»I ... I have quite forgotten what I was going to say.«

»Beastly funny country over that way,« the narrator drawled with perfect casualness. »You've read this Sea Wolf stuff –«

»You weren't the Sea Wolf,« Whiskers broke in with involuntary positiveness.

»No, sir,« was the snarling answer. »The Sea Wolf's dead, isn't he? And I'm still alive, aren't I?«

»Of course, of course,« Whiskers conceded. »He suffocated head-first in the mud off a wharf in Victoria a couple of years back.«

»As I was saying – and I don't like interruptions,« Bruce Cadogan Cavendish proceeded, »it's a beastly funny country over that way. I was at Taki-Tiki, a low island that politically belongs to the Solomons, but that geologically doesn't at all, for the Solomons are high islands. Ethnographically it belongs to Polynesia, Melanesia, and Micronesia, because all the breeds of the South Pacific have gravitated to it by canoe-drift and intricately, degeneratively, and amazingly interbred. The scum of the scrapings of the bottom of the human pit, biologically speaking, resides in Taki-Tiki. And I know the bottom and whereof I speak.

It was a beastly funny time of it I had, diving out shell, fishing beche-de-mer, trading hoop-iron and hatchets for copra and ivory-nuts, running niggers and all the rest of it. Why, even in Fiji the Lotu was having a hard time of it and the chiefs still eating long-pig. To the westward it was fierce – funny little black kinky-heads, man-eaters the last Jack of them, and the jack pot fat and spilling over with wealth –«

»Jack pots?« Fatty queried. At sight of an irritable movement, he added: »You see, I never got over to the West like Delarouse and you.«

»They're all head-hunters. Heads are valuable, especially a whiteman's head. They decorate the canoe-houses and devil-devil houses with them. Each village runs a jack pot, and everybody antes. Whoever brings in a whiteman's head takes the pot. If there aren't openers for a long time, the pot grows to tremendous proportions. Beastly funny, isn't it?

I know. Didn't a Holland mate die on me of blackwater? And didn't I win a pot myself? It was this way. We were lying at Lango-lui at the time. I never let on, and arranged the affair with Johnny, my boat-steerer. He was a kinky-head himself from Port Moresby. He cut the dead mate's head off and sneaked ashore in the night, while I whanged away with my rifle as if I were trying to get him. He opened the pot with the mate's head, and got it, too. Of course, next day I sent in a landing boat, with two covering boats, and fetched him off with the loot.«

»How big was the pot?« Whiskers asked. »I heard of a pot at Orla worth eighty quid.«

»To commence with,« Slim answered, »there were forty fat pigs, each worth a fathom of prime shell-money, and shell-money worth a quid a fathom. That was two hundred dollars right there. There were ninety-eight fathoms of shell-money, which is pretty close to five hundred in itself. And there were twenty-two gold sovereigns. I split it four ways: one-fourth to Johnny, one-fourth to the ship, one-fourth to me as owner, and one-fourth to me as skipper.