THE CLUB OF MA (Continued)

Dismiss the clumsy and brutal affair that sculptors have placed in the hand of Hercules, and which inevitably is recalled to mind by the word “club.”

The pasht of Karolin might almost have been called a sword, almost likened to a hockey stick. Four feet two inches from extremity to extremity, curved and broadened and flattened at the striking end, with a tip rim of coral morticed to the wood, it could strike with the convexity, the concavity or the flat. It could sever a head if properly used, or make a gash half a foot deep in a man, or simply stun. No man knew its age; the fire-hardened wood of which it was made had ceased to grow on Karolin, and the art by which the coral tip had been morticed to the wood was a forgotten art.

There is no doubt that this terrible weapon had a history as blood-stained as it was long, but it was the blood of battle it had spilt, not the blood of sacrifice and superstition, not the blood of greed and trade. Laminai alone had disgraced it by killing a woman with it. But Laminai was dead, and his sons and his seed destroyed for ever.

Lying by Dick, Katafa told him what she knew about it, showed him the rings on the handle, told him that now, since Ma and all the fighting men of Karolin were gone and Uta of no account, it was his to keep and hold and wield above the heads of all other men.

Talking to him, her voice suddenly ceased. The wind through the branches had brought a sound. Now it came clear, a sound like the cry of hounds in pursuit of game; it died off, grew louder, ceased. Then came another sound, sudden and close, and, bursting through the branches and between the trees so close to the lagoon bank that Dick could have hit him with a biscuit, came a man. He was the black-bearded man of the beach, and he was running for his life. Dick, concealed by the branches, just glimpsed him, but the glimpse was enough. Right on the heels of the fugitive came three of the ape-men, the leader armed with an axe.

They were no longer giving tongue, but he could hear their breath coming as they ran. “Waugh—waugh—waugh.”

They passed, then came a shriek from the sward, and then pandemonium.

Dick, listening, with Katafa’s arm about him, knew what had happened, but he did not know all, or how that the red-bearded man, the owner of the schooner and the terrible personality that had dominated the expedition, being put out of count, the New Hebrideans, armed with their tree-cutting axes, had risen in revolt. That of the four white men and the dozen Polynesian sailors of the schooner, not one man remained alive; that a hundred and forty Nahanesians held the island in their grasp, the schooner and the trade goods and rum on board of her.

At one stroke the club of Ma had done this work of magic with no magic to help it but that of its own perfect balance and the personality of its wielder.

Safe-hidden in the bushes, they heard the sounds from the sward die down. Then came silence, broken only by the old tune of the reef, the whisper of the wind and the sounds of the birds in the branches.