It is not, perhaps, greatly to be wondered at if, under such circumstances, the blacks had gradually come to regard the possessor of a white skin as the incarnation of everything that was superlatively detestable, and a person to be destroyed promptly with as little hesitation or compunction as one would destroy a particularly venomous snake; and such was the feeling which Grosvenor and Dick inspired in the breasts of those natives in whose hands they found themselves upon a certain memorable day. It was at first proposed to put them to the torture _sans ceremonie_; but a certain petty chief, anxious to curry favour with the king, intervened in the nick of time, and, having made prisoners of the entire party, sent the whole of them, including the wagon, oxen, horses, and animals generally, to the king's village, in order that His Majesty might have his full share of such sport as the torture of the white men might furnish. This journey, however, occupied five days, during the progress of which the two white men proved to be so different in every respect from the only other white men whom the blacks had ever encountered, to be possessed of such strange powers, and to be, generally, such "kittle cattle" to deal with, that the king, learning that these strangers were bent upon entering the territory of his white neighbours, ultimately came to the somewhat cynical conclusion that he could kill two birds with one stone, so to speak, by allowing the formidable strangers to go their way and inflict the maximum amount of annoyance and damage upon his especial enemies before those enemies in their turn destroyed the unwelcome visitors. Thus it came to pass that, after spending close upon a fortnight in momentary expectation of a hideously protracted death by torture, Dick Maitland and Philip Grosvenor one day found themselves most unexpectedly released, their belongings returned to them, and permission accorded them to proceed upon their journey as soon as they would. They instantly availed themselves of this permission, lest peradventure it should be retracted; the result being that for five days they travelled under the protection of an armed escort until they arrived at the frontier, where the escort hurriedly left them, after jeeringly warning them of the many evil things that awaited them in the immediate future.