He heard himself reply, "I'll tell you in a minute."

Again he saw himself look. For a long minute he looked.

"Both dead," he answered quietly. "Clancey, pass in a number three jack,
and get under yourself with another at the other end of the truck."

He lay on his back, staring straight up at one single star that rocked
mistily through a thinning of cloud-stuff overhead. The old ache was in
his throat, the old harsh dryness in mouth and eyes. And he knew--what
no other man knew--why he was in the Solomons, skipper of the teak-built
yacht _Arangi_, running niggers, risking his head, and drinking more
Scotch whiskey than was good for any man.

Not since that night had he looked with warm eyes on any woman. And he
had been noted by other whites as notoriously cold toward pickanninnies
white or black.

But, having visioned the ultimate horror of memory, Van Horn was soon
able to fall asleep again, delightfully aware, as he drowsed off, of
Jerry's head on his shoulder. Once, when Jerry, dreaming of the beach at
Meringe and of _Mister_ Haggin, Biddy, Terrence, and Michael, set up a
low whimpering, Van Horn roused sufficiently to soothe him closer to him,
and to mutter ominously: "Any nigger that'd hurt that pup. . . "

At midnight when the mate touched him on the shoulder, in the moment of
awakening and before he was awake Van Horn did two things automatically
and swiftly. He darted his right hand down to the pistol at his hip, and
muttered: "Any nigger that'd hurt that pup . . ."