"Not for one instant. I want you to make all your remarks in Kroo, or preferably Okky, if you aren't too rattled to remember any of that fashionable tongue. Here, put your sweet lips to the tube, and just say in the thickest language you can think of 'Get away back to Okky City, you bushmen. If you hesitate, your noses shall drop off, and your great fat lips shall follow, and red ants shall spring up out of the earth to eat them whilst you wait.' Savvy the idea?" "Savvy plenty," said White-Man's-Trouble, and rattled venom into the tube with a savage gusto. The result was sufficiently surprising. Spear-heads and gun-barrels bristled suddenly upwards from the clump of meadow-sweet, as ambushed Okky-men scrambled to their feet. For a full two minutes they stood there listening to the abuse which they heard pouring from the lips of the wooden mannikin close beside them, with eyes goggling, and mouths gaping, and knees chattering, the worst scared blacks in all the Oil Rivers. For the moment they were mesmerized by fright. But then the two mannikins which were nearest on either side began cackling with uncanny laughter, and a ju-ju man who was with them recognized an art higher than his own, and allowed the superstition that was native to him to rub away the thin veneer of his education. "Let us begone from here," he moaned, "even if it be to meet the curved execution axe of King Kallee in Okky City. Better the sharp edge of that, yes, better even lingering days on the crucifixion tree than the neighborhood of these devils. Wood they are now, I do believe. But they can talk as no thing of wood ever could talk; and presently they will come to life, and hurl at us those green tins of liquid fire with which they are garlanded. If there are any that wish to see more, let them stay. For myself I return to Okky City, even if it means impalement." The other wooden mannikins broke out into words, and immediately the bush around each of them rippled with men. Carter, whose knowledge of the native was growing, used every syllable of his vocabulary down two tubes alternately.