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“Oh, ho!” said Jack, beginning to see how the wind lay, “and so the other dodger’s a Catholic?”

“A rank, bigoted Catholic,” said Leicester hotly. “That’s what makes the missionaries so wild against him, and likewise the British and American officials.”

“They won’t let him be king, then?” asked Jack.

“He’s a rebel,” said Leicester, “and they’ve posted proclamations against him on every cocoanut tree around the beach.”

“And the natives, they won’t let Tanumafili be king neither?” said Jack.

“That’s him they’re chasing into the sea this minute,” explained Leicester.

Jack looked perplexed. “I don’t see why the Kanakas shouldn’t have the king they fancy,” he remarked.

“To hear you talk, one would think you was a bloody Dutchman yourself,” said Leicester.

“But the majority–” said Jack, “them two thousand—-“

“The Chief Justice ruled them out on a technicality,” said Leicester, “and if the Supreme Court ain’t right, who is? Do you think he’s going to give over this country to a papist? No, the only king here is Tanumafili, and the men-of-war will reinstate him at the muzzle of their guns. Then we’ll see who’s who in Samoar!”

Jack made his way across the street to the store where he usually sold his copra. Bullets were pattering on the roof, and the trader himself, a portly German in gold spectacles, was palpitating in a bomb-proof.

“I hope Mrs. Meyerfeld is well,” said Jack, who in Samoa had grown punctilious.

“Oh, mein Gott!” exclaimed Meyerfeld.

“And the children?–” inquired Jack, “Miss Hilda and Miss Theresa?”

“Oh, mein Gott!” said Meyerfeld.

“I have brought you forty bags of copra,” said Jack.

“Oh, mein Gott!” said Meyerfeld.

“Don’t you want it, then?” inquired Jack.

“Hear the pullets,” quavered Meyerfeld.

“But forty bags,” said Jack.

“I’ve no man, no noding,” groaned the trader.

“Gome again negst week. Gome again after de war.”

“I’ll put it in the shed myself,” said Jack.

He went out into the empty street and looked about him. The firing was going on as hotly as ever, but except for a single limp figure, face down in the dust, he failed to see the least sign of the contending parties. From the direction of the Mulivai bridge he heard bursts of cheering, with intermittent lulls and explosions as the battle rolled to and fro. War on so small a scale is startlingly like murder, and Jack shuddered as he went up to the corpse and turned it over. He returned to his boat, and in a fever of activity unloaded his forty bags and trundled them in batches into Meyerfeld’s copra shed across the road. It took half a dozen trips of the little flat-car to accomplish this task single-handed, and then there was the further delay in weighing each bag and checking off the contents on a bit of paper. Nor was this all, for he had to make a copy, besides, and tack it on the warehouse door with the inscription, “Taly and find correct John Wilson.”

This done, he dropped into his boat and hoisted the sails, weary, heartsick, and anxious for what the future might have in store for him. Passing to leeward of the British man-of-war, he saw her decks swarming with refugees, her crew grouped about the guns, and an officer in the fore-crosstrees sweeping the town with his glass. A gust of wind carried down to him the sound of children crying, and with it an indistinguishable humming, at once menacing and dejected, like the sigh of an impending gale. It echoed in his ears long afterwards, the most poignant note in war, the voice of the herded, helpless multitude.

He reached Oa in the gray of the morning, and the grating of his boat’s keel in the sand brought out Fetuao to meet him. She could not restrain her joy at the sight of him, kissing his hands and clinging to him as he took out the sails and oars and carried them up to the house. She never seemed so sweet to him, never so girlish and charming in her fresh young womanhood as in that dawn of his home-coming. To hear her laugh, to see her eyes sparkle, to feel her warm breath against his cheek, all transported him into a state of unreasoning security. Apia and its blood-stained streets faded into the immeasurable distance; the war, and all the attendant horrors that had haunted him, now seemed for a moment too remote to even think of. What had he to fear, here on his own hearthstone, with his dear wife beside him, in another world from that he had so lately quitted? If there was trouble, wouldn’t the consuls settle it, them and the treaty officials whose job it was to run the blessed group? He had never been no politician himself, and he wasn’t agoing to begin now. Let them worry as was paid to worry.