Excerpted from Chapter One, “Run.”

By nine-thirty in the evening on the final Tuesday in June 1893, Deputy Sheriff Louis Stolz had one fugitive in chains. He pulled his prisoner along a twisty shoulder of valley, the path lit by an almost-full moon, until he reached a meadow studded with volcanic rock. At the field’s far edge sat a white wooden cottage, with one dark window on each side. Two men hid inside. A young Hawaiian named Kaluaikoolau, known as Koolau, crouched with his wife behind a boulder several yards from the cottage porch.

“I hear something,” Koolau whispered to his wife, Piilani. They pressed into the stone, still warm from the sun. Across the meadow floated the sound of dragged links of iron. Koolau nodded toward the path. “There are two of them,” he told his wife. “Have courage. We may be going to die.”

Just then the cottage door burst open and two forms streaked through the night. One man, a Hawaiian named Kala, sprinted toward Deputy Stolz. “You stand still!” Stolz shouted. He raised a rifle. “You take care! Stop now!”

Piilani felt her husband shift and then stand. Koolau started toward the deputy. A crude triangle formed in the moonlight: Louis Stolz with his weapon trained on the unarmed Kala, and Koolau, standing between the two, covering the officer with a rifle of his own. Stolz began to slide to his right, and as the standoff’s geometry shifted, Koolau moved to restore it. Stepping to his left, Koolau’s bare foot caught a branch and he stumbled. As he fell, the rifle discharged. “The reverberations of the gun sounded everywhere,” Piilani later wrote, “spreading the news of this terrible thing done on this unforgettable night.”

The bullet struck Stolz just south of his rib cage, tearing through his stomach. “It hurts,” he moaned, collapsing onto his back. In an instant Stolz’s prisoner was upon him, cursing and striking the lawman with his iron cuffs. Koolau called for him to stop, and the prisoner retreated.

Piilani clung to the boulder. Koolau turned to her and said, Run to the cliffs. Then another shout broke the quiet. The voice belonged to Paoa, the man whom Louis Stolz had arrested earlier that day.

“He is going to shoot!” Paoa yelled. Peeking over the rock, Piilani saw that Stolz had partially gained his feet and had his rifle crooked weakly in an elbow’s crease. She screamed and Koolau whirled to face the deputy sheriff. One more decision to make. Koolau stepped toward Louis Stolz, pointed his weapon at the center of his chest, and fired.

The disease had struck the Hawaiian cowboy named Koolau four years earlier, in the spring of 1889 when he was twenty-six-years old. Piilani had been the first to notice the bright blemish on Koolau’s cheek. It might have been sunburn had it not lingered, then deepened in color to scarlet. “As I observed the appearance of my beloved husband,” Piilani wrote years later, “disturbed thoughts began to grow within me.”

Hawaiians of the era had several descriptive phrases for leprosy, but perhaps the most apt was “the sickness that is a crime.” If board of health agents discovered that Koolau showed signs of the disease, he would be forced onto a steamer bound for the leprosy hospital in Honolulu. From there he would be sent to the colony on the island of Molokai. Law would decree Piilani a widow and their six-year-old son fatherless. Officially, Koolau would be dead.

So Koolau tried to hide his suspect flesh. A photograph from the time shows him in a flat-brimmed hat tugged low on his broad face, with a crisp white shirt buttoned high to the neck. Piilani stands holding the hand of their son, Kaleimanu. Koolau’s mother is settled cross-legged on the grass between the young couple. Her son’s gaze is distant, as if the box camera were a window revealing an unexpected view.

Leprosy works with a tortuous deliberateness. A person becomes infected and years pass, then he or she wakes one morning lightly marked by disease. Years more can elapse before the sickness deepens. Koolau waited. Then in the early winter of 1892 a government agent appeared at his door. Escorted to the office of the physician for the western half of Kauai, Koolau stripped off his shirt and pants and stood naked. The physician examined the blemishes on Koolau’s face and ears, and traced a needle over the surface of the spots, testing for a loss of sensation. The log into which doctors recorded the results of such exams allowed three verdicts: Leper, Suspect, Not a Leper. Board regulations dictated that only the senior physicians at the leprosy hospital could make the final diagnosis, but physicians in the field were skilled enough to anticipate the outcome. Dr. Campbell told Koolau, Say your farewells.

That evening, Piilani and Koolau talked about what would happen next. An agent of the board would hold him for the steamer to Honolulu. He would be taken to Kalihi Hospital, where suspects were processed. Doctors would perform a second exam to confirm his leprosy. And he would be exiled to Molokai and locked in the colony the government had established on a shelf of land that extended from the base of a towering cliff. Awaiting him there, Koolau believed, was a life sentence of unspeakable horror. Nightmarish tales had emerged from the colony. These described an uncivilized community, populated by ghouls with hollowed eyes and limbless frames. Rumors told of patients being starved to death, subjected to bizarre medical experimentation, and conscripted into prostitution and slavery. Even the dead received no mercy: Koolau had heard of corpses scattered to rot or left beneath a thin sheet of earth, to be exhumed by wild pigs. What most disturbed the young couple, however, was that exile would mean the destruction of their family. They chose not to submit to the government. Koolau and Piilani decided to run.

“At sunset on a certain day,” Piilani wrote, “in the loneliness and awesomeness of the night,” they started for the valley of Kalalau, fifteen miles distant. Over the years other Hawaiians with the disease had sought refuge in the virtually inaccessible valley, part of a rippled landform where the earth heaves up in a series of deep clefts, open to the sea. Carved in the crescent of a horseshoe, the valley’s head and flanks drop away as sheer cliffs. Moving by moonlight, Koolau and Piilani followed a thread tramped by wildlife through the lantana brush. The trail reversed and ran upward, cresting at a windblown pass four thousand feet above the valley floor. To the right loomed a blank rock wall, to the left only air. Above them hung a ceiling of pewter cloud, which dropped suddenly and burst forth with biting rain. The storm trapped them in the dark on a ledge the depth of a man’s forearm. Piilani clung to the cliff and mouthed prayers into its face, asking “that the Three Heavenly Spirits regard us with love [and] spread their wings in refuge.”

Rain curtained off the cliff face, then sluiced along the ledge in a swift current. Feeling their way with their hands, Koolau and Piilani crabbed along the path, the child nestled between them. When they finally reached Kalalau, wrote Piilani, “our first action was to bend our knees and give praise.” Creasing the valley was a stream, which tumbled in falls and pools for several miles before spilling into the sea. The flats on either side were patterned with taro fields, tended by the families in the valley. Koolau and his family took shelter in the home of a man named Naoheiki.

Of the 23 households in the Kalalau Valley that winter of 1892–93, only 9 were unaffected by leprosy. The disease had struck 28 of the 120 residents, some severely. No matter their condition, however, the sick found the situation in the valley preferable to the colony on Molokai, which they collectively imagined as a penal hell. To be sent to the colony, they believed, meant to be alone, and then to be abused, and then to be dead. In Kalalau they had created a close-knit community, where the healthy pulled taro and netted fish for the weak, and families helped other families. They were in exile, but at least it was an exile of their own shaping. The board of health, however, considered the lepers outlaws.

Not long after arriving in the valley, Koolau located the home of the leader of the fugitive community, Judge Kapahei Kauai. A revered Hawaiian jurist, Judge Kauai had served in the legislature in Honolulu and had upon retiring become an energetic advocate for Hawaiian rights. Now he was sixty-eight years old, crippled by leprosy, at odds with the government’s law.

Propped in a chair in his cottage, with flowers scattered to sweeten the air, the judge and Koolau discussed their situation. The board will come for us, Kauai said. The judge knew who was likely to arrive first: a slender young man with whom the judge had had words one afternoon several years earlier. In anger the man had struck Kauai, drawing blood, and the judge had hauled him into court and won a verdict. Koolau remembered the man: Louis Stolz. When Stolz was named deputy sheriff, he had come to Koolau and asked the Hawaiian to make a celebratory saddle for him, but Koolau did not have the time. Stolz had gone away angry. Later, Koolau heard that it was Stolz who had reported him to the board.

No outsiders appeared in the valley that winter, however. Spring arrived, and Koolau and Piilani began to imagine that they were safe. Then one morning in June of 1893 Piilani heard boots crunching along the path leading to their cottage. Opening the door, she saw Louis Stolz.

Smothering her alarm with exaggerated politeness, Piilani greeted Stolz and invited him inside. The deputy sheriff was thirty-three, a fast-eyed man with a face that narrowed to a neat beard. Stolz scanned the room. Turning to Piilani with what she later described as “a cheerful voice and pleasant expression,” Stolz asked, “Piilani, where is Koolau?”

“This morning he went to work in the taro patch,” she answered.

“How is that sickness of his?”

“Not much, just a little redness on his cheeks sometimes, sometimes not.”

Stolz smiled and stared at Piilani. She said nothing more.

Koolau’s flight had caused deep embarrassment for the young deputy. Shortly after he had disappeared, Stolz had written to the board, “As this is the first person who has escaped from the district while I have been deputy sheriff I am anxious to bring him back.” Stolz’s humiliation also had a personal element. That January, after years of outside pressure, the constitutional monarchy had collapsed. White businessmen now held the levers of power, and Louis Stolz knew many of these men. He was, in fact, related by marriage to the man now heading the new government, a prominent lawyer named Sanford Ballard Dole: Stolz’s wife’s sister had married George Dole, Sanford’s brother.

Stolz craved the attention of men like Dole. To capture a band of renegade lepers—that would demand notice. He had begun to write weekly to the board, advising them of the outlaw situation in Kalalau Valley and insisting action be taken. “The amount and kind of intimacy existing between lepers and nonlepers at Kalalau is simply abominable,” he complained. Technically, the deputy had no legal standing in Kalalau Valley, which lay outside his jurisdiction. By invoking Koolau, however, Stolz argued that the problem was his to solve. “I am not hankering for any work in connection with lepers,” he wrote, “but the work ought to be done, and somebody must do it.” Leaving behind his wife and two young children, Stolz had set out for Kalalau. His plan was to use the influence of Judge Kauai, whom Stolz described as the “Archleper,” to convince the refugees in the valley to surrender peacefully—rather than risk the government taking them by force. Because of his history with the judge, however, Stolz hesitated to approach him directly. He needed Koolau’s assistance.

After the deputy left, Piilani sank to the floor and wept. She wrote, “I was overwhelmed with grief—who would not be—seeing the power of the government come hither to sever the sacred knot of holy marriage, and cutting the golden cord between parents and child. Alas! Alas!” Wailing, she ran to the field and found Koolau. The couple clenched each other, shuddering with sobs, as their son looked on in confusion.

Stolz remained in the valley trying to arrange a meeting with Koolau, but the Hawaiian avoided him. Frustrated, Stolz announced that all lepers in the valley were to gather at the beach, by order of the board of health. The next morning, two dozen men and women milled at the forest’s edge. Stolz informed them that a boat would arrive early the next week to collect them. They would be sent to Kalihi Hospital, and then to Molokai. Any person who resisted would be shackled and carried aboard. Stolz asked, Who agrees to go willingly?

Koolau stepped from the trees. “I first ask whether my wife will be allowed to go with me,” he yelled.

“No!” Stolz replied. “Your wife cannot at all go with you. You and all those who have the sickness will be taken, no one else.”

“Then I will not go,” Koolau announced. “I will not be taken by this wrongful law to that place.”

The crowd watched to see how the deputy would react. Writing earlier in the week, Stolz had assured the board that, “should the obstinate ones be removed the non-committal ones will undoubtedly go of their own accord.” Now Koolau openly defied him, emboldening the others. Stolz quickly broke the meeting, swallowing his rage.

When he returned to Kalalau a week later, Stolz brought two Hawaiian deputies. They waded ashore, rifles held above their heads to shield them from salt spray. A large group waited on the beach, intending to surrender. Stolz marched through the sand and announced that he intended to arrest Koolau. Using the gruesome imagery of a man disfigured by leprosy to ridicule Koolau, Stolz—whom the Hawaiians called Lui—boasted about what would transpire.

“You will all see,” Stolz yelled. “Koolau will run for the mountains and then he will become emaciated and have a big head. Lui will capture him and Koolau will be through in Kalalau. Lui will have the right, Lui will have the power over him. Lui is not mistaken, Koolau is mistaken. He is stubborn and much too proud—afterwards he will cry.”

Frightened by his tone, the people who had agreed to leave the valley now fled from the beach. The deputy sent the officers after them. He would find Koolau. Pinning his badge to his vest, Stolz removed his jacket and rolled it into a bundle. He tucked a package of crackers and extra rounds of ammunition into the folds. From the beach to the head of the valley, where he suspected Koolau was hidden, was a muddy scramble of several miles. Before he set out, Stolz scribbled a note to William O. Smith, the president of the board of health. “I will hurry up things as fast as possible,” Stolz wrote, “and report progress as it occurs.”

Smith received no reports. By midnight the next day Louis Stolz was dead, his body being frisked by a pair of Hawaiians who had found the corpse cooling in the night air. When they departed, the men carried Stolz’s rifle, his knife, a packet of papers from the board, and the deputy’s polished metal badge.