Before it had proceeded far, the sailor began to comprehend, not from the speeches made, but the gestures that accompanied them, that it was not the design of either party to cut off his head. The drawn scimitars, sweeping through the air, were not aimed at his neck, but rather in mutual menace of one another. Old Bill could see that there was some quarrel between the two sheiks, of which he was himself the cause; that the camp was not a unity consisting of a single chief, his family, and following; but that there were two separate leaders, each with his adherents, perhaps temporarily associated together for purposes of plunder. That they had collected the wreck of the corvette, and divided the spoils between them, was evident from the two heaps being kept carefully apart, each piled up near the tent of a chief. The old man-o'-war's-man made his observations in the midst of great difficulties; for while noting these particulars, he was pulled about the place, first by one sheik, then by the other, each retaining his disputed person in temporary possession. From the manner in which they acted, he could tell that it was his person that was the subject of dispute, and that both wanted to be the proprietor of it. CHAPTER TWENTY ONE. THE TWO SHEIKS. There was a remarkable difference between the two men thus claiming ownership in the body of Old Bill. One was a little weazen-faced individual, whose yellow complexion and sharp angular features proclaimed him of the Arab stock; while his competitor showed a skin of almost ebon blackness, a frame of herculean development, a broad face, with flat nose and thick lubberly lips, a head of enormous circumference, surmounted by a mop of woolly hair, standing erect several inches above his occiput. Had the sailor been addicted to ethnological speculations, he might have derived an interesting lesson from that contest, of which he was the cause. It might have helped him to a knowledge of the geography of the country in which he had been cast, for he was now upon that neutral territory where the true Ethiopian, the son of Ham, occasionally contests possession, both of the soil and the slave, with the wandering children of Japhet. The two men who were thus quarrelling about the possession of the English tar, though both of African origin, could scarce have been more unlike had their native countries been the antipodes of each other.