For the moment the Salariki made no move toward the sea which was to be their hunting ground.  Instead the youngest members of the party, some of whom were adolescents not yet entitled to wear the claw knife of manhood, spread out along the shore and set industriously to gathering driftwood, which they brought back to heap on the sand.  Dane, watching that harvest, caught sight of a smoothly polished length.  He called Weeks’ attention to the water rounded cylinder.

The oiler’s eyes lighted and he stooped to pick it up.  Where the other sticks were from grass trees this was something else.  And among the bleached pile it had the vividness of flame.  For it was a strident scarlet.  Weeks turned it over in his hands, running his fingers lovingly across its perfect grain.  Even in this crude state it had beauty.  He stopped the Salarik who had just brought in another armload of wood.

“This is what?” he spoke the Trade Lingo haltingly.

The native gazed somewhat indifferently at the branch.  “Tansil,” he answered.  “It grows on the islands—­” He made a vague gesture to include a good section of the western sea before he hurried away.

Weeks now went along the tide line on his own quest, Dane trailing him.  At the end of a quarter hour when a hail summoned them back to the site of the now lighted fire, they had some ten pieces of the tansil wood between them.  The finds ranged from a three foot section some four inches in diameter, to some slender twigs no larger than a writing steelo—­but all with high polish, the warm flame coloring.  Weeks lashed them together before he joined the group where Groft was outlining the technique of gorp hunting for the benefit of the Terrans.

Some two hundred feet away a reef, often awash and stained with the purple scum, angled out into the sea in a long curve which formed a natural breakwater.  This was the point of attack.  But first the purple film must be removed so that land and sea dwellers could meet on common terms.

The fire blazed up, eating hungrily into the driftwood.  And from it ran the young Salariki with lighted brands, which at the water’s edge they whirled about their heads and then hurled out onto the purple patches.  Fire arose from the water and ran with frantic speed across the crests of the low waves, while the Salariki coughed and buried their noses in their perfume boxes, for the wind drove shoreward an overpowering stench.

Where the cleansing fire had run on the water there was now only the natural metallic gray of the liquid, the cover was gone.  Older Salariki warriors were choosing torches from those they had brought, doing it with care.  Groft approached the Terrans carrying four.

“These you use now—­”

What for?  Dane wondered.  The sky was still sunlit.  He held the torch watching to see how the Salariki made use of them.

Groft led the advance—­running lightly out along the reef with agile and graceful leaps to cross the breaks where the sea hurled in over the rock.  And after him followed the other natives, each with a lighted torch in hand—­the torch they hunkered down to plant firmly in some crevice of the rock before taking a stand beside that beacon.