“Taute started the talk whilst Buck opened the tobacco case, and as I watched Tiaki’s face as the yarn went on, I thought to myself, God help Sru.
“Then, when the palaver was over, Taute showed him one of the crackers we’d brought with us and how it worked, explaining we’d got a cargo of them and how he could do Sru in.
“There was a dog walking on the beach twenty yards off, and Tiaki cocking his eye at it took aim and let fly with the cracker, and there wasn’t any dog left after the thing had burst, only a hole in the sand.
“You could have heard them shouting at Taleka. Those chaps ran about clean bughouse, and Buck, he stood by mighty pleased with himself till all of a sudden Tiaki quiets them and gives an order and the crowd broke and made a run for the canoe houses.
IV
“‘What’s up now?’ says Buck. He wasn’t long waiting to know. Four big war canoes pushed out full of men, and making straight for the Greyhound, and Taute, who was talking to Tiaki turns and tells us we were prisoners. Tiaki, for all his underlip, was no fool, and when Taute had done translating what he had to say to us his meaning leapt up at us like luminous paint.
“You see Tiaki had always been used to look on traders as hard bargainers who’d ask a tooth for a tenpenny nail, and here we were, us two, blowing in and offering him a cargo of ammunition for nothing, so long as he’d go and bomb Sru with it. It seemed too good to be true, and he suspected a trap. Said so, right out. He was going to hold us till the business was over and everything turned out satisfactory.
“I had to swallow twice to keep that news down. A moment before we’d been free men, and there we were now like rats in a barrel, but there was no use kicking, so we sat down on the sand and watched the canoe men swarming over the Greyhound and breaking out the cargo. They didn’t touch the Chinks nor loot the ship, just went for the cracker cases, bringing them off load after load and dumping them on the sand.
“Tiaki has a case opened and takes out a cracker; he’d tumbled to the mechanism, and there he stood with the thing in his hand explaining it to the population, talking away and flinging out his arms towards Taleka, evidently gingering them up for the attack on Sru. Then he gives an order sharp as the crack of a whip, and all the Marys and children and old chaps scattered off back to the village, and over a hundred of the fighting men took their seats on the beach in a big circle, whilst crackers were handed round to them and they examined the hang of the things, each man for himself.
“They were a fine lot, but differently coloured, some as dark as bar-chocolate and some the colour of coffee with milk in it, and as they sat there the women and children and old men came down from the village bringing bundles of mat baskets with them, and down they squatted by the edge of the trees going over the baskets and mending them and putting them in order.