Koolau had said, he was a hunted rat, a creature outside the law,
sunk so deep in the mire of human horror that he was above the law
as well as beneath it. His face was featureless, save for gaping
orifices and for the lidless eyes that burned under hairless brows.

"Let us not make trouble," he began. "We ask to be left alone. But
if they do not leave us alone, then is the trouble theirs and the
penalty. My fingers are gone, as you see." He held up his stumps
of hands that all might see. "Yet have I the joint of one thumb
left, and it can pull a trigger as firmly as did its lost neighbour
in the old days. We love Kauai. Let us live here, or die here, but
do not let us go to the prison of Molokai. The sickness is not
ours. We have not sinned. The men who preached the word of God and
the word of Rum brought the sickness with the coolie slaves who work
the stolen land. I have been a judge. I know the law and the
justice, and I say to you it is unjust to steal a man's land, to
make that man sick with the Chinese sickness, and then to put that
man in prison for life."

"Life is short, and the days are filled with pain," said Koolau.
"Let us drink and dance and be happy as we can."

From one of the rocky lairs calabashes were produced and passed
round. The calabashes were filled with the fierce distillation of
the root of the ti-plant; and as the liquid fire coursed through
them and mounted to their brains, they forgot that they had once
been men and women, for they were men and women once more. The
woman who wept scalding tears from open eye-pits was indeed a woman
apulse with life as she plucked the strings of an ukulele and lifted
her voice in a barbaric love-call such as might have come from the