_master_ BAMBA, KOHO
B. SMYTHE, _mate_ KAKWE, JACK-JACK
HENRY NEW MENOMI, FRANK

_Hic finis fandi_

Cap'n Bartlet removed his hat and wiped away a steam of sweat with
deliberate care and a red-barred kerchief. "Sounds natural," he
observed, clearing his throat. "Though I never did make much of that
'hic' language."

"It means 'here ended the talk,' or something of the kind," explained
Jeckol. "But still," he added, quite seriously, "the list isn't
complete, you know. Where's your friend Albro?"

Peters rolled the white of an eye on him. "Is it your fancy," he
inquired, "that the niggers run much to writin' epitaphs? Or books--?"

He held up to our gaze the object he had found on lifting the lid of the
box--a packet of thin bark strips covered with coarse markings and bound
with a twist of fiber which next he unknotted, to run the leaves over in
his hand. "I knew he was alive," said Cap'n Bartlett simply....

And that was the way we won to the story of James O'Shaughnessy Albro.
Even now I can recall each tone and gesture of its telling, each detail
of the group we made there in empty Barange village; the trader's drawl
and check as he read a line or turned to Kakwe with a question or flung
in some vivid comment of his own; the strained attention on Bartlet's
earnest face; incredulous sniff and squint of little Jeckol, still
unsubdued, fidgeting about; the statued bronze figures of our Tonga
boys as they stood leaning patiently on their rifles, awaiting the
master's next whim; the massed ring of the jungle; the odd, high-peaked
houses with their cavernous fronts like gaping and grinning listeners;
the lances of sunlight that began to splinter and fall out among
lengthening shadows across the open; and through all and over all the
heat and the smell and the brooding, ominous, inscrutable mystery of
Papua!

_Seeking wealth I found glory. I went below as an amateur diver and
I came up a professional god. But I wish I could find which son of
a nighthawk it was that cut my pipe. I'd excommunicate him on the
altar._

This is a page from the Book of Jim Albro, and it shows him as he lived.
Later entries are not so clear, not by any means so sprightly, and some
are pitiful enough in all truth. It must have been set down in the early
hours of his reign, while he was still in the flush of his stupendous
adventure, before he had begun to understand what lay ahead. But here