here that the bushmen could come down to the sea. The
ketch did a splendid traffic. It signed on twenty recruits the first
day. Even old Fanfoa signed on. And that same day the score of new
recruits chopped off the two white men's head, killed the boat's crew,
and burned the ketch. Thereafter, and for three months, there was
tobacco and trade goods in plenty and to spare in all the bush villages.
Then came the man-of-war that threw shells for miles into the hills,
frightening the people out of their villages and into the deeper bush.
Next the man-of-war sent landing parties ashore. The villages were all
burned, along with the tobacco and trade stuff.

The cocoanuts and bananas were chopped down, the taro gardens uprooted,
and the pigs and chickens killed.

It taught Fanfoa a lesson, but in the meantime he was out of tobacco.
Also, his young men were too frightened to sign on with the recruiting
vessels. That was why Fanfoa ordered his slave, Mauki, to be carried
down and signed on for half a case of tobacco advance, along with
knives, axes, calico, and beads, which he would pay for with his toil
on the plantations. Mauki was sorely frightened when they brought him on
board the schooner. He was a lamb led to the slaughter. White men were
ferocious creatures. They had to be, or else they would not make a
practice of venturing along the Malaita coast and into all harbors, two
on a schooner, when each schooner carried from fifteen to twenty blacks
as boat's crew, and often as high as sixty or seventy black recruits. In
addition to this, there was always the danger of the shore population,
the sudden attack and the cutting off of the schooner and all hands.
Truly, white men must be terrible. Besides, they were possessed of such
devil-devils--rifles that shot very rapidly many times, things of iron
and brass that made the schooners go when there was no wind, and boxes
that talked and laughed just as men talked and laughed.

Ay, and he had heard of one white man whose particular devil-devil was
so powerful that he could take out all his teeth and put them back at
will.

Down into the cabin they took Mauki. On deck, the one white man kept
guard with two revolvers in his belt. In the cabin the other white man
sat with a book before him, in which he inscribed strange marks and
lines. He looked at Mauki as though he had been a pig or a fowl, glanced
under the hollows of his arms, and wrote in the book. Then he held out
the wri