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.