He rose and walked to and fro, muttering to himself.  Then he spoke again.

“Mr. North, and you, my friend”—­turning to Macy—­“have saved me and those I love from a sudden and cruel death.  What can I do to show my gratitude?  You cannot now return to your ship; will you join your fortunes with mine?  I have long thought of leaving this island and settling in Ponape.  There is money to be made there.  Join me and be my partners.  My cutter is now hauled up on the beach—­if she were fit to go to sea we could leave the island to-night.  But that cannot be done.  It will take me a week to put her in proper repair—­and to-morrow we must fight for our lives.”

North stretched out his hand.  “Macy and I will stand by you, Ledyard.  We do not want to ever put foot again on the deck of the Iroquois.”

CHAPTER III

The story of that day of bloodshed and horror, when Charlik and his white allies sought to exterminate the whole community, cannot here be told in all its dreadful details.  Seventy years have come and gone since then, and there are but two or three men now living on the island who can speak of it with knowledge as a tale of “the olden days when we were heathens.”  Let the rest of the tale be told in the words of one of those natives of Leasse, who, then a boy, fought side by side with Ledyard, North, and Macy.

* * * * *

“The sun was going westward in the sky when the two ships rounded the point and anchored in what you white men now call Coquille Harbour.  We of Leasse, who watched from the shore, saw six boats put off, filled with men.  There pulled inside the reef, and went to the right towards Mout; three went to the left.  Letya (Ledyard), with the two white strangers who had come to him in the night, and two hundred of our men, had long before gone into the mountains to await Charlik and his fighting men, and their white friends.  They—­Letya and the Leasse people—­made a trap for Charlik’s men in the forest.  Charlik himself was in the boats with the other white men.  He wanted to see the people of Leasse and Mout driven into the water, so that he might shoot at them with a new rifle which Kesa or the other ship captain—­I forget which—­had given to him.  But he wanted most of all to get Cerita, the wife of Letya, the white man.  Only Cerita was to live.  These were Charlik’s words.  He did not know that her husband had returned from the sea.  Had he known that, he would not have given all his money and all his oil to the two white captains to help him to make Leasse and Mout desolate and give our bones to his dogs to eat.

“It was a great trap—­the trap prepared by Letya; and Charlik’s men and the white men with them fell in it.  They fell as a stone falls in a deep well, and sinks and is no more seen of men.