ne
doctor and now with another.

In these private talks he demonstrated that he knew their game as well as
they did, and that he was no slave to the dark superstitions and gross
impostures with which they kept the people in submission. Also, he
exposited the theory, as ancient as priests and rulers, that priests and
rulers must work together in the orderly governance of the people. He
was content that the people should believe that the gods, and the priests
who were the mouth-pieces of the gods, had the last word, but he would
have the priests know that in private the last word was his. Little as
they believed in their trickery, he told them, he believed less.

He knew taboo, and the truth behind taboo. He explained his personal
taboos, and how they came to be. Never must he eat clam-meat, he told
Agno. It was so selected by himself because he did not like clam-meat.
It was old Nino, high priest before Agno, with an ear open to the voice
of the shark-god, who had so laid the taboo. But, he, Bashti, had
privily commanded Nino to lay the taboo against clam-meat upon him,
because he, Bashti, did not like clam-meat and had never liked clam-meat.

Still further, since he had lived longer than the oldest priest of them,
his had been the appointing of every one of them. He knew them, had made
them, had placed them, and they lived by his pleasure. And they would
continue to take program from him, as they had always taken it, or else
they would swiftly and suddenly pass. He had but to remind them of the
passing of Kori, the devil devil doctor who had believed himself stronger
than his chief, and who, for his mistake, had screamed in pain for a week
ere what composed him had ceased to scream and for ever ceased to scream.

* * * * *

In Agno's large grass house was little light and much mystery. There was
no mystery there for Jerry, who merely knew things, or did not know
things, and who never bothered about what he did not know. Dried heads
and other cured and mouldy portions of human carcasses impressed him no
more than the dried alligators and dried fish that contributed to the
festooning of Agno's dark abode.

Jerry found himself well cared for. No children nor wives cluttered the
devil devil doctor's house. Several old women, a fly-flapping girl of
eleven, and two young men who had graduated from the canoe house of the
youths and who were studying priestcraft under the master, composed the
household and w