Lying
Bill. "There was a French missionary brought a gang of them there. 'E
was Pere Roussel, and 'e ran away with 'em because Llewellyn's bloody
crowd 'ere tried to steal 'em and sell 'em. They lived at Mangareva
with 'im till he died a few years ago, and they never went back."

Llewellyn lifted his dour eyes. There was never such a dule countenance
as his, dark naturally with his Welsh and Tahitian blood, and shaded
by the gloom of his soul. He looked regretfully at Captain Pincher.

"You are only repeating the untruthful assertion of that clergyman,"
he said accusingly. "He put it in a pamphlet in French. My people
have had to do with Easter Island for forty years. I lived there
several years and, as you know, I made that island what it is now, a
cattle and sheep ranch. It is the strangest place, with the strangest
history in the world. If we knew who settled it originally and carved
those stone gods the Dutch sailor spoke of, we would know more about
the human race and its wanderings.

"The Peruvians murdered and stole the Easter Islanders. Just before
we took hold there, a gang of blackbirders from Peru went there and
killed and took away many hundreds of them. They sold them to the
guano diggings in the Chincha Islands. Only those escaped death or
capture who hid in the dark caverns. Nearly all those taken away died
soon. We then made contracts with some of those left, and took them
to Tahiti to work. It is true they died, too, most of them, but some
you can find where McHenry lives half a mile from here at Patutoa. We
sold off the stock to Chileans, and that country owns the island now.

"I think the island had a superior race once. There are immense
platforms of stone, like the paepaes of the Marquesas, only bigger,
and the stones are all fitted together without cement. They built them
on promontories facing the sea. Some are three hundred feet long, and
the walls thirty feet high. On these platforms there were huge stone
gods that have been thrown down; some were thirty-seven feet high,
and they had redstone crowns, ten feet in diameter. There were stone
houses one hundred feet long, with walls five feet thick. How they
moved the stones no one knows, for, of course, these people there
now were not the builders. Some race of whom they knew nothing was
there before them.

"They are one of the greatest mysteries in the world. Easter is the
queerest of all the Maori islands. They had nothing like the other
Ma