"Plack!" he exclaimed. "It's horrible! It's disgusting! They have been cutting off beople's heads!"
"Fourteen by one count," I said; "twenty-two by another."
"Gabtain," said he with a look of extraordinary gravity, "dere's worse nor that!"
"Worse?" I said.
"I have it straight from Papalangi Mativa himself."
"Have what?" I asked.
"Excellency," said Papalangi Mativa, "perhaps it is not high-chief-known to thee that I and mine come from a noble Savai'i stock, and that the son of my mother's sister, a stripling named O, numbered himself among the enemy and was to-day killed and his head taken on the field of Vaitele."
"'This is a black business, Silver Tongue,' I said."[ToList]