“I had no weapon whatsoever to defend myself with. Deny had a club, I know. Feeling a mass of tangled arms clutching for me in the dark, I made a dive and, by good luck, caught what I meant to use as a club—it was a soft, slippery, nude savage! I felt the bones creak as I swung that living weapon round and round and aimed unseen blows at the bodies of the savages who tried to catch hold of me in that inky darkness.
“‘Go it, pal!’ yelled Deny. Crash! came the sound of his falling club, then a groan; another had gone under. Again and again came howls of pain to my ears as the natives fell to the forest floor before my tremendous onslaught as I wielded that soft, bulky weapon—a weapon that gave terrified shrieks as it attempted to save itself, for the poor devil made frantic clutches at the bodies I swung him towards as his hands tore at their mops of hair in terror.
“Then Deny came to my assistance, just in time too. But though I’d got a nasty knock on the head and nearly fell, I managed to follow Deny and Sanga as they called me. Then the three of us rushed away down the slopes. By daybreak we were miles away from that cursed village. And I don’t think we stopped more than an hour to rest before we got down to the seaboard.
“When we arrived back in Levuka we made up our minds to go out to the man-o’-war boat that was lying out in the bay, and tell them about Yoraka and his daughter up there in the Kai Tholos village. We were determined to get our own back off that bloodthirsty Britisher. We decided to let the matter slide for a day or so. Deny had got a blow on the back of the head during the mêlée and wanted to sleep for a day or so before he had any more excitement.
“It was during this interval that that happened which is history now. It was like this. Some sailors from a man-o’-war—three, I think—had gone off up in the mountains on a spree. They were never heard of again. So Commander Goodenough, of the British man-o’-war lying off Levuka, sent a crew of Jack Tars up to the tribal villages of the mountains to give them a lesson and see if they could hear anything of the missing men. They blew the Kai Tholos villages to smithereens! And it is common knowledge amongst the missionaries and traders to this day that, when they searched amongst the débris, to see if they could find any trace of their comrades, they came across the body of a white girl, clad in barbarian costume and riddled with bullets. Just by her side was the body of a white man, clad in a sulu gown. He was tattooed and sunburnt, but there was no mistake about his being a white man. They buried them both up there in the mountains, and put a cross on the girl’s grave; no name, just the date of the day when they had found her. Then they buried the man by her side, and, as he was a Britisher, they sounded the _Last Post_ and fired a volley over his grave. And Deny wrapped him up in the Union Jack!”