ell, with sharp-pointed
ends, thrust through a hole in the partition of his nostrils, extended
five inches across his face. About his neck, from a cord of twisted
coconut sennit, hung an ivory-white necklace of wild-boar's tusks. A
garter of white cowrie shells encircled one leg just below the knee. A
flaming scarlet flower was coquettishly stuck over one ear, and through a
hole in the other ear was threaded a pig's tail so recently severed that
it still bled.

As this dandy of Melanesia leaped into the sunshine, the Snider rifle in
his hands came into position, aimed from his hip, the generous muzzle
bearing directly on Van Horn. No less quick was Van Horn. With equal
speed he had snatched his rifle and brought it to bear from his hip. So
they stood and faced each other, death in their finger-tips, forty feet
apart. The million years between barbarism and civilization also yawned
between them across that narrow gulf of forty feet. The hardest thing
for modern, evolved man to do is to forget his ancient training. Easiest
of all things is it for him to forget his modernity and slip back across
time to the howling ages. A lie in the teeth, a blow in the face, a love-
thrust of jealousy to the heart, in a fraction of an instant can turn a
twentieth-century philosopher into an ape-like arborean pounding his
chest, gnashing his teeth, and seeing red.

So Van Horn. But with a difference. He straddled time. He was at one
and the same instant all modern, all imminently primitive, capable of
fighting in redness of tooth and claw, desirous of remaining modern for
as long as he could with his will master the study of ebon black of skin
and dazzling white of decoration that confronted him.

A long ten seconds of silence endured. Even Jerry, he knew not why,
stilled the growl in his throat. Five score of head-hunting cannibals on
the fringe of the jungle, fifteen Su'u return blacks in the boat, seven
black boat's crew, and a solitary white man with a cigar in his mouth, a
rifle at his hip, and an Irish terrier bristling against his bare calf,
kept the solemn pact of those ten seconds, and no one of them knew or
guessed what the outcome would be.

One of the return boys, in the bow of the whaleboat, made the peace sign
with his palm extended outward and weaponless, and began to chirp in the
unknown Su'u dialect. Van Horn held his aim and waited. The dandy
lowered his Snider, and breath came more easily to the ches