Meanwhile, Broncho, with the ready resource of a frontiersman, had seized the coil of line from a boat tub, and hastily making a running bowline, crept up behind the unsuspecting Kanaka. Lobu now stood hesitating, and gazing stupidly up at Jim above him. With a quick twist of the wrist the rope snaked from the cowboy's hand, and the loop dropped neatly over the insane man's head and shoulders. With such an expert at roping and throwing as Broncho, it was but a moment before Lobu lay on the deck, securely bound and helpless. "My! That was close!" panted Jim, as he slid down to the deck. "Jim, shake!" said the rover, breathing deeply and with the smallest tremble in his voice. "I won't forget what you did to-day as long as I live." The boy blushed vividly with pleasure, and stammered out something which was quite unintelligible, whilst Broncho said heartily: "Good for you, son! It shore were a clean strain play o' yours, an' plumb full o' sand as the Mohave desert." Then Tari came in for congratulations and thanks, and the way Jack gripped his hand made the Islander beam with pleasure and wince with pain. "Fine shootin', Tari, as ever I sees," commented Broncho. "Black Davis is plumb childlike with a belayin'-pin compared to you." The question now was, what was to be done with Lobu, who lay on the deck panting and spent, and apparently sane enough again, though rolling his eyes in wide alarm. "I believe he thinks we are going to cook and eat him," observed Jack. "The Marquesans always used to eat the captured amongst their enemies." "I'm feelin' some hungry myself," asserted Broncho, with his slow, quiet drawl, which always grew slower and more serious the lighter and more flippant the remark he was making happened to be. This was the way with the cowboy. On serious or more important subjects he assumed a lightness and indifference in his speech which he was very far from feeling, whilst he brought out a joke with more solemnity than a Chancellor of the Exchequer introducing the budget. "We'll shore have to skin him," he went on. "Eating a gent unskinned when he's tattooed that-away would give folks delusions that they're consumin' of boa-constrictors, which same is liable to give palp'tations round the cartridge-belt to a gent who's been used to beans, salt pig, an' air-tights, bein' some rich an' high-flung as an edible." Jack and Tari proceeded to have a long consultation together in the Marquesan dialect, at the end of which the former turned to the others and said: "Tari wants us to set him loose. He says he'll watch him closely, and give us warning if he looks like having another fit of man-hunting. What do you say, boys?"