Jerry of the Islands

it easily with Jerry still under his arm. The deck was cluttered with an exciting crowd. Exciting the crowd would have been to untravelled h

gle-ironed, sheathed in man-of-war copper and with a fin-keel of bronze, she had been sold into the Solomon Islands' trade for

scraped and hot-paraffined that they shone like tan opals in the glare of sun. Her excessive sail plan enabled her to sail like a witch, and, on occasion, gave Captain Van Horn, his white mate, and his fifteen black boat's crew as much as they could handle. She was sixty feet over al

their home villages on the wild island of Malaita. Twenty of them-familiar, all, to Jerry-were from Meringe; thirty of them came from the Bay of a Thousand Ships, in the Russell Isles; and the remaining twelve were from Pennduffryn on the eas

t," was Captain Van Horn's greeting, a quick pleasu

he best of the litter, barrin' Michael, of course, the two of them bein' all that's left and no better tha

posited Jerry in Van Horn's arms

l never forgive you, Skipper," he

ke my head first,"

Somo four heads, three from the dysentery, an' another wan from a tre

. 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 Sand

n't-yet," Ha

was the che

he 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

is head. But they got 'm. They got 'm. He lasted fourteen years, too. It was his cook-boy. Hatcheted '

ed it over to the Commissioner a

. It dried on 'm that way over the smokin' fire. But they got 'm, if it did take fourteen years. There's manny

atching, I go straight to them and tell them what. They can't get

good-bye, resolutely keeping his eyes f

ey've got no cause to love Jerry or his breed, an' I'd hate ill to happen 'm at a nigger's hands. An' in the dark of the

leboat, Jerry wriggled and voiced his anxiety in a low, whimpering whine. Ca

lled back across the widening water. "If au

e and put it with the ship's a

led more determinedly, and Van Horn set him down on the deck. He sprang to the rail with more quickness than was to be expected of an awkward puppy of six months, and not the quick attempt of Van Horn to cheek him would have succeeded. But Jerry recoiled

ed golden muzzle skyward, and emitted

man, brace up and be a man

out thinking about it at all, recognized that. His Mister Haggin wore pants and shoes. This god on the deck beside him was more like a black. Not only did he not wear pants

had been his knickerbocker ancestors before him clear back to the time when New York was not New York but New Amsterdam. To complete his costume, a floppy felt hat, distinctly Rembrandtish in effect, perched half on his head an

s persistent upward cock. Again, while Captain Van Horn and the mate, Borckman, gave orders, and while the Arangi's mainsail and spanker began to rise up the masts, Jerry loosed all his heart of woe in what Bob told Derby on the beach was the "grandest

-bird and half-man, than of a man, all man, and therefore a god. This served as an excellent counter-irritant. Indignation that a mere black should laugh at him mastered Jerry, and the next moment his puppy teeth, sharp-pointed as needles, had scored the astonished black's nake

ain Van Horn, whose quick eye had missed no detail of the incide

ged. "Get him! Shake him down

on the dark leg. This was too much, and the black, afraid more of Van Horn than of Jerry, turned and fled for'ard, leaping to safety on top of the eight Lee-Enfield rifles that lay on

er!" Van Horn confided to Borckman, as he bent

od, albeit it did not wear pants, forgot fo

te, still petting. "Look at the size of him already. Look at the bone of him. Some chest

-east Trade smote the sails and pressed the Arangi down. And down the deck, slanted for the moment to forty-five degrees, Jerry slipped and slid, vainly clawing at the smooth su

the Arangi, with the swiftness of a witch, rounded into the wind and attained a

t deck-traveller, as the mainsail, emptied of the wind and feeling the wind on the other side, swung crazily across above him. He cleared the danger of the mainsheet with a wild leap (al

that had dropped down upon him from out of the sky. Under that colossal threatened impact he crouched down to the deck. Above him, falling upon him like a bolt from the blue, was a winged hawk unthinkably vaster than the one he had enco

missed even the shadow of it, the mainsail, with a second crash of

uine fits by their first encounters with heaven-filling, sky-obscuring, down-impending sails. This

Van Horn swept Jerry from the de