ever he turned and twisted, and twisted back again, the suspended head
in the pungent smoke, and handful by handful added rotten punk of wood to
the smudge fire.

Sixty feet in the clear, the dim fire occasionally lighted, through
shadowy cross-beams, the ridge-pole that was covered with sennit of
coconut that was braided in barbaric designs of black and white and that
was stained by the smoke of years almost to a monochrome of dirty brown.
From the lofty cross-beams, on long sennit strings, hung the heads of
enemies taken aforetime in jungle raid and sea foray. The place breathed
the very atmosphere of decay and death, and the imbecile ancient, curing
in the smoke the token of death, was himself palsiedly shaking into the
disintegration of the grave.

Toward daylight, with great shouting and heaving and pull and haul,
scores of Somo men brought in another of the big war canoes. They made
way with foot and hand, kicking and thrusting dragging and shoving, the
bound captives to either side of the space which the canoe was to occupy.
They were anything but gentle to the meat with which they had been
favoured by good fortune and the wisdom of Bashti.

For a time they sat about, all pulling at clay pipes and chirruping and
laughing in queer thin falsettos at the events of the night and the
previous afternoon. Now one and now another stretched out and slept
without covering; for so, directly under the path of the sun, had they
slept nakedly from the time they were born.

Remained awake, as dawn paled the dark, only the grievously wounded or
the too-tightly bound, and the decrepit ancient who was not so old as
Bashti. When the boy who had stunned Jerry with his paddle-blade and who
claimed him as his own stole into the canoe house, the ancient did not
hear him. Being blind, he did not see him. He continued gibbering and
chuckling dementedly, to twist the bushman's head back and forth and to
feed the smudge with punk-wood. This was no night-task for any man, nor
even for him who had forgotten how to do aught else. But the excitement
of cutting out the _Arangi_ had been communicated to his addled brain,
and, with vague reminiscent flashes of the strength of life triumphant,
he shared deliriously in this triumph of Somo by applying himself to the
curing of the head that was in itself the concrete expression of triumph.

But the twelve-year-old lad who stole in and cautiously stepped over the
sleepers and threaded hi