up by the ocean.' This was to please the white man. But it
did not, for Burton, cruel as he was, called Tirauro a coward and felled
him at once. By ill-luck he fell within reach of Ridan, and in another
moment the manacled hands had seized his enemy's throat. For five
minutes the three men struggled together, the white overseer beating
Ridan over the head with the butt of his heavy Colt's pistol, and then
when Burton rose to his feet the two brown men were lying motionless
together; but Tirauro was dead.

Ridan was sick for a long time after this. A heavy flogging always did
make him sick, although he was so big and strong. And so, as he could
not work in the fields, he was sent to Apia to do light labour in the
cotton-mill there. The next morning he was missing. He had swum to
a brig lying at anchor in the harbour and hidden away in the empty
forehold. Then he was discovered and taken ashore to the mill again,
where the foreman gave him 'a dose of Cameroons medicine'--that is,
twenty-five lashes.

'Send him back to the plantation,' said the manager, who was a mere
German civilian, and consequently much despised by his foreman, who had
served in Africa. 'I'm afraid to keep him here, and I'm not going to
punish him if he tries to get away again, poor devil.'

So back he went to Mulifanua. The boat voyage from Apia down the coast
inside the reef is not a long one, but the Samoan crew were frightened
to have such a man free; so they tied him hand and foot and then lashed
him down tightly under the midship thwart with strips of green _fau_
bark. Not that they did so with unnecessary cruelty, but ex-Lieutenant
Schwartzkoff, the foreman, was looking on, and then, besides that,
this big-boned, light-skinned man was a foreigner, and a Samoan hates
a foreigner of his own colour if he is poor and friendless. And then he
was an _aitu_ a devil, and could speak neither Samoan, nor Fijian, nor
Tokelau, nor yet any English or German.

Clearly, therefore, he was not a man at all, but a _manu_--a beast, and
not to be trusted with free limbs. Did not the foreman say that he
was possessed of many devils, and for two years had lived alone on the
plantation, working in the field with the gangs of Tokelau and Solomon
Island men, but speaking to no one, only muttering in a strange tongue
to himself and giving sullen obedience to his taskmasters?

But as they talked and sang, and as the boat sailed along the white line
of beach fringed w