"Giving each of our prostrate bodies a prod with his toe to assure himself that they were really as limp as they looked, Boraki perched on the corner of the table and divided his time between eating chocolate wafers and giving his henchmen gratuitous tips on the way to hold down a struggling missionary. It was an even thing for a while, Boraki avers; the prettiest kind of a fight. But when the man who had stroked Oxford for three consecutive years finally threw off his assailants and made a break for the deck and fighting room, the wily pirate felt that it was time to take a hand himself. Without descending from his comfortable cross-legged perch on the snowy table-cloth, he leaned forward as the fugitive dashed by and coolly planted his water bottle just aft Loveworth's right ear, sending the stout-hearted missionary down alongside his officers in the shambles on the floor.
"Leaving his companions to tie up the prisoners, Boraki, munching at a mixed fistful of eclairs and canned salmon, sauntered forward to see all made snug in that part of the ship. Five minutes later, his head crowned with Loveworth's waste-basket—a cast iron imitation of a top hat—and puffing contentedly at a Perfecto, he had taken his station at the wheel and with the skill of a born sailor was guiding the Southern Cross in through the maze of shoals that surrounded his island.
"The run in was a dead beat to windward, the sun was pitilessly hot, and by the time the schooner's anchor went rattling down into the rose coral floor of Makatea lagoon Boraki's kingly head, under its sixteen-pound iron crown, was buzzing like the Trade-wind in the palm fronds. His blood seemed turned to boiling water and the words of the final orders that he tried to speak rattled together in his throat like the rustle of dead banana leaves, so that he had to make his meaning clear by signs. What wonder, then, that not even a hundred-yards-square of close-packed canoes, from each of which issued shouts of acclamation, could hold him when, from the cool, dark depth of the cabin, came the ringing Marquesan equivalent of 'Rum ho!'
"Boraki crossed the cockpit in one bound, negotiated the companionway in another, and with a third hurdled the prostrate forms of the prisoners and landed between his two faithful lieutenants who, after bootlessly ransacking the schooner from stem to stern, had at last discovered the wine lockers underneath the starboard transoms in the cabin.
"Boraki was vaguely aware that each of his men was holding up a cool-looking green bottle, through the wonderful gold network of which could be seen a beautiful golden liquid that bubbled and flashed and jumped up and down and seemed quite as impatient to get out and run down his burning throat as he was to have it do so. In the lockers below stretched endless lines of similar flashing bottles, and each line, to the chief's inflamed imagination, seemed long enough to link the lagoon of Makatea to the moon with a golden chain. He wondered how long it would take him to drink them all dry.
"But why this terrible delay? Wouldn't these fools ever set the nectar free and extinguish the flames that were licking up his insides? They were letting him die while they sought for a white man's 'pull-pull' to loosen the plugs with! What need was there for a 'pull-pull' anyhow? He would show them how the thing should be done, and, suiting the action to the word, the impatient chief seized a bottle in each hand and deftly opened the two at once by knocking their heads together.
"What else he opened at the same time Boraki probably never thoroughly understood, and so he was the readier to believe Loveworth when that keen opportunist told him solemnly that it was the Gate of Hell. After that point had been impressed upon him, his alarmed query as to whether or not all the devils who had come out when the Gate opened had returned was a perfectly natural one. He said that the only thing he clearly remembered was a feeling of wonder that the heads of the beautiful bottles should knock off so easily, and that his first recollection after that was of crying out because he thought some one was raking off his face with a comb made of shark-hooks. As a matter of fact the incidents alluded to were separated by more than an hour of time, and the shark-hook comb sensation was caused by the well-meant efforts of the first and second mates to remove the cast iron hat from Boraki's head with the aid of a hammer, file and cold chisel.
"When the roughly opened bottles of 'Extra Spry' kicked downward and set off the whole mine in the lockers the henchmen were only slammed across to the opposite side of the cabin and deposited, senseless, against the china closet; but the king himself, caught bending over, received the full force of the explosion upon the chest and was shot like a rocket against the ceiling. By the impact, his iron hat, while it probably saved him from a fractured skull, was driven through flesh and cartilage squarely down upon his shoulders, fitting so closely that only a rust hole in the crown saved its wearer from a speedy smothering. Surely no other king in history, so securely crowned, ever furnished so graphic an illustration of the 'Uneasy lies the head' adage.
"Ten seconds after the explosion, out of all the horde that had swarmed over her, not a Makatean who could help himself remained aboard the Southern Cross, and in less than that many minutes not a canoe cut the waters of the lagoon and no man, woman or child was stirring in the village. Huddled in their houses, the whole population was awaiting in fear and trembling the moment when the devil ship would reopen with its invisible cannon.
"The terror of the people was increased a hundredfold when a man who, watching at the sky-light of the cabin, had been stunned by the explosion, came floundering madly ashore a half hour later and ran from house to house telling in broken speech how he had seen the white men—whom they had all beheld lying bound and lifeless on the cabin floor—rise up and begin driving spikes through King Boraki's head. Never was clay laid ready to the hand of the moulder more plastic than was the outlaw community of Makatea at this moment; nor was ever man better qualified to make the most of the situation than the Reverend Horatio Loveworth.