“Nor I. It is not Marquesan.  It was his name, that he bore on the ship.”

“Honi?” I repeated incredulously, and then light broke.  “You mean Jones?”

“It may be.  I do not know.  Honi was his name, as my grandfather said it.  And this Honi had brought from the whale-ship a gun and a harpoon.  This harpoon had a head of iron and was fixed on a spear, with a long rope tied to the head, so that when it was thrust into the whale he was fastened to the boat that pursued him through the water.  There was no weapon like it on the island, and it was much admired.

“Honi fought with us when our tribe, the Papuaei, went to war with the Tiu of Taaoa.  He used his gun, and with it he won many battles, until he had killed so many of the enemy that they asked for peace.  Honi was praised by our tribe, and a fine house was built for him near the river, in the place where eels and shrimp were best.

“In this large house he drank more than in the other smaller one.  He used his gun to kill pigs and even birds.  My grandfather reproved him for wasting the powder, when pigs could easily be killed with spears.  But Honi would not listen, and he continued to kill until he had no more powder.  Then he quarreled with my grandfather, and one day, being drunk, he tried to kill him, and then fled to the Kau-i-te-oho, the tribe of redheaded people at Hanahupe.

“Learning that Honi was no longer with us, the Tiu tribe of Taaoa declared war again, and the red-headed tribe had an alliance with them through their chief’s families intermarrying, so that Honi fought with them.  His gun being without powder, he took his harpoon, and he came with the Tui and the Kau-i-te-oho to the dividing-line between the valleys where we used to fight.

“Where the precipices reared their middle points between the valleys, the tribes met and reviled one another.

“’You people with hair like cooked shrimp!  Are you ready for the ovens of our valley?’ cried my grandfather’s warriors.

“’You little men, who run so fast, we have now your white warrior with us, and you shall die by the hundreds!’ yelled our enemies.”

This picture of the scene at the line was characteristic of Polynesian warfare.  It is almost exactly like the meeting of armies long ago in Palestine and Syria, and before the walls of Troy.  Goliath slanged David grossly, threatening to give his body to the fowls of the air and the beasts of the field, and David retorted in kind.  So, when Ulysses launched his spear at Soccus, he cried: 

  “Ah, wretch, no father shall they corpse compose,
   Thy dying eye no tender mother close;
   But hungry birds shall tear those balls away,
   And hungry vultures scream around their prey.”

“For a quarter of an hour,” said Haabunai, “my grandfather’s people and the warriors of the enemy called thus to each other upon the top of the cliffs, and then Honi and the brother of my grandfather, head men of either side, advanced to battle.