three days I shall send to you your two wives. . . . "
He paused, and a long silence fell upon them.

"Well?" Bashti reiterated. "It is wives or staking out unhinged in
the sun. You choose, but think well before you choose the

unhinging."
"At my age, with all the vexations of youngness so far behind me!"

Nalasu complained.
"Choose. You will find there is vexation, and liveliness and much

of it, in the centre of the dog-killing yard when the sun cooks your
sore joints till the grease of the leanness of you bubbles like the

tender fat of a cooked sucking-pig."
"Then send me the wives," Nalasu managed to utter after a long

pause. "But send them in three days, not in two, nor to-morrow."
"It is well," Bashti nodded gravely. "You have lived at all only

because of those before you, now long in the dark, who worked so
that the tribe might live and you might come to be. You are. They

paid the price for you. It is your debt. You came into being with
this debt upon you. You will pay the debt before you pass out of

being. It is the law. It is very well."
CHAPTER XIX

And had Bashti hastened delivery of the wives by one day, or by even
two days, Nalasu would have entered the feared, purgatory of

matrimony. But Bashti kept his word, and on the third day was too
busy, with a more momentous problem, to deliver Bubu and Nena to the

blind old man who apprehensively waited their coming. For the
morning of the third day all the summits of leeward Malaita smoked

into speech. A warship was on the coast--so the tale ran; a big
warship that was heading in through the reef islands at Langa-Langa.

The tale grew. The warship was not stopping at Langa-Langa. The
warship was not stopping at Binu. It was directing its course

toward Somo.
Nalasu, blind, could not see this smoke speech written in the air.

Because of the isolation of his house, no one came and told him.
His first warning was when shrill voices of women, cries of

children, and wailings of babes in nameless fear came to him from
the main path that led from the village to the upland boundaries of

Somo. He read only fear and panic from the sounds, deduced that the
village was fleeing to its mountain fastnesses, but did not know the

cause of the flight.
He called Jerry to him and instructed him to scout to the great

banyan tree, where Nalasu's path and the main path joined, and to
observe and report. And Jerry sat under the banyan tree and

observed the flight of all Somo. Men, women, and children, the
young and the aged, babes at breast and patriarchs leaning on sticks

and staffs passed before his eyes, betraying the greatest haste and
alarm. The village dogs were as frightened, whimpering and whining

as they ran. And the contagion of terror was strong upon Jerry. He
knew the prod of impulse to join in this rush away from some

unthinkably catastrophic event that impended and that stirred his
intuitive apprehensions of death. But he mastered the impulse with

his sense of loyalty to the blind man who had fed him and caressed
him for a long six months.

Back with Nalasu, sitting between his knees, he made his report. It
was impossible for him to count more than five, although he knew the

fleeing population numbered many times more than five. So he
signified five men, and more; five women, and more five children,

and more; five babies, and more; five dogs, and more--even of pigs
did he announce five and more. Nalasu's ears told him that it was

many, many times more, and he asked for names. Jerry know the names
of Bashti, of Agno, and of Lamai, and Lumai. He did not pronounce

them with the slightest of resemblance to their customary soundings,
but pronounced them in the whiff-whuff of shorthand speech that

Nalasu had taught him.
Nalasu named over many other names that Jerry knew by ear but could

not himself evoke in sound, and he answered yes to most of them by
simultaneously nodding his head and advancing his right paw. To

some names he remained without movement in token that he did not
know them. And to other names, which he recognized, but the owners

of which he had not seen, he answered no by advancing his left paw.
And Nalasu, beyond knowing that something terrible was impending--

something horribly more terrible than any foray of neighbouring
salt-water tribes, which Somo, behind her walls, could easily fend

off, divined that it was the long-expected punitive man-of-war.
Despite his three-score years, he had never experienced a village

shelling. He had heard vague talk of what had happened in the
matter of shell-fire in other villages, but he had no conception of

it save that it must be, bullets on a larger scale than Snider
bullets that could be fired correspondingly longer distances through

the air.
But it was given to him to know shell-fire before he died. Bashti,

who had long waited the cruiser that was to avenge the destruction
of the Arangi and the taking of the heads of the two white men, and

who had long calculated the damage to be wrought, had given the
command to his people to flee to the mountains. First in the

vanguard, borne by a dozen young men, went his mat-wrapped parcels
of heads. The last slow trailers in the rear of the exodus were

just passing, and Nalasu, his bow and his eighty arrows clutched to
him, Jerry at his heels, made his first step to follow, when the air

above him was rent by a prodigiousness of sound.
Nalasu sat down abruptly. It was his first shell, and it was a

thousand times more terrible than he had imagined. It was a rip-
snorting, sky-splitting sound as of a cosmic fabric being torn

asunder between the hands of some powerful god. For all the world
it was like the roughest tearing across of sheets that were thick as

blankets, that were broad as the earth and wide as the sky.
Not only did he sit down just outside his door, but he crouched his

head to his knees and shielded it with the arch of his arms. And
Jerry, who had never heard shell-fire, much less imagined what it

was like, was impressed with the awfulness of it. It was to him a
natural catastrophe such as had happened to the Arangi when she was

flung down reeling on her side by the shouting wind. But, true to
his nature, he did not crouch down under the shriek of that first

shell. On the contrary, he bristled his hair and snarled up with
menacing teeth at whatever the thing was which was so enormously

present and yet invisible to his eyes.
Nalasu crouched closer when the shell burst beyond, and Jerry

snarled and rippled his hair afresh. Each repeated his actions with
each fresh shell, for, while they screamed no more loudly, they

burst in the jungle more closely. And Nalasu, who had lived a long
life most bravely in the midst of perils he had known, was destined

to die a coward out of his fear of the thing unknown, the chemically
propelled missile of the white masters. As the dropping shells

burst nearer and nearer, what final self-control he possessed left
him. Such was his utter panic that he might well have bitten his

veins and howled. With a lunaticscream, he sprang to his feet and
rushed inside the house as if forsooth its grass thatch could

protect his head from such huge projectiles. He collided with the
door-jamb, and, ere Jerry could follow him, whirled around in a part

circle into the centre of the floor just in time to receive the next
shell squarely upon his head.

Jerry had just gained the doorway when the shell exploded. The
house went into flying fragments, and Nalasu flew into fragments

with it. Jerry, in the doorway, caught in the out-draught of the
explosion, was flung a score of feet away. All in the same fraction

of an instant, earthquake, tidal wave, volcaniceruption, the
thunder of the heavens and the fire-flashing of an electric bolt

from the sky smote him and smote consciousness out of him.