Next morning, Joan and Sheldon, at breakfast, were aroused by a swelling murmur of angry voices.  The first rule of Berande had been broken.  The compound had been entered without permission or command, and all the two hundred labourers, with the exception of the boss-boys, were guilty of the offence.  They crowded up, threatening and shouting, close under the front veranda.  Sheldon leaned over the veranda railing, looking down upon them, while Joan stood slightly back.  When the uproar was stilled, two brothers stood forth.  They were large men, splendidly muscled, and with faces unusually ferocious, even for Solomon Islanders.  One was Carin-Jama, otherwise The Silent; and the other was Bellin-Jama, The Boaster.  Both had served on the Queensland plantations in the old days, and they were known as evil characters wherever white men met and gammed.

“We fella boy we want ’m them dam two black fella Mary,” said Bellin-Jama.

“What you do along black fella Mary?” Sheldon asked.

“Kill ’m,” said Bellin-Jama.

“What name you fella boy talk along me?” Sheldon demanded, with a show of rising anger.  “Big bell he ring.  You no belong along here.  You belong along field.  Bime by, big fella bell he ring, you stop along kai-kai, you come talk along me about two fella Mary.  Now all you boy get along out of here.”

The gang waited to see what Bellin-Jama would do, and Bellin-Jama stood still.

“Me no go,” he said.

“You watch out, Bellin-Jama,” Sheldon said sharply, “or I send you along Tulagi one big fella lashing.  My word, you catch ’m strong fella.”

Bellin-Jama glared up belligerently.

“You want ’m fight,” he said, putting up his fists in approved, returned-Queenslander style.

Now, in the Solomons, where whites are few and blacks are many, and where the whites do the ruling, such an offer to fight is the deadliest insult.  Blacks are not supposed to dare so highly as to offer to fight a white man.  At the best, all they can look for is to be beaten by the white man.

A murmur of admiration at Bellin-Jama’s bravery went up from the listening blacks.  But Bellin-Jama’s voice was still ringing in the air, and the murmuring was just beginning, when Sheldon cleared the rail, leaping straight downward.  From the top of the railing to the ground it was fifteen feet, and Bellin-Jama was directly beneath.  Sheldon’s flying body struck him and crushed him to earth.  No blows were needed to be struck.  The black had been knocked helpless.  Joan, startled by the unexpected leap, saw Carin-Jama, The Silent, reach out and seize Sheldon by the throat as he was half-way to his feet, while the five-score blacks surged forward for the killing.  Her revolver was out, and Carin-Jama let go his grip, reeling backward with a bullet in his shoulder.  In that fleeting instant of action she had thought to shoot him in the arm, which, at that short distance, might reasonably have been achieved.  But the wave of savages leaping forward had changed her shot to the shoulder.  It was a moment when not the slightest chance could be taken.