eat sorrow. Of what worth are your courage
and cunning, when you have no seed to make your courage and cunning live
again?"

"I am an old man," Nalasu began.

"Not so old as I am," Bashti interrupted. "Not too old to marry so that
your seed will add strength to the tribe."

"I was married, and long married, and I fathered three brave sons. But
they are dead. I shall not live so long as you. I think of my young
days as pleasant dreams remembered after sleep. More I think of death,
and the end. Of marriage I think not at all. I am too old to marry. I
am old enough to make ready to die, and a great curiousness have I about
what will happen to me when I am dead. Will I be for ever dead? Will I
live again in a land of dreams--a shadow of a dream myself that will
still remember the days when I lived in the warm world, the quick juices
of hunger in my mouth, in the chest of the body of me the love of woman?"

Bashti shrugged his shoulders.

"I too, have thought much on the matter," he said. "Yet do I arrive
nowhere. I do not know. You do not know. We will not know until we are
dead, if it happens that we know anything when what we are we no longer
are. But this we know, you and I: the tribe lives. The tribe never
dies. Wherefore, if there be meaning at all to our living, we must make
the tribe strong. Your work in the tribe is not done. You must marry so
that your cunning and your courage live after you. I have a wife for
you--nay, two wives, for your days are short and I shall surely live to
see you hang with my fathers from the canoe-house ridgepole."

"I will not pay for a wife," Nalasu protested. "I will not pay for any
wife. I would not pay a stick of tobacco or a cracked coconut for the
best woman in Somo."

"Worry not," Bashti went on placidly. "I shall pay you for the price of
the wife, of the two wives. There is Bubu. For half a case of tobacco
shall I buy her for you. She is broad and square, round-legged, broad-
hipped, with generous breasts of richness. There is Nena. Her father
sets a stiff price upon her--a whole case of tobacco. I will buy her for
you as well. Your time is short. We must hurry."

"I will not marry," the old blind man proclaimed hysterically.

"You will. I have spoken."

"No, I say, and say again, no, no, no, no. Wives are nuisances. They
are young things, and their heads are filled with foolishness. Their
tongues are loose with idleness of speech.