his.

The boy merely peered into the house as he passed around it to the rear,
and he saw his father and mother, at opposite corners, sleeping without
covering, and, in the middle of the floor, his four naked brothers and
sisters curled together in a tangle like a litter of puppies. All about
the house, which in truth was scarcely more than an animal lair, was an
earthly paradise. The air was spicily and sweetly heavy with the scents
of wild aromatic plants and gorgeous tropic blooms. Overhead three
breadfruit trees interlaced their noble branches. Banana and plantain
trees were burdened with great bunches of ripening fruit. And huge,
golden melons of the papaia, ready for the eating, globuled directly from
the slender-trunked trees not one-tenth the girth of the fruits they
bore. And, for Jerry, most delightful of all, there was the gurgle and
plash of a brooklet that pursued its invisible way over mossy stones
under a garmenture of tender and delicate ferns. No conservatory of a
king could compare with this wild wantonness of sun-generous vegetation.

Maddened by the sound of the water, Jerry had first to endure an
embracing and hugging from the boy, who, squatted on his hams, rocked
back and forth and mumbled a strange little crooning song. And Jerry,
lacking articulate speech, had no way of telling him of the thirst of
which he was perishing.

Next, Lamai tied him securely with a sennit cord about the neck and
untied the cords that bit into his legs. So numb was Jerry from lack of
circulation, and so weak from lack of water through part of a tropic day
and all of a tropic night, that he stood up, tottered and fell, and, time
and again, essaying to stand, floundered and fell. And Lamai understood,
or tentatively guessed. He caught up a coconut calabash attached to the
end of a stick of bamboo, dipped into the greenery of ferns, and
presented to Jerry the calabash brimming with the precious water.

Jerry lay on his side at first as he drank, until, with the moisture,
life flowed back into the parched channels of him, so that, soon, still
weak and shaky, he was up and braced on all his four wide-spread legs and
still eagerly lapping. The boy chuckled and chirped his delight in the
spectacle, and Jerry found surcease and easement sufficient to enable him
to speak with his tongue after the heart-eloquent manner of dogs. He
took his nose out of the calabash and with his rose-ribbon strip of
tongue licked L