"They must have overlooked Pahuri when they first came aboard. As the German left my door I heard a racket up forward: that half-caste, mauling the old man in a way that made me see red. I was fool enough to try to break down the door until Schmidt bellowed out something that stopped the noise." My uncle held up his hands to show me the knuckles, bruised and clotted with blood. "The noise must have given the alarm to Fatu," he went on, "for a few minutes afterward he put off with Ivi and Ofai in the boat. The current had swung the Tara around so that I could see what followed out of the porthole. Schmidt heard them launching the boat and called his men. He had a powerful electric torch and when he flashed it toward the land I saw my boys taking their places at the oars, Fatu in the stern, and ten or a dozen divers on the beach. Schmidt growled out an order to his partner and I heard Rairi's voice raised to warn the boat away. But our men paid no attention; the light showed them making for the Tara at top speed. "'Let them have it, then!' bawled Thursday Island. I heard two rifles crack, the snap and click of the levers, and two more quick shots. Ivi dropped his oar and sank down on the grating with a hand to his shoulder. Fatu sprang to his feet, snatched up the oar, and took the wounded man's place, to pull straight for the schooner. Rairi and the nigger would have slaughtered them like sheep, but they held their fire when I shouted through the porthole, telling my men to go back; that a strange schooner was in the lagoon, that her skipper had made me prisoner, and that they had best leave the affair in my hands. There isn't a gun of any sort ashore and I don't want to be rescued at the cost of half a dozen lives! Well, they obeyed me and went ashore. The sound of the shooting roused the whole camp--things have been humming ever since. Perhaps Fatu has some scheme for setting me free; Schmidt seems to think so at any rate, for he and his men went to work on the windlass, got the anchor off the bottom, and allowed the Tara to drift offshore with the current before they anchored her again. As for the fix we're in, the worst that can happen is that we'll lose our pearls. I doubt if even Schmidt has the audacity to load a hundred tons of shell under the noses of the men ashore--I wonder if he would dare? What sort of crew has he--many men he can trust for this sort of villainy?" I said that I believed most of Schmidt's men were newly shipped, that aside from Rairi and the black they seemed an average lot of natives, not particularly bad. From Marama's words and what I had seen of the man himself, I judged that Tua, the mate, was a first-class fellow, beginning to feel qualms about the company in which he found himself.