The poor fellow laughed good-naturedly, and I little thought that this simple request of mine would be the cause of his being a cripple for life. He came aft, took the steer oar from me, and I, seating myself on the after thwart, began to pull. We were at this time about thirty yards from the beach, and between it and the inner reef of the harbour. We sent the boat along for two or three hundred yards without a hitch, and I was thinking of what my cook would have for my supper, when we suddenly plumped into a patch of dead coral and stuck hard and fast.

Knowing that the tide was falling, we all jumped out, and pushed the boat off into deeper water as quickly as possible, just as half a dozen bright torches of coco-nut leaves flared up on the shore and revealed the boat dimly to those who were holding them.

At first I imagined that the chief of the village had sent some of his people to help us through the channel, but I was quickly undeceived when I heard “Flash Harry’s” voice.

“I’ve got you now, my saucy young quarter-deck-style-of-pup. Slew round and come ashore, or I’ll blow your head off.”

One glance ashore showed me that we were in a desperate position. “Flash Harry,” who was all but stark-naked—he had only a girdle of ti tree leaves round his waist—was covering the boat with his Winchester rifle, and his followers, armed with other guns, were ready to fire a volley into us, although most of them were pretty well drunk.

“They can’t hit us, Te Manu,” I cried to the Gilbert Islander, whose inborn fighting proclivities were showing in his gleaming eyes and short, panting breaths, “most of them have no cartridges in their guns, and they are all too drunk to shoot straight. Let us go on!”

Te Manu gripped the haft of the steer oar and swung the boat’s head round, and then I and the other native at the bow oar—a mere boy of sixteen—pulled for all we were worth just as “Flash Harry” dropped on one knee and fired.

Poor Te Manu swayed to and fro for a few moments and then cried out, “He has broken my hand, sir! But go on, pull, pull hard!”

Under a spattering fire from the beachcomber’s drunken companions we pulled out into deeper water and safety, and then, shipping my oar, I sprang to Te Manu’s aid. The bullet had struck him in the back of the right hand and literally cut off three of the poor fellow’s knuckles. I did what I could to stop the loss of blood, and told him to sit down, but he refused, and although suffering intense pain, insisted on steering with his left hand. As soon as we reached the cutter I at once hove up anchor and stood along the coast before a strong breeze to Matautu Harbour, where I was able to have the man’s hand properly attended to. He never recovered the use of it again except in a slight degree.

I never saw “Flash Harry” again, for a few months later I left Samoa for the Caroline Group, and when I returned a year afterwards I was told that he had at last found the country too hot for him and had left the island in a German “blackbirder” bound to the Solomon Islands.

Quite six years had passed, and then I learnt, in a somewhat curious manner, what became of him. One day in Sydney, New South Wales, three captains and myself met for lunch at the Paragon Hotel, on Circular Quay. We were all engaged in the South Sea trade, and one of the company, who was a stranger to me, had just returned from the Solomon Islands, with which group and its murderous, cannibal people he was very familiar. (He was himself destined to be killed there with his ship’s company in 1884.) He was a young man who had had some very narrow escapes and some very thrilling experiences, some of which he narrated.

We were talking of the massacre of Captain Ferguson and the crew of the Sydney trading steamer Ripple, by the natives of Bougainville Island in the Solomon Group, when our friend remarked—

“Ah, poor Ferguson ought to have been more careful. Why, the very chief of that village at Numa Numa—the man who cut him down with a tomahawk—had killed two other white men. Ferguson knew that, and yet would allow him to come aboard time after time with hundreds of his people, and gave him and them the run of his ship. I knew the fellow well. He told me to my face, the first time I met him, that he had killed and eaten two white men.”

“Who were they?” I asked.

“One was a man trading for Captain MacLeod of New Caledonia; the other chap was some beachcombing fellow who had been kicked ashore at Numa Numa by his skipper. I heard he came from Samoa originally. Anyway the chief told me that as soon as the ship that had put the man ashore had sailed, he was speared through the back as he was drinking a coco-nut.

“When they stripped off his clothes to make him ready for the oven, they found he was tattoed, Samoan fashion, from the waist to the knees. Then, as he had red hair, they cut off his head and smoke-dried it, instead of eating it with the rest of the body; they kept it as an ornament for the stem of a big canoe. A white man’s head is a great thing at any time for a canoe’s figurehead in the Solomons, but a white man’s head with red hair is a great mana” (mascotte).

Then I told him that I had known the man, and gave him his antecedents.

“Ah,” he said, “I daresay if you had been there you would have felt as if you could have eaten a bit of the beggar yourself.”

“I certainly do feel pleased that he’s settled,” I replied, as I thought of poor Red Bird’s hand.

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