And a busy afternoon it was.  Joan and Sheldon, both armed, went through the barracks, house by house, the boss-boys assisting, and half a dozen messengers, in relay, shouting along the line the names of the boys wanted.  Each boy brought the key to his particular box, and was permitted to look on while the contents were overhauled by the boss-boys.

A wealth of loot was recovered.  There were fully a dozen cane-knives—­big hacking weapons with razor-edges, capable of decapitating a man at a stroke.  Towels, sheets, shirts, and slippers, along with toothbrushes, wisp-brooms, soap, the missing billiard ball, and all the lost and forgotten trifles of many months, came to light.  But most astonishing was the quantity of ammunition-cartridges for Lee-Metfords, for Winchesters and Marlins, for revolvers from thirty-two calibre to forty-five, shot-gun cartridges, Joan’s two boxes of thirty-eight, cartridges of prodigious bore for the ancient Sniders of Malaita, flasks of black powder, sticks of dynamite, yards of fuse, and boxes of detonators.  But the great find was in the house occupied by Gogoomy and five Port Adams recruits.  The fact that the boxes yielded nothing excited Sheldon’s suspicions, and he gave orders to dig up the earthen floor.  Wrapped in matting, well oiled, free from rust, and brand new, two Winchesters were first unearthed.  Sheldon did not recognize them.  They had not come from Berande; neither had the forty flasks of black powder found under the corner-post of the house; and while he could not be sure, he could remember no loss of eight boxes of detonators.  A big Colt’s revolver he recognized as Hughie Drummond’s; while Joan identified a thirty-two Ivor and Johnson as a loss reported by Matapuu the first week he landed at Berande.  The absence of any cartridges made Sheldon persist in the digging up of the floor, and a fifty-pound flour tin was his reward.  With glowering eyes Gogoomy looked on while Sheldon took from the tin a hundred rounds each for the two Winchesters and fully as many rounds more of nondescript cartridges of all sorts and makes and calibres.

The contraband and stolen property was piled in assorted heaps on the back veranda of the bungalow.  A few paces from the bottom of the steps were grouped the forty-odd culprits, with behind them, in solid array, the several hundred blacks of the plantation.  At the head of the steps Joan and Sheldon were seated, while on the steps stood the gang-bosses.  One by one the culprits were called up and examined.  Nothing definite could be extracted from them.  They lied transparently, but persistently, and when caught in one lie explained it away with half a dozen others.  One boy complacently announced that he had found eleven sticks of dynamite on the beach.  Matapuu’s revolver, found in the box of one Kapu, was explained away by that boy as having been given to him by Lervumie.  Lervumie, called forth to testify, said he had got it from Noni; Noni had got it from Sulefatoi; Sulefatoi from Choka; Choka from Ngava; and Ngava completed the circle by stating that it had been given to him by Kapu.  Kapu, thus doubly damned, calmly gave full details of how it had been given to him by Lervumie; and Lervumie, with equal wealth of detail, told how he had received it from Noni; and from Noni to Sulefatoi it went on around the circle again.