"Out of one of the ship's life-boats, I suppose?" he said in a low tone

to the captain.

"Yes. Did you see the number?"

"Number 3, I think."

"I agree with you. That was the first life-boat which got away."

Christobal, startled out of his wonted sang-froid, whispered in his

turn: "Do you mean to say that one of the boats has fallen into the hands of

these fiends?"

"I am afraid so," replied Courtenay. "Of course, that particular keg

may have drifted ashore. In any case, it tells the fate of one section

of the mutineers. Either the boat is swamped, or the crew are now on

the island, and we know what that signifies."

"Is there no chance of bribing these people into friendliness, or, at

least, into a temporary truce?"

"It is hard to decide. Tollemache and Suarez are best able to form an

opinion. What do you say, Tollemache?"

"Not a bit of use; they are insatiable. The more you give the more

they want. The only way to deal with those rotters is to stir them up

with a Gatling or a twelve-pounder."

Suarez, when appealed to, shook his head.

"Last winter," he said, "the man sitting aft, he with the single

albatross feather sticking in his hair, seized his own son, aged six,

and dashed his brains out on the rocks because the little fellow

dropped a basket of sea-eggs he was carrying. The woman nearest to him

is his wife, and she raised no protest. You might as well try to

fondle a hungry puma. I am the only man they have ever spared, and

they spared me solely because they thought I gave them power over their

enemies. If you had a cannon, you might drive them off. As it is, we

shall be compelled to fight for our lives; they are brave enough in

their own way."

The experience of the miner from Argentina was not to be gainsaid. The

predicament of the giant Kansas--inert, immovable, lying in that

peaceful bay at the mercy of a horde of painted savages--was one of the

strange facts almost beyond credence which men encounter at times in

the byways of life. It reminded Courtenay of a visit he paid to the

crocodile tank at Karachi when he was a midshipman on the Boadicea.

He noticed that some of the huge saurians, eighteen feet in length and

covered with scale armor off which a bullet would glance, were

squirming uneasily, and the Hindu attendant told him that they had been

bitten by mosquitoes!

He laughed quietly, but his mirth had a curious ring in it which boded

ill for certain unknown members of the Alaculof tribe when the

threatened tussle came to close quarters. Elsie heard him. Leaning

over the rails of the spar deck, she asked cheerfully: "What is the joke, Captain Courtenay? And why don't the Indians come

nearer? Are they timid? They don't look it."




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