I lighted up my pipe and waited, and the story that Oti told me in
atrocious bech-de-mer I here turn into proper English. Otherwise, in
spirit and order of narrative, the tale is as it fell from Oti's lips.

"It was after that that we were very proud. We had fought many times
with the strange white men who live upon the sea, and always we had
beaten them. A few of us were killed, but what was that compared with
the stores of wealth of a thousand thousand kinds that we found on the
ships? And then one day, maybe twenty years ago, or twenty-five, there
came a schooner right through the passage and into the lagoon. It was
a large schooner with three masts. She had five white men and maybe
forty boat's crew, black fellows from New Guinea and New Britain; and
she had come to fish beche-de-mer. She lay at anchor across the lagoon
from here, at Pauloo, and her boats scattered out everywhere, making
camps on the beaches where they cured the beche-de-mer. This made them
weak by dividing them, for those who fished here and those on the
schooner at Pauloo were fifty miles apart, and there were others
farther away still.

"Our king and headmen held council, and I was one in the canoe that
paddled all afternoon and all night across the lagoon, bringing word
to the people of Pauloo that in the morning we would attack the
fishing camps at the one time and that it was for them to take the
schooner. We who brought the word were tired with the paddling, but we
took part in the attack. On the schooner were two white men, the
skipper and the second mate, with half a dozen black boys. The skipper
with three boys we caught on shore and killed, but first eight of us
the skipper killed with his two revolvers. We fought close together,
you see, at hand grapples.