This unsubmissive and aggressive attitude of Marquesan women was brought home to me this very afternoon after the trial, when Daughter of the Pigeon came galloping up to my cabin.  She reined in her horse like a cowboy who had lassoed a steer and, throwing the bridle over the branch of an orange-tree, tripped into my living-room, where I was writing.

Without a word she put her arms around me, and in a moment I was enacting the part of Joseph when he fled from Potiphar’s wife.  With some muscular exertion I got her out of the house at the cost of my shirt.  Puafaufe (Drink of Beer), a chief of Taaoa, appeared at this moment, while I was still struggling with her upon my paepae.

“Makimaki okioki i te! An ungovernable creature!” he commented, shaking his head, and looking on with interest as she again attacked me vigorously, to the danger of my remaining shreds of garments.  Chivalry is not a primitive emotion, but it dies hard in the civilized brain, and I was attempting the impossible.  Fending her off as best I could, I conjured the chief by the red stripe on the sleeve of his white jacket, his badge of office, to rescue me, for Madame Bapp was now on her paepae, craning her fat neck, and I had no mind to be laughed at by my own tint.

The chief, however, maintained the impartial attitude of the bystander at a street fight.  Smothered in the embraces of Daughter of the Pigeon, covered with embarrassment, I struggled and cursed, and had desperately decided to fling her bodily over the eight-foot wall of the paepae into the jungle, when another arrival dashed up the trail.  This was the brother of Daughter of the Pigeon.

It was evident that my cabin had been appointed as a rendezvous, though I had no acquaintance with any of my three visitors.  A suspicion was born in my dull brain.  To make it surety, I grasped my feminine wooer by wrists and throat and thrust her into the arms of the chief with a stern injunction to hold her.  Then, without hint of my intention, I hastened into the house and brought forth the demijohn and cocoanut-shells.

The amorous fury of Daughter of the Pigeon melted into gratitude, and after two drinks apiece the company galloped away, leaving me to repair tattered garments and thank my stars for my supply of namu.

But the end of court-day was not yet.  I had barely fallen into my first slumber that night when I was awakened by the disconsolate Shan-Shan man, who came humbly to present me with a half-pound doughnut of his own making, and to beg my intercession with the governor for the return of his gun.  He reiterated tearfully that he had not meant to shoot kukus with it, that he had not done so, that he desired it only in order to be able to take a pot-shot at the offending countryman in the village.  He urged desperately that the other Chinese still possessed a gun well oiled and loaded.  He asserted even with tears that he had all respect and admiration for the white man’s law.  But he wanted his gun, and he wanted it quickly.