out and the boat pushed off a few yards with only the two white men in her whilst the landing party made for the canoes and began to smash them up.
Sru—she could tell him by his size—wielded the ax, two others helped in the business with great lumps of loose coral, whilst the fourth stood watch.
It took time, for they did their work thoroughly, breaking the outriggers, breaking the outrigger poles, breaking the canoe bodies, working with the delight that children take in sheer destruction.
The god Destruction was abroad on Karolin beach and lagoon. Though without a temple or a place in mythology of all the gods, he is the most powerful, the most agile and quick of eye, and the swiftest to come when called.
Le Moan watching, saw the four men on the beach stand contemplating their work before returning to the boat.
Then she saw one of them throw up his hands and fall as if felled by an ax. The others turned to run and the foremost of them tripped as a man trips on a kink in a carpet and fell; of the two others one pitched and turned a complete somersault as though some unseen jiu-jitsu player had dealt with him, and the fourth crumpled like a suddenly closed concertina.
Le Moan’s heart sprang alive in her. She knew. The terrible arrows of Karolin poisoned with argora that kills with the swiftness and more than certainty of a bullet had, fired from the trees, done their work.
The spear was the favourite weapon of Karolin, not
