obeyed as a beaten dog, spirit-broken, might have obeyed, dragging
herself to her feet, trembling afresh, and with backward glances of her
perpetual terror of the big white master that she was convinced would
some day eat her. In such fashion, stabbing Van Horn to the heart
because of his inability to convey his kindness to her across the abyss
of the ages that separated them, she slunk away to the companionway and
crawled down it feet-first like some enormous, large-headed worm.

After he had sent Tambi to follow her with the precious phonograph, Van
Horn continued to smoke on while the sharp, needle-like spray of the rain
impacted soothingly on his heated body.

Only for five minutes did the rain descend. Then, as the stars drifted
back in the sky, the smell of steam seemed to stench forth from deck and
mangrove swamp, and the suffocating heat wrapped all about.

Van Horn knew better, but ill health, save for fever, had never concerned
him; so he did not bother for a blanket to shelter him.

"Yours the first watch," he told Borckman. "I'll have her under way in
the morning, before I call you."

He tucked his head on the biceps of his right arm, with the hollow of the
left snuggling Jerry in against his chest, and dozed off to sleep.

And thus adventuring, white men and indigenous black men from day to day
lived life in the Solomons, bickering and trafficking, the whites
striving to maintain their heads on their shoulders, the blacks striving,
no less single-heartedly, to remove the whites' heads from their
shoulders and at the same time to keep their own anatomies intact.

And Jerry, who knew only the world of Meringe Lagoon, learning that these
new worlds of the ship _Arangi_ and of the island of Malaita were
essentially the same, regarded the perpetual game between the white and
the black with some slight sort of understanding.

CHAPTER X

Daylight saw the _Arangi_ under way, her sails drooping heavily in the
dead air while the boat's crew toiled at the oars of the whaleboat to tow
her out through the narrow entrance. Once, when the ketch, swerved by
some vagrant current, came close to the break of the shore-surf, the
blacks on board drew toward one another in apprehension akin to that of
startled sheep in a fold when a wild woods marauder howls outside. Nor
was there any need for Van Horn's shout to the whaleboat: "Washee-washee!
Damn your hides!" The boat's crew lifted themselves clear of th