ed.

Came the sound of paddles, and, next, emerging into the lantern's area of
light, the high, black bow of a war canoe, curved like a gondola, inlaid
with silvery-glistening mother-of-pearl; the long lean length of the
canoe which was without outrigger; the shining eyes and the black-shining
bodies of the stark blacks who knelt in the bottom and paddled; Ishikola,
the old chief, squatting amidships and not paddling, an unlighted, empty-
bowled, short-stemmed clay pipe upside-down between his toothless gums;
and, in the stern, as coxswain, the dandy, all nakedness of blackness,
all whiteness of decoration, save for the pig's tail in one ear and the
scarlet hibiscus that still flamed over the other ear.

Less than ten blacks had been known to rush a blackbirder officered by no
more than two white men, and Van Horn's hand closed on the butt of his
automatic, although he did not pull it clear of the holster, and
although, with his left hand, he directed the cigar to his mouth and
puffed it lively alight.

"Hello, Ishikola, you blooming old blighter," was Van Horn's greeting to
the old chief, as the dandy, with a pry of his steering-paddle against
the side of the canoe and part under its bottom, brought the dug-out
broadside-on to the _Arangi_ so that the sides of both crafts touched.

Ishikola smiled upward in the lantern light. He smiled with his right
eye, which was all he had, the left having been destroyed by an arrow in
a youthful jungle-skirmish.

"My word!" he greeted back. "Long time you no stop eye belong me."

Van Horn joked him in understandable terms about the latest wives he had
added to his harem and what price he had paid for them in pigs.

"My word," he concluded, "you rich fella too much together."

"Me like 'm come on board gammon along you," Ishikola meekly suggested.

"My word, night he stop," the captain objected, then added, as a
concession against the known rule that visitors were not permitted aboard
after nightfall: "You come on board, boy stop 'm along boat."

Van Horn gallantly helped the old man to clamber to the rail, straddle
the barbed wire, and gain the deck. Ishikola was a dirty old savage. One
of his tambos (tambo being beche-de-mer and Melanesian for "taboo") was
that water unavoidable must never touch his skin. He who lived by the
salt sea, in a land of tropic downpour, religiously shunned contact with
water. He never went swimming or wading, and always fled to shelter fr