ckets
scattering like rabbits down the hill, and throwing away their rifles,
water bottles, and accouterments in their precipitate flight. There were
wounded men lying all about him, groaning, some of them, and calling out
faintly for help; but, hell! what did he care! Let them groan, the
skunks; let them remember the women and children they had bombarded, and
the houses they had burned, and the honest hearts they had broken! To
hell with them! Besides, for the matter of that, he was feeling sort of
sick himself--sort of numb and shivery--and he staggered like a drunken
man as he went slowly back up to the wall. It was all he could do to
straddle the blamed thing, and then it was only with the help of a
wounded Samoan who took his hand. The Kanaka, dizzily seen through a
kind of mist, was no other than Tua; together, like men in a dream, they
searched for Fetuao's body; and dragging it out of the shambles where it
lay, they tried to clean away the blood with wisps of grass. Jack was
sitting with the girl's head in his lap when he began to sway unsteadily
backward and forward, feeling strangely sleepy and cold. He moaned. He
gasped. Hell! they must have plugged him somewhere, after all. And then
he rolled over--dead.

THE SECURITY OF THE HIGH SEAS

Things had been dull in Apia before the arrival of Captain Satterlee in
the _Southern Belle_. Not business alone--which was, of course, only to
be expected, what with the civil war being just over and the Kanakas
driven to eat their cocoanuts instead of selling them to traders in the
form of copra--but, socially speaking, the little capital of the Samoan
group had been next door to dead. Picnics had been few; a heavy dust had
settled on the floor of the public hall--a galvanized iron barn which
social leaders could rent for six Chile dollars a night, lights
included; the butcher's wedding, contrary to all expectation, had been
strictly private, and might almost have slipped by unnoticed had it not
been for a friendly editorial in the _Samoa Weekly Times_; and with the
exception of an auction, a funeral, and a billiard tournament at the
International Hotel, a general lethargy had overtaken Apia and the
handful of whites who made it their home.

As Mr. Skiddy, the boyish American consul, expressed himself, "You
can't get anybody to do anything these days."

Possibly this long spell of monotony contributed to Captain Satterlee's
pronounced and instant success. The top