Chapter 7 - Page 2

windows of their lawn and muslin curtains, replacing
them with gaudy calico from the trade-store, and made herself
several gowns. When she wrote out a list of goods and clothing for
herself, to be sent down to Sydney by the first steamer, Sheldon
wondered how long she had made up her mind to stay.

She was certainly unlike any woman he had ever known or dreamed of.
So far as he was concerned she was not a woman at all. She neither
languished nor blandished. No feminine lures were wasted on him.
He might have been her brother, or she his brother, for all sex had
to do with the strange situation. Any mere polite gallantry on his
part was ignored or snubbed, and he had very early given up
offering his hand to her in getting into a boat or climbing over a
log, and he had to acknowledge to himself that she was eminently
fitted to take care of herself. Despite his warnings about
crocodiles and sharks, she persisted in swimming in deep water off
the beach; nor could he persuade her, when she was in the boat, to
let one of the sailors throw the dynamite when shooting fish. She
argued that she was at least a little bit more intelligent than
they, and that, therefore, there was less liability of an accident
if she did the shooting. She was to him the most masculine and at
the same time the most feminine woman he had ever met.

A source of continual trouble between them was the disagreement
over methods of handling the black boys. She ruled by stern
kindness, rarely rewarding, never punishing, and he had to confess
that her own sailors worshipped her, while the house-boys were her
slaves, and did three times as much work for her as he had ever got
out of them. She quickly saw the unrest of the contract labourers,
and was not blind to the danger, always imminent, that both she and
Sheldon ran. Neither of them ever ventured out without a revolver,
and the sailors who stood the night watches by Joan's grass house
were armed with rifles. But Joan insisted that this reign of
terror had been caused by the reign of fear practised by the white
men. She had been brought up with the gentle Hawaiians, who never
were ill-treated nor roughly handled, and she generalized that the
Solomon Islanders, under kind treatment, would grow gentle.

One evening a terrific uproar arose in the barracks, and Sheldon,
aided by Joan's sailors, succeeded in rescuing two women whom the
blacks were beating to death. To save them from the vengeance of
the blacks, they were guarded in the cook-house for the night.
They were the two women who did the cooking for the labourers, and
their offence had consisted of one of them taking a bath in the big
cauldron in which the potatoes were boiled. The blacks were not
outraged from the