“We hadn’t been lying there cursing ourselves more than half an hour when, the sun having got over the reef, a chap comes in, catches Sellers by the heels and drags him out just as if he’d been a dead carcase.
“‘Good-bye, boys,’ cries Sellers, as he’s dragged along the ground, and good-bye it was, for a few minutes after we heard him scream.
“He went on screaming for fifteen minutes, maybe more, and I was fifteen years older when he let off and the silence came up again with nothing but the sound of the reef and the jabbering of those cursed Kanakas.
“‘If I had a knife I’d stick it into myself,’ says Heffernan. ‘Lord! what have they been doing to him?’
“I couldn’t answer, more than just by spitting, and there we lay waiting our turn and watching the sun striking fuller on the lagoon through the door space.
“I could see the schooner lying there at anchor, but not a soul could I see on board her; the crew were either down below or had been murdered. As I was looking at her I heard Heffernan give a grunt, then I saw that he was sitting up and that his hands were free. He’d been working away, saying nothing, and he’d managed to get the cocoanut fibre rope free of his wrists; a minute after, he’d got his feet loose, and then he turned to me and it didn’t take more than five minutes to make me a free man like himself.
“That being done we set to work on the back wall of the shack, pulling aside the wattles and tearing out the grass binding till we were free at last and out into the thick growth, which was mostly mammee apple and cassia mixed up with pandanus and cocoanut trees.
“What made us bother to break free from the shack, Lord only knows. There was no use getting free, seeing we were on an atoll and would be hunted down like rats once Tawela and her crowd got wind that we were loose; anyhow, we’d worked like niggers and just as if our lives had depended on it, and now in the bushes we were crawling along on our bellies to put as big a distance as we could between ourselves and that crowd—as if it mattered!
“We worked along, taking the line of bushes towards the reef opening, and all the time to the left of us we could hear the breaking of the swell on the outer beach, whilst to the right of us we could see bits of the lagoon now and then through the branches.
“The strangest feeling I’ve ever felt was being stuck like that between the free sea and that locked-in lagoon.