th hands, while the child, astride
her hip, held on to her with both small arms part way about her.

Still she waited the stroke, for with Borckman's head thrown back was no
time to strive to sever the spinal cord at the neck. Many eyes beheld
the impending tragedy. Jerry saw, but did not understand. With all his
hostility to niggers he had not divined the attack from the air. Tambi,
who chanced to be near the skylight, saw, and, seeing, reached for a Lee-
Enfield. Lerumie saw Tambi's action and hissed haste to the Mary.

Borckman, as unaware of this, his last second of life, as he had been of
his first second of birth, lowered the bottle and straightened forward
his head. The keen edge sank home. What, in that flash of instant when
his brain was severed from the rest of his body, Borckman may have felt
or thought, if he felt or thought at all, is a mystery unsolvable to
living man. No man, his spinal cord so severed, has ever given one word
or whisper of testimony as to what were his sensations and impressions.
No less swift than the hatchet stroke was the limp placidity into which
Borckman's body melted to the deck. He did not reel or pitch. He
_melted_, as a sack of wind suddenly emptied, as a bladder of air
suddenly punctured. The bottle fell from his dead hand upon the yams
without breaking, although the remnant of its contents gurgled gently out
upon the deck.

So quick was the occurrence of action, that the first shot from Tambi's
musket missed the Mary ere Borckman had quite melted to the deck. There
was no time for a second shot, for the Mary, dropping the tomahawk,
holding her child in both her hands and plunging to the rail, was in the
air and overboard, her fall capsizing the canoe which chanced to be
beneath her.

Scores of actions were simultaneous. From the canoes on both sides
uprose a glittering, glistening rain of mother-of-pearl-handled tomahawks
that descended into the waiting hands of the Somo men on deck, while the
Marys on deck crouched down and scrambled out of the fray. At the same
time that the Mary who had killed Borckman leapt the rail, Lerumie bent
for the tomahawk she had dropped, and Jerry, aware of red war, slashed
the hand that reached for the tomahawk. Lerumie stood upright and loosed
loudly, in a howl, all the pent rage and hatred, of months which he had
cherished against the puppy. Also, as he gained the perpendicular and as
Jerry flew at his legs, he launched a kic