fleet of canoes. They were all that were left of Pauloo, which likewise
was in ashes, for a third schooner had come in through the Pauloo
Passage. You see, that mate, with his black boys, had not been drowned.
He had made the Solomon Islands, and there told his brothers of what we
had done in Oolong. And all his brothers had said they would come and
punish us, and there they were in the three schooners, and our three
villages were wiped out.

"And what was there for us to do? In the morning the two schooners from
windward sailed down upon us in the middle of the lagoon. The trade wind
was blowing fresh, and by scores of canoes they ran us down. And the
rifles never ceased talking. We scattered like flying fish before the
bonita, and there were so many of us that we escaped by thousands, this
way and that, to the islands on the rim of the atoll.

"And thereafter the schooners hunted us up and down the lagoon. In the
nighttime we slipped past them. But the next day, or in two days or
three days, the schooners would be coming back, hunting us toward
the other end of the lagoon. And so it went. We no longer counted nor
remembered our dead. True, we were many and they were few. But what
could we do? I was in one of the twenty canoes filled with men who were
not afraid to die. We attacked the smallest schooner. They shot us down
in heaps. They threw dynamite into the canoes, and when the dynamite
gave out, they threw hot water down upon us. And the rifles never ceased
talking. And those whose canoes were smashed were shot as they swam
away. And the mate danced up and down upon the cabin top and yelled,
'Yah! Yah! Yah!'"

"Every house on every smallest island was burned. Not a pig nor a fowl
was left alive. Our wells were defiled with the bodies of the slain, or
else heaped high with coral rock. We were twenty-five thousand on Oolong
before the three schooners came. Today we are five thousand. After the
schooners left, we were but three thousand, as you shall see.

"At last the three schooners grew tired of chasing us back and forth. So
they went, the three of them, to Nihi, in the northeast. And then they
drove us steadily to the west. Their nine boats were in the water as
well. They beat up every island as they moved along. They drove us,
drove us, drove us day by day. And every night the three schooners and
the nine boats made a chain of watchfulness that stretched across the
lagoon from rim to rim, so that we could not