, was passed through the
partition-cartilage of his nose.

But in spite of embellishments, Mauki had a nice face. It was really
a pretty face, viewed by any standard, and for a Melanesian it was a
remarkably good-looking face. Its one fault was its lack of strength. It
was softly effeminate, almost girlish. The features were small, regular,
and delicate. The chin was weak, and the mouth was weak. There was no
strength nor character in the jaws, forehead, and nose. In the eyes only
could be caught any hint of the unknown quantities that were so large a
part of his make-up and that other persons could not understand. These
unknown quantities were pluck, pertinacity, fearlessness, imagination,
and cunning; and when they found expression in some consistent and
striking action, those about him were astounded.

Mauki's father was chief over the village at Port Adams, and thus, by
birth a salt-water man, Mauki was half amphibian. He knew the way of the
fishes and oysters, and the reef was an open book to him. Canoes, also,
he knew. He learned to swim when he was a year old. At seven years he
could hold his breath a full minute and swim straight down to bottom
through thirty feet of water. And at seven years he was stolen by
the bushmen, who cannot even swim and who are afraid of salt water.
Thereafter Mauki saw the sea only from a distance, through rifts in the
jungle and from open spaces on the high mountain sides. He became the
slave of old Fanfoa, head chief over a score of scattered bush-villages
on the range-lips of Malaita, the smoke of which, on calm mornings,
is about the only evidence the seafaring white men have of the teeming
interior population. For the whites do not penetrate Malaita. They tried
it once, in the days when the search was on for gold, but they always
left their heads behind to grin from the smoky rafters of the bushmen's
huts.

When Mauki was a young man of seventeen, Fanfoa got out of tobacco. He
got dreadfully out of tobacco. It was hard times in all his villages.
He had been guilty of a mistake. Suo was a harbor so small that a large
schooner could not swing at anchor in it. It was surrounded by mangroves
that overhung the deep water. It was a trap, and into the trap sailed
two white men in a small ketch. They were after recruits, and they
possessed much tobacco and trade goods, to say nothing of three rifles
and plenty of ammunition. Now there were no salt-water men living at
Suo, and it was t