of ash? Had all that made Van Horn passed like the flame of the
splinter? Had he passed into the darkness for ever into which the

beast passed, into which passed the speared crocodile, the hooked
bonita, the netted mullet, the slain pig that was fat to eat? Was

Van Horn's darkness as the darkness of the blue-bottle fly that his
fly-flapping maid smashed and disrupted in mid-flight of the air?--

as the darkness into which passed the mosquito that knew the secret
of flying, and that, despite its perfectness of flight, with almost

an unthought action, he squashed with the flat of his hand against
the back of his neck when it bit him?

What was true of this white man's head, so recently alive and
erectly dominant, Bashti knew was true of himself. What had

happened to this white man, after going through the dark gate of
death, would happen to him. Wherefore he questioned the head, as if

its dumb lips might speak to him from out of the mystery and tell
him the meaning of life, and the meaning of death that inevitably

laid life by the heels.
Jerry's long-drawn howl of woe at sight and scent of all that was

left of Skipper, roused Bashti from his reverie. He looked at the
sturdy, golden-brown puppy, and immediately included it in his

reverie. It was alive. It was like man. It knew hunger, and pain,
anger and love. It had blood in its veins, like man, that a thrust

of a knife could make redly gush forth and denude it to death. Like
the race of man it loved its kind, and birthed and breast-nourished

its young. And passed. Ay, it passed; for many a dog, as well as a
human, had he, Bashti, devoured in his hey-dey of appetite and

youth, when he knew only motion and strength, and fed motion and
strength out of the calabashes of feasting.

But from woe Jerry went on into anger. He stalked stiff-legged,
with a snarl writhen on his lips, and with recurrent waves of hair-

bristling along his back and up his shoulders and neck. And he
stalked not the head of Skipper, where rested his love, but Bashti,

who held the head on his knees. As the wild wolf in the upland
pasture stalks the mare mother with her newly delivered colt, so

Jerry stalked Bashti. And Bashti, who had never feared death all
his long life and who had laughed a joke with his forefinger blown

off by the bursting flint-lock pistol, smiled gleefully to himself,
for his glee was intellectual and in admiration of this half-grown

puppy whom he rapped on the nose with a short, hardwood stick and
compelled to keep distance. No matter how often and fiercely Jerry

rushed him, he met the rush with the stick, and chuckled aloud,
understanding the puppy's courage, marvelling at the stupidity of

life that impelled him continually to thrust his nose to the hurt of
the stick, and that drove him, by passion of remembrance of a dead

man to dare the pain of the stick again and again.
This, too, was life, Bashti meditated, as he deftly rapped the

screaming puppy away from him. Four-legged life it was, young and
silly and hot, heart-prompted, that was like any young man making

love to his woman in the twilight, or like any young man fighting to
the death with any other young man over a matter of passion, hurt

pride, or thwarted desire. As much as in the dead head of Van Horn
or of any man, he realized that in this live puppy might reside the

clue to existence, the solution of the riddle.
So he continued to rap Jerry on the nose away from him, and to

marvel at the persistence of the vital something within him that
impelled him to leap forward always to the stick that hurt him and

made him recoil. The valour and motion, the strength and the
unreasoning of youth he knew it to be, and he admired it sadly, and

envied it, willing to exchange for it all his lean grey wisdom if
only he could find the way.

"Some dog, that dog, sure some dog," he might have uttered in Van
Horn's fashion of speech. Instead, in beche-de-mer, which was as

habitual to him as his own Somo speech, he thought:
"My word, that fella dog no fright along me."

But age wearied sooner of the play, and Bashti put an end to it by
rapping Jerry heavily behind the ear and stretching him out stunned.

The spectacle of the puppy, so alive and raging the moment before,
and, the moment after, lying as if dead, caught Bashti's speculative

fancy. The stick, with a single sharp rap of it, had effected the
change. Where had gone the anger and wit of the puppy? Was that

all it was, the flame of the splinter that could be quenched by any
chance gust of air? One instant Jerry had raged and suffered,

snarled and leaped, willed and directed his actions. The next
instant he lay limp and crumpled in the little death of

unconsciousness. In a brief space, Bashti knew, consciousness,
sensation, motion, and direction would flow back into the wilted

little carcass. But where, in the meanwhile, at the impact of the
stick, had gone all the consciousness, and sensitiveness, and will?

Bashti sighed wearily, and wearily wrapped the heads in their grass-
mat coverings--all but Van Horn's; and hoisted them up in the air to

hang from the roof-beams--to hang as he debated, long after he was
dead and out if it, even as some of them had so hung from long

before his father's and his grandfather's time. The head of Van
Horn he left lying on the floor, while he stole out himself to peer

in through a crack and see what next the puppy might do.
Jerry quivered at first, and in the matter of a minute struggled

feebly to his feet where he stood swaying and dizzy; and thus
Bashti, his eye to the crack, saw the miracle of life flow back

through the channels of the inert body and stiffen the legs to
upstanding, and saw consciousness, the mystery of mysteries, flood

back inside the head of bone that was covered with hair, smoulder
and glow in the opening eyes, and direct the lips to writhe away

from the teeth and the throat to vibrate to the snarl that had been
interrupted when the stick smashed him down into darkness.

And more Bashti saw. At first, Jerry looked about for his enemy,
growling and bristling his neck hair. Next, in lieu of his enemy,

he saw Skipper's head, and crept to it and loved it, kissing with
his tongue the hard cheeks, the closed lids of the eyes that his

love could not open, the immobile lips that would not utter one of
the love-words they had been used to utter to the little dog.

Next, in profounddesolation, Jerry set down before Skipper's head,
pointed his nose toward the lofty ridge-pole, and howled mournfully

and long. Finally, sick and subdued, he crept out of the house and
away to the house of his devil devil master, where, for the round of

twenty-four hours, he waked and slept and dreamed centuries of
nightmares.

For ever after in Somo, Jerry feared that grass house of Bashti. He
was not in fear of Bashti. His fear was indescribable and

unthinkable. In that house was the nothingness of what once was
Skipper. It was the token of the ultimatecatastrophe to life that

was wrapped and twisted into every fibre of his heredity. One step
advanced beyond this, Jerry's uttermost, the folk of Somo, from the

contemplation of death, had achieved concepts of the spirits of the
dead still living in immaterial and supersensuous realms.

And thereafter Jerry hated Bashti intensely, as a lord of life who
possessed and laid on his knees the nothingness of Skipper. Not

that Jerry reasoned it out. All dim and vague it was, a sensation,
an emotion, a feeling, an instinct, an intuition, name it mistily as

one will in the misty nomenclature of speech wherein words cheat
with the impression of definiteness and lie to the brain an

understanding which the brain does not possess.
CHAPTER XVI

Three months more passed; the north-west monsoon, after its half-
year of breath, had given way to the south-east trade; and Jerry

still continued to live in the house of Agno and to have the run of
the village. He had put on weight, increased in size, and,

protected by the taboo, had become self-confident almost to