In like manner Mauki interviewed the boat boys. Then he ordered Bunster's wife
to return to her family house. Had she refused, he would have been in a

quandary, for his tambo would not have permitted him to lay hands on her.
The house deserted, he entered the sleeping room, where the trader lay in a

doze. Mauki first removed the revolvers, then placed the ray fish mitten on
his hand. Bunster's first warning was a stroke of the mitten that removed the

skin the full length of his nose.
"Good fella, eh?" Mauki grinned, between two strokes, one of which swept the

forehead bare and the other of which cleaned off one side of his face. "Laugh,
damn you, laugh."

Mauki did his work throughly, and the kanakas, hiding in their houses, heard
the "big fella noise" that Bunster made and continued to make for an hour or

more.
When Mauki was done, he carried the boat compass and all the rifles and

ammunition down to the cutter, which he proceeded to ballast with cases of
tobacco. It was while engaged in this that a hideous, skinless thing came out

of the house and ran screaming down the beach till it fell in the sand and
mowed and gibbered under the scorching sun. Mauki looked toward it and

hesitated. Then he went over and removed the head, which he wrapped in a mat
and stowed in the stern locker of the cutter.

So soundly did the kanakas sleep through that long hot day that they did not
see the cutter run out through the passage and head south, close-hauled on the

southeast trade. Nor was the cutter ever sighted on that long tack to the
shores of Ysabel, and during the tedious head-beat from there to Malaita. He

landed at Port Adams with a wealth of rifles and tobacco such as no one man
had ever possessed before. But he did not stop there. He had taken a white

man's head, and only the bush could shelter him. So back he went to the bush
villages, where he shot old Fanfoa and half a dozen of the chief men, and made

himself the chief over all the villages. When his father died, Mauki's brother
ruled in Port Adams, and joined together, salt-water men and bushmen, the

resulting combination was the strongest of the ten score fighting tribes of
Malaita.

More than his fear of the British government was Mauki's fear of the
all-powerful Moongleam Soap Company; and one day a message came up to him in

the bush, reminding him that he owed the Company eight and one-half years of
labor. He sent back a favorable answer, and then appeared the inevitable white

man, the captain of the schooner, the only white man during Mauki's reign, who
ventured the bush and came out alive. This man not only came out, but he

brought with him seven hundred and fifty dollars in gold sovereigns--the money
price of eight years and a half of labor plus the cost price of certain rifles

and cases of tobacco.
Mauki no longer weighs one hundred and ten pounds. His stomach is three times

its former girth, and he has four wives. He has many other things--rifles and
revolvers, the handle of a china cup, and an excellent collection of bushmen's

heads. But more precious than the entire collection is another head, perfectly
dried and cured, with sandy hair and a yellowish beard, which is kept wrapped

in the finest of fibre lava-lavas. When Mauki goes to war with villages beyond
his realm, he invariably gets out this head, and alone in his grass palace,

contemplates it long and solemnly. At such times the hush of death falls on
the village, and not even a pickaninny dares make a noise. The head is

esteemed the most powerful devil-devil on Malaita, and to the possession of it
is ascribed all of Mauki's greatness.

"YAH! YAH! YAH!"
He was a whiskey-guzzling Scotchman, and he downed his whiskey neat, beginning

with his first tot punctually at six in the morning, and thereafter repeating
it at regular intervals throughout the day till bedtime, which was usually

midnight. He slept but five hours out of the twenty-four, and for the
remaining nineteen hours he was quietly and decently drunk. During the eight

weeks I spent with him on Oolong Atoll, I never saw him draw a sober breath.
In fact, his sleep was so short that he never had time to sober up. It was the

most beautiful and orderlyperennial drunk I have ever observed.
McAllister was his name. He was an old man, and very shaky on his pins. His

hand trembled as with a palsy, especially noticeable when he poured his
whiskey, though I never knew him to spill a drop. He had been twenty-eight

years in Melanesia, ranging from German New Guinea to the German Solomons, and
so thoroughly had he become identified with that portion of the world, that he

habitually spoke in that bastard lingo called "bech-de-mer." Thus, in
conversation with me, SUN HE COME UP meant sunrise; KAI-KAI HE STOP meant that

dinner was served; and BELLY BELONG ME WALK ABOUT meant that he was sick at
his stomach. He was a small man, and a withered one, burned inside and outside

by ardent spirits and ardent sun. He was a cinder, a bit of a clinker of a
man, a little animated clinker, not yet quite cold, that moved stiffly and by

starts and jerks like an automaton. A gust of wind would have blown him away.
He weighed ninety pounds.

But the immense thing about him was the power with which he ruled. Oolong
Atoll was one hundred and forty miles in circumference. One steered by compass

course in its lagoon. It was populated by five thousand Polynesians, all
strapping men and women, many of them standing six feet in height and weighing

a couple of hundred pounds. Oolong was two hundred and fifty miles from the
nearest land. Twice a year a little schooner called to collect copra. The one

white man on Oolong was McAllister, petty trader and unintermittent guzzler;
and he ruled Oolong and its six thousand savages with an iron hand. He said

come, and they came, go, and they went. They never questioned his will nor
judgment. He was cantankerous as only an aged Scotchman can be, and interfered

continually in their personal affairs. When Nugu, the king's daughter, wanted
to marry Haunau from the other end of the atoll, her father said yes; but

McAllister said no, and the marriage never came off. When the king wanted to
buy a certain islet in the lagoon from the chief priest, McAllister said no.

The king was in debt to the Company to the tune of 180,000 cocoanuts, and
until that was paid he was not to spend a single cocoanut on anything else.

And yet the king and his people did not love McAllister. In truth, they hated
him horribly, and, to my knowledge, the whole population, with the priests at

the head, tried vainly for three months to pray him to death. The devil-devils
they sent after him were awe-inspiring, but since McAllister did not believe

in devil-devils, they were without power over him. With drunken Scotchmen all
signs fail. They gathered up scraps of food which had touched his lips, an

empty whiskey bottle, a cocoanut from which he had drunk, and even his
spittle, and performed all kinds of deviltries over them. But McAllister lived

on. His health was superb. He never caught fever; nor coughs nor colds;
dysentery passed him by; and the malignant ulcers and vile skin diseases that

attack blacks and whites alike in that climate never fastened upon him. He
must have been so saturated with alcohol as to defy the lodgment of germs. I

used to imagine them falling to the ground in showers of microscopiccinders
as fast as they entered his whiskey-sodden aura. No one loved him, not even

germs, while he loved only whiskey, and still he lived.
I was puzzled. I could not understand six thousand natives putting up with

that withered shrimp of a tyrant. It was a miracle that he had not died
suddenly long since. Unlike the cowardly Melanesians, the people were

high-stomached and warlike. In the big graveyard, at head and feet of the
graves, were relics of past sanguinary history--blubber-spades, rusty old

bayonets and cutlasses, copper bolts, rudder-irons, harpoons, bomb guns,
bricks that could have come from nowhere but a whaler's trying-out furnace,

and old brass pieces of the sixteenth century that verified the traditions of
the early Spanish navigators. Ship after ship had come to grief on Oolong. Not

thirty years before, the whaler BLENNERDALE, running into the lagoon for
repair, had been cut off with all hands. In similar fashion had the crew of

the GASKET, a sandalwood trader, perished. There was a big French bark, the
TOULON, becalmed off the atoll, which the islanders boarded after a sharp

tussle and wrecked in the Lipau Passage, the captain and a handful of sailors
escaping in the longboat. Then there were the Spanish pieces, which told of

the loss of one of the early explorers. All this, of the vessels named, is a
matter of history, and is to be found in the SOUTH PACIFIC SAILING DIRECTORY.

But that there was other history, unwritten, I was yet to learn. In the
meantime I puzzled why six thousand primitive savages let one degenerate

Scotch despot live.
One hot afternoon McAllister and I sat on the veranda looking out over the

lagoon, with all its wonder of jeweled colors. At our backs, across the
hundred yards of palm-studded sand, the outer surf roared on the reef. It was

dreadfully warm. We were in four degree south latitude and the sun was
directly overhead, having crossed the Line a few days before on its journey

south. There was no wind--not even a catspaw. The season of the southeast
trade was drawing to an early close, and the northwest monsoon had not yet