aptured Koho's eldest son he
compelled a conference with the old chief. It was then that McTavish
laid down the rate of head-exchange. For each head of his own people
he promised to take ten of Koho's. After Koho had learned that the
Scotchman was a man of his word, the first true peace was made. In
the meantime McTavish had built the bungalow and barracks, cleared the
jungle-land along the beach, and laid out the plantation. After that
he had gone on his way to mend trouble on the atoll of Tasman, where
a plague of black measles had broken out and been ascribed to Grief's
plantation by the devil-devil doctors. Once, a year later, he had been
called back again to straighten up New Gibbon; and Koho, after paying a
forced fine of two hundred thousand cocoanuts, decided it was cheaper
to keep the peace and sell the nuts. Also, the fires of his youth
had burned down. He was getting old and limped of one leg where a
Lee-Enfield bullet had perforated the calf.

II

"I knew a chap in Hawaii," Grief said, "superintendent of a sugar
plantation, who used a hammer and a ten-penny nail."

They were sitting on the broad bungalow veranda, and watching Worth, the
manager of New Gibbon, doctoring the sick squad. They were New Georgia
boys, a dozen of them, and the one with the aching tooth had been put
back to the last. Worth had just failed in his first attempt. He wiped
the sweat from his forehead with one hand and waved the forceps with the
other.

"And broke more than one jaw," he asserted grimly.

Grief shook his head. Wallenstein smiled and elevated his brows.

"He said not, at any rate," Grief qualified. "He assured me,
furthermore, that he always succeeded on the first trial."

"I saw it done when I was second mate on a lime-juicer," Captain Ward
spoke up. "The old man used a caulking mallet and a steel marlin-spike.
He took the tooth out with the first stroke, too, clean as a whistle."

"Me for the forceps," Worth muttered grimly, inserting his own pair in
the mouth of the black. As he pulled, the man groaned and rose in the
air. "Lend a hand, somebody, and hold him down," the manager appealed.

Grief and Wallenstein, on either side, gripped the black and held him.
And he, in turn, struggled against them and clenched his teeth on the
forceps. The group swayed back and forth. Such exertion, in the stagnant
heat, brought the sweat out on all of them. The black sweated, too, but
his was the sweat of excruciating p