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The weapons had been sold long since to Tarawa, Apaiang, and Pleasant Island; places unheard of by the general reader, where obscure inhabitants paid for these instruments of death in money or in labour, misused them as it was known they would be misused, and had been disarmed by force.
For Heaven's sake, please come instantly and exert yourself on my behalf, or else we may lose Tarawa for good, and put back the good work by a dozen years." "We'll have to go, dear," said Kirke to his pretty wife. "Yes, we'll have to go," she assented sadly.
"Here is Tarawa; here is Apia in Samoa, nearly fifteen hundred miles distant. Here is the island of Ovalau in Fiji, about the same distance. Do you see?" "Yes, I see." "And here, north-west from Tarawa, is your home on Guam more than two thousand miles away. 'Tis a long, long way but it could be done." "A long, long way indeed." She lifted her eyes to me and then she placed her hand on mine.
"I shall do it, I shall do it," I said aloud, and already I fancied I could see my boat sailing into either Levuka or else Apia Harbour, fifteen hundred miles away, and hear the cheers, and see the flags run up by the ships in port, as I stepped out of my boat on to the beach to report myself to the British Consul "Jim Sherry, master and owner of a twenty-eight feet whale-boat, from Tarawa Island, in the Gilbert Group."
"My blessing on thee, Simi," said the man, as he blew a stream of smoke through his nostrils; "in but a few days I shall be strong, and then there shall be but one white man alive on Tarawa thyself." Niâbon angrily bade him be silent and make no threats; it would be time enough, she said, to talk of revenge when he was able to put a gun to his shoulder or a hand to his knife.
Robot tanks loaded with explosives disappeared as had those containing the soldiers, and only the stifled sound of their explosion registered the fact that they had fulfilled their design if not their purpose. It was difficult for the man on the street to understand how the weapons successful in Normandy and Tarawa could be balked by vegetation.
The advent of white men as traders had, however, been of great advantage to the island generally in one respect the savage, intractable inhabitants began to recognise the fact that so long as they warred among themselves the white man would be averse to remaining among them, and consequently for the four years previous to my arrival on Tarawa there had been no tribal battle, though isolated murders were by no means uncommon.
I rose from my rough bed of cane-work and mats, and, lighting my pipe, went outside, walked down to the beach, and seating myself on a canoe, looked out upon the wide expanse of ocean, heaving under a dark and lowering sky, and wondered moodily why I was ever such an idiot as to take charge of a trading station on such a God-forsaken place as Tarawa Island in the Gilbert Group.
Experience had shown him that in native questions she was always as good as her word, and it was with a kind of proud humility he conceded her the place he was so much less able himself to fill. He had not the faintest apprehensions about the Tarawa matter.
Their bodies were thrown into the well, and then for two days some of the people of Tarawa threw stones upon them till the hole, which was five fathoms across from its sloping banks, and a fathom and a half down to where the fresh water lay, was filled, and only a flat surface of stones was to be seen.
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