amai's hand. And Lamai, in ecstasy over this
establishment of common speech, urged the calabash back under Jerry's
nose, and Jerry drank again.

He continued to drink. He drank until his sun-shrunken sides stood out
like the walls of a balloon, although longer were the intervals from the
drinking in which, with his tongue of gratefulness, he spoke against the
black skin of Lamai's hand. And all went well, and would have continued
to go well, had not Lamai's mother, Lenerengo, just awakened, stepped
across her black litter of progeny and raised her voice in shrill protest
against her eldest born's introducing of one more mouth and much more
nuisance into the household.

A squabble of human speech followed, of which Jerry knew no word but of
which he sensed the significance. Lamai was with him and for him.
Lamai's mother was against him. She shrilled and shrewed her firm
conviction that her son was a fool and worse because he had neither the
consideration nor the silly sense of a fool's solicitude for a
hard-worked mother. She appealed to the sleeping Lumai, who awoke
heavily and fatly, who muttered and mumbled easy terms of Somo dialect to
the effect that it was a most decent world, that all puppy dogs and
eldest-born sons were right delightful things to possess, that he had
never yet starved to death, and that peace and sleep were the finest
things that ever befell the lot of mortal man--and, in token thereof,
back into the peace of sleep, he snuggled his nose into the biceps of his
arm for a pillow and proceeded to snore.

But Lamai, eyes stubbornly sullen, with mutinous foot-stampings and a
perfect knowledge that all was clear behind him to leap and flee away if
his mother rushed upon him, persisted in retaining his puppy dog. In the
end, after an harangue upon the worthlessness of Lamai's father, she went
back to sleep.

Ideas beget ideas. Lamai had learned how astonishingly thirsty Jerry had
been. This engendered the idea that he might be equally hungry. So he
applied dry branches of wood to the smouldering coals he dug out of the
ashes of the cooking-fire, and builded a large fire. Into this, as it
gained strength, he placed many stones from a convenient pile, each fire-
blackened in token that it had been similarly used many times. Next,
hidden under the water of the brook in a netted hand-bag, he brought to
light the carcass of a fat wood-pigeon he had snared the previous day. He
wrapped the pige