What happened aboard the _Arangi_ Jerry never knew. He did know that it
was a world destroyed, for he saw it destroyed. The boy who had knocked
him on the head with the paddle, tied his legs securely and tossed him
out on the beach ere he forgot him in the excitement of looting the
_Arangi_.
With great shouting and song, the pretty teak-built yacht was towed in by
the long canoes and beached close to where Jerry lay just beyond the
confines of the coral-stone walls. Fires blazed on the beach, lanterns
were lighted on board, and, amid a great feasting, the _Arangi_ was
gutted and stripped. Everything portable was taken ashore, from her pigs
of iron ballast to her running gear and sails. No one in Somo slept that
night. Even the tiniest of children toddled about the feasting fires or
sprawled surfeited on the sands. At two in the morning, at Bashti's
command, the shell of the boat was fired. And Jerry, thirsting for
water, having whimpered and wailed himself to exhaustion, lying helpless,
leg-tied, on his side, saw the floating world he had known so short a
time go up in flame and smoke.
And by the light of her burning, old Bashti apportioned the loot. No one
of the tribe was too mean to receive nothing. Even the wretched bush-
slaves, who had trembled through all the time of their captivity from
fear of being eaten, received each a clay pipe and several sticks of
tobacco. The main bulk of the trade goods, which was not distributed,
Bashti had carried up to his own large grass house. All the wealth of
gear was stored in the several canoe houses. While in the devil devil
houses the devil devil doctors set to work curing the many heads over
slow smudges; for, along with the boat's crew there were a round dozen of
No-ola return boys and several Malu boys which Van Horn had not yet
delivered.
Not all these had been slain, however. Bashti had issued stern
injunctions against wholesale slaughter. But this was not because his
heart was kind. Rather was it because his head was shrewd. Slain they
would all be in the end. Bashti had never seen ice, did not know it
existed, and was unversed in the science of refrigeration. The only way
he knew to keep meat was to keep it alive. And in the biggest canoe
house, the club house of the stags, where no Mary might come under
penalty of death by torture, the captives were stored.
Tied or trussed like fowls or pigs, they were tumbled on the hard-packed
earthen floor, beneath which, shallowly buried, lay the remains of
ancient chiefs, while, overhead, in wrappings of grass mats, swung all
that was left of several of Bashti's immediate predecessors, his father
latest among them and so swinging for two full generations. Here, too,
since she was to be eaten and since the taboo had no bearing upon one
condemned to be cooked, the thin little Mary from the lazarette was
tumbled trussed upon the floor among the many blacks who had teased and
mocked her for being fattened by Van Horn for the eating.
And to this canoe house Jerry was also brought to join the others on the
floor. Agno, chief of the devil devil doctors, had stumbled across him
on the beach, and, despite the protestations of the boy who claimed him
as personal trove, had ordered him to the canoe house. Carried past the
fires of the feasting, his keen nostrils had told him of what the feast
consisted. And, new as the experience was, he had bristled and snarled
and struggled against his bonds to be free. Likewise, at first, tossed
down in the canoe house, he had bristled and snarled at his fellow
captives, not realizing their plight, and, since always he had been
trained to look upon niggers as the eternal enemy, considering them
responsible for the catastrophe to the _Arangi_ and to Skipper.
For Jerry was only a little dog, with a dog's limitations, and very young
in the world. But not for long did he throat his rage at them. In vague
ways it was borne in upon him that they, too, were not happy. Some had
been cruelly wounded, and kept up a moaning and groaning. Without any
clearness of concept, nevertheless Jerry had a realization that they were
as painfully circumstanced as himself. And painful indeed was his own
circumstance. He lay on his side, the cords that bound his legs so tight
as to bite into his tender flesh and shut off the circulation. Also, he
was perishing for water, and panted, dry-tongued, dry-mouthed, in the
stagnant heat.
A dolorous place it was, this canoe house, filled with groans and sighs,
corpses beneath the floor and composing the floor, creatures soon to be
corpses upon the floor, corpses swinging in aerial sepulchre overhead,
long black canoes, high-ended like beaked predatory monsters, dimly
looming in the light of a slow fire where sat an ancient of the tribe of
Somo at his interminable task of smoke-curing a bushman's head. He was
withered, and blind, and senile, gibbering and mowing like some huge ape
as ever he turned and twisted, and twisted back again, the suspended head
in the pungent smoke, and handful by handful added rotten punk of wood to
the smudge fire.
Sixty feet in the clear, the dim fire occasionally lighted, through
shadowy cross-beams, the ridge-pole that was covered with sennit of
coconut that was braided in barbaric designs of black and white and that
was stained by the smoke of years almost to a monochrome of dirty brown.
From the lofty cross-beams, on long sennit strings, hung the heads of
enemies taken aforetime in jungle raid and sea foray. The place breathed
the very atmosphere of decay and death, and the imbecile ancient, curing
in the smoke the token of death, was himself palsiedly shaking into the
disintegration of the grave.
Toward daylight, with great shouting and heaving and pull and haul,
scores of Somo men brought in another of the big war canoes. They made
way with foot and hand, kicking and thrusting dragging and shoving, the
bound captives to either side of the space which the canoe was to occupy.
They were anything but gentle to the meat with which they had been
favoured by good fortune and the wisdom of Bashti.
For a time they sat about, all pulling at clay pipes and chirruping and
laughing in queer thin falsettos at the events of the night and the
previous afternoon. Now one and now another stretched out and slept
without covering; for so, directly under the path of the sun, had they
slept nakedly from the time they were born.
Remained awake, as dawn paled the dark, only the grievously wounded or
the too-tightly bound, and the decrepit ancient who was not so old as
Bashti. When the boy who had stunned Jerry with his paddle-blade and who
claimed him as his own stole into the canoe house, the ancient did not
hear him. Being blind, he did not see him. He continued gibbering and
chuckling dementedly, to twist the bushman's head back and forth and to
feed the smudge with punk-wood. This was no night-task for any man, nor
even for him who had forgotten how to do aught else. But the excitement
of cutting out the _Arangi_ had been communicated to his addled brain,
and, with vague reminiscent flashes of the strength of life triumphant,
he shared deliriously in this triumph of Somo by applying himself to the
curing of the head that was in itself the concrete expression of triumph.
But the twelve-year-old lad who stole in and cautiously stepped over the
sleepers and threaded his way among the captives, did so with his heart
in his mouth. He knew what taboos he was violating. Not old enough even
to leave his father's grass roof and sleep in the youths' canoe house,
much less to sleep with the young bachelors in their canoe house, he knew
that he took his life, with all of its dimly guessed mysteries and
arrogances, in his hand thus to trespass into the sacred precinct of the
full-made, full-realized, full-statured men of Somo.
But he wanted Jerry and he got him. Only the lean little Mary, trussed
for the cooking, staring through her wide eyes of fear, saw the boy pick
Jerry up by his tied legs and carry him out and away from the booty of
meat of which she was part. Jerry's heroic little heart of courage would
have made him snarl and resent such treatment of handling had he not been
too exhausted and had not his mouth and throat been too dry for sound. As
it was, miserably and helplessly, not half himself, a puppet dreamer in a
half-nightmare, he knew, as a restless sleeper awakening between vexing
dreams, that he was being transported head-downward out of the canoe
house that stank of death, through the village that was only less
noisome, and up a path under lofty, wide-spreading trees that were
beginning languidly to stir with the first breathings of the morning
wind.