Then he drinks “geen,” and cools down.
But Keebo sees his advantage. He expatiates on the mechanical ability and cleverness of white men in general, and of Massa Kennie, Archie, and Harvey in particular, and so inflames the king’s cupidity, that he sends for the white men, and has their chains knocked off in his presence, and tells his sentries they are free, and any one who touches the hem of their garments shall be made food for the blue-bottle flies, and the long-legged “krachaw.” (A kind of carrion-eating heron.)
“Ha! ha! ha!” he yells, “the king will live for ever.”
Then he drinks again, yells again, whacks his wives with the tom-tom stick, and laughs to see them wince; and drinks, and drinks, and drinks, till he falls back asleep, and is borne away by the wives he whacked, and laid tenderly on the daïs.
“Well,” cried Harvey, “this is a queer ending to a day’s march.”
Zona shrugs his square thin shoulders, and Kenneth and Archie laugh.
“Ask those scoundrels,” says Kenneth to Essequibo, “what they have done with our arms and our boat.”
Very submissive are those spear-armed warriors now. They lead them to a wood, and there in the thicket they find everything intact.
“Now, lads, do as I tell you,” said Kenneth.
And here is what our heroes did at Kenneth’s advice. They rolled all their spare arms and ammunition in blankets, dug a hole, buried them, and turned the boat upside down on them. Next they tore up a lot of white and red rags, tied them to strings, and arranged these along, over, and around the boat, in precisely the way you would over a row of peas in the country to keep the sparrows away.