The light was now turned on to its full power, and the man who managed it kept on changing its position so that it blazed right upon each canoe in turn, with a singular result, each doing the same. For, as if startled by the light, the occupants began to paddle backward in a hurried way, till the beam was shifted, when they ceased.
“Why they’re regularly scared at the lamp, captain,” cried Doctor Instow.
“Yes, that’s so, sir,” replied the captain; “and it looks as if they knew that their deeds were evil, shunning the light in this fashion; but it can’t last. They’ll soon get used to it; and if they can only be scared until I get the steam up I don’t mind.”
“Are you getting the steam up, captain?” asked Jack eagerly.
“Yes; can’t you hear the fires going?”
Jack had been too much excited to notice any one special thing in the preparations to resist an attack, but he was now conscious of a dull humming sound which he knew was the softened roar of the furnaces.
“The yacht’s like a useless log lying here becalmed,” continued the captain; “but once I have a good head of steam on she becomes a living creature, and I can do anything with her—and with them if they don’t behave themselves. I don’t want to run down and drown any of the poor wretches; but if they attack us they must take the consequences.”
“Poor ignorant creatures!” said Sir John. “I suppose they don’t know our power.”
“That’s it,” replied Captain Bradleigh. “The more savage a man is, according to my experience, the more vain and conceited he seems. He believes in himself thoroughly, for he is generally vigorous and active as a wild beast, and looks down on an ordinary white man with a kind of scorn. You would be surprised, Mr Jack, what a number of lessons have to be given him before he will believe in our machinery and weapons of war, unless you can appeal to his brain by making him believe that they are what the Scotchman calls uncanny. If you once find him thinking that steam, or the gun which kills a man a couple of hundred yards away, is the result of fetish or the bunyip, or a diabolical spirit, he’s the greatest coward under the sun. Give them another brush over with the light, my lad.”
The man in charge of the great star sent the rays sweeping over the sea, once more making the dazzling beam play here and there at his will, upon first one and then another of the blacks in the canoes, with the result that they were all thrown into a state of confusion, each as the light dazzled his eyes ducking down right into the bottom of his vessel, or trying to bend behind his neighbour and to escape from the terrible blazing eye, which seemed to go through him.