MAUKI
He weighed one hundred and ten pounds. His hair was kinky and negroid,
and he was black. He was peculiarly black. He was neither blue-black
nor purple-black, but plum-black. His name was Mauki, and he was the
son of a chief. He had three tambos. Tambo is Melanesian for taboo,
and is first cousin to that Polynesian word. Mauki's three tambos were
as follows: First, he must never shake hands with a woman, nor have a
woman's hand touch him or any of his personal belongings; secondly, he
must never eat clams nor any food from a fire in which clams had been
cooked; thirdly, he must never touch a crocodile, nor travel in a
canoe that carried any part of a crocodile even if as large as a
tooth.
Of a different black were his teeth, which were deep black, or,
perhaps better, LAMP-black. They had been made so in a single night,
by his mother, who had compressed about them a powdered mineral which
was dug from the landslide back of Port Adams. Port Adams is a
salt-water village on Malaita, and Malaita is the most savage island
in the Solomons--so savage that no traders or planters have yet gained
a foothold on it; while, from the time of the earliest bêche-de-mer
fishers and sandalwood traders down to the latest labor recruiters
equipped with automatic rifles and gasolene engines, scores of white
adventurers have been passed out by tomahawks and soft-nosed Snider
bullets. So Malaita remains today, in the twentieth century, the
stamping ground of the labor recruiters, who farm its coasts for
laborers who engage and contract themselves to toil on the plantations
of the neighboring and more civilized islands for a wage of thirty
dollars a year. The natives of those neighboring and more civilized
islands have themselves become too civilized to work on plantations.
Mauki's ears were pierced, not in one place, nor two places, but in a
couple of dozen places. In one of the smaller holes he carried a clay
pipe. The larger holes were too large for such use. The bowl of the
pipe would have fallen through. In fact, in the largest hole in each
ear he habitually wore round wooden plugs that were an even four
inches in diameter. Roughly speaking, the circumference of said holes
was twelve and one-half inches. Mauki was catholic in his tastes. In
the various smaller holes he carried such things as empty rifle
cartridges, horseshoe nails, copper screws, pieces of string, braids
of sennit, strips of green leaf, and, in the cool of the day, scarlet
hibiscus flowers. From which it will be seen that pockets were not
necessary to his well-being. Besides, pockets were impossible, for his
only wearing apparel consisted of a piece of calico several inches
wide. A pocket knife he wore in his hair, the blade snapped down on a
kinky lock. His most prized possession was the handle of a china cup,
which he suspended from a ring of turtle-shell, which, in turn, was
passed through the partition-cartilage of his nose.
But in spite of embellishments, Mauki had a nice face. It was really a
pretty face, viewed by any standard, and for a Melanesian it was a
remarkably good-looking face. Its one fault was its lack of strength.
It was softly effeminate, almost girlish. The features were small,
regular, and delicate. The chin was weak, and the mouth was weak.
There was no strength nor character in the jaws, forehead, and nose.
In the eyes only could be caught any hint of the unknown quantities
that were so large a part of his make-up and that other persons could
not understand. These unknown quantities were pluck, pertinacity,
fearlessness, imagination, and cunning; and when they found expression
in some consistent and striking action, those about him were
astounded.
Mauki's father was chief over the village at Port Adams, and thus, by
birth a salt-water man, Mauki was half amphibian. He knew the way of
the fishes and oysters, and the reef was an open book to him. Canoes,
also, he knew. He learned to swim when he was a year old. At seven
years he could hold his breath a full minute and swim straight down to
bottom through thirty feet of water. And at seven years he was stolen
by the bushmen, who cannot even swim and who are afraid of salt water.
Thereafter Mauki saw the sea only from a distance, through rifts in
the jungle and from open spaces on the high mountain sides. He became
the slave of old Fanfoa, head chief over a score of scattered
bush-villages on the range-lips of Malaita, the smoke of which, on
calm mornings, is about the only evidence the seafaring white men have
of the teeming interior population. For the whites do not penetrate
Malaita. They tried it once, in the days when the search was on for
gold, but they always left their heads behind to grin from the smoky
rafters of the bushmen's huts.
When Mauki was a young man of seventeen, Fanfoa got out of tobacco. He
got dreadfully out of tobacco. It was hard times in all his villages.
He had been guilty of a mistake. Suo was a harbor so small that a
large schooner could not swing at anchor in it. It was surrounded by
mangroves that overhung the deep water. It was a trap, and into the
trap sailed two white men in a small ketch. They were after recruits,
and they possessed much tobacco and trade goods, to say nothing of
three rifles and plenty of ammunition. Now there were no salt-water
men living at Suo, and it was there 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 writing 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 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 and cooking and eating the rest of him.
The Malaita coast was only twenty miles away, but the last night a
strong current and baffling winds prevented them from gaining across.
Daylight found them still several miles from their goal. But daylight
brought a cutter, in which were two white men, who were not afraid of
eleven Malaita men armed with twelve rifles. Mauki and his companions
were carried back to Tulagi, where lived the great white master of all
the white men. And the great white master held a court, after which,
one by one, the runaways were tied up and given twenty lashes each,
and sentenced to a fine of fifteen dollars. They were sent back to New
Georgia, where the white men knocked seven bells out of them all
around and put them to work. But Mauki was no longer house-boy. He was
put in the road-making gang. The fine of fifteen dollars had been paid
by the white men from whom he had run away, and he was told that he
would have to work it out, which meant six months' additional toil.
Further, his share of the stolen tobacco earned him another year of
toil.
Port Adams was now three years and a half away, so he stole a canoe
one night, hid on the islets in Manning Straits, passed through the
Straits, and began working along the eastern coast of Ysabel, only to
be captured, two-thirds of the way along, by the white men on Meringe
Lagoon. After a week, he escaped from them and took to the bush. There
were no bush natives on Ysabel, only salt-water men, who were all
Christians. The white men put up a reward of five-hundred sticks of
tobacco, and every time Mauki ventured down to the sea to steal a
canoe he was chased by the salt-water men. Four months of this passed,
when, the reward having been raised to a thousand sticks, he was
caught and sent back to New Georgia and the road-building gang. Now a
thousand sticks are worth fifty dollars, and Mauki had to pay the
reward himself, which required a year and eight months' labor. So Port
Adams was now five years away.
His homesickness was greater than ever, and it did not appeal to him
to settle down and be good, work out his four years, and go home. The
next time, he was caught in the very act of running away. His case was
brought before Mr. Haveby, the island manager of the Moongleam Soap
Company, who adjudged him an incorrigible. The Company had plantations
on the Santa Cruz Islands, hundreds of miles across the sea, and there
it sent its Solomon Islands' incorrigibles. And there Mauki was sent,
though he never arrived. The schooner stopped at Santa Anna, and in
the night Mauki swam ashore, where he stole two rifles and a case of
tobacco from the trader and got away in a canoe to Cristoval. Malaita
was now to the north, fifty or sixty miles away. But when he attempted
the passage, he was caught by a light gale and driven back to Santa
Anna, where the trader clapped him in irons and held him against the
return of the schooner from Santa Cruz. The two rifles the trader
recovered, but the case of tobacco was charged up to Mauki at the rate
of another year. The sum of years he now owed the Company was six.
On the way back to New Georgia, the schooner dropped anchor in Marau
Sound, which lies at the southeastern extremity of Guadalcanar. Mauki
swam ashore with handcuffs on his wrists and got away to the bush. The
schooner went on, but the Moongleam trader ashore offered a thousand
sticks, and to him Mauki was brought by the bushmen with a year and
eight months tacked on to his account. Again, and before the schooner
called in, he got away, this time in a whale boat accompanied by a
case of the trader's tobacco. But a northwest gale wrecked him upon
Ugi, where the Christian natives stole his tobacco and turned him over
to the Moongleam trader who resided there. The tobacco the natives
stole meant another year for him, and the tale was now eight years and
a half.
"We'll send him to Lord Howe," said Mr. Haveby. "Bunster is there, and
we'll let them settle it between them. It will be a case, I imagine,
of Mauki getting Bunster, or Bunster getting Mauki, and good riddance
in either event."
If one leaves Meringe Lagoon, on Ysabel, and steers a course due
north, magnetic, at the end of one hundred and fifty miles he will
lift the pounded coral beaches of Lord Howe above the sea. Lord Howe
is a ring of land some one hundred and fifty miles in circumference,
several hundred yards wide at its widest, and towering in places to a
height of ten feet above sea level. Inside this ring of sand is a
mighty lagoon studded with coral patches. Lord Howe belongs to the
Solomons neither geographically nor ethnologically. It is an atoll,
while the Solomons are high islands; and its people and language are
Polynesian, while the inhabitants of the Solomons are Melanesian.
Lord Howe has been populated by the westward Polynesian drift which
continues to this day, big outrigger canoes being washed upon its
beaches by the southeast trade. That there has been a slight
Melanesian drift in the period of the northwest monsoon, is also
evident.
Nobody ever comes to Lord Howe, or Ontong-Java as it is sometimes
called. Thomas Cook & Son do not sell tickets to it, and tourists do
not dream of its existence. Not even a white missionary has landed on
its shore. Its five thousand natives are as peaceable as they are
primitive. Yet they were not always peaceable. The Sailing Directions
speak of them as hostile and treacherous. But the men who compile the
Sailing Directions have never heard of the change that was worked in
the hearts of the inhabitants, who, not many years ago, cut off a big
bark and killed all hands with the exception of the second mate. The
survivor carried the news to his brothers. The captains of three
trading schooners returned with him to Lord Howe. They sailed their
vessels right into the lagoon and proceeded to preach the white man's
gospel that only white men shall kill white men and that the lesser
breeds must keep hands off. The schooners sailed up and down the
lagoon, harrying and destroying. There was no escape from the narrow
sand-circle, no bush to which to flee. The men were shot down at
sight, and there was no avoiding being sighted. The villages were
burned, the canoes smashed, the chickens and pigs killed, and the
precious cocoanut trees chopped down. For a month this continued, when
the schooner sailed away; but the fear of the white man had been
seared into the souls of the islanders and never again were they rash
enough to harm one.
Max Bunster was the one white man on Lord Howe, trading in the pay of
the ubiquitous Moongleam Soap Company. And the Company billeted him on
Lord Howe, because, next to getting rid of him, it was the most
out-of-the-way place to be found. That the Company did not get rid of
him was due to the difficulty of finding another man to take his
place. He was a strapping big German, with something wrong in his
brain. Semi-madness would be a charitable statement of his condition.
He was a bully and a coward, and a thrice-bigger savage than any
savage on the island.
Being a coward, his brutality was of the cowardly order. When he first
went into the Company's employ, he was stationed on Savo. When a
consumptive colonial was sent to take his place, he beat him up with
his fists and sent him off a wreck in the schooner that brought him.
Mr. Haveby next selected a young Yorkshire giant to relieve Bunster.
The Yorkshire man had a reputation as a bruiser and preferred fighting
to eating. But Bunster wouldn't fight. He was a regular little
lamb--for ten days, at the end of which time the Yorkshire man was
prostrated by a combined attack of dysentery and fever. Then Bunster
went for him, among other things getting him down and jumping on him a
score or so of times. Afraid of what would happen when his victim
recovered. Bunster fled away in a cutter to Guvutu, where he
signalized himself by beating up a young Englishman already crippled
by a Boer bullet through both hips.
Then it was that Mr. Haveby sent Bunster to Lord Howe, the falling-off
place. He celebrated his landing by mopping up half a case of gin and
by thrashing the elderly and wheezy mate of the schooner which had
brought him. When the schooner departed, he called the kanakas down to
the beach and challenged them to throw him in a wrestling bout,
promising a case of tobacco to the one who succeeded. Three kanakas he
threw, but was promptly thrown by a fourth, who, instead of receiving
the tobacco, got a bullet through his lungs.
And so began Bunster's reign on Lord Howe. Three thousand people lived
in the principal village; but it was deserted, even in broad day, when
he passed through. Men, women, and children fled before him. Even the
dogs and pigs got out of the way, while the king was not above hiding
under a mat. The two prime ministers lived in terror of Bunster, who
never discussed any moot subject, but struck out with his fists
instead.
And to Lord Howe came Mauki, to toil for Bunster for eight long years
and a half. There was no escaping from Lord Howe. For better or worse,
Bunster and he were tied together. Bunster weighed two hundred pounds.
Mauki weighed one hundred and ten. Bunster was a degenerate brute. But
Mauki was a primitive savage. While both had wills and ways of their
own.
Mauki had no idea of the sort of master he was to work for. He had had
no warnings, and he had concluded as a matter of course that Bunster
would be like other white men, a drinker of much whiskey, a ruler and
a lawgiver who always kept his word and who never struck a boy
undeserved. Bunster had the advantage. He knew all about Mauki, and
gloated over the coming into possession of him. The last cook was
suffering from a broken arm and a dislocated shoulder, so Bunster made
Mauki cook and general house-boy.
And Mauki soon learned that there were white men and white men. On
the very day the schooner departed he was ordered to buy a chicken
from Samisee, the native Tongan missionary. But Samisee had sailed
across the lagoon and would not be back for three days. Mauki returned
with the information. He climbed the steep stairway (the house stood
on piles twelve feet above the sand), and entered the living room to
report. The trader demanded the chicken. Mauki opened his mouth to
explain the missionary's absence. But Bunster did not care for
explanations. He struck out with his fist. The blow caught Mauki on
the mouth and lifted him into the air. Clear through the doorway he
flew, across the narrow veranda, breaking the top railing, and down to
the ground.
His lips were a contused, shapeless mass, and his mouth was full of
blood and broken teeth.
"That'll teach you that back talk don't go with me," the trader
shouted, purple with rage, peering down at him over the broken
railing.
Mauki had never met a white man like this, and he resolved to walk
small and never offend. He saw the boat boys knocked about, and one of
them put in irons for three days with nothing to eat for the crime of
breaking a rowlock while pulling. Then, too, he heard the gossip of
the village and learned why Bunster had taken a third wife--by force,
as was well known. The first and second wives lay in the graveyard,
under the white coral sand, with slabs of coral rock at head and feet.
They had died, it was said, from beatings he had given them. The third
wife was certainly ill-used, as Mauki could see for himself.
But there was no way by which to avoid offending the white man who
seemed offended with life. When Mauki kept silent, he was struck and
called a sullen brute. When he spoke, he was struck for giving back
talk. When he was grave, Bunster accused him of plotting and gave him
a thrashing in advance; and when he strove to be cheerful and to
smile, he was charged with sneering at his lord and master and given a
taste of stick. Bunster was a devil.
The village would have done for him, had it not remembered the lesson
of the three schooners. It might have done for him anyway, if there
had been a bush to which to flee. As it was, the murder of the white
men, of any white man, would bring a man-of-war that would kill the
offenders and chop down the precious cocoanut trees. Then there were
the boat boys, with minds fully made up to drown him by accident at
the first opportunity to capsize the cutter. Only Bunster saw to it
that the boat did not capsize.
Mauki was of a different breed, and escape being impossible while
Bunster lived, he was resolved to get the white man. The trouble was
that he could never find a chance. Bunster was always on guard. Day
and night his revolvers were ready to hand. He permitted nobody to
pass behind his back, as Mauki learned after having been knocked down
several times. Bunster knew that he had more to fear from the
good-natured, even sweet-faced, Malaita boy than from the entire
population of Lord Howe; and it gave added zest to the programme of
torment he was carrying out. And Mauki walked small, accepted his
punishments, and waited.
All other white men had respected his tambos, but not so Bunster.
Mauki's weekly allowance of tobacco was two sticks. Bunster passed
them to his woman and ordered Mauki to receive them from her hand. But
this could not be, and Mauki went without his tobacco. In the same way
he was made to miss many a meal, and to go hungry many a day. He was
ordered to make chowder out of the big clams that grew in the lagoon.
This he could not do, for clams were tambo. Six times in succession he
refused to touch the clams, and six times he was knocked senseless.
Bunster knew that the boy would die first, but called his refusal
mutiny, and would have killed him had there been another cook to take
his place.
One of the trader's favorite tricks was to catch Mauki's kinky locks
and bat his head against the wall. Another trick was to catch Mauki
unawares and thrust the live end of a cigar against his flesh. This
Bunster called vaccination, and Mauki was vaccinated a number of times
a week. Once, in a rage, Bunster ripped the cup handle from Mauki's
nose, tearing the hole clear out of the cartilage.
"Oh, what a mug!" was his comment, when he surveyed the damage he had
wrought.
The skin of a shark is like sandpaper, but the skin of a ray fish is
like a rasp. In the South Seas the natives use it as a wood file in
smoothing down canoes and paddles. Bunster had a mitten made of ray
fish skin. The first time he tried it on Mauki, with one sweep of the
hand it fetched the skin off his back from neck to armpit. Bunster was
delighted. He gave his wife a taste of the mitten, and tried it out
thoroughly on the boat boys. The prime ministers came in for a stroke
each, and they had to grin and take it for a joke.
"Laugh, damn you, laugh!" was the cue he gave.
Mauki came in for the largest share of the mitten. Never a day passed
without a caress from it. There were times when the loss of so much
cuticle kept him awake at night, and often the half-healed surface was
raked raw afresh by the facetious Mr. Bunster. Mauki continued his
patient wait, secure in the knowledge that sooner or later his time
would come. And he knew just what he was going to do, down to the
smallest detail, when the time did come.
One morning Bunster got up in a mood for knocking seven bells out of
the universe. He began on Mauki, and wound up on Mauki, in the
interval knocking down his wife and hammering all the boat boys. At
breakfast he called the coffee slops and threw the scalding contents
of the cup into Mauki's face. By ten o'clock Bunster was shivering
with ague, and half an hour later he was burning with fever. It was no
ordinary attack. It quickly became pernicious, and developed into
black-water fever. The days passed, and he grew weaker and weaker,
never leaving his bed. Mauki waited and watched, the while his skin
grew intact once more. He ordered the boys to beach the cutter, scrub
her bottom, and give her a general overhauling. They thought the order
emanated from Bunster, and they obeyed. But Bunster at the time was
lying unconscious and giving no orders. This was Mauki's chance, but
still he waited.
When the worst was past, and Bunster lay convalescent and conscious,
but weak as a baby, Mauki packed his few trinkets, including the china
cup handle, into his trade box. Then he went over to the village and
interviewed the king and his two prime ministers.
"This fella Bunster, him good fella you like too much?" he asked.
They explained in one voice that they liked the trader not at all. The
ministers poured forth a recital of all the indignities and wrongs
that had been heaped upon them. The king broke down and wept. Mauki
interrupted rudely.
"You savve me--me big fella marster my country. You no like 'm this
fella white marster. Me no like 'm. Plenty good you put hundred
cocoanut, two hundred cocoanut, three hundred cocoanut along cutter.
Him finish, you go sleep 'm good fella. Altogether kanaka sleep m good
fella. Bime by big fella noise along house, you no savve hear 'm that
fella noise. You altogether sleep strong fella too much."
In like manner Mauki interviewed the boat boys. Then he ordered
Bunster's wife to return to her family house. Had she refused, he
would have been in a quandary, for his tambo would not have permitted
him to lay hands on her.
The house deserted, he entered the sleeping room, where the trader lay
in a doze. Mauki first removed the revolvers, then placed the ray fish
mitten on his hand. Bunster's first warning was a stroke of the mitten
that removed the skin the full length of his nose.
"Good fella, eh?" Mauki grinned, between two strokes, one of which
swept the forehead bare and the other of which cleaned off one side of
his face. "Laugh, damn you, laugh."
Mauki did his work throughly, and the kanakas, hiding in their houses,
heard the "big fella noise" that Bunster made and continued to make
for an hour or more.
When Mauki was done, he carried the boat compass and all the rifles
and ammunition down to the cutter, which he proceeded to ballast with
cases of tobacco. It was while engaged in this that a hideous,
skinless thing came out of the house and ran screaming down the beach
till it fell in the sand and mowed and gibbered under the scorching
sun. Mauki looked toward it and hesitated. Then he went over and
removed the head, which he wrapped in a mat and stowed in the stern
locker of the cutter.
So soundly did the kanakas sleep through that long hot day that they
did not see the cutter run out through the passage and head south,
close-hauled on the southeast trade. Nor was the cutter ever sighted
on that long tack to the shores of Ysabel, and during the tedious
head-beat from there to Malaita. He landed at Port Adams with a wealth
of rifles and tobacco such as no one man had ever possessed before.
But he did not stop there. He had taken a white man's head, and only
the bush could shelter him. So back he went to the bush villages,
where he shot old Fanfoa and half a dozen of the chief men, and made
himself the chief over all the villages. When his father died, Mauki's
brother ruled in Port Adams, and joined together, salt-water men and
bushmen, the resulting combination was the strongest of the ten score
fighting tribes of Malaita.
More than his fear of the British government was Mauki's fear of the
all-powerful Moongleam Soap Company; and one day a message came up to
him in the bush, reminding him that he owed the Company eight and
one-half years of labor. He sent back a favorable answer, and then
appeared the inevitable white man, the captain of the schooner, the
only white man during Mauki's reign, who ventured the bush and came
out alive. This man not only came out, but he brought with him seven
hundred and fifty dollars in gold sovereigns--the money price of eight
years and a half of labor plus the cost price of certain rifles and
cases of tobacco.
Mauki no longer weighs one hundred and ten pounds. His stomach is
three times its former girth, and he has four wives. He has many other
things--rifles and revolvers, the handle of a china cup, and an
excellent collection of bushmen's heads. But more precious than the
entire collection is another head, perfectly dried and cured, with
sandy hair and a yellowish beard, which is kept wrapped in the finest
of fibre lava-lavas. When Mauki goes to war with villages beyond his
realm, he invariably gets out this head, and alone in his grass
palace, contemplates it long and solemnly. At such times the hush of
death falls on the village, and not even a pickaninny dares make a
noise. The head is esteemed the most powerful devil-devil on Malaita,
and to the possession of it is ascribed all of Mauki's greatness.
