At last, one man, alone in a small canoe, took the letter and
started. Waiting for relief, work went on steadily on the Minota.
Her water-tanks were emptied, and spars, sails, and ballast started
shoreward. There were lively times on board when the Minota rolled
one bilge down and then the other, a score of men leaping for life
and legs as the trade-boxes, booms, and eighty-pound pigs of iron
ballast rushed across from rail to rail and back again. The poor
pretty harbour yacht! Her decks and running rigging were a raffle.
Down below everything was disrupted. The cabin floor had been torn
up to get at the ballast, and rusty bilge-water swashed and
splashed. A bushel of limes, in a mess of flour and water, charged
about like so many sticky dumplings escaped from a half-cooked stew.
In the inner cabin, Nakata kept guard over our rifles and
ammunition.
Three hours from the time our messenger started, a whale-boat,
pressing along under a huge spread of canvas, broke through the
thick of a shrieking squall to windward. It was Captain Keller, wet
with rain and spray, a revolver in belt, his boat's crew fully
armed, anchors and hawsers heaped high amidships, coming as fast as
wind could drive - the white man, the inevitable white man, coming to
a white man's rescue.
The vulture line of canoes that had waited so long broke and
disappeared as quickly as it had formed. The corpse was not dead
after all. We now had three whale-boats, two plying steadily
between the vessel and shore, the other kept busy running out
anchors, rebending parted hawsers, and recovering the lost anchors.
Later in the afternoon, after a consultation, in which we took into
consideration that a number of our boat's crew, as well as ten of
the recruits, belonged to this place, we disarmed the boat's crew.
This, incidently, gave them both hands free to work for the vessel.
The rifles were put in the charge of five of Mr. Caulfeild's mission
boys. And down below in the wreck of the cabin the missionary and
his converts prayed to God to save the Minota. It was an impressive
scene! the unarmed man of God praying with cloudless faith, his
savage followers leaning on their rifles and mumbling amens. The
cabin walls reeled about them. The vessel lifted and smashed upon
the coral with every sea. From on deck came the shouts of men
heaving and toiling, praying, in another fashion, with purposeful
will and strength of arm.
That night Mr. Caulfeild brought off a warning. One of our recruits
had a price on his head of fifty fathoms of shell-money and forty
pigs. Baffled in their desire to capture the vessel, the bushmen
decided to get the head of the man. When killing begins, there is
no telling where it will end, so Captain Jansen armed a whale-boat
and rowed in to the edge of the beach.
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