"But won't he die?" I asked. "I saw you stab him three times." My uncle laughed. "No more than you will," he replied. "A shark of that size takes a lot of killing. But he's going to die to-morrow, if we have to sit up all night hammering out a lance and a harpoon. Our fish-spears would only tickle his ribs. Come, he seems to have given us up--let's be getting back to the Tara." VI THE END OF THE SHARK AND THE BEGINNING OF THE DIVING That Sunday night, while the crew of the Tara told to their friends the story of Ofai's rescue, my uncle and I labored with forge and anvil and grindstone under the shed of corrugated iron. From the schooner's trade-room we took a couple of the whale-spades used throughout the islands as agricultural tools, and removed the wooden hafts from their sockets. While I pumped the bellows, Uncle Harry heated one of these in the forge and hammered it into the shape of a harpoon, welding on a piece of steel to make the socket into which the hinged barb would fit. Then, gripping a morsel of steel in the tongs, he forged out the barb, punched a hole through it, and riveted it in place, so that it folded into its socket when the harpoon was thrown and opened to prevent the iron's withdrawal from the wound. When the harpoon was finished to his satisfaction, I turned the grindstone while he ground it to a razor-edge. After that he heated the other spade and forged out a lance for killing: a slender, double-edged blade, two inches wide and eighteen long--a murderous weapon in skilled hands. We fixed the lance on a twelve-foot pole of hibiscus, and whittled out a short stout shaft for the harpoon, tapered to fit loosely in the socket. Then my uncle fetched from the storeroom a coil of heavy cotton line. Passing one end of it through a screw eye halfway up the shaft of the harpoon he lashed it firmly to the small of the iron. It was long past midnight. "We won't get much sleep," he remarked, as we paddled out to the schooner in a canoe. "We must kill that shark to-morrow--to-day, rather--without fail! The natives are superstitious as children; they used to worship sharks, you know, before the missionaries came, and if any ghost-talk starts, we may have to go back for another lot of men. I'll wake you at five o'clock."