Plunging our paddles into the water, we sent our bamboo craft along till we were in absolute safety as far as the tide-rip was concerned. Then Yorke laid down his paddle.
“We're all right now, Drake; and now we'll give these man-chawing beggars a bit of a surprise. They mean to knock us on the head in another ten minutes, and take our carcasses ashore for to-night's dinner. You are the younger man, and can shoot better than I, so I'll be polite and give you first show. Sight for five hundred yards for a trial shot, at the leading canoe. But wait a minute—don't stand up.”
He quickly piled up the young coconuts in a firm heap, and then stood over me, his own rifle in hand, whilst I knelt on the bamboos and placed my rifle on the top of the heap of coconuts.
I am now, at this time of life, ashamed of the savage instinct that in those days filled me with a certain joy in destroying human life, unthinkingly, and without compunction. But I had been brought up in a rough school, among men who thought it not only justifiable, but correct and proper to shoot a man—black, or white, or brown, or yellow—who had done them any wrong. It had been my lot, in the Solomon Islands, to witness one of the most hideous and appalling massacres of a ship's crew that was ever perpetrated by natives—a massacre that had filled my youthful mind with the most intense and unreasoning hatred of all “niggers,” as we called the natives of Melanesia. The memory of that awful scene had burned itself upon my brain, for the captain and mate of the vessel were dear friends of mine, and they and their men had been cruelly slaughtered, not for any wrong they had done—for they were good, straight men—but simply because their blind confidence in the savage natives invited their destruction.
I steadied my rifle upon the top of the heap of coconuts, and waited a second or two till every man in the first canoe was in line. Then I pulled the trigger, and was thrown back bleeding and unconscious, for the rifle burst just in front of the breech block, which blew out and struck me on the top of my head, nearly fracturing my skull.
When I came to again Yorke's face was bending over me.
“We're all right, Drake. The brigantine is within a mile of us, coming up with a light air, and we'll be aboard in half an hour. How do you feel, my son?”
“Rockotty. Did the rifle burst?”
“Burst? It burst like a cannon, all but killed you, and a splinter hurt me in the eye. Drake, my boy, the next time you do the Gadarene swine trick with a cheap German Snider in your hand, see that the barrel is clear before you fire it. When you fell that time, your rifle barrel must have been pretty badly choked with sand and coral pebbles... Now lie still, and don't worry like an old maid who has lost her cat. You can do nothing, and will only be a damned nuisance if you do try to do anything. The brigantine will be here presently, and you'll get your head attended to, and have 'pretty-pretty' plasters stuck on your nose and other parts of your facial beauties.”