ness, Nau-hau trod the deck boldly and
unashamed. His sole gear of clothing was a length of trunk strap buckled
about his waist. Between this and his bare skin was thrust the naked
blade of a ten-inch ripping knife. His sole decoration was a white China
soup-plate, perforated and strung on coconut sennit, suspended from about
his neck so that it rested flat on his chest and half-concealed the
generous swell of muscles. It was the greatest of treasures. No man of
Malaita he had ever heard of possessed an unbroken soup-plate.

Nor was he any more ridiculous because of the soup-plate than was he
ludicrous because of his nakedness. He was royal. His father had been a
king before him, and he had proved himself greater than his father. Life
and death he bore in his hands and head. Often he had exercised it,
chirping to his subjects in the tongue of Langa-Langa: "Slay here," and
"Slay there"; "Thou shalt die," and "Thou shalt live." Because his
father, a year abdicated, had chosen foolishly to interfere with his
son's government, he had called two boys and had them twist a cord of
coconut around his father's neck so that thereafter he never breathed
again. Because his favourite wife, mother of his eldest born, had dared
out of silliness of affection to violate one of his kingly tamboos, he
had had her killed and had himself selfishly and religiously eaten the
last of her even to the marrow of her cracked joints, sharing no morsel
with his boonest of comrades.

Royal he was, by nature, by training, by deed. He carried himself with
consciousness of royalty. He looked royal--as a magnificent stallion may
look royal, as a lion on a painted tawny desert may look royal. He was
as splendid a brute--an adumbration of the splendid human conquerors and
rulers, higher on the ladder of evolution, who have appeared in other
times and places. His pose of body, of chest, of shoulders, of head, was
royal. Royal was the heavy-lidded, lazy, insolent way he looked out of
his eyes.

Royal in courage was he, this moment on the _Arangi_, despite the fact
that he knew he walked on dynamite. As he had long since bitterly
learned, any white man was as much dynamite as was the mysterious death-
dealing missile he sometimes employed. When a stripling, he had made one
of the canoe force that attacked the sandalwood-cutter that had been even
smaller than the _Arangi_. He had never forgotten that mystery. Two of
the three white men he