Then he might have shot one or two and given the
rest a new lesson, writ in red, for them to con. It was one man against
two hundred, and he was horribly afraid of his sickness overpowering him
and leaving him at their mercy. He saw visions of the blacks taking
charge of the plantation, looting the store, burning the buildings, and
escaping to Malaita. Also, one gruesome vision he caught of his own
head, sun-dried and smoke-cured, ornamenting the canoe house of a
cannibal village. Either the _Jessie_ would have to arrive, or he would
have to do something.
The bell had hardly rung, sending the labourers into the fields, when
Sheldon had a visitor. He had had the couch taken out on the veranda,
and he was lying on it when the canoes paddled in and hauled out on the
beach. Forty men, armed with spears, bows and arrows, and war-clubs,
gathered outside the gate of the compound, but only one entered. They
knew the law of Berande, as every native knew the law of every white
man's compound in all the thousand miles of the far-flung Solomons. The
one man who came up the path, Sheldon recognized as Seelee, the chief of
Balesuna village. The savage did not mount the steps, but stood beneath
and talked to the white lord above.
Seelee was more intelligent than the average of his kind, but his
intelligence only emphasized the lowness of that kind.
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