k with all his might that caught
and lifted Jerry squarely under the middle.

And in the next second, or fraction of second, as Jerry lifted and soared
through the air, over the barbed wire of the rail and overboard, while
Sniders were being passed up overside from the canoes, Tambi fired his
next hasty shot. And Lerumie, the foot with which he had kicked not yet
returned to the deck as again he was in mid-action of stooping to pick up
the tomahawk, received the bullet squarely in the heart and pitched down
to melt with Borckman into the softness of death.

Ere Jerry struck the water, the glory of Tambi's marvellously lucky shot
was over for Tambi; for, at the moment he pressed trigger to the
successful shot, a tomahawk bit across his skull at the base of the brain
and darkened from his eyes for ever the bright vision of the sea-washed,
sun-blazoned tropic world. As swiftly, all occurring almost
simultaneously, did the rest of the boat's crew pass and the deck became
a shambles.

It was to the reports of the Sniders and the noises of the death scuffle
that Jerry's head emerged from the water. A man's hand reached over a
canoe-side and dragged him in by the scruff of the neck, and, although he
snarled and struggled to bite his rescuer, he was not so much enraged as
was he torn by the wildest solicitude for Skipper. He knew, without
thinking about it, that the _Arangi_ had been boarded by the hazily
sensed supreme disaster of life that all life intuitively apprehends and
that only man knows and calls by the name of "death." Borckman he had
seen struck down. Lerumie he had heard struck down. And now he was
hearing the explosions of rifles and the yells and screeches of triumph
and fear.

So it was, helpless, suspended in the air by the nape of the neck, that
he bawled and squalled and choked and coughed till the black, disgusted,
flung him down roughly in the canoe's bottom. He scrambled to his feet
and made two leaps: one upon the gunwale of the canoe; the next,
despairing and hopeless, without consideration of self, for the rail of
the _Arangi_.

His forefeet missed the rail by a yard, and he plunged down into the sea.
He came up, swimming frantically, swallowing and strangling salt water
because he still yelped and wailed and barked his yearning to be on board
with Skipper.

But a boy of twelve, in another canoe, having witnessed the first black's
adventure with Jerry, treated him without ceremony, laying