British war vessel had appeared in the Solomons.

And thus, Bashti, with a fine fresh idea inside his head, bowed his
chief's head in consent that his people could flock aboard and

trade. Very few of them knew what his idea was or that he even had
an idea.

Trade grew still brisker as more canoes came alongside and black men
and women thronged the deck. Then came the recruits, new-caught,

young, savage things, timid as deer, yet yielding to stern parental
and tribal law and going down into the Arangi's cabin, one by one,

their fathers and mothers and relatives accompanying them in family
groups, to confront the big fella white marster, who wrote their

names down in a mysterious book, had them ratify the three years'
contract of their labour by a touch of the right hand to the pen

with which he wrote, and who paid the first year's advance in trade
goods to the heads of their respective families.

Old Bashti sat near, taking his customary heavy tithes out of each
advance, his three old wives squatting humbly at his feet and by

their mere presence giving confidence to Van Horn, who was elated by
the stroke of business. At such rate his cruise on Malaita would be

a short one, when he would sail away with a full ship.
On deck, where Borckman kept a sharp eye out against danger, Jerry

prowled about, sniffing the many legs of the many blacks he had
never encountered before. The wild-dog had gone ashore with the

return boys, and of the return boys only one had come back. It was
Lerumie, past whom Jerry repeatedly and stiff-leggedly bristled

without gaining response of recognition. Lerumie coolly ignored
him, went down below once and purchased a trade hand-mirror, and,

with a look of the eyes, assured old Bashti that all was ready and
ripe to break at the first favourable moment.

On deck, Borckman gave this favourable moment. Nor would he have so
given it had he not been guilty of carelessness and of disobedience

to his captain's orders. He did not leave the schnapps alone. Be
did not sense what was impending all about him. Aft, where he

stood, the deck was almost deserted. Amidships and for'ard, gamming
with the boat's crew, the deck was crowded with blacks of both

sexes. He made his way to the yam sacks lashed abaft the mizzenmast
and got his bottle. Just before he drank, with a shred of caution,

he cast a glance behind him. Near him stood a harmless Mary,
middle-aged, fat, squat, asymmetrical, unlovely, a sucking child of

two years astride her hip and takingnourishment. Surely no harm
was to be apprehended there. Furthermore, she was patently a

weaponless Mary, for she wore no stitch of clothing that otherwise
might have concealed a weapon. Over against the rail, ten feet to

one side, stood Lerumie, smirking into the trade mirror he had just
bought.

It was in the trade mirror that Lerumie saw Borckman bend to the
yam-sacks, return to the erect, throw his head back, the mouth of

the bottle glued to his lips, the bottom elevated skyward. Lerumie
lifted his right hand in signal to a woman in a canoe alongside.

She bent swiftly for something that she tossed to Lerumie. It was a
long-handled tomahawk, the head of it an ordinary shingler's

hatchet, the haft of it, native-made, a black and polished piece of
hard wood, inlaid in rude designs with mother-of-pearl and wrapped

with coconut sennit to make a hand grip. The blade of the hatchet
had been ground to razor-edge.

As the tomahawk flew noiselessly through the air to Lerumie's hand,
just as noiselessly, the next instant, it flew through the air from

his hand into the hand of the fat Mary with the nursing child who
stood behind the mate. She clutched the handle with both hands,

while the child, astride her hip, held on to her with both small
arms part way about her.

Still she waited the stroke, for with Borckman's head thrown back
was no time to strive to sever the spinal cord at the neck. Many

eyes beheld the impendingtragedy. Jerry saw, but did not
understand. With all his hostility to niggers he had not divined

the attack from the air. Tambi, who chanced to be near the
skylight, saw, and, seeing, reached for a Lee-Enfield. Lerumie saw

Tambi's action and hissed haste to the Mary.
Borckman, as unaware of this, his last second of life, as he had

been of his first second of birth, lowered the bottle and
straightened forward his head. The keen edge sank home. What, in

that flash of instant when his brain was severed from the rest of
his body, Borckman may have felt or thought, if he felt or thought

at all, is a mystery unsolvable to living man. No man, his spinal
cord so severed, has ever given one word or whisper of testimony as

to what were his sensations and impressions. No less swift than the
hatchet stroke was the limp placidity into which Borckman's body

melted to the deck. He did not reel or pitch. He melted, as a sack
of wind suddenly emptied, as a bladder of air suddenly punctured.

The bottle fell from his dead hand upon the yams without breaking,
although the remnant of its contents gurgled gently out upon the

deck.
So quick was the occurrence of action, that the first shot from

Tambi's musket missed the Mary ere Borckman had quite melted to the
deck. There was no time for a second shot, for the Mary, dropping

the tomahawk, holding her child in both her hands and plunging to
the rail, was in the air and overboard, her fall capsizing the canoe

which chanced to be beneath her.
Scores of actions were simultaneous. From the canoes on both sides

uprose a glittering, glistening rain of mother-of-pearl-handled
tomahawks that descended into the waiting hands of the Somo men on

deck, while the Marys on deck crouched down and scrambled out of the
fray. At the same time that the Mary who had killed Borckman leapt

the rail, Lerumie bent for the tomahawk she had dropped, and Jerry,
aware of red war, slashed the hand that reached for the tomahawk.

Lerumie stood upright and loosed loudly, in a howl, all the pent
rage and hatred, of months which he had cherished against the puppy.

Also, as he gained the perpendicular and as Jerry flew at his legs,
he launched a kick with all his might that caught and lifted Jerry

squarely under the middle.
And in the next second, or fraction of second, as Jerry lifted and

soared through the air, over the barbed wire of the rail and
overboard, while Sniders were being passed up overside from the

canoes, Tambi fired his next hasty shot. And Lerumie, the foot with
which he had kicked not yet returned to the deck as again he was in

mid-action of stooping to pick up the tomahawk, received the bullet
squarely in the heart and pitched down to melt with Borckman into

the softness of death.
Ere Jerry struck the water, the glory of Tambi's marvellously lucky

shot was over for Tambi; for, at the moment he pressed trigger to
the successful shot, a tomahawk bit across his skull at the base of

the brain and darkened from his eyes for ever the bright vision of
the sea-washed, sun-blazoned tropic world. As swiftly, all

occurring almost simultaneously, did the rest of the boat's crew
pass and the deck became a shambles.

It was to the reports of the Sniders and the noises of the death
scuffle that Jerry's head emerged from the water. A man's hand

reached over a canoe-side and dragged him in by the scruff of the
neck, and, although he snarled and struggled to bite his rescuer, he

was not so much enraged as was he torn by the wildest solicitude for
Skipper. He knew, without thinking about it, that the Arangi had

been boarded by the hazily sensed supremedisaster of life that all
life intuitively apprehends and that only man knows and calls by the

name of "death." Borckman he had seen struck down. Lerumie he had
heard struck down. And now he was hearing the explosions of rifles

and the yells and screeches of triumph and fear.
So it was, helpless, suspended in the air by the nape of the neck,

that he bawled and squalled and choked and coughed till the black,
disgusted, flung him down roughly in the canoe's bottom. He

scrambled to his feet and made two leaps: one upon the gunwale of
the canoe; the next, despairing and hopeless, without consideration

of self, for the rail of the Arangi.