chasing. But there were times when the white lords were not about. Then
it was "'Ware niggers!" One must dare to chase only with due precaution.
Because then, beyond the white lord's eyes, the niggers had a way, not
merely of scowling and muttering, but of attacking four-legged dogs with
stones and clubs. Jerry had seen his mother so mishandled, and, ere he
had learned discretion, alone in the high grass had been himself club-
mauled by Godarmy, the black who wore a china door-knob suspended on his
chest from his neck on a string of sennit braided from cocoanut fibre.
More. Jerry remembered another high-grass adventure, when he and his
brother Michael had fought Owmi, another black distinguishable for the
cogged wheels of an alarm clock on his chest. Michael had been so
severely struck on his head that for ever after his left ear had remained
sore and had withered into a peculiar wilted and twisted upward cock.

Still more. There had been his brother Patsy, and his sister Kathleen,
who had disappeared two months before, who had ceased and no longer were.
The great god, _Mister_ Haggin, had raged up and down the plantation. The
bush had been searched. Half a dozen niggers had been whipped. And
_Mister_ Haggin had failed to solve the mystery of Patsy's and Kathleen's
disappearance. But Biddy and Terrence knew. So did Michael and Jerry.
The four-months' old Patsy and Kathleen had gone into the cooking-pot at
the barracks, and their puppy-soft skins had been destroyed in the fire.
Jerry knew this, as did his father and mother and brother, for they had
smelled the unmistakable burnt-meat smell, and Terrence, in his rage of
knowledge, had even attacked Mogom the house-boy, and been reprimanded
and cuffed by _Mister_ Haggin, who had not smelled and did not
understand, and who had always to impress discipline on all creatures
under his roof-tree.

But on the beach, when the blacks, whose terms of service were up came