in liquor. With the bucket swinging and clattering and banging around,
he made a dash up on the verandah, among the pretty muslin-clad ladies
and white-duck suited men, creating havoc and destruction, and smelling
of kerosene and burnt hair and ancient goat, and uttering horrible,
blood-curdling _bah-h-h-s_, till he got into the card-table corner, and
mistaking the wide glass window for an open door, he promptly jumped
through it, and fell with a shower of glass outside on to the verandah
again, where Thady O'Brien and the fat German with the spectacles fell
on him, and tried to hold him down, and the spectacles were ground into
dust and otherwise damaged, and some of the ladies endeavouring to
escape out of the hideous _mélée_ fell with him, and then the goat
struggled to his feet with the bucket squashed flat against his
forehead, and his horns covered with lace, and tulle, and bits of kid
gloves, and planted one of his cloven forefeet into the shirt-front of a
German officer, and smashed his watch. Then with another roar of
defiance he burst through and disappeared into the wilderness at the
back of Mrs. MacLaggan's garden, where he was followed by Leger, the
drunken carpenter, and his wife, and nineteen Samoans, all armed with
rifles. The army fired at him for two hours, and about midnight returned
and reported him riddled with bullets, whereupon Mrs. Molly, who was a
little hysterical at the awful mess and wreckage caused by the brute,
thanked them and gave them ten dollars.

Now it so happened that Billy MacLaggan was not killed at all, for about
two o'clock in the morning, as Bully Hayes and Tom Denison were sitting
on the verandah of the former's house at Matautu Point, drinking brandy
and soda, and dabbing arnica bandages on their various contusions, Pilot
Hamilton hailed them from the front gate. He had just left the dance
with his wife, and was quite sober--for Samoa. He asked them to come on
with him to his place, as Billy MacLaggan, he said, was lying down in