ly buried, lay the remains of
ancient chiefs, while, overhead, in wrappings of grass mats, swung all
that was left of several of Bashti's immediate predecessors, his father
latest among them and so swinging for two full generations. Here, too,
since she was to be eaten and since the taboo had no bearing upon one
condemned to be cooked, the thin little Mary from the lazarette was
tumbled trussed upon the floor among the many blacks who had teased and
mocked her for being fattened by Van Horn for the eating.

And to this canoe house Jerry was also brought to join the others on the
floor. Agno, chief of the devil devil doctors, had stumbled across him
on the beach, and, despite the protestations of the boy who claimed him
as personal trove, had ordered him to the canoe house. Carried past the
fires of the feasting, his keen nostrils had told him of what the feast
consisted. And, new as the experience was, he had bristled and snarled
and struggled against his bonds to be free. Likewise, at first, tossed
down in the canoe house, he had bristled and snarled at his fellow
captives, not realizing their plight, and, since always he had been
trained to look upon niggers as the eternal enemy, considering them
responsible for the catastrophe to the _Arangi_ and to Skipper.

For Jerry was only a little dog, with a dog's limitations, and very young
in the world. But not for long did he throat his rage at them. In vague
ways it was borne in upon him that they, too, were not happy. Some had
been cruelly wounded, and kept up a moaning and groaning. Without any
clearness of concept, nevertheless Jerry had a realization that they were
as painfully circumstanced as himself. And painful indeed was his own
circumstance. He lay on his side, the cords that bound his legs so tight
as to bite into his tender flesh and shut off the circulation. Also, he
was perishing for water, and panted, dry-tongued, dry-mouthed, in the
stagnant heat.

A dolorous place it was, this canoe house, filled with groans and sighs,
corpses beneath the floor and composing the floor, creatures soon to be
corpses upon the floor, corpses swinging in aerial sepulchre overhead,
long black canoes, high-ended like beaked predatory monsters, dimly
looming in the light of a slow fire where sat an ancient of the tribe of
Somo at his interminable task of smoke-curing a bushman's head. He was
withered, and blind, and senile, gibbering and mowing like some huge ape
as