Arangi_ Jerry never knew. He did know that it
was a world destroyed, for he saw it destroyed. The boy who had knocked
him on the head with the paddle, tied his legs securely and tossed him
out on the beach ere he forgot him in the excitement of looting the
_Arangi_.

With great shouting and song, the pretty teak-built yacht was towed in by
the long canoes and beached close to where Jerry lay just beyond the
confines of the coral-stone walls. Fires blazed on the beach, lanterns
were lighted on board, and, amid a great feasting, the _Arangi_ was
gutted and stripped. Everything portable was taken ashore, from her pigs
of iron ballast to her running gear and sails. No one in Somo slept that
night. Even the tiniest of children toddled about the feasting fires or
sprawled surfeited on the sands. At two in the morning, at Bashti's
command, the shell of the boat was fired. And Jerry, thirsting for
water, having whimpered and wailed himself to exhaustion, lying helpless,
leg-tied, on his side, saw the floating world he had known so short a
time go up in flame and smoke.

And by the light of her burning, old Bashti apportioned the loot. No one
of the tribe was too mean to receive nothing. Even the wretched bush-
slaves, who had trembled through all the time of their captivity from
fear of being eaten, received each a clay pipe and several sticks of
tobacco. The main bulk of the trade goods, which was not distributed,
Bashti had carried up to his own large grass house. All the wealth of
gear was stored in the several canoe houses. While in the devil devil
houses the devil devil doctors set to work curing the many heads over
slow smudges; for, along with the boat's crew there were a round dozen of
No-ola return boys and several Malu boys which Van Horn had not yet
delivered.

Not all these had been slain, however. Bashti had issued stern
injunctions against wholesale slaughter. But this was not because his
heart was kind. Rather was it because his head was shrewd. Slain they
would all be in the end. Bashti had never seen ice, did not know it
existed, and was unversed in the science of refrigeration. The only way
he knew to keep meat was to keep it alive. And in the biggest canoe
house, the club house of the stags, where no Mary might come under
penalty of death by torture, the captives were stored.

Tied or trussed like fowls or pigs, they were tumbled on the hard-packed
earthen floor, beneath which, shallow