sat with a book before him, in which he inscribed strange marks and
lines. He looked at Mauki as though he had been a pig or a fowl,
glanced under the hollows of his arms, and wrote in the book. Then he
held out the writing stick and Mauki just barely touched it with his
hand, in so doing pledging himself to toil for three years on the
plantations of the Moongleam Soap Company. It was not explained to him
that the will of the ferocious white men would be used to enforce the
pledge, and that, behind all, for the same use, was all the power and
all the warships of Great Britain.

Other blacks there were on board, from unheard-of far places, and when
the white man spoke to them, they tore the long feather from Mauki's
hair, cut that same hair short, and wrapped about his waist a
lava-lava of bright yellow calico.

After many days on the schooner, and after beholding more land and
islands than he had ever dreamed of, he was landed on New Georgia, and
put to work in the field clearing jungle and cutting cane grass. For
the first time he knew what work was. Even as a slave to Fanfoa he had
not worked like this. And he did not like work. It was up at dawn and
in at dark, on two meals a day. And the food was tiresome. For weeks
at a time they were given nothing but sweet potatoes to eat, and for
weeks at a time it would be nothing but rice. He cut out the cocoanut
from the shells day after day; and for long days and weeks he fed the
fires that smoked the copra, till his eyes got sore and he was set to
felling trees. He was a good axe-man, and later he was put in the
bridge-building gang. Once, he was punished by being put in the
road-building gang. At times he served as boat's crew in the whale
boats, when they brought in copra from distant beaches or when the
white men went out to dynamite fish.