s way among the captives, did so with his heart
in his mouth. He knew what taboos he was violating. Not old enough even
to leave his father's grass roof and sleep in the youths' canoe house,
much less to sleep with the young bachelors in their canoe house, he knew
that he took his life, with all of its dimly guessed mysteries and
arrogances, in his hand thus to trespass into the sacred precinct of the
full-made, full-realized, full-statured men of Somo.

But he wanted Jerry and he got him. Only the lean little Mary, trussed
for the cooking, staring through her wide eyes of fear, saw the boy pick
Jerry up by his tied legs and carry him out and away from the booty of
meat of which she was part. Jerry's heroic little heart of courage would
have made him snarl and resent such treatment of handling had he not been
too exhausted and had not his mouth and throat been too dry for sound. As
it was, miserably and helplessly, not half himself, a puppet dreamer in a
half-nightmare, he knew, as a restless sleeper awakening between vexing
dreams, that he was being transported head-downward out of the canoe
house that stank of death, through the village that was only less
noisome, and up a path under lofty, wide-spreading trees that were
beginning languidly to stir with the first breathings of the morning
wind.

CHAPTER XIII

The boy's name, as Jerry was to learn, was Lamai, and to Lamai's house
Jerry was carried. It was not much of a house, even as cannibal grass-
houses go. On an earthen floor, hard-packed of the filth of years, lived
Lamai's father and mother and a spawn of four younger brothers and
sisters. A thatched roof that leaked in every heavy shower leaned to a
wabbly ridge-pole over the floor. The walls were even more pervious to a
driving rain. In fact, the house of Lamai, who was the father of Lumai,
was the most miserable house in all Somo.

Lumai, the house-master and family head, unlike most Malaitans, was fat.
And of his fatness it would seem had been begotten his good nature with
its allied laziness. But as the fly in his ointment of jovial
irresponsibility was his wife, Lenerengo--the prize shrew of Somo, who
was as lean about the middle and all the rest of her as her husband was
rotund; who was as remarkably sharp-spoken as he was soft-spoken; who was
as ceaselessly energetic as he was unceasingly idle; and who had been
born with a taste for the world as sour in her mouth as it was sweet in