ght skirmishes with small bands of natives. One big Dobodura rushed
at Sergeant Kimi with uplifted club, but Kimi coolly knelt down and
shot him in the stomach when he was only a few yards off. The round,
sharp stone on the club being an extra fine one, I soon exchanged it
with Kimi for two sticks of tobacco (the chief article of trade in
New Guinea, and worth about three half-pence a stick).

Toku, Monckton's boy, and a brother of my boy, Arigita, who carried
his master's small pea-rifle, shot a man in the back with it as the
man fled, and thereafter was a hero among the boys. Arigita wished
to emulate his brother, and begged hard to do some shooting on his
own account with my twelve-bore shot gun, which he carried, and he
seemed very much hurt because I would not allow it.

We passed through many more villages, embowered in palm groves, and
in each village we saw plenty of human skulls and long sticks with
human jawbones hanging upon them. On one I counted twenty-five; there
were also long rows of the jawbones of pigs, and a few crocodiles'
heads. These villages were all deserted, the natives having fled. At
length we came to what appeared, from its great size, to be the
chief village, which we later learnt was named Dobodura. It extended
some distance, and stood amid thousands of coconut palms. Here we
determined to camp, but we found that most of the police had rushed
on ahead after the Doboduras, much to Monckton's annoyance, for it
was risky, to say the least, as the enemy might easily have attacked
each party separately. But the police and carriers, now that they had
"tasted blood," seemed to get quite out of hand, and their savagery
coming to the surface, they rushed about as if demented. However,
they soon returned with more captured weapons of warfare, having
killed two more men, and they also brought two prisoners, a young man
and a young woman. The prisoners looked horribly frightened, having
never seen a white man before, and they thought they would be eaten:
so Constable Yaidi told me.

The man was a stupid looking oaf, and seemed too dazed to speak. The
woman, however, if she had been washed, would have been quite
good-looking. She had rather the European type of features, and was
quite talkative. She told us that most of her people had gone off
to fight a mountain tribe, who had threatened to swoop down on this
village. These complications were getting exceedingly Gilbertian in
character. To begin wit