Part 13 (1/2)
For a ti and laughing in queer thin falsettos at the events of the night and the previous afternoon Now one and now another stretched out and slept without covering; for so, directly under the path of the sun, had they slept nakedly from the time they were born
Rerievously wounded or the too-tightly bound, and the decrepit ancient as not so old as Bashti When the boy who had stunned Jerry with his paddle-blade and who claimed him as his own stole into the canoe house, the ancient did not hear hi and chuckling dementedly, to twist the bushe with punk-wood This was no night-task for any ht else But the excitei_ had been coue reth of life triumphant, he shared deliriously in this triu of the head that was in itself the concrete expression of triumph
But the twelve-year-old lad who stole in and cautiously stepped over the sleepers and threaded his way a the captives, did so with his heart in his h even to leave his father's grass roof and sleep in the youths' canoe house,bachelors in their canoe house, he knew that he took his life, with all of its diances, in his hand thus to trespass into the sacred precinct of the full-made, full-realized, full-statured ot hi through her wide eyes of fear, saw the boy pick Jerry up by his tied legs and carry him out and away from the booty of meat of which she was part Jerry's heroic little heart of courage would havehad he not been too exhausted and had not his mouth and throat been too dry for sound As it was, miserably and helplessly, not half hiht drea transported head-doard out of the canoe house that stank of death, through the village that was only less noiso trees that were beginning languidly to stir with the first breathings of thewind
CHAPTER XIII
The boy's name, as Jerry was to learn, was Lamai, and to Lamai's house Jerry was carried It was not o On an earthen floor, hard-packed of the filth of years, lived Laer brothers and sisters A thatched roof that leaked in every heavy shower leaned to a wabbly ridge-pole over the floor The walls were evenrain In fact, the house of Lamai, as the father of Lumai, was the most miserable house in all Somo
Lumai, the house-master and family head, unlike most Malaitans, was fat
And of his fatness it would seeood nature with its allied laziness But as the fly in his ointo--the prize shrew of Somo, as as lean about the middle and all the rest of her as her husband was rotund; as as remarkably sharp-spoken as he was soft-spoken; as as ceaselessly energetic as he was unceasingly idle; and who had been born with a taste for the world as sour in her mouth as it eet in his
The boy merely peered into the house as he passed around it to the rear, and he saw his father and , 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 aroeous 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 lobuled directly froirth of the fruits they bore And, for Jerry, le and plash of a brooklet that pursued its invisible way over armenture of tender and delicate ferns No conservatory of a king could coetation
Maddened by the sound of the water, Jerry had first to endure an e from the boy, who, squatted on his hae little crooning song And Jerry, lacking articulate speech, had no way of telling hi
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 froh part of a tropic day and all of a tropic night, that he stood up, tottered and fell, and, ti to stand, floundered and fell And Laht up a coconut calabash attached to the end of a stick of bareenery of ferns, and presented to Jerry the calabash bri 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 easeue after the heart-eloquent s He took his nose out of the calabash and with his rose-ribbon strip of tongue licked Lamai's hand And Laed 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 froratefulness, he spoke against the black skin of Lao well, had not Lao, 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 kneord but of which he sensed the significance Laainst 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-workedLumai, oke heavily and fatly, who muttered and mumbled easy terms of Somo dialect to the effect that it was a s 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 Las and a perfect knowledge that all was clear behind him to leap and flee away if hisIn the end, after an harangue upon the worthlessness of Laet ideas Laly thirsty Jerry had been This engendered the idea that he ry So he applied dry branches of wood to the s-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 pigeon in green leaves, and, surrounding it with the hot stones froeon and stones with earth
When, after a tieon and stripped froave forth a scent so savoury as to prick up Jerry's ears and set his nostrils to quivering When the boy had torn the steaan; nor did the meal cease till the last sliver of ued frohout theover and over his little song, and patting and caressing him
On the other hand, refreshed by the water and theHe was polite, and received his petting with soft-shi+ning eyes, tail-waggings and the custos; but he was restless, and continually listened to distant sounds and yearned away to be gone This was not lost upon the boy, who, before he curled himself down to sleep, securely tied to a tree the end of the cord that was about Jerry's neck
After straining against the cord for a ti Skipper was too much with him He knew, and yet he did not know, the irretrievable ultis and whis, that he applied his sharp first-teeth to the sennit cord and chewed upon it till it parted
Free, like a hoeon, he headed blindly and directly for the beach and the salt sea over which had floated the _Arangi_, on her deck Skipper in coely deserted, and those that were in it were sunk in sleep So no one vexed hi pathways between the posts of totele tree trunks, were seated in the gaping jaws of carved sharks For So back to Somo its founder, worshi+pped the shark-God and the salt-water deities as well as the deities of the bush and swaht until he was past the sea-wall, Jerry cai_ was to be seen on the placid surface of the lagoon All about hi odours of dying fires and burnt meat Many of the feasters had not troubled to return to their houses, but lay about on the sand, in thesunshi+ne, men, women, and children and entire families, wherever they had yielded to slue, so close that his fore-feet rested in the water, Jerry sat down, his heart bursting for Skipper, thrust his nose heavenward at the sun, and wailed his woe as dogs have ever wailed since they came in from the oods to the fires of ainst his breast with cuddling arrass house by the brook
Water he offered, but Jerry could drink no et his torusted with so unreasonable a puppy, Laeness, clouted Jerry over the head, right side and left, and tied his have ever been tied For, in his way, La done with any dog, yet he devised, on the spur of theJerry with a stick The stick was of ba One end he tied shortly to Jerry's neck, the other end, just as shortly to a tree All that Jerry's teeth could reach was the stick, and dry and seasoned ba