hief at that."

"Yes, and there's two heads more that the _Arangi_ owes Somo," Van Horn
nodded. "You recollect, down to the south'ard last year, a chap named
Hawkins was lost in his whaleboat running the Arli Passage?" Haggin,
returning along the deck, nodded. "Two of his boat's crew were Somo
boys. I'd recruited them for Ugi Plantation. With your boys, that makes
six heads the _Arangi_ owes. But what of it? There's one salt-water
village, acrost on the weather coast, where the _Arangi_ owes eighteen. I
recruited them for Aolo, and being salt-water men they put them on the
_Sandfly_ that was lost on the way to the Santa Cruz. They've got a jack-
pot over there on the weather coast--my word, the boy that could get my
head would be a second Carnegie! A hundred and fifty pigs and shell
money no end the village's collected for the chap that gets me and
delivers."

"And they ain't--yet," Haggin snorted.

"No fear," was the cheerful retort.

"You talk like Arbuckle used to talk," Haggin censured. "Manny's the
time I've heard him string it off. Poor old Arbuckle. The most sure and
most precautious chap that ever handled niggers. He never went to sleep
without spreadin' a box of tacks on the floor, and when it wasn't them it
was crumpled newspapers. I remember me well, bein' under the same roof
at the time on Florida, when a big tomcat chased a cockroach into the
papers. And it was blim, blam, blim, six times an' twice over, with his
two big horse-pistols, an' the house perforated like a cullender.
Likewise there was a dead tom-cat. He could shoot in the dark with never
an aim, pullin' trigger with the second finger and pointing with the
first finger laid straight along the barrel.

"No, sir, my laddy buck. He was the bully boy with the glass eye. The
nigger didn't live that'd lift his head. But they got 'm. They got 'm.
He lasted fourteen years, too. It was his cook-boy. Hatcheted 'm before
breakfast. An' it's well I remember our second trip into the bush after
what was left of 'm."

"I saw his head after you'd turned it over to the Commissioner at
Tulagi," Van Horn supplemented.

"An' the peaceful, quiet, everyday face of him on it, with almost the
same old smile I'd seen a thousand times. It dried on 'm that way over
the smokin' fire. But they got 'm, if it did take fourteen years.
There's manny's the head that goes to Malaita, manny's the time untooken;
but, like the old pitcher, it's tooke