“Last winter,” he said, “the man sitting aft, he with the single albatross feather sticking in his hair, seized his own son, aged six, and dashed his brains out on the rocks because the little fellow dropped a basket of sea-eggs he was carrying. The woman nearest to him is his wife, and she raised no protest. You might as well try to fondle a hungry puma. I am the only man they have ever spared, and they spared me solely because they thought I gave them power over their enemies. If you had a cannon, you might drive them off. As it is, we shall be compelled to fight for our lives; they are brave enough in their own way.” The experience of the miner from Argentina was not to be gainsaid. The predicament of the giant _Kansas_—inert, immovable, lying in that peaceful bay at the mercy of a horde of painted savages—was one of the strange facts almost beyond credence which men encounter at times in the byways of life. It reminded Courtenay of a visit he paid to the crocodile tank at Karachi when he was a midshipman on the _Boadicea_. He noticed that some of the huge saurians, eighteen feet in length and covered with scale armor off which a bullet would glance, were squirming uneasily, and the Hindu attendant told him that they had been bitten by mosquitoes! He laughed quietly, but his mirth had a curious ring in it which boded ill for certain unknown members of the Alaculof tribe when the threatened tussle came to close quarters. Elsie heard him. Leaning over the rails of the spar deck, she asked cheerfully: “What is the joke, Captain Courtenay? And why don’t the Indians come nearer? Are they timid? They don’t look it.” He glanced up at her. If aught were needed to complete the contrast between civilization and savagery it was given by the comparison which the girl offered to the women in the canoe. The hot sun and the absence of wind had changed the temperature from winter to summer. After breakfast, Elsie had donned a muslin dress, and a broad-brimmed straw hat. Exposure to the weather had bronzed her skin to a delightful tint. Her nut-brown hair framed a sweetly pretty face, and her clear blue eyes and red lips, slightly parted, smiled bewitchingly at the men beneath. The camera in her hands added a holiday aspect to her appearance, an aspect which was unutterably disquieting in its relation to the muttered forebodings she had broken in on. But Courtenay’s voice gave no hint of the tumult in his breast, though some malign spirit seemed to whisper the agonizing question: “Will you permit her to fall into the hands of the ghouls waiting without?” “I find the get-up of our visitors distinctly humorous,” he said, “and I hope they are a bit scared of us. We would prefer their room to their company.” “I thought that Señor Suarez would hail them, as he can speak their language. Perhaps he does not wish them to know he is on board?”