six heads the Arangi owes.  But what of it?  There’s one salt-water village, acrost on the weather coast, where the Arangi owes eighteen.  I recruited them for Aolo, and being salt-water men they put them on the Sandfly that was lost on the way to the Santa Cruz.  They’ve got a jack-pot over there on the weather coast—­my word, the boy that could get my head would be a second Carnegie!  A hundred and fifty pigs and shell money no end the village’s collected for the chap that gets me and delivers.”

“And they ain’t—­yet,” Haggin snorted.

“No fear,” was the cheerful retort.

“You talk like Arbuckle used to talk,” Haggin censured.  “Manny’s the time I’ve heard him string it off.  Poor old Arbuckle.  The most sure and most precautious chap that ever handled niggers.  He never went to sleep without spreadin’ a box of tacks on the floor, and when it wasn’t them it was crumpled newspapers.  I remember me well, bein’ under the same roof at the time on Florida, when a big tomcat chased a cockroach into the papers.  And it was blim, blam, blim, six times an’ twice over, with his two big horse-pistols, an’ the house perforated like a cullender.  Likewise there was a dead tom-cat.  He could shoot in the dark with never an aim, pullin’ trigger with the second finger and pointing with the first finger laid straight along the barrel.

“No, sir, my laddy buck.  He was the bully boy with the glass eye.  The nigger didn’t live that’d lift his head.  But they got ’m.  They got ’m.  He lasted fourteen years, too.  It was his cook-boy.  Hatcheted ’m before breakfast.  An’ it’s well I remember our second trip into the bush after what was left of ’m.”

“I saw his head after you’d turned it over to the Commissioner at Tulagi,” Van Horn supplemented.

“An’ the peaceful, quiet, everyday face of him on it, with almost the same old smile I’d seen a thousand times.  It dried on ’m that way over the smokin’ fire.  But they got ’m, if it did take fourteen years.  There’s manny’s the head that goes to Malaita, manny’s the time untooken; but, like the old pitcher, it’s tooken in the end.”

“But I’ve got their goat,” the captain insisted.  “When trouble’s hatching, I go straight to them and tell them what.  They can’t get the hang of it.  Think I’ve got some powerful devil-devil medicine.”

Tom Haggin thrust out his hand in abrupt good-bye, resolutely keeping his eyes from dropping to Jerry in the other’s arms.

“Keep your eye on my return boys,” he cautioned, as he went over the side, “till you land the last mother’s son of ’m.  They’ve got no cause to love Jerry or his breed, an’ I’d hate ill to happen ’m at a nigger’s hands.  An’ in the dark of the night ’tis like as not he can do a fare-you-well overside.  Don’t take your eye off ’m till you’re quit of the last of ’m.”

At sight of big Mister Haggin deserting him and being pulled away in the whaleboat, Jerry wriggled and voiced his anxiety in a low, whimpering whine.  Captain Van Horn snuggled him closer in his arm with a caress of his free hand.