“Oh, that was just a hang-over from the Western Front,” replied the curator. “I’ve been through any number of trench scrimmages, and I learned that it’s not the iron casing of grenades that does the most mischief, but the gas itself. It has far more rending power than that cast-iron shell of the grenade. Remember our old air guns of boyhood? Well, I sent some sketches to the factory and had them make me this pistol on the same lines. These light nickel shells of T. N. T. turned out to be as good as heavy grenades when I tested them. All that is needed is something to throw them with accuracy, so I had this gun made and a lot of shells, timed for eighty, fifty, and thirty yards--which is about as close as you can be to them with any safety. That’s all there is to it. Beats the old dynamite stick that they used to use on the savages of the South Seas all hollow, I’ll say!” They passed the floating wreckage of the night before as he spoke, and everyone set to work picking up paddles, spears, and arrows, the latter sticking up out of water, point down, like buoys. Then the curator made a grab and hauled aboard a floating shield. It was of the same long, oval type that the war party had carried the day before, and he examined the red paint in the carving minutely with his magnifying glass. “It’s the same mineral we found in Aru, Dwight,” he declared, after a close scrutiny. “Wait till we get to camp; I’ve got a fine young idea hatching.” That was all they could get out of him, but the paddles swept on more tirelessly than ever, for both boys were consumed with curiosity over the new mineral. At length they came to their own headland, with the frowning ramparts of the mountains looming back of them endlessly to the south. Here was the mouth of their creek, and up it they drove the canoe under the green arches of the jungle. After a time it came out at the old coral bank, and the abandoned sail proa showed up ahead, its bow still on the little beach. Sadok and Baderoon jumped ashore and set about getting their fire started, while the boys dove for their provision sacks, for they had had nothing to eat for twenty-four hours and were famished. But the curator could not wait. He cut off a sliver from the red mineral paint in the shield scrolls and scraped a portion of it into a small test tube which he got out of his mess kit. Filling it with a little water, he went over to Nicky’s alcohol flame and brought it to a boil. Then he opened a tiny bottle of acid and dropped a tear of it into the test tube.