In a brief space the raging Teuton was dragged alongside the vat, while the three fire-eaters, whose duty it was to protect him from such ungentle treatment, contented themselves by hurling defiance at Mackay and his companions from a conveniently remote distance. But their wordy vapourings fell on deaf ears. The chief object of their wrath seemed wholly unconscious of their presence.
"An' so you've come to see the working arrangements of the process again," he said to his unwilling visitor with a grim smile; but there was a steely glitter in his eyes which alarmed Wynberg amazingly.
"I'll have you put in prison for this!" he yelled. "To prison you shall go!"
His enemy was unimpressed. "Humph!" he snorted. "Hoch der Kaiser! Ease him up an' let me get a nice canny grip o' him somewhere, my lads. Ay, that's near enough. Up she goes!" He swooped down his great paw, seized the unfortunate man by the slack of his wide riding-breeches, and, with scarcely an effort, hoisted him up struggling like a sportive fish on a hook, and yelling loud enough to waken the seven sleepers, over the ore platform, then he calmly dumped him into the vat amid the bubbling slimes.
"You'll be in a position to observe a' the working arrangements now," he bellowed. "Mak' the maist o' yer chance, you yelpin' hyena."
The shrieks of Wynberg had by this time caused a large number of miners to hasten up. "Great centipedes! ye ain't murderin' any one, are ye, Mackay?" cried the foremost of them.
Mackay smiled blandly, and descended from his perch, leaving the dripping specimen of humanity to crawl out from his unpleasant environment as best he could. "I'm merely givin' the discoverer o' Wynberg's Process an inside knowledge o' the work, an' he's howlin' wi' joy an' gratitude, that's a'."
Then a great roar of laughter broke forth as a bedraggled figure scrambled over the edge of the vat, shaking the clinging ooze from his head like a water dog, and sputtering out mouthfuls of saline fluid. Seeing the crowd assembled, and feeling safe from further molestation, he gathered courage, and sitting down on the platform he shrilled forth his denunciation of Mackay in the choicest vituperative phrases of two languages. When sheer lack of breath had pulled him up, Bob began to address the miners in even dispassionate tones—
"Men, you know that I am the discoverer of the original process, and you also know that my batteries and generator were stolen on the night of the public trial by two men. Jack surprised them while they were carrying them away, and they tried their best to murder him. I say this man," and he pointed contemptuously at Wynberg, "was one of the thieves."
"It's a lie! It's a lie!" screamed the German.