t, even of a sort,
they were two-legged gods who carried flying death in their hands that
reached farther than their hands and bridged distance.

As he ran the jungle, so Jerry ran the village. No place was sacred to
him. In the devil devil houses, where, before the face of mystery men
and women crawled in fear and trembling, he walked stiff-legged and
bristling; for fresh heads were suspended there--heads his eyes and keen
nostrils identified as those of once living blacks he had known on board
the _Arangi_. In the biggest devil devil house he encountered the head
of Borckman, and snarled at it, without receiving response, in
recollection of the fight he had fought with the schnapps-addled mate on
the deck of the _Arangi_.

Once, however, in Bashti's house, he chanced upon all that remained on
earth of Skipper. Bashti had lived very long, had lived most wisely and
thought much, and was thoroughly aware that, having lived far beyond the
span of man his own span was very short. And he was curious about it
all--the meaning and purpose of life. He loved the world and life, into
which he had been fortunately born, both as to constitution and to place,
which latter, for him, had been the high place over hie priests and
people. He was not afraid to die, but he wondered if he might live
again. He discounted the silly views of the tricky priests, and he was
very much alone in the chaos of the confusing problem.

For he had lived so long, and so luckily, that he had watched the waning
to extinction of all the vigorous appetites and desires. He had known
wives and children, and the keen-edge of youthful hunger. He had seen
his children grow to manhood and womanhood and become fathers and
grandfathers, mothers and grandmothers. But having known woman, and
love, and fatherhood, and the belly-delights of eating, he had passed on
beyond. Food? Scarcely did he know its meaning, so little did he eat.
Hunger, that bit him like a spur when he was young and lusty, had long
since ceased to stir and prod him. He ate out of a sense of necessity
and duty, and cared little for what he ate, save for one thing: the eggs
of the megapodes that were, in season, laid in his private, personal,
strictly tabooed megapode laying-yard. Here was left to him his last
lingering flesh thrill. As for the rest, he lived in his intellect,
ruling his people, seeking out data from which to induce laws that would
make his people stronger and rive