occurred, and the father and the females of the household went in to
breakfast, the exercises of the morning not being now renewed, while
Alf and his brother scoured the wood. Upon one leg of Alf's jeans
trousers appeared an artistic dab of red. He had been wounded, and for
days the sitting down and the uprising of him would be acts of care.

And where was the South Sea islander? Almost as he lunged he had
leaped backward around the corner of the house and run for the covered
ditch. Once in that covert, he did not "lurk" to any great extent. He
crawled away as rapidly as his hands and knees would carry him,
reasoning that the boys would, upon finding no one near the house, run
naturally to the wood in search of the enemy. They never thought of
the old ditch, though, later in the day, the thing occurred to them,
and an examination of the sandy bottom told the story. The edge of the
field was reached, the islander lying very low until he could climb the
fence in safety. Then he examined his fatal spear-point. It appeared
incarnadined. There was certainly blood on the spear of Mudara!

A week later Alf caught Grant, and, despite another valiant struggle,
licked him mercilessly. A year later the fortunes of war had turned
the other way. As they grew, these boys, like race-horses
well-matched, passed each other, physically, time and again, one now
surging to the front and then another, with no great difference at any
time between them.

CHAPTER VII.

HOW FICTION MADE FACT.

What may become a streak of proper modern chivalry in the man is but a
fantastic imagining in the boy. Some one has said that but for the
reading of "Ivanhoe" in the South, there would have been no war of the
rebellion, that the sentiment of knightliness and desire to uphold
opinions in material encounter was so fostered by the presence of the
book in thousands of households that, when the issue came, a majority
was for war which might have been otherwise inclined under more
practical teaching. This may or may not have been the case. There
would be nothing strange in it were the theory correct; the influence
of great novels is always underrated; but certain it is that the
reading of the age influences much the youth, and that many a bent of
mind is made by the books that lie about the house when some strong
young intellect is forming. So with this boy. The same force which
made of him a great savage marauder of the South Sea island