soldiers were drawing near. They crept along the trail in single
file, and he tried to count them until he lost track. At any rate,
there were a hundred or so of them--all come after Koolau the leper.
He felt a fleeting prod of pride. With war guns and rifles, police
and soldiers, they came for him, and he was only one man, a crippled
wreck of a man at that. They offered a thousand dollars for him,
dead or alive. In all his life he had never possessed that much
money. The thought was a bitter one. Kapahei had been right. He,
Koolau, had done no wrong. Because the haoles wanted labour with
which to work the stolen land, they had brought in the Chinese
coolies, and with them had come the sickness. And now, because he
had caught the sickness, he was worth a thousand dollars--but not to
himself. It was his worthless carcass, rotten with disease or dead
from a bursting shell, that was worth all that money.

When the soldiers reached the knife-edged passage, he was prompted
to warn them. But his gaze fell upon the body of the murdered maid,
and he kept silent. When six had ventured on the knife-edge, he
opened fire. Nor did he cease when the knife-edge was bare. He
emptied his magazine, reloaded, and emptied it again. He kept on
shooting. All his wrongs were blazing in his brain, and he was in a
fury of vengeance. All down the goat-trail the soldiers were
firing, and though they lay flat and sought to shelter themselves in
the shallow inequalities of the surface, they were exposed marks to
him. Bullets whistled and thudded about him, and an occasional
ricochet sang sharply through the air. One bullet ploughed a crease
through his scalp, and a second burned across his shoulder-blade
without breaking the skin.

It was a massacre, in which one man did the killing. The soldiers