After relating how his companions had found me bound to the tree, senseless or asleep, he inquired how it came to pass I was there.
"I fled to escape your wife," said I, looking round fearfully.
"Yah, yah," said he, laughing; "I was sorry for the loss of my white slave, but am glad you escaped her knife; for she wished much to ornament her big canoe, so she got the head of another white man."
"Another—who—which?"
"Amoo does not know; he tried to steal a canoe and escape to the Pongo Islands, but was retaken, and so my wife got his head for her canoe. She boiled it in a stone pipkin, with gums and herbs, stuck fish-bones in its nose and ears, and now it will last for many, many suns and moons, without decay."
(Who was this other unfortunate that had perished so miserably? He might be my friend Hartly—if indeed it was not he who was so cruelly destroyed in the basket of thorns.)
"Never mind who it was," said Amoo, divining my thoughts, "since you are found again."
"To be your prisoner?" I sighed.
Amoo grinned, leered cunningly, and shook his woolly head.
"What then?"