seaman's landmark, Mount Kolorat, green-forested to its cloud-capped

summit four thousand feet in the air. Even as he looked, thin
smoke-columns were rising along the slopes and lesser peaks, and

more were beginning to rise.
"My word," Tambi grinned. "Plenty boy stop 'm bush lookout along

you eye belong him."
Van Horn smiled understandingly. He knew, by the ancient telegraphy

of smoke-signalling, the message was being conveyed from village to
village and tribe to tribe that a labour-recruiter was on the

leeward coast.
All morning, under a brisk beam wind which had sprung up with the

rising of the sun, the Arangi flew north, her course continuously
advertised by the increasing smoke-talk that gossiped along the

green summits. At high noon, with Van Horn, ever-attended by Jerry,
standing for'ard and conning, the Arangi headed into the wind to

thread the passage between two palm-tufted islets. There was need
for conning. Coral patches uprose everywhere from the turquoise

depths, running the gamut of green from deepest jade to palest
tourmaline, over which the sea filtered changing shades, creamed

lazily, or burst into white fountains of sun-flashed spray.
The smoke columns along the heights became garrulous, and long

before the Arangi was through the passage the entire leeward coast,
from the salt-water men of the shore to the remotest bush villagers,

knew that the labour recruiter was going in to Langa-Langa. As the
lagoon, formed by the chain of islets lying off shore, opened out,

Jerry began to smell the reef-villages. Canoes, many canoes, urged
by paddles or sailed before the wind by the weight of the freshening

South East trade on spread fronds of coconut palms, moved across the
smooth surface of the lagoon. Jerry barked intimidatingly at those

that came closest, bristling his neck and making a ferocious
simulation of an efficientprotector of the white god who stood

beside him. And after each such warning, he would softly dab his
cool damp muzzle against the sun-heated skin of Skipper's leg.

Once inside the lagoon, the Arangi filled away with the wind a-beam.
At the end of a swift half-mile she rounded to, with head-sails

trimming down and with a great flapping of main and mizzen, and
dropped anchor in fifty feet of water so clear that every huge

fluted clamshell was visible on the coral floor. The whaleboat was
not necessary to put the Langa-Langa return boys ashore. Hundreds

of canoes lay twenty deep along both sides of the Arangi, and each
boy, with his box and bell, was clamoured for by scores of relatives

and friends.
In such height of excitement, Van Horn permitted no one on board.

Melanesians, unlike cattle, are as prone to stampede to attack as to
retreat. Two of the boat's crew stood beside the Lee-Enfields on

the skylight. Borckman, with half the boat's crew, went about the
ship's work. Van Horn, Jerry at his heels, careful that no one

should get at his back, superintended the departure of the Langa-
Langa returns and kept a vigilant eye on the remaining half of the

boat's crew that guarded the barbed-wire rails. And each Somo boy
sat on his trade-box to prevent it from being tossed into the

waiting canoes by some Langa-Langa boy.
In half an hour the riot departedashore. Only several canoes

lingered, and from one of these Van Horn beckoned aboard Nau-hau,
the biggest chief of the stronghold of Langa-Langa. Unlike most of

the big chiefs, Nau-hau was young, and, unlike most of the
Melanesians, he was handsome, even beautiful.

"Hello, King o' Babylon," was Van Horn's greeting, for so he had
named him because of fancied Semitic resemblance blended with the

crude power that marked his visage and informed his bearing.
Born and trained to nakedness, Nau-hau trod the deck boldly and

unashamed. His sole gear of clothing was a length of trunk strap
buckled about his waist. Between this and his bare skin was thrust

the naked blade of a ten-inch ripping knife. His sole decoration
was a white China soup-plate, perforated and strung on coconut

sennit, suspended from about his neck so that it rested flat on his
chest and half-concealed the generous swell of muscles. It was the

greatest of treasures. No man of Malaita he had ever heard of
possessed an unbroken soup-plate.

Nor was he any more ridiculous because of the soup-plate than was he
ludicrous because of his nakedness. He was royal. His father had

been a king before him, and he had proved himself greater than his
father. Life and death he bore in his hands and head. Often he had

exercised it, chirping to his subjects in the tongue of Langa-Langa:
"Slay here," and "Slay there"; "Thou shalt die," and "Thou shalt

live." Because his father, a year abdicated, had chosen foolishly
to interfere with his son's government, he had called two boys and

had them twist a cord of coconut around his father's neck so that
thereafter he never breathed again. Because his favourite wife,

mother of his eldest born, had dared out of silliness of affection
to violate one of his kingly tamboos, he had had her killed and had

himself selfishly and religiously eaten the last of her even to the
marrow of her cracked joints, sharing no morsel with his boonest of

comrades.
Royal he was, by nature, by training, by deed. He carried himself

with consciousness of royalty. He looked royal--as a magnificent
stallion may look royal, as a lion on a painted tawny desert may

look royal. He was as splendid a brute--an adumbration of the
splendid human conquerors and rulers, higher on the ladder of

evolution, who have appeared in other times and places. His pose of
body, of chest, of shoulders, of head, was royal. Royal was the

heavy-lidded, lazy, insolent way he looked out of his eyes.
Royal in courage was he, this moment on the Arangi, despite the fact

that he knew he walked on dynamite. As he had long since bitterly
learned, any white man was as much dynamite as was the mysterious

death-dealing missile he sometimes employed. When a stripling, he
had made one of the canoe force that attacked the sandalwood-cutter

that had been even smaller than the Arangi. He had never forgotten
that mystery. Two of the three white men he had seen slain and

their heads removed on deck. The third, still fighting, had but the
minute before fled below. Then the cutter, along with all her

wealth of hoop-iron, tobacco, knives and calico, had gone up into
the air and fallen back into the sea in scattered and fragmented

nothingness. It had been dynamite--the MYSTERY. And he, who had
been hurled uninjured through the air by a miracle of fortune, had

divined that white men in themselves were truly dynamite, compounded
of the same mystery as the substance with which they shot the swift-

darting schools of mullet, or blow up, in extremity, themselves and
the ships on which they voyaged the sea from far places. And yet on

this unstable and death-terrific substance of which he was well
aware Van Horn was composed, he trod heavily with his personality,

daring, to the verge of detonation, to impact it with his insolence.
"My word," he began, "what name you make 'm boy belong me stop along

you too much?" Which was a true and correct charge that the boys
which Van Horn had just returned had been away three years and a

half instead of three years.
"You talk that fella talk I get cross too much along you," Van Horn

bristled back, and then added, diplomatically, dipping into a half-
case of tobacco sawed across and proffering a handful of stick

tobacco: "Much better you smoke 'm up and talk 'm good fella talk."
But Nau-hau grandly waved aside the gift for which he hungered.

"Plenty tobacco stop along me," he lied. "What name one fella boy
go way no come back?" he demanded.

Van Horn pulled the long slenderaccount book out of the twist of
his loin-cloth, and, while he skimmed its pages, impressed Nau-hau

with the dynamite of the white man's superior powers which enabled
him to remember correctly inside the scrawled sheets of a book

instead of inside his head.
"Sati," Van Horn read, his finger marking the place, his eyes