第37章 THE STORY OF A PLANTATION(2)

He had once landed there,he told me,about dusk,and found the remains of a man and woman partly eaten.On his starting and sickening at the sight,one of Moipu's young men picked up a human foot,and provocatively staring at the stranger,grinned and nibbled at the heel.None need be surprised if Mr.Stewart fled incontinently to the bush,lay there all night in a great horror of mind,and got off to sea again by daylight on the morrow.'It was always a bad place,Atuona,'commented Mr.Stewart,in his homely Fifeshire voice.In spite of this dire introduction,he accepted the captain's offer,was landed at Taahauku with three Chinamen,and proceeded to clear the jungle.

War was pursued at that time,almost without interval,between the men of Atuona and the men of Haamau;and one day,from the opposite sides of the valley,battle -or I should rather say the noise of battle -raged all the afternoon:the shots and insults of the opposing clans passing from hill to hill over the heads of Mr.

Stewart and his Chinamen.There was no genuine fighting;it was like a bicker of schoolboys,only some fool had given the children guns.One man died of his exertions in running,the only casualty.

With night the shots and insults ceased;the men of Haamau withdrew;and victory,on some occult principle,was scored to Moipu.Perhaps,in consequence,there came a day when Moipu made a feast,and a party from Haamau came under safe-conduct to eat of it.These passed early by Taahauku,and some of Moipu's young men were there to be a guard of honour.They were not long gone before there came down from Haamau,a man,his wife,and a girl of twelve,their daughter,bringing fungus.Several Atuona lads were hanging round the store;but the day being one of truce none apprehended danger.The fungus was weighed and paid for;the man of Haamau proposed he should have his axe ground in the bargain;and Mr.

Stewart demurring at the trouble,some of the Atuona lads offered to grind it for him,and set it on the wheel.While the axe was grinding,a friendly native whispered Mr.Stewart to have a care of himself,for there was trouble in hand;and,all at once,the man of Haamau was seized,and his head and arm stricken from his body,the head at one sweep of his own newly sharpened axe.In the first alert,the girl escaped among the cotton;and Mr.Stewart,having thrust the wife into the house and locked her in from the outside,supposed the affair was over.But the business had not passed without noise,and it reached the ears of an older girl who had loitered by the way,and who now came hastily down the valley,crying as she came for her father.Her,too,they seized and beheaded;I know not what they had done with the axe,it was a blunt knife that served their butcherly turn upon the girl;and the blood spurted in fountains and painted them from head to foot.

Thus horrible from crime,the party returned to Atuona,carrying the heads to Moipu.It may be fancied how the feast broke up;but it is notable that the guests were honourably suffered to retire.

These passed back through Taahauku in extreme disorder;a little after the valley began to be overrun with shouting and triumphing braves;and a letter of warning coming at the same time to Mr.

Stewart,he and his Chinamen took refuge with the Protestant missionary in Atuona.That night the store was gutted,and the bodies cast in a pit and covered with leaves.Three days later the schooner had come in;and things appearing quieter,Mr.Stewart and the captain landed in Taahauku to compute the damage and to view the grave,which was already indicated by the stench.While they were so employed,a party of Moipu's young men,decked with red flannel to indicate martial sentiments,came over the hills from Atuona,dug up the bodies,washed them in the river,and carried them away on sticks.That night the feast began.

Those who knew Mr.Stewart before this experience declare the man to be quite altered.He stuck,however,to his post;and somewhat later,when the plantation was already well established,and gave employment to sixty Chinamen and seventy natives,he found himself once more in dangerous times.The men of Haamau,it was reported,had sworn to plunder and erase the settlement;letters came continually from the Hawaiian missionary,who acted as intelligence department;and for six weeks Mr.Stewart and three other whites slept in the cotton-house at night in a rampart of bales,and (what was their best defence)ostentatiously practised rifle-shooting by day upon the beach.Natives were often there to watch them;the practice was excellent;and the assault was never delivered -if it ever was intended,which I doubt,for the natives are more famous for false rumours than for deeds of energy.I was told the late French war was a case in point;the tribes on the beach accusing those in the mountains of designs which they had never the hardihood to entertain.And the same testimony to their backwardness in open battle reached me from all sides.Captain Hart once landed after an engagement in a certain bay;one man had his hand hurt,an old woman and two children had been slain;and the captain improved the occasion by poulticing the hand,and taunting both sides upon so wretched an affair.It is true these wars were often merely formal -comparable with duels to the first blood.Captain Hart visited a bay where such a war was being carried on between two brothers,one of whom had been thought wanting in civility to the guests of the other.About one-half of the population served day about on alternate sides,so as to be well with each when the inevitable peace should follow.The forts of the belligerents were over against each other,and close by.