The king gets blue with rage. He whacks Keebo with the tom-tom stick, and he whacks his wives; then he declares that the white men shall _not_ die, that their spirits shall _not_ go to the glorious land of flowers and sunshine. Then he drinks "geen," and cools down. But Keebo sees his advantage. He expatiates on the mechanical ability and cleverness of white men in general, and of Massa Kennie, Archie, and Harvey in particular, and so inflames the king's cupidity, that he sends for the white men, and has their chains knocked off in his presence, and tells his sentries they are free, and any one who touches the hem of their garments shall be made food for the blue-bottle flies, and the long-legged "krachaw." [A kind of carrion-eating heron.] "Ha! ha! ha!" he yells, "the king will live for ever." Then he drinks again, yells again, whacks his wives with the tom-tom stick, and laughs to see them wince; and drinks, and drinks, and drinks, till he falls back asleep, and is borne away by the wives he whacked, and laid tenderly on the dais. "Well," cried Harvey, "this is a queer ending to a day's march." Zona shrugs his square thin shoulders, and Kenneth and Archie laugh. "Ask those scoundrels," says Kenneth to Essequibo, "what they have done with our arms and our boat." Very submissive are those spear-armed warriors now. They lead them to a wood, and there in the thicket they find everything intact. "Now, lads, do as I tell you," said Kenneth. And here is what our heroes did at Kenneth's advice. They rolled all their spare arms and ammunition in blankets, dug a hole, buried them, and turned the boat upside down on them. Next they tore up a lot of white and red rags, tied them to strings, and arranged these along, over, and around the boat, in precisely the way you would over a row of peas in the country to keep the sparrows away. Funny though it may seem, this was quite enough to keep these savage negroes at bay. There was magic in it, they thought, and they gave that wood a wide berth. Well, our heroes had, after a manner of speaking, to buy their lives. The king had them before him at daybreak, not to order them to execution, but to give them his royal commands. They were to teach his people to do all the clever things that white men could do; if they failed, the king told them death would be the fate of their teachers. "We do not fear to die, King 'Ntango," said Kenneth. The king looked at him with a merry twinkle in his eye; then he took a sip of "geen" and said, through the interpreter Keebo,-- "You do not fear death? No, you think you go straight to your glorious land of sunshine; but listen, you will _not_. I will arrange it differently. I will cut from you a leg, an arm, and an ear,--ha! ha! what think you? will the leg, and arm, and ear go first to the land of sunshine, and wait you? Take care, I am a great king, and I have twenty thousand ways to torture without killing."