.

Five were still at large, but escape was impossible. They could not get
down to the coast, nor dared they venture too far inland for fear of the
wild bushmen. Then one of the five came in voluntarily and gave himself
up, and Sheldon learned that Gogoomy and two others were all that were at
large. There should have been a fourth, but according to the man who had
given himself up, the fourth man had been killed and eaten. It had been
fear of a similar fate that had driven him in. He was a Malu man, from
north-western Malaita, as likewise had been the one that was eaten.
Gogoomy's two other companions were from Port Adams. As for himself, the
black declared his preference for government trial and punishment to
being eaten by his companions in the bush.

"Close up Gogoomy _kai-kai_ me," he said. "My word, me no like boy _kai-
kai_ me."

Three days later Sheldon caught one of the boys, helpless from swamp
fever, and unable to fight or run away. On the same day Seelee caught
the second boy in similar condition. Gogoomy alone remained at large;
and, as the pursuit closed in on him, he conquered his fear of the
bushmen and headed straight in for the mountainous backbone of the
island. Sheldon with four Tahitians, and Seelee with thirty of his
hunters, followed Gogoomy's trail a dozen miles into the open
grass-lands, and then Seelee and his people lost heart. He confessed
that neither he nor any of his tribe had ever ventured so far inland
before, and he narrated, for Sheldon's benefit, most horrible tales of
the horrible bushmen. In the old days, he said, they had crossed the
grass-lands and attacked the salt-water natives; but since the coming of
the white men to the coast they had remained in their interior
fastnesses, and no salt-water native had ever seen them again.

"Gogoomy he finish along them fella bushmen," he assured Sheldon. "My
word, he finish close up, _kai-kai_ altogether."

So the expedition turned back. Nothing could persuade the coast natives
to venture farther, and Sheldon, with his four Tahitians, knew that it
was madness to go on alone. So he stood waist-deep in the grass and
looked regretfully across the rolling savannah and the soft-swelling
foothills to the Lion's Head, a massive peak of rock that upreared into
the azure from the midmost centre of Guadalcanar, a landmark used for
bearings by every coasting mariner, a mountain as yet untrod by the foot
of a white man.

That night,