had robbed Sati's father of Sati's labour before Van Horn's eyes. But
Nau-hau was not above strutting. He declined a proffered present of
tobacco, bought a case of stick tobacco from Van Horn, paying him five
pounds for it, and insisted on having it sawed open so that he could fill
his pipe.

"Plenty good boy stop along Langa-Langa?" Van Horn, unperturbed, politely
queried, in order to make conversation and advertise nonchalance.

The King o' Babylon grinned, but did not deign to reply.

"Maybe I go ashore and walk about?" Van Horn challenged with tentative
emphasis.

"Maybe too much trouble along you," Nau-hau challenged back. "Maybe
plenty bad fella boy kai-kai along you."

Although Van Horn did not know it, at this challenge he experienced the
hair-pricking sensations in his scalp that Jerry experienced when he
bristled his back.

"Hey, Borckman," he called. "Man the whaleboat."

When the whaleboat was alongside, he descended into it first, superiorly,
then invited Nau-hau to accompany him.

"My word, King o' Babylon," he muttered in the chief's ears as the boat's
crew bent to the oars, "one fella boy make 'm trouble, I shoot 'm hell
outa you first thing. Next thing I shoot 'm hell outa Langa-Langa. All
the time you me fella walk about, you walk about along me. You no like
walk about along me, you finish close up altogether."

And ashore, a white man alone, attended by an Irish terrier puppy with a
heart flooded with love and by a black king resentfully respectful of the
dynamite of the white man, Van Horn went, swashbuckling barelegged
through a stronghold of three thousand souls, while his white mate,
addicted to schnapps, held the deck of the tiny craft at anchor off
shore, and while his black boat's crew, oars in hands, held the whaleboat
stern-on to the beach to receive the expected flying leap of the man they
served but did not love, and whose head they would eagerly take any time
were it not for fear of him.

Van Horn had had no intention of going ashore, and that he went ashore at
the black chief's insolent challenge was merely a matter of business. For
an hour he strolled about, his right hand never far from the butt of the
automatic that lay along his groin, his eyes never too far from the
unwilling Nau-hau beside him. For Nau-hau, in sullen volcanic rage, was
ripe to erupt at the slightest opportunity. And, so strolling, Van Horn
was given to see what few white men have seen, for Lang