dog.  While he might not chase these particular blacks, he declined familiarity with them.  He kept his eye on them.  He had seen blacks as tolerated as these, lined up and whipped by Mister Haggin.  They occupied an intermediate place in the scheme of things, and they were to be watched in case they did not keep their place.  He accorded them room, but he did not accord them equality.  At the best, he could be stand-offishly considerate of them.

He made thorough examination of the galley, a rude affair, open on the open deck, exposed to wind and rain and storm, a small stove that was not even a ship’s stove, on which somehow, aided by strings and wedges, commingled with much smoke, two blacks managed to cook the food for the four-score persons on board.

Next, he was interested by a strange proceeding on the part of the boat’s crew.  Upright pipes, serving as stanchions, were being screwed into the top of the Arangi’s rail so that they served to support three strands of barbed wire that ran completely around the vessel, being broken only at the gangway for a narrow space of fifteen inches.  That this was a precaution against danger, Jerry sensed without a passing thought to it.  All his life, from his first impressions of life, had been passed in the heart of danger, ever-impending, from the blacks.  In the plantation house at Meringe, always the several white men had looked askance at the many blacks who toiled for them and belonged to them.  In the living-room, where were the eating-table, the billiard-table, and the phonograph, stood stands of rifles, and in each bedroom, beside each bed, ready to hand, had been revolvers and rifles.  As well, Mister Haggin and Derby and Bob had always carried revolvers in their belts when they left the house to go among their blacks.

Jerry knew these noise-making things for what they were—­instruments of destruction and death.  He had seen live things destroyed by them, such as puarkas, goats, birds, and crocodiles.  By means of such things the white-gods by their will crossed space without crossing it with their bodies, and destroyed live things.  Now he, in order to damage anything, had to cross space with his body to get to it.  He was different.  He was limited.  All impossible things were possible to the unlimited, two-legged white-gods.  In a way, this ability of theirs to destroy across space was an elongation of claw and fang.  Without pondering it, or being conscious of it, he accepted it as he accepted the rest of the mysterious world about him.

Once, even, had Jerry seen his Mister Haggin deal death at a distance in another noise-way.  From the veranda he had seen him fling sticks of exploding dynamite into a screeching mass of blacks who had come raiding from the Beyond in the long war canoes, beaked and black, carved and inlaid with mother-of-pearl, which they had left hauled up on the beach at the door of Meringe.