At first they put both gloves and sticks to the primitive service of belabouring their opponents to the utmost capacity of their muscles, and the sight of two stalwart brown men, clad only in boxing-gloves or basket-hilt, pounding away at one another with every ounce that was in them, and with never an attempt at defence, kept the white men in paroxysms of laughter. But punishment even of so comparatively mild a character as that soon led to more advanced ideas, and before long the browns were a match for the whites, and were never tired of the sport. Captain Cathie, when he was not ranging the seas in the _Torch_, put his men through their cutlass drill on the beach as regularly as if the houses behind had been a coastguard instead of a mission-station, and to the brown men this was a sight never to be missed. The measured sweep and clash of the glancing steel fascinated them. Presently they were asking for cutlass drill also, and it was not denied them. Such things might to some seem roundabout steps on the road to salvation--to Kenneth Blair they were very direct and important ones. [Illustration: Steps on the road to salvation.] With these brown men and women he was forbearing and long-suffering to a degree which, in the opinion of some of his friends, passed reasonable bounds. That, perhaps, only went to prove the breadth and depth of his nature. He could flame, however, with the best when occasion called, yet there was a righteousness in his anger which lifted it above the common anger of smaller men. From whatever distant strain they drew, the girls of Kapaa'a were undoubtedly good looking. Physically they were models of sinuous beauty, wild, dark-eyed nymphs, with manes of flower-decked hair and natural graces of action that came of ages of unfettered life and limbs. Their pretty faces and kittenish ways might well play havoc with the hearts--or say the fancies--of hot-blooded young sailormen, and these coquettes of the ridi-fringe were no whit behind their kind in the full appreciation of their powers. Blair saw the danger as soon as he saw the girls. He had a way of looking facts square in the face without any blinking. He talked very straight to his boys, pointing out the cons of the case with the utmost frankness, and exhorting them to caution and restraint in their dealing with the island women. That so few casualties occurred spoke volumes for his moral grip over his men. The danger was very real, for the brown girls' estimation of the attentions of the white men was open and unblushing, and tended to irritation on the part of discarded brown lovers. Captain Cathie, in one of his bluffer moments, bluntly suggested wholesale marriage as a preventive of irregularities, and the starting of a new race on that basis, instancing the Pitcairners as typical resultants. But Blair bade him postpone any such notions until the islanders had at all events attained to some degree of civilisation.