unless a rule had been broken.

Mauki did not like the plantation. He hated work, and he was the son
of a chief. Furthermore, it was ten years since he had been stolen from
Port Adams by Fanfoa, and he was homesick. He was even homesick for the
slavery under Fanfoa. So he ran away. He struck back into the bush, with
the idea of working southward to the beach and stealing a canoe in which
to go home to Port Adams.

But the fever got him, and he was captured and brought back more dead
than alive.

A second time he ran away, in the company of two Malaita boys. They got
down the coast twenty miles, and were hidden in the hut of a Malaita
freeman, who dwelt in that village. But in the dead of night two white
men came, who were not afraid of all the village people and who knocked
seven bells out of the three runaways, tied them like pigs, and
tossed them into the whale boat. But the man in whose house they had
hidden--seven times seven bells must have been knocked out of him from
the way the hair, skin, and teeth flew, and he was discouraged for the
rest of his natural life from harboring runaway laborers.

For a year Mauki toiled on. Then he was made a house-boy, and had good
food and easy times, with light work in keeping the house clean and
serving the white men with whiskey and beer at all hours of the day and
most hours of the night. He liked it, but he liked Port Adams more. He
had two years longer to serve, but two years were too long for him in
the throes of homesickness. He had grown wiser with his year of service,
and, being now a house-boy, he had opportunity. He had the cleaning of
the rifles, and he knew where the key to the store room was hung. He
planned to escape, and one night ten Malaita boys and one boy from San
Cristoval sneaked from the barracks and dragged one of the whale boats
down to the beach. It was Mauki who supplied the key that opened the
padlock on the boat, and it was Mauki who equipped the boat with a dozen
Winchesters, an immense amount of ammunition, a case of dynamite with
detonators and fuse, and ten cases of tobacco.

The northwest monsoon was blowing, and they fled south in the night
time, hiding by day on detached and uninhabited islets, or dragging
their whale boat into the bush on the large islands. Thus they gained
Guadalcanar, skirted halfway along it, and crossed the Indispensable
Straits to Florida Island. It was here that they killed the San
Cristoval boy, saving his head a