mashed him fairly
in the face with my fist. He grappled with me, and we went down, rolling
and scrambling and struggling for grips. He was getting away with me,
when some one came running up with a lantern. Then I saw his face. How
shall I describe the horror of it. It was not a face--only wasted or
wasting features--a living ravage, noseless, lipless, with one ear
swollen and distorted, hanging down to the shoulder. I was frantic. In
a clinch he hugged me close to him until that ear flapped in my face.
Then I guess I went insane. It was too terrible. I began striking him
with my revolver. How it happened I don't know, but just as I was
getting clear he fastened upon me with his teeth. The whole side of my
hand was in that lipless mouth. Then I struck him with the revolver butt
squarely between the eyes, and his teeth relaxed."

Cudworth held his hand to me in the moonlight, and I could see the scars.
It looked as if it had been mangled by a dog.

"Weren't you afraid?" I asked.

"I was. Seven years I waited. You know, it takes that long for the
disease to incubate. Here in Kona I waited, and it did not come. But
there was never a day of those seven years, and never a night, that I did
not look out on . . . on all this . . . " His voice broke as he swept
his eyes from the moon-bathed sea beneath to the snowy summits above. "I
could not bear to think of losing it, of never again beholding Kona.
Seven years! I stayed clean. But that is why I am single. I was
engaged. I could not dare to marry while I was in doubt. She did not
understand. She went away to the States and married. I have never seen
her since.

"Just at the moment I got clear of the leper policeman there was a rush
and clatter of hoofs like a cavalry charge. It was the squarehead. He
had been afraid of a rumpus and he had improved his time by making those
blessed lepers he was guarding saddle up four horses. We were ready for
him. Lyte had accounted for three _kokuas_, and between us we untangled
Burnley from a couple more. The whole settlement was in an uproar by
that time, and as we dashed away somebody opened upon us with a
Winchester. It must have been Jack McVeigh, the superintendent of
Molokai.

"That was a ride! Leper horses, leper saddles, leper bridles,
pitch-black darkness, whistling bullets, and a road none of the best. And
the squarehead's horse was a mule, and he didn't know how to ride,
either. But we made