Soon after this they were carried back to the village of their first imprisonment, but Woodard had seen blue water again and he was resolved to risk his life for liberty. Eluding his guards, he took a spear for a weapon and followed the forest paths all night until he emerged on a beach, where he discovered a canoe and paddled out to sea. Rough water swamped the ticklish craft, and he had to swim half a mile to get to land again. Back he trudged to his hut on the mountain-side and crawled into it before dawn. Undiscouraged, he broke away again, and made for a town called Dungalla, where he had a notion that his friend Tuan Hadjee, the priest, might be found. He somehow steered a course through the forests and ravines and fetched up at the stockade which surrounded Dungalla. As a disquieting apparition he alarmed a nervous old gentleman, who scampered off to shriek to the village that a gigantic white devil was sitting on a log at the edge of the clearing. The old codger turned out to be a servant of Tuan Hadjee, who warmly welcomed the chief mate and took him into his house as a guest. The rajah to whom Woodard belonged got wind of his whereabouts and wrathfully demanded that he be sent back. The prideful rajah of Dungalla refused in language no less provocative. Woodard smuggled a message through to his men, urging them to escape and join him. This they succeeded in doing, and the people of Dungalla were delighted to receive them. This episode strained the relations of the two rajahs to the breaking-point, and war was promptly declared. Inasmuch as they were the bone of contention, Woodard and his seamen promptly offered to fight on the side of the rajah of Dungalla; so they proceeded to imperil their skins in one of those tribal feuds which eternally flicker and smolder in the Malaysian forests. Woodard was placed in command of a tower upon the stockade wall, where he served a brass swivel and hammered obedience into a native detachment. His sun-blistered, leech-bitten sailors, clad only in sarongs, held the other barricade with creeses and muskets, and were regarded as supernatural heroes by the simple soldiery of the rajah. A drawn battle was fought, with about two hundred men in each army, and a good many were killed or wounded. After that the war dragged along and seemed to be getting nowhere, and the chief mate lost all patience with it; so he bearded the rajah and flatly told him that his men would fight no longer unless some assurance was given that they would be conveyed to Macassar.