At last the shells ceased.This, he reasoned, was because the soldiers were drawing near.They crept along the trail in single file, and he tried to count them until he lost track.At any rate, there were a hundred or so of them--all come after Koolau the leper.He felt a fleeting prod of pride.With war guns and rifles, police and soldiers, they came for him, and he was only one man, a crippled wreck of a man at that.They offered a thousand dollars for him,dead or alive. In all his life he had never possessed that muchmoney.The thought was abitter one.Kapahei had been right.He, Koolau, had done no wrong.Because the haoles wanted labour with which to work the stolen land, they had brought in the Chinese coolies, and with them had come the sickness.And now, because he had caught the sickness, he was worth a thousand dollars--but not to himself.It was his worthless carcass, rotten with disease or dead from a bursting shell, that was worth all that money.
When the soldiers reached the knife-edged passage, he was prompted to warn them.But his gaze fell upon the body of the murdered maid, and he kept silent.When six had ventured on the knife-edge, he opened fire.Nor did he cease when the knife-edge was bare.He emptied his magazine, reloaded, and emptied it again.He kept on shooting.All his wrongs were blazing in his brain, and he was in a fury of vengeance.All down the goat-trail the soldiers were firing, and though they lay flat and sought to shelter themselves in the shallow inequalities of the surface, they were exposed marks to him.Bullets whistled and thudded about him, and an occasional ricochet sang sharply through the air.One bullet ploughed a crease through his scalp, and a second burned across his shoulder-bladewithout breaking the skin.
It was a massacre, in which one man did the killing.The soldiers began to retreat, helping along their wounded.As Koolau picked them off he became aware of the smell of burnt meat.He glanced about him at first, and then discovered that it was his own hands.The heat of the rifle was doing it.The leprosy had destroyed most of the nerves in his hands.Though his flesh burned and he smelled it, there was no sensation.
He lay in the thicket, smiling, until he remembered the war guns.Without doubt they would open upon him again, and this time upon the very thicket from which he had inflicted the danger.Scarcely had he changed his position to a nook behind a small shoulder of the wall where he had noted that no shells fell, than the bombardment recommenced.He counted the shells.Sixty more were thrown into the gorge before the war-guns ceased.The tiny area was pitted with their explosions, until it seemed impossible that any creature couldhave survived. Sothe soldiers thought, for, under the burning afternoon sun, they climbed the goat-trail again.And again the knife-edged passage was disputed, and again they fell back to thebeach.
For two days longer Koolau held the passage, though the soldiers contented themselves with flinging shells into his retreat.ThenPahau, a leper boy, came to the top of the wall at the back of the gorge and shouted down to him that Kiloliana, hunting goats that they might eat, had been killed by a fall, and that the women were frightened and knew not what to do.Koolau called the boy down and left him with a spare gun with which to guard the passage.Koolau found his people disheartened.The majority of them were too helpless to forage food for themselves under such forbidding circumstances, and all were starving.He selected two women and a man who were not too far gone with the disease, and sent them back to the gorge to bring up food and mats.The rest he cheered and consoled until even the weakest took a hand in building roughshelters for themselves.
But those he had dispatched for food did not return, and he started back for the gorge.As he came out on the brow of the wall, half a dozen rifles cracked.A bullet tore through the fleshy part of his shoulder, and his cheek was cut by a sliver of rock where a second bullet smashed against the cliff.In the moment that this happened, and he leaped back, he saw that the gorge was alive with soldiers.His own people had betrayed him.The shell-fire had been too terrible, and they had preferred the prison of Molokai.
Koolau dropped back and unslung one of his heavy cartridge-belts.Lying among the rocks, he allowed the head and shoulders of the first soldier to rise clearly into view before pulling trigger.Twice this happened, and then, after some delay, in place of a head and shoulders a white flag was thrust above the edge of the wall.
"What do you want?" be demanded.
"I want you, if you are Koolau the leper," came the answer.
