He had never forgotten that mystery.

Two of the three white men he had seen slain and their heads removed on deck.
The third, still fighting, had but the minute before fled below.

Then the cutter, along with all her wealth of hoop-iron, tobacco, knives and calico, had gone up into the air and fallen back into the sea in scattered and fragmented nothingness.

It had been dynamite--the MYSTERY.
And he, who had been hurled uninjured through the air by a miracle of fortune, had divined that white men in themselves were truly dynamite, compounded of the same mystery as the substance with which they shot the swift-darting schools of mullet, or blow up, in extremity, themselves and the ships on which they voyaged the sea from far places.

And yet on this unstable and death-terrific substance of which he was well aware Van Horn was composed, he trod heavily with his personality, daring, to the verge of detonation, to impact it with his insolence.
"My word," he began, "what name you make 'm boy belong me stop along you too much ?" Which was a true and correct charge that the boys which Van Horn had just returned had been away three years and a half instead of three years.
"You talk that fella talk I get cross too much along you," Van Horn bristled back, and then added, diplomatically, dipping into a half-case of tobacco sawed across and proffering a handful of stick tobacco: "Much better you smoke 'm up and talk 'm good fella talk." But Nau-hau grandly waved aside the gift for which he hungered.
"Plenty tobacco stop along me," he lied.