at they served to support three strands
of barbed wire that ran completely around the vessel, being broken only
at the gangway for a narrow space of fifteen inches. That this was a
precaution against danger, Jerry sensed without a passing thought to it.
All his life, from his first impressions of life, had been passed in the
heart of danger, ever-impending, from the blacks. In the plantation
house at Meringe, always the several white men had looked askance at the
many blacks who toiled for them and belonged to them. In the
living-room, where were the eating-table, the billiard-table, and the
phonograph, stood stands of rifles, and in each bedroom, beside each bed,
ready to hand, had been revolvers and rifles. As well, _Mister_ Haggin
and Derby and Bob had always carried revolvers in their belts when they
left the house to go among their blacks.

Jerry knew these noise-making things for what they were--instruments of
destruction and death. He had seen live things destroyed by them, such
as puarkas, goats, birds, and crocodiles. By means of such things the
white-gods by their will crossed space without crossing it with their
bodies, and destroyed live things. Now he, in order to damage anything,
had to cross space with his body to get to it. He was different. He was
limited. All impossible things were possible to the unlimited,
two-legged white-gods. In a way, this ability of theirs to destroy
across space was an elongation of claw and fang. Without pondering it,
or being conscious of it, he accepted it as he accepted the rest of the
mysterious world about him.

Once, even, had Jerry seen his _Mister_ Haggin deal death at a distance
in another noise-way. From the veranda he had seen him fling sticks of
exploding dynamite into a screeching mass of blacks who had come raiding
from the Beyond in the long war canoes, beaked and black, carved and
inlaid with mother-of-pearl, which they had left hauled up on the beach
at the door of Meringe.

Many precautions by the white-gods had Jerry been aware of, and so,
sensing it almost in intangible ways, as a matter of course he accepted
this barbed-wire fence on the floating world as a mark of the persistence
of danger. Disaster and death hovered close about, waiting the chance to
leap upon life and drag it down. Life had to be very alive in order to
live was the law Jerry had learned from the little of life he knew.

Watching the rigging up of the barbed wire, Jerry