At Tanaki meanwhile, as we afterwards learned by inquiry among the islanders, things had been going on with the unhappy missionary very much as our worst fears had led us to expect. Though I wasn\'t there at the time to see for myself, I got to know what happened a little later almost as well as if I\'d been on the spot; so I shall take the liberty once more—not being one of these book-making chaps—of telling my story my own way, and explaining how matters went in rough sailor fashion, without trying to let you know in detail how we found it all out till I come to explain the upshot of our present adventures.

Well, on the night when Martin and Jack [pg 87] stole away from the hut and got clear off on their venturesome journey in the mission boat, their father and mother, with little Calvin, who was eight years old, and Miriam, who was a pretty wee lassie of three, were heavily guarded by half a dozen desperate and drunken savages in the temple-tomb of the deceased Taranaka. It was a thatched native grass-house, with a bare mud floor, and a rough altar-slab raised high on the threshold, which covered the remains of the blood-thirsty old chieftain—the man who in his early youth had seen "Capitaney Cook" when he discovered the islands. The Melanesian natives, I ought to tell you, regard their dead ancestors as a sort of gods or guardian spirits, and frequently offer up food and drink at their graves as presents to appease them. Every morning gifts of taro, bread-fruit, and plantain were laid on the altar by Taranaka\'s tomb; and once every ten days a little square gin, mixed with cocoa-milk, was poured out upon the rude slab of unsculptured stone, that the dead chief\'s [pg 88] ghost might come to drink of it and be satisfied. Wednesday the tenth was the anniversary of Taranaka\'s death (he had been killed in a fight with some neighboring islanders, who fell out with him over the wreck of an American whaling vessel), and it was on that festival day that the chief proposed offering up the blood of our fellow-countrymen as an expiation to the shades of his departed relative.

Macglashin and his wife never even knew that the boys had escaped. If they had, those long days of suspense might have been even worse for them. They might have been looking forward with mad hope to some miracle of rescue such as that which the Albatross had so boldly planned, and which had been so cruelly interfered with by the breakdown of our machinery. As it was, the savages carefully kept from them all knowledge of their boys\' escape. They never even breathed a hint of that desperate voyage. Every day, on the contrary, when they brought the unhappy missionary and his wife their daily [pg 89] rations of yam and banana, they taunted them with threats of what tortures the Chief had still in store for Jack and Martin. They were fatting them up, they said, for Taranaka to feed upon. On Taranaka\'s day they would be offered up as victims on the cannibal altar.

But the most terrible part of all the poor father and mother\'s sufferings was the fact that they couldn\'t keep the knowledge of that awful fate in store for them even from Calvin and pretty little Miriam. Macglashin\'s diary, which I read later on, was just heartrending about the children. Those helpless mites cowered all day long on the bare mud floor of that hideous temple, awaiting the horrible doom that the savages held out before them with the painful resignation of innocent childhood. They were too frightened to cry over it; too frightened to talk of it; they only crouched pale and terrified by their mother\'s side, and dragged out the long day in horrible apprehensions. They knew they must die, and they sat there watching [pg 90] for that inevitable sentence to be carried out with the stoical fortitude of utter childish helplessness. Well, there—I\'m an old hand on the sea, you know, and I don\'t mind the dangers of the wind and waves for grown men and boys that can look after themselves, any more than most of you land-folks mind dodging about in the Strand at Charing Cross on a crowded afternoon in the London season; but I can\'t bear to talk or even to think of what those poor children suffered all those terrible days in the heathen tomb-house. There are things that make a man\'s blood run cold to speak about. That makes mine run cold: I can\'t dwell on it any longer; it\'s too ghastly to realize.

So there—the days went by, one after another; and Monday the eighth came, and Tuesday the ninth, and still no chance of escape or rescue. Up to the last moment, Macglashin hoped (as he says in the diary) that some miracle might occur to set them free, some interposition of [pg 91] Providence on their behalf to prevent the last misfortune from overtaking his poor pallid little Miriam. Perhaps the mission ship, that went her rounds twice a year, might happen to put in, out of due season, with some special message or under stress of weather; or perhaps some whaling vessel or some English gunboat might arrive in the nick of time in the little harbor of Tanaki. But when Tuesday evening came, and no help had arrived, the unhappy man\'s heart sank within him. He gave up that last wild hope of a rescue at the eleventh hour, and addressed himself to die with what courage he could muster.

Ah yes, to die one\'s self is all easy enough; nobody worth his salt minds that; but to see one\'s wife and children murdered before one\'s eyes—there, I\'m a rough sort of sailor-body, as I said before, but you must excuse my breaking off. I haven\'t got the strength to hold my pen and write about it. Why, I\'ve a boy of my own at school at Sydney, and my Mary\'s in [pg 92] England, bless her little heart! at a lady\'s college they call it nowadays; and I know what it means; I know what it means, gentlemen. I\'d no more expose those two dear children in the places I\'ve been among the islands myself, than—well, than I\'d send them to sea alone in a cock-boat. And my heart just bleeds for that poor father at Tanaki, when I read his diary over again, though I haven\'t got the skill to put it all down in words at full length as one of those fellows would do that write for the newspapers.

However, on Tuesday night, neither Macglashin himself nor Mrs. Macglashin could get a wink of sleep, as you may easily imagine. They sat up in the temple, with their backs against the wall, and relays of black fellows, armed with Sniders, and smeared with red paint, watching them closely all the while, to see they didn\'t escape or try to do away with themselves. But Calvin fell asleep out of pure fatigue on his mother\'s lap, and Miriam, poor little soul, lay against her father\'s shoulder, dozing as [pg 93] peacefully as ever she dozed in her own small cot at the mission-house, where ............