“I was on the beach pulling up my canoe and taking out the fish I had speared,” said this wreck of a man.  “Half the night was spent, and every one was asleep except me.  We were a little company, for they had killed and eaten most of us, and others had died of the white man’s curse.  In the night I heard the cries of the Hanavave and Hanahouua men who had lowered themselves down the precipice and were using their war-clubs on the sleeping.

“I was one man.  I could do nothing but die, and I was full of life.  In the darkness I smashed with a rock all the canoes on the beach save mine.  In my ears were the groans of the dying, and the war-cries.  I saw the torches coming.  I put the fish back in my canoe, and pushed out.

“They were but a moment late, for I have a hole in my head into which they shot a nail, and I have this crack in my head upon which they flung a stone.  They could not follow me, for there were no canoes left.  I paddled to Oomoa after a day, during which I did what I have no memory of.”

“They had guns?” I asked him.

“They had a few guns, but they used in them nails or stones, having no balls of metal.  Their slings were worse.  I could sling a stone as big as a mango and kill a man, striking him fair on the head, at the distance those guns would shoot.  We made our slings of the bark of the cocoanut-tree, and the stones, polished by rubbing against each other, we carried in a net about the waist.”

“But if that stone broke your head, why did you not die?”

“A tatihi fixed my head.  The nail in my leg he took out with a loop of hair, and cured the wound.”

“Did you not lie in wait for those murderers?”

Tutaiei hemmed and cast down his eye.

“The French came then with soldiers and made it so that if I killed any one, they killed me; the law, they call it.  They did nothing to those warriors because the deed was done before the French came.  I waited and thought.  I bought a gun from a whaler.  But the time never came.

“All my people had died at their hands.  Six heads they carried back to feast on the brains.  They ate the brains of my wife.  I kept the names of those that I should kill.  There was Kiihakia, who slew Moariniu, the blind man; Nakahania, who killed Hakaie, husband of Tepeiu; Niana, who cut off the head of Tahukea, who was their daughter and my woman; Veatetau should die for Tahiahokaani, who was young and beautiful, who was the sister of my woman.  I waited too long, for time took them all, and I alone survive of the people of Oi, or of those who killed them.”

“The vendetta between valleys—­called umuhuke, or the Vengeance of the Oven,—­thus wiped out the people of Oi,” commented Pere Olivier.  “The skulls were kept in banian-trees, or in the houses.  Frere Fesal started the mission here and built that little church.  There were plenty of people to work among.  But now, after thirty years I have been here, they are nearly finished.  They have no courage to go on, that is all. C’est un pays sans l’avenir. The family of the dying never weep.  They gather to eat the feast of the dead, and the crying is a rite, no more.  These people are tired of life.”