And the lean, fear-stricken girl, like a frightened rabbit in the mouth of its burrow, on hands and knees peered forth upon the scene from the lazarette and knew that the cooking-pot and the end of time had come for her.

CHAPTER XII

What happened aboard the Arangi Jerry never knew.  He did know that it was a world destroyed, for he saw it destroyed.  The boy who had knocked him on the head with the paddle, tied his legs securely and tossed him out on the beach ere he forgot him in the excitement of looting the Arangi.

With great shouting and song, the pretty teak-built yacht was towed in by the long canoes and beached close to where Jerry lay just beyond the confines of the coral-stone walls.  Fires blazed on the beach, lanterns were lighted on board, and, amid a great feasting, the Arangi was gutted and stripped.  Everything portable was taken ashore, from her pigs of iron ballast to her running gear and sails.  No one in Somo slept that night.  Even the tiniest of children toddled about the feasting fires or sprawled surfeited on the sands.  At two in the morning, at Bashti’s command, the shell of the boat was fired.  And Jerry, thirsting for water, having whimpered and wailed himself to exhaustion, lying helpless, leg-tied, on his side, saw the floating world he had known so short a time go up in flame and smoke.

And by the light of her burning, old Bashti apportioned the loot.  No one of the tribe was too mean to receive nothing.  Even the wretched bush-slaves, who had trembled through all the time of their captivity from fear of being eaten, received each a clay pipe and several sticks of tobacco.  The main bulk of the trade goods, which was not distributed, Bashti had carried up to his own large grass house.  All the wealth of gear was stored in the several canoe houses.  While in the devil devil houses the devil devil doctors set to work curing the many heads over slow smudges; for, along with the boat’s crew there were a round dozen of No-ola return boys and several Malu boys which Van Horn had not yet delivered.

Not all these had been slain, however.  Bashti had issued stern injunctions against wholesale slaughter.  But this was not because his heart was kind.  Rather was it because his head was shrewd.  Slain they would all be in the end.  Bashti had never seen ice, did not know it existed, and was unversed in the science of refrigeration.  The only way he knew to keep meat was to keep it alive.  And in the biggest canoe house, the club house of the stags, where no Mary might come under penalty of death by torture, the captives were stored.

Tied or trussed like fowls or pigs, they were tumbled on the hard-packed earthen floor, beneath which, shallowly buried, lay the remains of ancient chiefs, while, overhead, in wrappings of grass mats, swung all that was left of several of Bashti’s immediate predecessors, his father latest among them and so swinging for two full generations.  Here, too, since she was to be eaten and since the taboo had no bearing upon one condemned to be cooked, the thin little Mary from the lazarette was tumbled trussed upon the floor among the many blacks who had teased and mocked her for being fattened by Van Horn for the eating.