The two months that followed were the most terrible in the history of
Samoa. A handful of exasperated whites--treaty officials, missionaries,
and consuls--were determined to foist Tanumafili on the unwilling
natives of the group, and backed by three men-of-war, they declared
Mataafa a rebel and plunged the country into a disastrous and sanguinary
war. England and America, in the person of their respective naval
commanders, vied with one another in their self-appointed task; and
while the Germans stood aloof, protesting and aghast, our ships ravaged
the Samoan coast, burning, bombarding, and destroying with
indiscriminate fury. In this savage conflict, so unjust in its
inception, so frightful in its effects on an unoffending people, the
Samoans showed an extraordinary spirit in defending what all men hold
most dear. Driven from the shore by our guns, they massed their warriors
behind Apia, and on ground of their own choosing gave obstinate battle
to the invaders.
It is not the writer's purpose to follow the varying stages of this
ignoble quarrel, in which blood flowed like water in our vain attempts
to force the unwilling Samoans to accept a Protestant divinity student
for their king. This little war, so remote, so ill understood at home,
so brief, violent, and unjust, swept over the islands like a hurricane.
Abruptly begun by headstrong naval officers and officials on the spot,
it was as abruptly ended by peremptory orders from London and
Washington; but the interval (necessarily a long one) before the news
could go out and the orders return halfway round the world, was
sufficient to reduce Samoa to the verge of ruin.
In such a country, without roads, telegraphs, or newspapers, where rumor
passes from mouth to mouth, and facts, in the process, get twisted out
of all recognition, war brings with it a period of agonizing ignorance,
when anything is told and anything believed. To Jack this waiting became
almost intolerable; his suspense, and the uncertainty of those dreadful
days, told on him with an augmented force, so that he grew thin and
started at a sound. Through an unseen channel the news of fighting
persistently trickled into Oa; more battles; more villages bombarded;
such an one wounded, such an one killed, with stories of the increasing
ruthlessness of the British and Americans. On some days the sound of
cannon could be plainly heard from leeward, the signal for the women and
children to crowd with their pastor into the church, and for the
men--the scanty remnants that still remained--to grasp their rifles and
melt into the forest.
But as time passed, and one false alarm was succeeded by another, Jack
plucked up a little heart. He began to make allowance for native
exaggeration and laughed at his own former fears. If the men-of-war
should come to Oa, were they likely to bombard an undefended village
full of women and children, or burn, pillage, and destroy as mercilessly
as he had been told? Bah! a pack of Kanaka lies, the gradual distortion
of the truth as it passed along the line, until one burned house became
a hundred and one village the whole coast of Atua! He went back to his
neglected plantation, now overgrown with weeds, and set to work again
with a determination not to borrow trouble. But, in spite of himself, he
would find himself listening for the sound of cannon, laying down his ax
or his bush knife in a panic and running back to the shore to make sure
that nothing had happened in the hour he had been gone.
It was during one of these mornings in the bush, a morning singularly
free of the apprehensions which usually beset him, that Fetuao came
rushing through the bananas where he was at work, crying out, "_Manuao,
manuao!_" Together, without exchanging a single word, they flew headlong
to the beach, never stopping until they took shelter beneath the eaves
of their own house. Yes, there was the man-of-war, a Britisher with
yellow funnels, well outside the reef, towing behind her a flotilla of
boats chock-a-block with natives. The red head-dresses of their crews
showed them to be the followers of Tanumafili, and a couple of
unmistakable pith helmets in the stern of the biggest betrayed the
presence of directing white men. At the tail of the boats was a large
steam launch flying the stars and stripes, the American contribution to
the little fleet.
Jack breathed a sigh of relief at the sight of his own flag. Wherever
that flew he knew that he and his were safe. By George! everybody in Oa
Bay was safe so long as they didn't try to make a fight of it; and he
could have laughed to see the terrified women scooting for the church,
the children bawling at their heels. The fools, what had they to fear?
American officers were not the kind to fire on women and children, nor
were they likely to look on mum-chance, and let the lime-juicers do it
neither. No, sirree!
The man-of-war slowed down her engines and came almost to a standstill.
There was a sudden flash from one of her sponsons, a puff of smoke, and
then the roar of a six-inch gun. The shell struck a palm not a hundred
yards from where Jack was standing, and with a loud explosion took off
the entire top as neatly as though a knife had sliced it.
"Good God!" cried the sailor; and the words were scarcely out of his
mouth before he heard the venomous rush of another shell. Jack could
not believe his senses. What! no warning, no notice beforehand; not
even ten minutes to allow the women and children to get out of danger!
Bang! The church this time! He clutched Fetuao as he saw the shower of
cement and rocks, and the frenzied flight of its occupants for safety.
If that shell had gone through the window instead of striking the
corner----
Bang!
"Run! run!" cried Fetuao, and without even waiting for him to follow or
turning round to see that he did so, she darted through the house and
disappeared. But Jack, in a white heat of indignation, folded his arms
and remained doggedly where he was. Let them shoot, the skunks! Let them
shoot, the stinking cowards! This was his house, and he would remain
beside it until the crack of doom, shells or no shells. He would stand
off them fire-bugs and looters when they landed, and tell them officers
what a plain American citizen thought of them. He wasn't afraid of the
swine. By God! he would like to boot the raft of them. He shook his fist
in their faces, he did; and as for that villainous launch rolling idly
in the swell while the big bully fired on the defenseless town, he spat
to express his disgust for it.
The bombardment, like a salute, continued with regular intermissions
between each gun. The marksmanship was poor, many of the shells falling
short or bursting prematurely in midair. Except for the church, which
was twice struck, and the chief's house that was set on fire, the damage
done was inappreciable; and Jack, whose heart at first had been in his
mouth, now grinned with derision as he watched for the recurring
flashes.
"The Chilaneans could do better nor you!" he cried.
"Jack," whispered a voice beside him, and there was Fetuao back again in
a state of the sweetest contrition and remorse. He took her in his arms
and kissed her; and then, like a pair of lovers, they held each other's
hands and shrank close together as the shells burst over the village.
The firing lasted for an hour, and then the flotilla of boats, preceded
by the American launch, passed in procession through the break in the
reef, and headed for Jack's house.
"Oh, it's the flag they see!" cried Fetuao, and she besought Jack, with
tears in her eyes, to haul it down.
"Never!" he said, grinding his teeth.
There were some three or four hundred men in the boats, and as they
raced in, cheering and yelling at the top of their voices, Jack quailed
in spite of himself. But outwardly, at least, he showed no sign of
agitation, standing like a rock before his house and facing the storm
that was about to burst.
It wasn't for himself that he was afraid, not so long as that
puffing-billy of a steamboat held the lead, and the grand old flag
streamed out behind her. The jackies would see him through this
business, whatever deviltry they might inflict on the rest of the
unfortunate village, for blood's thicker than water every time, and
Americans stand together all the world over. He wasn't no politician nor
side-taker, and it was all the same to him whether he had a missionary
king or a benighted papist. All he asked of anybody, by God! was to be
let alone, though this broadsiding of defenseless people made him sick
at the stummick, it did.
The launch came bumping into shallow water, blowing off clouds of steam
as her crew jumped out with their rifles and waded ashore, while the
Tanumafili boats, dashing up in quick succession, amid a furious and
ever-deepening uproar, discharged in their turn cargo upon cargo of
shrieking warriors. In the indescribable commotion that followed there
seemed to be no prearranged plan nor any settled order of operation. The
Tanus scattered in a dozen noisy parties, looting and burning the
houses, barking the breadfruit trees, shooting the pigs and horses,
devastating with diabolical thoroughness the inland plantations that
sustained the village. The Americans, fearful of ambuscades, stuck to
the shore and systematically destroyed the boats, which for a mile or
two were drawn up on the edge of the beach. These boats, in a country
without roads, are as much a necessity to a man as the house which
shelters him. They often represent the hoardings of years, and are not
seldom the result of a stern frugality and self-denial; they constitute,
indeed, the only wealth of Samoa, and in them is invested the united
savings of the whole population. In Oa these boats numbered perhaps a
hundred, or a hundred and twenty in all, which, under the direction of a
red-faced boatswain with a package of dynamite sticks, were one by one
blown to pieces, and the shattered boards drawn into heaps and fired.
That day the whole of Oa went up in smoke and flame. Nothing was spared,
not even the church, nor the school, nor the pastor's house; not a canoe
nor a dugout; not a net, nor a fish trap, nor a float; not a pig, a
horse, nor a chicken. The boundary walls, emerging black and desolate
above the embers of the village, alone survived the universal waste.
Jack's boat, being the nearest, was the first to be singled out; and as
the blue-jackets began to bore it with auger holes in which to place the
dynamite, he walked down to the petty officer and roughly bade him leave
it alone. "Hold on, there!" he said. "That's my boat!"
The boatswain looked him up and down. "You get out of this!" he said.
Jack twitched the auger from one of the seamen and flung it into the
lagoon. Then, seizing a rifle from the heap lying on the ground, he
whirled it round his head like a club and advanced furiously on the
boatswain, who pulled out a six-shooter and leveled it at his head. Even
as he did so, one of the officers came running up, waving his sword and
shouting; while Jack, confident that he had nothing now to apprehend,
dropped the rifle and turned to meet him. He had scarcely got so far as,
"Please, sir, this boat is my property," when a scream from Fetuao
warned him that the natives were rushing his house. Abandoning the boat,
he ran back to face this new danger, which, of the two, was so
infinitely the worse. His first instinct was to snatch a hatchet and
kill one of the half-naked plunderers, but Fetuao, catching his hands,
held him back, and the impulse passed as he realized his utter
helplessness. With smarting eyes and a heart that seemed to burst within
his breast, he saw his house gutted of everything--his chests torn open,
his tools taken, his wife's poor finery divided, and her twenty-dollar
sewing machine the subject of a wrangle that ended in its being smashed
under the butt of a gun. It was horrible to look on, impotent and
raging, and see the fruit of three years the prey of these yelling
savages; to realize that he must begin again from the bottom; that all
his labor, and care, and thrift, had gone for nothing. Not daring to
leave Fetuao behind, he took her with him and started off to find the
officer to whom he had at first complained. His protest had not
apparently been very effective, to judge from the torn fragments of the
boat now blazing in a bonfire, and he was hardly encouraged to make a
second attempt. However, slim as the chance was, it was now the only
thing left to do. Surely it was not possible that they would let his
house be looted and fired with the others!
The officer, a thin young man with a cigar, was standing in the shade of
a palm.
"Mister," said Jack timidly, for somehow all the fight had oozed out of
him, "Mister, they're looting my house up there!"
"Well?" said the officer.
"I'm an American," said Jack.
"Well?" said the officer.
Jack regarded him helplessly. "Can't you do nothing for an American?" he
asked.
"Not for a damned beach-comber," said the officer, turning on his heel.
Jack did not attempt to follow or to pester him. He knew when he was
beat. He sat down on the nearest log, and making room for Fetuao beside
him, drew out his pipe, filled it and began to smoke. The girl tried to
speak to him, but he would not answer. She whispered to him that their
house was burning, and he never even turned his head to look. She took
his hand, but he snatched it impatiently away, refusing to be
comforted. Thus he remained for hours, sullen and half-stupefied, until
the returning Tanus embarked again, and the launch, with jubilant
whistles, led the flotilla back to the man-of-war. It was only when the
ship was out of sight that Jack rose, stretched himself, and breathed
the profound sigh of a man who has endured and has survived the most
terrible experience of a lifetime.
With slow steps, and many expressions of anger and resentment, Fetuao
and he walked through the village, gazing with bitter curiosity at the
ruins that everywhere surrounded them. They made their way to their own
little plantation, to find it devastated like the others, the breadfruit
trees ringed, the coffee bushes torn up by the roots, the _taro_,
bananas, and vanilla cut to pieces. In the paddock the cow and calf lay
dead in a pool of blood; of the dairy, half-set in the stream, nothing
remained but some stumps and smoking ashes; under a felled mango tree
they saw the protruding hoofs of Fetuao's mare, Afiola.
Returning with a few bananas they managed to find in the plantation,
they built a fire and roasted them within a few feet of where, that
morning, their house had stood. Though nothing now was left of it but
some charred wood, the place was still home to them. As Fetuao moved
forlornly about, picking up a few trifles that had been dropped or
thrown away by the invaders--a comb, a spool of thread, a flatiron, a
book or two with the covers scorched off--she lifted up a grimy rag and
tossed it, with a little gesture of disdain, at her husband's feet. He
spread it out and saw that it was the consul's flag, the flag he had
flown above his house with such confidence in its protection; the flag
which, until then, he had always reverenced.
Jack slowly tore it into pieces.
V
Nothing is stranger than the effect of the same misfortune on different
natures. To Jack, arrested in the full tide of his petty activities, it
was absolutely overwhelming. When everything he possessed was swept
away, and with it the routine that for three years had kept him busy and
content, he knew not what to do nor which way to turn. Sunk in apathy,
he spent whole days in dully mourning for what he had lost. He would
have starved had not Fetuao forced him to follow her into the mountains,
where, under her direction, he dug _tamu_ and climbed the trees for wild
chestnuts; while she, with deft hands and a little tangled bunch of
weeds, caught prawns in the pools and streams. At her bidding he made a
tiny hut of cocoanut branches, a clumsy canoe good enough to fish with,
and nets from the sinnet she taught him how to twist out of cocoanut
husks. She even sent him back to work in the plantation, for the bananas
at least could be saved, and there was a well of sprouting yams and some
_tingapula_ that had somehow escaped destruction. But Jack's spirit was
broken; the old incentive was gone; he could not revive the energy, the
zest, the interest that before had never failed him. He did what Fetuao
bade him and no more, and the days, once so short, seemed now never to
end.
One morning early he was awakened by the murmur of voices in the dark,
and on going to the door of the hut he was surprised to see Fetuao's
brothers, Tua and Anapu, Mele her uncle, Lapongi the orator, and a dozen
others, some of them boys not yet tattooed. In answer to his questions
Tua told him that a messenger had come for them with orders to at once
join the Mataafa forces behind Apia.
"And thou also, Jack," said Lapongi the orator, "for every man now is
needed to withstand the fury of the whites."
Jack, as usual, turned to Fetuao.
"We shall both of us go," said she, "I to carry water for the wounded,
thou with the _muaau_, a rock of strength and terror."
Jack made no protest. Hell! what did it matter where they went? Munching
the food that was handed him, he looked across the bay, now silvering
in the dawn, and wondered whether he was not seeing it for the last
time.
It was late at night when they passed the outposts and reached the
Mataafa camp, which stood on a high plateau overlooking Apia. Below them
the search-lights of the men-of-war moved restlessly about, shining at
times with a bewildering brilliancy into their very faces; and from the
little war-encompassed capital there rose a distant drumming and bugling
as the missionary boy king, unsafe even under the guns of Britain and
America, took his precautions against a night attack. After the
stillness of Oa there was something confusing in the stir and bustle of
Mataafa's big camp--in the constant passing of armed men, the change of
guards, and the rousing choruses around the fires. There was, besides,
an atmosphere of recklessness and gayety, engendered by excitement, by
danger, by the very desperation of their cause, that could not long be
resisted by even the most impassive recruit. Jack alone, of his whole
party, remained indifferent and unmoved; but his wife, all of the savage
in her rising to the surface, grew intoxicated almost to the point of
delirium.
Ordinarily so demure and quiet, she became from henceforward a creature
of another clay. Whirling her ax and dancing almost naked at the head of
the Oa contingent, she led it wherever it was sent, daring bullets and
shells with smiling intrepidity. In her wild beauty an artist might have
taken her for the spirit of war itself, as she moved undaunted along the
firing line, or with biting reproaches drove up skulkers from the rear.
Like some untried actress bringing down her house, she was overborne
with her own success; and the more she was praised the more
extravagantly and unflinchingly she exposed herself. Under the stress of
those fierce emotions her character in every way underwent a change for
the worse. In war time, death, always in the air, seems to annihilate
with its dark shadow all the bonds that bind society together. Life,
hitherto so assured, of a sudden becomes the most transient of human
gifts, to be enjoyed with a feverish heedlessness before it vanishes
forever into the unknown. Thus Fetuao found and accepted a dozen lovers
among her men, and while still according her husband the first place,
she yet permitted them liberties and familiarities that they were not
slow to take advantage of.
Deep in every woman's heart there is a love for the men of her race, a
love motherly and pitiful, that will bring the tears to her eyes at the
sight of a passing regiment and cause her to passionately mourn the
unknown soldier dead. This sentiment, this instinct, is a thousandfold
intensified on the bloody field itself. The pang when those brave
fellows fall is inexpressible; her pride is strangely humbled, and in
her mad exaltation she shrinks from nothing, and makes a virtue of her
own abandonment.
Jack followed Fetuao everywhere, a despondent, woe-begone figure, who,
amid the hail of bullets and the yells of contending warriors, lay or
ran or advanced with the others in a black preoccupation. He had not a
spark of interest in the struggle; his thoughts were forty miles away in
that ruined home, with his plants, and trees, and shrubs, his cow, and
his chickens. What victory could give them back? What terror had a
defeat for one who had already lost his all! He lived in the past, in
those frugal, thrifty, laborious years; for the present he had but an
indifference, an apathy, that he had not even the desire to shake off.
He became the butt of the warriors, who brought him their rifles to mend
and called him a coward for his pains. They envied him Fetuao, who, for
all her flirtations, slept every night by his side and was not happy
when he was out of her sight. They nicknamed him her "Paalangi dog," and
would whistle to him derisively and shout, "Come 'ere!" secure in the
chronic absent-mindedness that had become a joke to them all. When he
answered, as he always answered, "Eh, what?" and raised his vacant,
moody face, there would be an outburst of laughter, in which he himself
joined with a mirthless geniality, like a man unbending to a lot of
children. If a shell went off some one was sure to cry, "Eh, what?" and
this phrase, together with a mimicry of Jack's slow, dejected utterance
of it, became the stock pleasantry of the camp humorists, who brought it
out on all occasions.
The conflicts about Apia were mostly affairs of outposts, a pressing in
and a pressing back of the pickets on either side. The naval commanders,
in spite of repeated bombardments and the enormous havoc they wrought
along the coasts, found themselves hardly able to do more than hold
their own against the Mataafa army. The safety of Apia was constantly in
jeopardy, though barricades were thrown up in the streets and three
hundred men landed from the ships. A desperate night attack on the main
guard at the Tivoli Hotel betrayed the weakness of the whites to friends
and foes alike, and redoubled the anxiety of the admiral and captains.
It was plain that no decisive blow could be struck pending the arrival
of the reenforcements that had been urgently cabled for from New
Zealand, unless a better use were made of the missionary levies on the
spot. These loose native organizations were accordingly broken up,
consolidated into a single compact force of eight hundred men, well
armed and well drilled, and placed under the absolute command of a naval
lieutenant.
This fine force, supported by whites and Maxims, was counted on to
retrieve the situation and drive Mataafa from his mountain stronghold.
The plan for a joint attack was accordingly drawn up. A quota of seamen
and marines, with a couple of machine guns, was to form the center of
the little army, while the native brigade on either wing was to advance
simultaneously, lap round and outflank the Mataafas. This operation,
covered by a terrific bombardment from the three ships of war, was
forthwith begun; on its success was staked the hopes of the little
clique who had so lightly adopted the cause of a divinity student of
seventeen, against the vote and wish of well-nigh all Samoa.
On that day the Oa party held the center of the Mataafa line, a stone
wall stretching across a wide clearing to the forest on either side. It
was the post of honor, for it crossed the road up which the enemy were
toiling with their guns, and guarded the headquarters of the patriot
king, not a hundred yards behind. In the trampled grass two hundred men
sat or lay with their rifles in their hands and listened to the measured
periods of the orators exhorting them to remember their wrongs and die
fighting. These old men, white-haired, scarred with the wounds of bygone
battles, their wrinkled hands clasping the staves on which they leaned,
never winced as the shells whistled above their heads, nor abated by a
hair's breadth their tone of strident warning and encouragement. At
such a distance, and against a target six hundred feet above the sea
level, the men-of-war made poor practice and did little more than waste
their ammunition. But the shattering detonations of their guns, and the
thundering echoes rolling and re-rolling round the bay, made pleasant
music for their crews ashore. It seemed incredible that such
earth-shaking explosions could be wholly without effect, and the tired
seamen sweating up the hill were kindled by the thought that the rebels
were already suffering heavily and likely to run at the first encounter.
Sitting listlessly on a boulder, Jack scarcely took in the fact that
anything out of the way was about to happen. His only concern was not to
be too far from Fetuao, and so long as he had her in his sight he was
dumbly content. He was as solitary among the thronging warriors as any
castaway in mid-ocean, and his patient, stolid, inexpressive face, grown
older in a month by a dozen years, was the only one which failed to
reflect the coming conflict. Fetuao, on the contrary, was on fire from
top to toe; her saucy tongue was loosened, and her bright eyes dancing
in wild excitement. Joking and laughing in the roaring circle of her
admirers, she matched her quick wit against them all in a victorious
scream of banter and repartee.
Suddenly a shot rang out in the lower woods; then two, with a faltering
third; then a scattered volley like a bunch of firecrackers going off at
once. A score of men showed at the turn of the road doubling back for
dear life, the pickets who had been dislodged and driven in by the
advancing whites. They had hardly leaped the wall, panting, and
crouching with the main body behind it, when the machine guns wheeled
into the open and began to fire. In the first murderous crash it seemed
as though nothing human could withstand them, and the blue-jackets,
dotted here and there in the grass, raised an exultant yell, and some
even sprang up in anticipation of the call to charge. But the men that
worked the guns had to stand exposed and helpless before a fire more
galling than their own. They began to drop, and those who were unhurt
disconcertedly turned and ran. A couple of officers sprang out of the
grass to take charge of the abandoned guns, managing in their flurry to
jam them both. For a minute they tinkered and hammered at the choked
mechanism, exposing themselves, as they did so, to the concentrated
volleys of a hundred Samoan rifles. Of a sudden, one clapped his hand to
his breast and sank on his knees; his comrade caught him round the body
and dragged him back, leaving the guns, now silent and useless, to shine
innocuously in the sun.
All this while the woods on either hand reverberated with the volleys
and the cheers of an extended battle, and a haze of powder smoke
drifted above the tree tops. No one knew how the day was going, and the
most conflicting rumors ran like wildfire through the Mataafa lines
together with the names of such an one killed and such an one wounded.
Dodging the bullets, Fetuao flitted about with water for the parched
fighters, passing the news and rolling cigarettes for such of the
wounded as were not too far gone to care for them. Occasionally she
ferreted out a trembling wretch in the rear and drove him to the front
with taunts; or, if he were too panic-stricken to get up, she had no
compunction in thrashing him with a stick until he did so. The little
savage was beside herself as she danced and sang like a wanton child in
the rain--a rain of Martini and Lee-Remington balls stinging the air all
about her.
After the machine guns were put out of action the fight became a rifle
duel, which went on briskly for upward of an hour. Again and again the
whites rose in the grass, blundered forward and took cover, each rush
stemmed by the Oas, who, darting up from their wall, gave volley for
volley at point-blank range. Standing in a slop of blood, their great
naked feet trampling the dead and writhing bodies of their comrades,
they rivaled the rocky wall itself in the unflinching obstinacy of their
resistance. It was then the battle reached its deadliest stage, more
falling in those terrible minutes than during the whole previous course
of the action. There was no shouting, no cheering, but with clenched
teeth each man held his place and panted for the supreme moment that
should spell either victory or rout. That moment came with the bugle
call to charge, when the whites, rising for the last time, flung
themselves forward with bayonets fixed. On they came, crimson-faced,
mouths open, British and Americans in a pellmell rush like a rally of
boys at football. Even as they did so, Fetuao leaped bolt upright on the
wall, and swinging her carbine round her head, opposed her slender body
to the whole attack. In an instant she was tumbling backward with a
bullet through her throat, and as she lay coughing and strangling in the
mire, Jack ran forward with a cry and caught her in his arms. There she
died, amid the crash and roar of a hand-to-hand fight, jostled and
stumbled on, her little hot hands clinging to his in the convulsive
grasp of dissolution.
Jack sprang up like a madman. He had no thought in his dizzy head but
vengeance--vengeance, sudden, bloody, and swift. He plunged into the
thickest of the fray, cursing and raving as he opened a path with his
brawny shoulders. A seaman tried to drive him through with a bayonet,
but he caught the fellow round the neck and throttled him; he wrenched
away the weapon and stabbed out with it right and left, with a strength,
skill, and ferocity that nothing could withstand. He was fired at
again and again; his ashen face was twenty times a target, once at so
close a range that the powder burned his very skin. As the line swayed
to and fro in that desperate final struggle, there was a hoarse cry
against him, constantly repeated, of, "Shoot that white man!" "Kill the
renegade!" But Jack, seemingly proof against bullet and sword, stood his
ground like a lion and clubbed the butt of his gun into the faces of his
foes; and when the whites, at last losing heart, began to weaken and
fall back, it was Jack that led the Samoan charge, waving a dripping
bayonet, and bellowing like a maniac for the rest to follow him.
[Illustration: "In an instant she was tumbling backward."]
He stopped beside the guns, laughing wildly to see the blue-jackets
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.