strong current and baffling winds prevented them from gaining across.
Daylight found them still several miles from their goal. But daylight
brought a cutter, in which were two white men, who were not afraid of
eleven Malaita men armed with twelve rifles. Mauki and his companions
were carried back to Tulagi, where lived the great white master of all
the white men. And the great white master held a court, after which,
one by one, the runaways were tied up and given twenty lashes each,
and sentenced to a fine of fifteen dollars. They were sent back to New
Georgia, where the white men knocked seven bells out of them all
around and put them to work. But Mauki was no longer house-boy. He was
put in the road-making gang. The fine of fifteen dollars had been paid
by the white men from whom he had run away, and he was told that he
would have to work it out, which meant six months' additional toil.
Further, his share of the stolen tobacco earned him another year of
toil.

Port Adams was now three years and a half away, so he stole a canoe
one night, hid on the islets in Manning Straits, passed through the
Straits, and began working along the eastern coast of Ysabel, only to
be captured, two-thirds of the way along, by the white men on Meringe
Lagoon. After a week, he escaped from them and took to the bush. There
were no bush natives on Ysabel, only salt-water men, who were all
Christians. The white men put up a reward of five-hundred sticks of
tobacco, and every time Mauki ventured down to the sea to steal a
canoe he was chased by the salt-water men. Four months of this passed,
when, the reward having been raised to a thousand sticks, he was
caught and sent back to New Georgia and the road-building gang. Now a
thousand sticks are worth fifty dollars, and Mauki had to pay the
reward himself, which required a year and eight months' labor. So Port
Adams was now five years away.