“This was the manner of the trap:  The path down the cliff was between two high walls of rock; at the foot of the cliff was a thick clump of high pandanus trees growing closely together.  In between these trees Letya built a high barrier of logs, encompassing the outlet of the path to Leasse.  This barrier was a half circle; the two ends touched the edge of the cliff, and the centre was hidden among the pandanus trees.  On the top of this barrier the men of Leasse waited with loaded muskets; lower down on the ground were others, they too had loaded muskets.  On the top of the cliff where the path led down, fifty men were hidden.  They were hidden in the thick scrub which we call oap.  Oap is a good thing in which to hide from an enemy, and then spring from and slay him suddenly.

“I, who was then a boy, saw all this.  I heard Letya, our white man, tell the head of our village that Charlik’s men would enter into the trap and perish.  Then kava was made, and Letya and the head men drank.  Kava is good, but rum is better to make men fight.  We had no rum, but we had great love for Letya and his wife, and his two children, and great hate for Charlik.  So we said, ‘If this is death, it is death,’ and every man went to his post—­some to the barrier at the foot of the cliff, and some to the thicket of oap on the summit.  Cerita, the wife of Letya the Englishman, was weeping.  She was weeping because Nena, the chief of Mout, was waiting in the house to kill her if her husband should be slain.  But she did not weep because of the fear of death; it was for her children she wept.  That is the way of women.  What is the life of a child to the life of a man?

“Nena was my father’s brother.  He was a brave man, but was too old to fight, for his eyes were dimmed by many years.  So he sat beside Cerita and her two children, with a long knife in his hand and waited.  He covered his face with a mat and waited.  It was right for him to do this, for Letya was a great man; and his wife, although she was a foreigner, was an honoured woman.  Therefore though Nena might not look upon her face at other times, he could kill her if Letya said she must die.  This was quite right and correct.  A wife must be guided by her husband and do what is right and correct, and avoid scandal.

“For many hours the women in the houses waited in silence.  Then suddenly they heard the thunder of two hundred guns, and the roaring of voices, then more muskets.  They ran out of the houses and looked up to the cliff, and lo! the sky was bright as day, for when Charlik’s people and the white men walked into the trap in the darkness, Letya and our people set alight great heaps of dry leaves and scrub, which were placed all along the barrier of logs.  This was done so that they could see better to shoot.  There were thirty or forty of Charlik’s men killed by that volley.  The white man who was leading them was very brave; he tried to climb over the barrier,