was after that that we were very proud. We had fought many times
with the strange white men who live upon the sea, and always we had
beaten them. A few of us were killed, but what was that compared with
the stores of wealth of a thousand thousand kinds that we found on the
ships? And then one day, maybe twenty years ago, or twenty-five, there
came a schooner right through the passage and into the lagoon. It was a
large schooner with three masts. She had five white men and maybe forty
boat's crew, black fellows from New Guinea and New Britain; and she
had come to fish beche-de-mer. She lay at anchor across the lagoon from
here, at Pauloo, and her boats scattered out everywhere, making camps
on the beaches where they cured the beche-de-mer. This made them weak
by dividing them, for those who fished here and those on the schooner at
Pauloo were fifty miles apart, and there were others farther away still.

"Our king and headmen held council, and I was one in the canoe that
paddled all afternoon and all night across the lagoon, bringing word
to the people of Pauloo that in the morning we would attack the fishing
camps at the one time and that it was for them to take the schooner. We
who brought the word were tired with the paddling, but we took part
in the attack. On the schooner were two white men, the skipper and the
second mate, with half a dozen black boys. The skipper with three boys
we caught on shore and killed, but first eight of us the skipper killed
with his two revolvers. We fought close together, you see, at hand
grapples.

"The noise of our fighting told the mate what was happening, and he put
food and water and a sail in the small dingy, which was so small that
it was no more than twelve feet long. We came down upon the