"Then they will stop," said Evans decisively. "Yes, they will stop," said Blair. "God grant us a safe deliverance!" "Amen!" said Evans, and they walked in the shadow of the coming death. The ladies received the news with white faces but stout hearts, and did not hesitate one moment. Their place was beside the men. They did not wait to count the cost, though in each one of them was the dull, dread knowledge of what that cost might be. Their duty was to these brown kinsfolk of their adoption, and they were British born. Evans took charge of the defence with all the energy and skill that were in him, and, possessing their souls in God, they all went quietly into the fight, compared with which the battle of One-Tree Pass was veriest child's play. The village was sheltered by the bush and the crowding palms. Every man was taken off the dismantled _Torch_, and set to work building a hospital on the beach, a long, open house of poles and palm-leaves, through which the fresh sea breezes could blow at will. Soft springy couches of palm-leaves were ranged inside, and the simple preparations were complete. Not the smallest of the horrors and perplexities of the situation was the wholesale nature of the seizure. Springing from one identical cause, the results came all together. The hospital was filled before it was finished, and the builders could not keep pace with the demands for accommodation. Not one of Ra'a's people suffered--clear indication of the ghastly origin of the evil. Blair induced them to return for the time being to their village on the hillside, and such of Ha'o's people as showed no signs of infection he camped temporarily on the opposite hill. Every house from which the sick were carried was promptly burned. The brown folk could not understand such radical measures, but they were scared by the sights they saw, and they did as they were told. So suddenly had the catastrophe come upon them, and in so wholesale a fashion, that their thoughts had had no time to travel beyond their own immediate concerns. But when the work was steadily under way Blair bethought him suddenly of their new allies on the east coast, and he begged Captain Cathie to run round in the launch and see how matters were going with them.