I am old, I am quiet in my
ways, the fires of life have departed from me, I prefer to sit alone in
the dark and think. Chattering young things about me, with nothing but
foam and spume in their heads, on their tongues, would drive me mad. Of
a surety they would drive me mad--so mad that I will spit into every clam
shell, make faces at the moon, and bite my veins and howl."

"And if you do, what of it? So long as your seed does not perish. I
shall pay for the wives to their fathers and send them to you in three
days."

"I will have nothing to do with them," Nalasu asserted wildly.

"You will," Bashti insisted calmly. "Because if you do not you will have
to pay me. It will be a sore, hard debt. I will have every joint of you
unhinged so that you will be like a jelly-fish, like a fat pig with the
bones removed, and I will then stake you out in the midmost centre of the
dog-killing ground to swell in pain under the sun. And what is left of
you I shall fling to the dogs to eat. Your seed shall not perish out of
Somo. I, Bashti, so tell you. In three days I shall send to you your
two wives. . . . "

He paused, and a long silence fell upon them.

"Well?" Bashti reiterated. "It is wives or staking out unhinged in the
sun. You choose, but think well before you choose the unhinging."

"At my age, with all the vexations of youngness so far behind me!" Nalasu
complained.

"Choose. You will find there is vexation, and liveliness and much of it,
in the centre of the dog-killing yard when the sun cooks your sore joints
till the grease of the leanness of you bubbles like the tender fat of a
cooked sucking-pig."

"Then send me the wives," Nalasu managed to utter after a long pause.
"But send them in three days, not in two, nor to-morrow."

"It is well," Bashti nodded gravely. "You have lived at all only because
of those before you, now long in the dark, who worked so that the tribe
might live and you might come to be. You are. They paid the price for
you. It is your debt. You came into being with this debt upon you. You
will pay the debt before you pass out of being. It is the law. It is
very well."

CHAPTER XIX

And had Bashti hastened delivery of the wives by one day, or by even two
days, Nalasu would have entered the feared, purgatory of matrimony. But
Bashti kept his word, and on the third day was too busy, with a more
momentous problem, to deliver Bubu and Nena to the blind old man who
a