indiscriminately, for under its fiery influence natives may attempt anything; but an armful of rifles with ammunition which, even though it may have been condemned as rotten, is as likely to go off as not, may cause many a white man's head to be smoke-dried and hung as a proud trophy in an island canoe house.
It was typical of Vasco Moniz that he clung always to his own name out of sheer bravado, though the hands of so many of his fellow beings were against him. Wily as a fox, slippery as an eel, he was prepared to elude capture at any time, as he had done in the past. Crimes against the laws of communities and the laws of decency are soon allowed to slide into the limbo of the past in that strange, vast region south of the Philippines, unless the criminal has transgressed too far, and in that case there is no forgetfulness. It was gun-running to blacks in the Solomons which had placed Moniz beyond the pale, and more than one man, and a woman, would now have shot him on sight. But Moniz had lain low after the disastrous consequences of what he had done. Eight white men were killed and a ketch was looted by Locana natives bearing rifles which it was known Moniz had supplied to them. And Moniz was aware that the shackles threatened whenever a British warship hove in sight, and not merely on account of his gun-running operations either.
