om
a shower. Not that this was true of the rest of his tribe. It was the
peculiar tambo laid upon him by the devil-devil doctors. Other tribesmen
the devil-devil doctors tabooed against eating shark, or handling turtle,
or contacting with crocodiles or the fossil remains of crocodiles, or
from ever being smirched by the profanity of a woman's touch or of a
woman's shadow cast across the path.

So Ishikola, whose tambo was water, was crusted with the filth of years.
He was sealed like a leper, and, weazen-faced and age-shrunken, he
hobbled horribly from an ancient spear-thrust to the thigh that twisted
his torso droopingly out of the vertical. But his one eye gleamed
brightly and wickedly, and Van Horn knew that it observed as much as did
both his own eyes.

Van Horn shook hands with him--an honour he accorded only chiefs--and
motioned him to squat down on deck on his hams close to the fear-struck
girl, who began trembling again at recollection of having once heard
Ishikola offer five twenties of drinking coconuts for the meat of her for
a dinner.

Jerry needs must sniff, for future identification purposes, this
graceless, limping, naked, one-eyed old man. And, when he had sniffed
and registered the particular odour, Jerry must growl intimidatingly and
win a quick eye-glance of approval from Skipper.

"My word, good fella kai-kai dog," said Ishikola. "Me give 'm
half-fathom shell money that fella dog."

For a mere puppy this offer was generous, because half a fathom of shell-
money, strung on a thread of twisted coconut fibres, was equivalent in
cash to half a sovereign in English currency, to two dollars and a half
in American, or, in live-pig currency, to half of a fair-sized fat pig.

"One fathom shell-money that fella dog," Van Horn countered, in his heart
knowing that he would not sell Jerry for a hundred fathoms, or for any
fabulous price from any black, but in his head offering so small a price
over par as not to arouse suspicion among the blacks as to how highly he
really valued the golden-coated son of Biddy and Terrence.

Ishikola next averred that the girl had grown much thinner, and that he,
as a practical judge of meat, did not feel justified this time in bidding
more than three twenty-strings of drinking coconuts.

After these amenities, the white master and the black talked of many
things, the one bluffing with the white-man's superiority of intellect
and knowledge, the other feeling and gue