"I Know What You Think," The Missionary Called Out To Them.
"You
think plenty tobacco on the schooner and you're going to get it.
I
tell you plenty rifles on schooner. You no get tobacco, you get
bullets."
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.
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