on its oars, kept afloat on the edge of the beach.  When I landed with my trade-goods, leaving my steering sweep apeak, Otoo left his stroke position and came into the stern-sheets, where a Winchester lay ready to hand under a flap of canvas.  The boat’s crew was also armed, the Sniders concealed under canvas flaps that ran the length of the gunwales.  While I was busy arguing and persuading the woolly-headed cannibals to come and labor on the Queensland plantations Otoo kept watch.  And often and often his low voice warned me of suspicious actions and impending treachery.  Sometimes it was the quick shot from his rifle, knocking a savage over, that was the first warning I received.  And in my rush to the boat his hand was always there to jerk me flying aboard.  Once, I remember, on Santa Anna, the boat grounded just as the trouble began.  The covering boat was dashing to our assistance, but the several score of savages would have wiped us out before it arrived.  Otoo took a flying leap ashore, dug both hands into the trade-goods, and scattered tobacco, beads, tomahawks, knives, and calicoes in all directions.

This was too much for the woolly-heads.  While they scrambled for the treasures, the boat was shoved clear, and we were aboard and forty feet away.  And I got thirty recruits off that very beach in the next four hours.

The particular instance I have in mind was on Malaita, the most savage island in the easterly Solomons.  The natives had been remarkably friendly; and how were we to know that the whole village had been taking up a collection for over two years with which to buy a white man’s head?  The beggars are all head-hunters, and they especially esteem a white man’s head.  The fellow who captured the head would receive the whole collection.  As I say, they appeared very friendly; and on this day I was fully a hundred yards down the beach from the boat.  Otoo had cautioned me; and, as usual when I did not heed him, I came to grief.

The first I knew, a cloud of spears sailed out of the mangrove swamp at me.  At least a dozen were sticking into me.  I started to run, but tripped over one that was fast in my calf, and went down.  The woolly-heads made a run for me, each with a long-handled, fantail tomahawk with which to hack off my head.  They were so eager for the prize that they got in one another’s way.  In the confusion, I avoided several hacks by throwing myself right and left on the sand.

Then Otoo arrived—­Otoo the manhandler.  In some way he had got hold of a heavy war club, and at close quarters it was a far more efficient weapon than a rifle.  He was right in the thick of them, so that they could not spear him, while their tomahawks seemed worse than useless.  He was fighting for me, and he was in a true Berserker rage.  The way he handled that club was amazing.  Their skulls squashed like overripe oranges.  It was not until he had driven them back, picked me up in his arms, and started to run, that he received his first wounds.  He arrived in the boat with four spear thrusts, got his Winchester, and with it got a man for every shot.  Then we pulled aboard the schooner and doctored up.