Among other things he learned beche-de-mer English, with which he
could talk with all white men, and with all recruits who otherwise
would have talked in a thousand different dialects. Also, he learned
certain things about the white men, principally that they kept their
word. If they told a boy he was going to receive a stick of tobacco,
he got it. If they told a boy they would knock seven bells out of him
if he did a certain thing, when he did that thing, seven bells
invariably were knocked out of him. Mauki did not know what seven
bells were, but they occurred in beche-de-mer, and he imagined them to
be the blood and teeth that sometimes accompanied the process of
knocking out seven bells. One other thing he learned: no boy was
struck or punished unless he did wrong. Even when the white men were
drunk, as they were frequently, they never struck unless a rule had
been broken.

Mauki did not like the plantation. He hated work, and he was the son
of a chief. Furthermore, it was ten years since he had been stolen
from Port Adams by Fanfoa, and he was homesick. He was even homesick
for the slavery under Fanfoa. So he ran away. He struck back into the
bush, with the idea of working southward to the beach and stealing a
canoe in which to go home to Port Adams.

But the fever got him, and he was captured and brought back more dead
than alive.

A second time he ran away, in the company of two Malaita boys. They
got down the coast twenty miles, and were hidden in the hut of a
Malaita freeman, who dwelt in that village. But in the dead of night
two white men came, who were not afraid of all the village people and