"Ah!" said the old man, with an aggrieved shake of the head, "she got it pretty hot; that's why I couldn't get round to wipe out those schooners. Both her masts are down, and she got a shot into the machinery. The men are seeing what they can do to it. The masts we can fit ourselves." "And you've no casualties?" "Some splinter wounds and some bit bruises from the spars. Nothing of consequence, sir." "Well, we're very well through a nasty job, captain, and we've reason to be thankful for it. Now suppose we have something to eat--I'm starving." CHAPTER XXII PAX It took some days to get matters shipshape after the general upheaval of the invasion. For one thing, the brown men were much too busy on the other side of the island to settle down to ordinary work. Most of the women and children had joined them there, the villages were deserted, and there was an intangible something in the mental and moral atmosphere which made for depression. Blair sent Evans over to see Ha'o, and endeavour to bring him back to his right mind. Evans returned downcast, and described what he had seen only to Blair and Stuart. Aunt Jannet, if she had heard, would have had a fit. The ladies were back in their own homes, and the crippled Blackbirds were bottled up in the Happy Valley, under the wardership of Sandy Lean and his wife and a small guard of _Torch_ men. It seemed like desecration of the beautiful spot to use it as a prison, but it was the only place in the island where the yellow men would be reasonably safe from the brown ones. The stars in their courses fought for Joshua. In like manner the strange, stern facts of life fought now for Kenneth Blair. The cloud which had threatened his work with destruction broke in unexpected blessing. The fight in One-Tree Pass was an epoch in the history of Kapaa'a. In the first place it had brought into line--fighting line indeed, but none the less permanent on that account--the various factions in the island, and developed among them a hitherto undreamed-of community of interests. Not by any means for the first time in history, a general menace from without welded into one a diversity of hostile fragments, and discovered to them an unexpected identity of ideas. On a microscopic scale it was, in its results, the Franco-German war over again. The men from the eastern coast, who had borne the first brunt of the invasion, had lost everything, including their headman. But they had found more than they had lost. They had found out that the western men were not necessarily their enemies, and that both they and the white men were ready to fight to the death to save the island from the grip of the yellow men.