Breaking Tapu With a Shot-Gun!

Sun (Auckland), Volume 1, Issue 27, 23 April 1927, Page 17 (Supplement)

Breaking Tapu With a Shot-Gun!

fearing it might better him legally, Graham immediately demanded a gun licence from the accused who, if found wanting, could be fined a trifle and lectured severely and, which seemed most important, the course of justice diverted into a less serious channel. That can be done with natives who are not concerned with the kind of process so long as one proceeds to some kind of end. Unfortunately they produced a licence and Nati’s charge had to be dealt with. The chief and his son pleaded “Not guilty!” stoutly.

Graham asked the woman through the interpreter if she had any idea why the chief and his son should fire at her so rudely. She was at once covered with confusion and considerably embarrassed as coyly, even blushingly, she whispered in a thin small voice that these men had the worst designs on her. Graham doubted that, and his doubts were deepened when he observed the ungallant and partially repressed cynical amusement struggling through the very real fear of punishment in the faces of the two accused. Nati was extremely ugly, more homely than any of her sisters without t’:eir undoubted advantage of beautiful physique. She, poor dear, had not only a repulsive visage but also a thin emaciated figure. Graham found it impossible to believe that her charms would be considered worth a, locally, precious cartridge. The only other witness was an Australian trader called Smith, a bluff, hearty fellow who deposed that the woman, Nati, had come running to him two months earlier with blood on her leg, shrieking that she had been shot by one of the accused. He had abstracted the pellets from the upper part of her leg and had attended her until the wounds had healed. Graham asked him, pertinently, if he employed a woman in any capacity, and he replied that yes, he did, as his laundress. The prideful idea of the distinctly unironed Smith with a laundress seemed amusing to Graham, but not to Smith, and the former’s obvious doubt was sufficiently offensive to the trader to make him growl rather maliciously: “And there’s no doubt about it; those blackguards shot the poor woman and it’s a shame; I hope they get hung for it.” Graham repressed him.

The next thing was to examine the wounds. This was extremely awkward for everybody and apparently most embarrassing for the native police, who suffered the most poignant shame while their master looked very closely at two small circular spots on the fleshy part of the woman’s leg. After two months it .s difficult to tell when a small scar had its beginning; even Graham’s botonising magnifying glass was incapable of showing him whether the pellets had been fired two months earlier or two years! The scars had healed -n ell, although it seemed to Graham that some one, probably Nati herself, had been squeezing them to the point of anger. Beyond the statement that they nau not shot the woman, the accused had nothing to say. Any idea of establishing an alibi, in a land where a nice distinction between the days of a month is unknown, was out of the question. There was not enough evidence to convict the men, hut it was sufficiently strong to make matters uncomfoi ble for the chief and his son should Graham commit them to