imself evoke in sound, and he answered yes to most of them by
simultaneously nodding his head and advancing his right paw. To some
names he remained without movement in token that he did not know them.
And to other names, which he recognized, but the owners of which he had
not seen, he answered no by advancing his left paw.

And Nalasu, beyond knowing that something terrible was
impending--something horribly more terrible than any foray of
neighbouring salt-water tribes, which Somo, behind her walls, could
easily fend off, divined that it was the long-expected punitive man-of-
war. Despite his three-score years, he had never experienced a village
shelling. He had heard vague talk of what had happened in the matter of
shell-fire in other villages, but he had no conception of it save that it
must be, bullets on a larger scale than Snider bullets that could be
fired correspondingly longer distances through the air.

But it was given to him to know shell-fire before he died. Bashti, who
had long waited the cruiser that was to avenge the destruction of the
_Arangi_ and the taking of the heads of the two white men, and who had
long calculated the damage to be wrought, had given the command to his
people to flee to the mountains. First in the vanguard, borne by a dozen
young men, went his mat-wrapped parcels of heads. The last slow trailers
in the rear of the exodus were just passing, and Nalasu, his bow and his
eighty arrows clutched to him, Jerry at his heels, made his first step to
follow, when the air above him was rent by a prodigiousness of sound.

Nalasu sat down abruptly. It was his first shell, and it was a thousand
times more terrible than he had imagined. It was a rip-snorting, sky-
splitting sound as of a cosmic fabric being torn asunder between the
hands of some powerful god. For all the world it was like the roughest
tearing across of sheets that were thick as blankets, that were broad as
the earth and wide as the sky.

Not only did he sit down just outside his door, but he crouched his head
to his knees and shielded it with the arch of his arms. And Jerry, who
had never heard shell-fire, much less imagined what it was like, was
impressed with the awfulness of it. It was to him a natural catastrophe
such as had happened to the _Arangi_ when she was flung down reeling on
her side by the shouting wind. But, true to his nature, he did not
crouch down under the shriek of that first shell. On the contra