to their deaths. Let us watch."

"They are brave men," said Koolau. "Let us watch."

Side by side they lay among the morning-glories, with the yellow
blossoms of the hau dropping upon them from overhead, watching the
motes of men toil upward, till the thing happened, and three of
them, slipping, rolling, sliding, dashed over a cliff-lip and fell
sheer half a thousand feet.

Kiloliana chuckled.

"We will be bothered no more," he said.

"They have war guns," Koolau made answer. "The soldiers have not
yet spoken."

In the drowsy afternoon, most of the lepers lay in their rock dens
asleep. Koolau, his rifle on his knees, fresh-cleaned and ready,
dozed in the entrance to his own den. The maid with the twisted
arms lay below in the thicket and kept watch on the knife-edge
passage. Suddenly Koolau was startled wide awake by the sound of an
explosion on the beach. The next instant the atmosphere was
incredibly rent asunder. The terrible sound frightened him. It was
as if all the gods had caught the envelope of the sky in their hands
and were ripping it apart as a woman rips apart a sheet of cotton
cloth. But it was such an immense ripping, growing swiftly nearer.
Koolau glanced up apprehensively, as if expecting to see the thing.
Then high up on the cliff overhead the shell burst in a fountain of
black smoke. The rock was shattered, the fragments falling to the