on
said, "Was the _expedition_ successful?"

Donnegan brushed off the sarcasm. "Fooling aside, it is getting to be
something of an expedition to find fruit. The natives are cleaning it
out near at hand."

Turning to me Benson said, "There's another thing. The little devils
have settled all around us, and everything is community property with
them. Not only do they strip the fruit but they pick up anything that
isn't nailed down and wander off with it."

"That's odd," I said. "Joe indicates that they place no value on
possessions normally."

"Oh, they don't keep things," Donnegan explained. "They pack them off,
fiddle with them and then we find them strewn all over the forest.
Sometimes I'd like to wring their little necks!"

Benson looked up at him quickly. "Sounds funny coming from you, Paul.
You were one of their chief defenders at the meeting last week."

Donnegan's face darkened. "That was last week, before I found out a few
things. As a matter of fact, I think it's time you knew about them,
too." He squatted down by us and unburdened himself.

* * * * *

As it so often will, a barrier had erected itself between the colony
members and their leader, Phillip Benson. Donnegan somewhat shamefacedly
confessed what had gone on behind this curtain of silence.

It seemed that two weeks earlier Bromley, one of the chemists, had
contrived some rather crude, old-fashioned, sulphur-and-phosphorus,
friction matches. Trading on the native's delight with fire, he had
bribed them with matches to give him one of the tala-mangoes which he
tasted, then promptly proceeded to swill until he was quite drunk.

In a generous mood he passed out matches to other male members of the
colony who, in turn, made the barter and joined the party.

"The stuff is really delicious," Donnegan admitted. "And it doesn't even
give you a hang-over."

"Go on," Benson invited coldly.

Within a few days, Donnegan related, everybody was nipping on the tala.
Bromley was turning out a steady supply of matches from his lab, and
they were now the going currency for trading with the natives. In order
to keep their wives quiet the men brought the super-ripe mangoes home
and shared them.

The precious fruit, it developed, came from regular mango trees but
reached the desired, fermented condition only at the leafy crowns of the
trees where even the nimble, light-weight natives found it hazardous and
difficult to reach t