* *

"The sun was going westward in the sky when the two ships rounded the
point and anchored in what you white men now call Coquille Harbour. We
of Leasse, who watched from the shore, saw six boats put off, filled
with men. There pulled inside the reef, and went to the right towards
Mout; three went to the left. Letya (Ledyard), with the two white
strangers who had come to him in the night, and two hundred of our men,
had long before gone into the mountains to await Charlik and his
fighting men, and their white friends. They--Letya and the Leasse
people--made a trap for Charlik's men in the forest. Charlik himself was
in the boats with the other white men. He wanted to see the people of
Leasse and Mout driven into the water, so that he might shoot at them
with a new rifle which Kesa or the other ship captain--I forget
which--had given to him. But he wanted most of all to get Cerita, the
wife of Letya, the white man. Only Cerita was to live. These were
Charlik's words. He did not know that her husband had returned from the
sea. Had he known that, he would not have given all his money and all
his oil to the two white captains to help him to make Leasse and Mout
desolate and give our bones to his dogs to eat.

"It was a great trap--the trap prepared by Letya; and Charlik's men and
the white men with them fell in it. They fell as a stone falls in a deep
well, and sinks and is no more seen of men.

"This was the manner of the trap: The path down the cliff was between
two high walls of rock; at the foot of the cliff was a thick clump of
high pandanus trees growing closely together. In between these trees
Letya built a high barrier of logs, encompassing the outlet of the path
to Leasse. This barrier was a half circle; the two ends touched the edge
of the cliff, and the centre was hidden among the pandanus trees. On the
top of this barrier the men of Leasse waited with loaded muskets; lower
down on the ground were others, they too had loaded muskets. On the top
of the cliff where the path led down, fifty men were hidden. They were
hidden in the thick scrub which we call _oap. Oap_ is a good thing in
which to hide from an enemy, and then spring from and slay him suddenly.

"I, who was then a boy, saw all this. I heard Letya, our white man, tell
the head of our village that Charlik's men would enter into the trap and
perish. Then kava was made, and Letya and the head men drank. Kava is
good, but rum is better to m