up-standing veins from
which the flesh had shrunk away, dipped out a huge pistol of such remote
vintage that one of Cromwell's round-heads might well have carried it or
that it might well have voyaged with Quiros or La Perouse. It was a
flint-lock, as long as a man's forearm, and it had been loaded that
afternoon by no less a person than Bashti himself.

Quick as Bashti had been, Van Horn was almost as quick, but not quite
quick enough. Even as his hand leapt to the modern automatic lying out
of it's holster and loose on his knees, the pistol of the centuries went
off. Loaded with two slugs and a round bullet, its effect was that of a
sawed-off shotgun. And Van Horn knew the blaze and the black of death,
even as "Gott fer dang!" died unuttered on his lips and as his fingers
relaxed from the part-lifted automatic, dropping it to the floor.

Surcharged with black powder, the ancient weapon had other effect. It
burst in Bashti's hand. While Aora, with a knife produced apparently
from nowhere, proceeded to hack off the white master's head, Bashti
looked quizzically at his right forefinger dangling by a strip of skin.
He seized it with his left hand, with a quick pull and twist wrenched it
off, and grinningly tossed it, as a joke, into the pandanus basket which
still his wife with one hand held before him while with the other she
clutched her forehead bleeding from a flying fragment of pistol.

Collaterally with this, three of the young recruits, joined by their
fathers and uncles, had downed, and were finishing off the only one of
the boat's crew that was below. Bashti, who had lived so long that he
was a philosopher who minded pain little and the loss of a finger less,
chuckled and chirped his satisfaction and pride of achievement in the
outcome, while his three old wives, who lived only at the nod of his
head, fawned under him on the floor in the abjectness of servile
congratulation and worship. Long had they lived, and they had lived long
only by his kingly whim. They floundered and gibbered and mowed at his
feet, lord of life and death that he was, infinitely wise as he had so
often proved himself, as he had this time proved himself again.

And the lean, fear-stricken girl, like a frightened rabbit in the mouth
of its burrow, on hands and knees peered forth upon the scene from the
lazarette and knew that the cooking-pot and the end of time had come for
her.

CHAPTER XII

What happened aboard the _