They were a quartet of jim-dandies and all they needed was a stove-pipe hat apiece to complete their outfits.
Again they boosted me into the air and with a savage at each corner of me they started off on a dog-trot, whither I knew not but what I did know was that I was a goner. After a march, or a trot, of two days and nights we came to an Indian village. There were several hundred men, women and children savages about but they were dressed better than the hunters who had brought me in for each one wore a string around his or her waist and a rattle-box on her or his ankle.
If any one thinks that cannibalism has been wiped out in the Amazon jungles he has another think coming for I saw with these—my own eyes—the whole horrible ceremony gone through with of eating human flesh.
After I had been there a few days a couple of savages, one with brown hair and beard and the other with red hair and beard, began talking to me in Spanish after trying Portuguese on me. I was quite surprised when they told me they were rubber men from Señor Castro’s fezenda whom the cannibals had captured nearly a year before.
We planned escape by the hour, though one of them said that was just what these man eaters wanted us to do and that when a fellow tried to escape they would recapture him, bring him back, put him in the proverbial pot and let him stew in his own juice. We were of a mind that it would be better to be live men turned savages than to be cooked men eaten by cannibals.
His most high worshipful King Oopla relieved me of my revolver, and came nearly shooting up the village,—which I heartily wished he had done,—also my watch, knife, compass and other trinkets which four former articles he generously kept for himself and the latter he gave to a wench whom I afterwards learned was his daughter, the Princess Jaci—which is as near as I could come to pronouncing her name. I called her Princess Mabel, the latter name being that of a shine kitchen-mechanic we once had.
Her face was thin and small and was topped by an enormous mass of frizzled hair while her eyes set at a slight angle so that you couldn’t just tell whether she was looking at you to the leeward or a rubber tree to the windward.
Although her eyes were thus slightly out of alignment and her mouth was cut on much too large a scale, which gave her a hard look, she was always smiling good naturedly.
The first thing I knew Princess Mabel began to hang around me and to eat and drink out of my cocoa-nut shell. She was an artistic creation in olive drab, small, and lithe, but withal a very amiable and charming maiden as cannibal maidens go.
She hadn’t been spoiled by working in high-toned families in Montclair yet. I fought shy of her for some time for I thought they wanted to put up a job on me and that the moment I gave her a pleasant look I’d be on my way to the stew pot; this belief was further fixed in my mind by occasionally finding a skull, a rib, ulna, fibula, and other parts of the human skeleton lying around loose.