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.
Van Horn, before speaking again, loosened his automatic pistol half out of its holster, and slipped the holster around from his hip till it rested on his groin conveniently close to his hand.
"How many fella boy stop along you ?" he demanded.
"One fella ten-boy altogether he stop," came the aged voice.
"Come alongside then." Without turning his head, his right hand unconsciously dropping close to the butt of the automatic, Van Horn commanded: "You fella Tambi.

Fetch 'm lantern.

No fetch 'm this place.
Fetch 'm aft along mizzen rigging and look sharp eye belong you." Tambi obeyed, exposing the lantern twenty feet away from where his captain stood.

This gave Van Horn the advantage over the approaching canoe-men, for the lantern, suspended through the barbed wire across the rail and well down, would clearly illuminate the occupants of the canoe while he was left in semi-darkness and shadow.
"Washee-washee!" he urged peremptorily, while those in the invisible canoe still hesitated.
Came the sound of paddles, and, next, emerging into the lantern's area of light, the high, black bow of a war canoe, curved like a gondola, inlaid with silvery-glistening mother-of-pearl; the long lean length of the canoe which was without outrigger; the shining eyes and the black-shining bodies of the stark blacks who knelt in the bottom and paddled; Ishikola, the old chief, squatting amidships and not paddling, an unlighted, empty- bowled, short-stemmed clay pipe upside-down between his toothless gums; and, in the stern, as coxswain, the dandy, all nakedness of blackness, all whiteness of decoration, save for the pig's tail in one ear and the scarlet hibiscus that still flamed over the other ear.
Less than ten blacks had been known to rush a blackbirder officered by no more than two white men, and Van Horn's hand closed on the butt of his automatic, although he did not pull it clear of the holster, and although, with his left hand, he directed the cigar to his mouth and puffed it lively alight.
"Hello, Ishikola, you blooming old blighter," was Van Horn's greeting to the old chief, as the dandy, with a pry of his steering-paddle against the side of the canoe and part under its bottom, brought the dug-out broadside-on to the _Arangi_ so that the sides of both crafts touched.
Ishikola smiled upward in the lantern light.

He smiled with his right eye, which was all he had, the left having been destroyed by an arrow in a youthful jungle-skirmish.
"My word!" he greeted back.