“But suppose he does not die?” asked the witch doctor, scratching his woolly head.
“Then,” exclaimed Obebe triumphantly, “we will know that you are right, and that he was, indeed, the river devil.”
Obebe went and ordered women to take food to the Spaniard while the witch doctor stood, where Obebe had left him, in the middle of the street, still scratching his head in thought.
And thus was Esteban Miranda, possessor of the most fabulous fortune in diamonds that the world had ever known, condemned to life imprisonment in the village of Obebe, the cannibal.
While he had been lying in the hut his traitorous confederate, Owaza, from the opposite bank of the river from the spot where he and Esteban had hidden the golden ingots, saw Tarzan and his Waziri come and search for the gold and go away again, and the following morning Owaza came with fifty men whom he had recruited from a neighboring village and dug up the gold and started with it toward the coast.
That night Owaza made camp just outside a tiny village of a minor chief, who was weak in warriors. The old fellow invited Owaza into his compound, and there he fed him and gave him native beer, while the chief’s people circulated among Owaza’s boys plying them with innumerable questions until at last the truth leaked out and the chief knew that Owaza’s porters were carrying a great store of yellow gold.
When the chief learned this for certain he was much perturbed, but finally a smile crossed his face as he talked with the half-drunken Owaza.
“You have much gold with you,” said the old chief, “and it is very heavy. It will be hard to get your boys to carry it all the way back to the coast.”
“Yes,” said Owaza, “but I shall pay them well.”
“If they did not have to carry it so far from home you would not have to pay them so much, would you?” asked the chief.