begun--and, save for the closed eyes, all the sullen handsomeness and
animal virility of the boy, as Joan had known it, was still to be seen in
the monstrous thing that twisted and dangled in the eddying smoke.

Nor was Joan's horror lessened by the conduct of the Poonga-Poonga boys.
On the instant they recognized the head, and on the instant rose their
wild hearty laughter as they explained to one another in shrill falsetto
voices. Gogoomy's end was a joke. He had been foiled in his attempt to
escape. He had played the game and lost. And what greater joke could
there be than that the bushmen should have eaten him? It was the
funniest incident that had come under their notice in many a day. And to
them there was certainly nothing unusual nor bizarre in the event.
Gogoomy had completed the life-cycle of the bushman. He had taken heads,
and now his own head had been taken. He had eaten men, and now he had
been eaten by men.

The Poonga-Poonga men's laughter died down, and they regarded the
spectacle with glittering eyes and gluttonous expressions. The
Tahitians, on the other hand, were shocked, and Adamu Adam was shaking
his head slowly and grunting forth his disgust. Joan was angry. Her
face was white, but in each cheek was a vivid spray of red. Disgust had
been displaced by wrath, and her mood was clearly vengeful.

Sheldon laughed.

"It's nothing to be angry over," he said. "You mustn't forget that he
hacked off Kwaque's head, and that he ate one of his own comrades that
ran away with him. Besides, he was born to it. He has but been eaten
out of the same trough from which he himself has eaten."

Joan looked at him with lips that trembled on the verge of speech.

"And don't forget," Sheldon added, "that he is the son of a chief, and
that as sure as fate his Port Adams tribesmen will take a white man's
head in payment."

"It is all so ghastly ridiculous," Joan finally said.

"And--er--romantic," he suggested slyly.

She did not answer, and turned away; but Sheldon knew that the shaft had
gone home.

"That fella boy he sick, belly belong him walk about," Binu Charley said,
pointing to the Poonga-Poonga man whose shoulder had been scratched by
the arrow an hour before.

The boy was sitting down and groaning, his arms clasping his bent knees,
his head drooped forward and rolling painfully back and forth. For fear
of poison, Sheldon had immediately scarified the wound and injected
permanganate o