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Ishikola next averred that the girl had grown much thinner, and that he, as a practical judge of meat, did not feel justified this time in bidding more than three twenty-strings of drinking coconuts.
The old salt-water chief rolled his one eye and blinked a fair simulation of stupidity and innocence. "My word, me cross along you too much," Van Horn continued. "Ishikola, you plenty bad fella boy. You get 'm to hell overside."
Other tribesmen the devil-devil doctors tabooed against eating shark, or handling turtle, or contacting with crocodiles or the fossil remains of crocodiles, or from ever being smirched by the profanity of a woman's touch or of a woman's shadow cast across the path. So Ishikola, whose tambo was water, was crusted with the filth of years.
Pulling the stick of dynamite out from the twist of his loin cloth and glancing at the cigar to be certain it was alight, he rose to his feet with leisurely swiftness and with leisurely swiftness gained the rail. "What name belong you?" was his challenge to the dark. "Me fella Ishikola," came the answer in the quavering falsetto of age.
Ishikola, in crude beche- de-mer, tried to learn the Solomon Islands general situation in relation to Su'u, and Van Horn was not above playing the unfair diplomatic game as it is unfairly played in all the chancellories of the world powers. "My word," Van Horn concluded; "you bad fella too much along this place. Too many heads you fella take; too much kai-kai long pig along you."
He bent to rake the leaves over with his hand, but sat swiftly upright when Van Horn roared at him: "Stand clear! Keep 'm fella hand belong you long way big bit!" Van Horn turned on Ishikola, and simulated wrath which he did not feel against the ancient and ever-recurrent trick. "What name you come alongside, gun he stop along canoe belong you?" he demanded.
"Me like 'm come on board gammon along you," Ishikola meekly suggested. "My word, night he stop," the captain objected, then added, as a concession against the known rule that visitors were not permitted aboard after nightfall: "You come on board, boy stop 'm along boat." Van Horn gallantly helped the old man to clamber to the rail, straddle the barbed wire, and gain the deck.
Jerry needs must sniff, for future identification purposes, this graceless, limping, naked, one-eyed old man. And, when he had sniffed and registered the particular odour, Jerry must growl intimidatingly and win a quick eye-glance of approval from Skipper. "My word, good fella kai-kai dog," said Ishikola. "Me give 'm half-fathom shell money that fella dog."
Van Horn shook hands with him an honour he accorded only chiefs and motioned him to squat down on deck on his hams close to the fear-struck girl, who began trembling again at recollection of having once heard Ishikola offer five twenties of drinking coconuts for the meat of her for a dinner.
Ishikola was a dirty old savage. He who lived by the salt sea, in a land of tropic downpour, religiously shunned contact with water. He never went swimming or wading, and always fled to shelter from a shower. Not that this was true of the rest of his tribe. It was the peculiar tambo laid upon him by the devil-devil doctors.
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