“Now, then, Sadok, launch one of those proas and after ’em and we’ll have ’em on the run!” barked Nicky, seizing the psychological moment to attack. Sadok called on the _orang-kaya_, and he and a dozen warriors sprang to the nearest proa and launched her, Nicky reloading swiftly. As she put out for the pirate lakatoi he opened up with a second burst of pistol shots. The pirate was now making all sail out to sea, the few flashes from her native muskets showing that most of her crew were paddling hard away from them. Presently her mat sail came down and she paddled into the eye of the wind, where their own proa could not follow. Nicky shot a third burst after them as the range widened out of bow shot. “Gee! the curator told me that New Guinea pirates still attacked the villages in the wilder part of Aru, but I couldn’t have believed it!” he muttered to himself. “Now I’ve been in it--and we drove them off! Must be a fine country we’re going to, what Sadok!” “Plenty bad mans ober dere!” agreed Sadok. “Mus’ shoot all time.” They picked up a few dead men out of the dark waters. Hideously streaked with white clay, they wore long white boars’ tusks through their noses, and had a peculiar breast guard, made of rows of boars’ tusks one above the other, woven in a kind of net of palm-fiber. A keen, flat bamboo knife floating in the water gave Nicky a clew as to the tribe. “Tugeri!” he exclaimed. “Head hunters. They were after heads and loot, Sadok! A sudden attack and a quick getaway is their style. Last year they appeared suddenly inside the barbed wire of the Dutch fort at Merauke and decapitated six Javanese and got away before the garrison could get out after them. We’ll have a time, with either them or the Outanatas!” The proa returned to shore amid the shouts and rejoicings of all the village capering about the beach. Nicky and Sadok, utterly weary, retired to their portion of the hut to sleep, after the first burst of enthusiasm had died down. But the natives made an all-night orgy of it. Nicky put on his bathing suit headgear and his night socks over his arms and wrists, and turned in on a palm-fiber mat, while mosquitoes hummed about him and the noise and shouting and laughter on shore dulled away in his drowsy ears. Next day they bade good-by to the chief. He had a present to make, it seemed, in return for the white man’s services in repelling their visitors of the night before. Out of a fetish bag, that held evidently the treasures of the entire village, he took a parcel carefully wrapped in cotton. Unwinding it, he drew out the skin of a bird of more than ordinary interest. Reverently he unwrapped the last of its bindings, and handed it to Nicky with a smile of grateful pleasure. “Gorry!” muttered the boy, as he received the present before the whole tribe. “If I’m not wrong, that’s the rarest of the rare--the magnificent bird of paradise! Won’t the curator be tickled, though!”