The rubber men, who could speak the Indian tongue a little, assured me, however, that the King had taken a great fancy to me—I suppose because I looked so young and tender—and that the Princess herself thought very well of me. The King’s idea, they informed me, was to have me marry the princess so as to improve the royal strain just as his own savage self had been improved in the slave days of South America when the niggers would run away from their masters and seek decent society among the cannibals.
“For heaven’s sake, boy,” one of the rubber men said to me, “make up your mind to marry her or we’ll all be served up a la chop suey in the grill room.”
Henceforth I treated her with all the courtesy and dignity I could command and she reciprocated by showing me where her papa kept my pistol, my watch and my compass—things I was glad to know, and she gave me these stones too, which I am told by dealers in gems in Maiden Lane to be diamonds. How much are they worth? No one knows until I have them cut.
Everything went fine for the next couple of months but I was getting pretty sick of the life and kept scheming to get away. This tribe of savages used powerful bows and arrows barbed with bone and tipped with feathers. It was all I could do to bend them but the King had one made for me that was more to my strength and I learned to use it with precision and great effect.
Every day I would go hunting and I always had the company of a couple of pleasant secret service savages. Whatever I bagged I gave King Oopla and Princess Mabel the very choicest of it and I always tried to get game that was to their liking. We became great friends and I wouldn’t leave these good simple minded people—no not for anything in the world unless I got a good chance.
But I went a little farther every day and often lost myself from my savage guides, but, never fear, I always came back like a dutiful prospective son-in-law should. On returning one day from a hunting trip that had lasted longer than-any of the others I had ever made, I found they had killed one of the rubber men and were cooking him en casserole.
That evening at sundown the ceremonies began and when it had grown dark great bonfires were lit and the cannibals, with hideous painted faces and bodies were dancing as if their very lives depended on it to the bombastic beating of tom-toms, Old King Oopla had on his dress suit which consisted of a pair of long horns projecting from either side of his head, a red undershirt, and a celluloid cuff on each ankle. Her royal highness, Princess Mabel, was bedecked out in a wonderful head-gear and a fluffy ballet skirt built up of macaw and other brilliant feathers. A few strings of human teeth around her neck completed her bridal costume. She looked awful nice.
The King, Mabel, and myself were squatting on a kind of throne built up in the center of the ring of dancers but so enthusiastic did these royal personages become that the King and the Princess must needs have a fling at it too.
After keeping the dance going into the small hours of the morning they stopped and gorged themselves with human flesh until they fell down in their tracks, actually drunk with the gruesome orgy. It was a preliminary feast to my marriage with Princess Mabel. When at last the coast was clear I recovered not only my revolver but another one from the hole in the tree where the King hid his treasures and giving it to Señor Paes, the surviving rubber man, we stole forth determined on gaining our freedom or else going to our deaths.
At the end of every mile we covered I put my ear to the ground and listened in, but there were no sounds of our being followed. After ten hours’ travel over trails that I knew I figured that we were nearer Jurutty than to the cannibal village. We kept right on and after another five hours my ground telegraph told me that human footsteps were coming and I knew it was a question of only a little time until the savages would overtake us.