Five were still at large, but escape was impossible.  They could not get down to the coast, nor dared they venture too far inland for fear of the wild bushmen.  Then one of the five came in voluntarily and gave himself up, and Sheldon learned that Gogoomy and two others were all that were at large.  There should have been a fourth, but according to the man who had given himself up, the fourth man had been killed and eaten.  It had been fear of a similar fate that had driven him in.  He was a Malu man, from north-western Malaita, as likewise had been the one that was eaten.  Gogoomy’s two other companions were from Port Adams.  As for himself, the black declared his preference for government trial and punishment to being eaten by his companions in the bush.

“Close up Gogoomy kai-kai me,” he said.  “My word, me no like boy kai-kai me.”

Three days later Sheldon caught one of the boys, helpless from swamp fever, and unable to fight or run away.  On the same day Seelee caught the second boy in similar condition.  Gogoomy alone remained at large; and, as the pursuit closed in on him, he conquered his fear of the bushmen and headed straight in for the mountainous backbone of the island.  Sheldon with four Tahitians, and Seelee with thirty of his hunters, followed Gogoomy’s trail a dozen miles into the open grass-lands, and then Seelee and his people lost heart.  He confessed that neither he nor any of his tribe had ever ventured so far inland before, and he narrated, for Sheldon’s benefit, most horrible tales of the horrible bushmen.  In the old days, he said, they had crossed the grass-lands and attacked the salt-water natives; but since the coming of the white men to the coast they had remained in their interior fastnesses, and no salt-water native had ever seen them again.

“Gogoomy he finish along them fella bushmen,” he assured Sheldon.  “My word, he finish close up, kai-kai altogether.”

So the expedition turned back.  Nothing could persuade the coast natives to venture farther, and Sheldon, with his four Tahitians, knew that it was madness to go on alone.  So he stood waist-deep in the grass and looked regretfully across the rolling savannah and the soft-swelling foothills to the Lion’s Head, a massive peak of rock that upreared into the azure from the midmost centre of Guadalcanar, a landmark used for bearings by every coasting mariner, a mountain as yet untrod by the foot of a white man.

That night, after dinner, Sheldon and Joan were playing billiards, when Satan barked in the compound, and Lalaperu, sent to see, brought back a tired and travel-stained native, who wanted to talk with the “big fella white marster.”  It was only the man’s insistence that procured him admittance at such an hour.  Sheldon went out on the veranda to see him, and at first glance at the gaunt features and wasted body of the man knew that his errand was likely to prove important.  Nevertheless, Sheldon demanded roughly,—­