had seen slain and their heads removed on deck.
The third, still fighting, had but the minute before fled below. Then
the cutter, along with all her wealth of hoop-iron, tobacco, knives and
calico, had gone up into the air and fallen back into the sea in
scattered and fragmented nothingness. It had been dynamite--the MYSTERY.
And he, who had been hurled uninjured through the air by a miracle of
fortune, had divined that white men in themselves were truly dynamite,
compounded of the same mystery as the substance with which they shot the
swift-darting schools of mullet, or blow up, in extremity, themselves and
the ships on which they voyaged the sea from far places. And yet on this
unstable and death-terrific substance of which he was well aware Van Horn
was composed, he trod heavily with his personality, daring, to the verge
of detonation, to impact it with his insolence.

"My word," he began, "what name you make 'm boy belong me stop along you
too much?" Which was a true and correct charge that the boys which Van
Horn had just returned had been away three years and a half instead of
three years.

"You talk that fella talk I get cross too much along you," Van Horn
bristled back, and then added, diplomatically, dipping into a half-case
of tobacco sawed across and proffering a handful of stick tobacco: "Much
better you smoke 'm up and talk 'm good fella talk."

But Nau-hau grandly waved aside the gift for which he hungered.

"Plenty tobacco stop along me," he lied. "What name one fella boy go way
no come back?" he demanded.

Van Horn pulled the long slender account book out of the twist of his
loin-cloth, and, while he skimmed its pages, impressed Nau-hau with the
dynamite of the white man's superior powers which enabled him to remember
correctly inside the scrawled sheets of a book instead of inside his
head.

"Sati," Van Horn read, his finger marking the place, his eyes alternating
watchfully between the writing and the black chief before him, while the
black chief himself speculated and studied the chance of getting behind
him and, with the single knife-thrust he knew so well, of severing the
other's spinal cord at the base of the neck.

"Sati," Van Horn read. "Last monsoon begin about this time, him fella
Sati get 'm sick belly belong him too much; bime by him fella Sati finish
altogether," he translated into beche-de-mer the written information:
_Died_ _of_ _dysentery_ _July_ _4th_, 1901.

"Plenty work