ting stick and Mauki just barely touched it with his hand, in so
doing pledging himself to toil for three years on the plantations of the
Moongleam Soap Company. It was not explained to him that the will of
the ferocious white men would be used to enforce the pledge, and that,
behind all, for the same use, was all the power and all the warships of
Great Britain.

Other blacks there were on board, from unheard-of far places, and when
the white man spoke to them, they tore the long feather from Mauki's
hair, cut that same hair short, and wrapped about his waist a lava-lava
of bright yellow calico.

After many days on the schooner, and after beholding more land and
islands than he had ever dreamed of, he was landed on New Georgia, and
put to work in the field clearing jungle and cutting cane grass. For the
first time he knew what work was. Even as a slave to Fanfoa he had not
worked like this. And he did not like work. It was up at dawn and in at
dark, on two meals a day. And the food was tiresome. For weeks at a time
they were given nothing but sweet potatoes to eat, and for weeks at
a time it would be nothing but rice. He cut out the cocoanut from the
shells day after day; and for long days and weeks he fed the fires
that smoked the copra, till his eyes got sore and he was set to
felling trees. He was a good axe-man, and later he was put in the
bridge-building gang. Once, he was punished by being put in the
road-building gang. At times he served as boat's crew in the whale
boats, when they brought in copra from distant beaches or when the white
men went out to dynamite fish.

Among other things he learned beche-de-mer English, with which he could
talk with all white men, and with all recruits who otherwise would have
talked in a thousand different dialects. Also, he learned certain things
about the white men, principally that they kept their word. If they told
a boy he was going to receive a stick of tobacco, he got it. If they
told a boy they would knock seven bells out of him if he did a certain
thing, when he did that thing, seven bells invariably were knocked out
of him. Mauki did not know what seven bells were, but they occurred
in beche-de-mer, and he imagined them to be the blood and teeth that
sometimes accompanied the process of knocking out seven bells. One other
thing he learned: no boy was struck or punished unless he did wrong.
Even when the white men were drunk, as they were frequently, they never
struck