Maehoe

He had a spear wound in his shoulder, and he thought a rib was broken.
By Murray Leinster
A brutal white, a faithful black, and Fear act out their part in this drama of the Solomon Islands.
The wicked flee when no man pursueth. —Proverbs 28:1.
This is the story of Gleason and Maehoe and of Fear, who makes a bad third in any company. Henderson doesn’t really count, because he died of black-water fever some three weeks after Gleason met him. And old Sunaku—he was killed, later, when a British warship shelled his village for trying to cut off a trading schooner—is a very minor character. All you really have to remember is that Maehoe desired, passionately, to become a member of the Native Constabulary Force of the Solomon Islands Protectorate, and that Henderson was entirely too fond of one Biblical quotation.
Gleason had no idea of the triangular relationship he was entering when he landed his whaleboat on the shingle beach below Henderson’s house and staggered through the surf supported by his four surviving paddlers. He had a spear wound in his shoulder, and he thought a rib was broken—it hurt excruciatingly as one of his boat-boys helped him up the beach—and he was a mass of minor wounds and bruises.
The four boat-boys were in at least as bad a case. A particularly filthy rag about the arm of one of them was stained unpleasantly by the wound made by an irregularly shaped slug fired at close range. A trade gas-pipe gun had fired the slug as part of its charge of half a handful of assorted hardware. Another of the boys—they were To Ba’ita boys, from the north of Malaita—was limping with a gaping hole in his leg. The other two were merely slashed, cut, pounded, scratched, and generally battered, as the survivors of the defeated side in the nastiest kind of jungle fighting are so very apt to be. Those injuries had come about when Gleason was trying to rob a devil-devil house of its trophies for strictly commercial reasons. The whole tale would be unpleasant. But he had gotten caught in a jungle path and he and his boat-boys had to fight nearly two miles to get back to the water. The boys, being from north Malaita, rated as potential long pig in south Malaita, and fought like demons to get away. Gleason got away with them by a miracle, but he lost his schooner, and after Henderson patched him up he was very unphilosophic about the affair.