"I should consider it not unlikely. You certainly will if you stay."
"Well, I am——! Was it missionaries you said?"
"That's what I said."
"Very well, then," said the invader, pulling himself together, "I'll see you eternally annihilated first." That was not his exact expression, but it is printable and will suffice.
"Eighty-six minutes left," said Blair quietly.
Captain Cathie waved his hat three times to the Torch, and Long Tom's angry bellow rolled up into the hills and lined the side of the trader with curious faces.
"Missionaries! Well, I am——" and he looked at them, and then at the Torch with the cloud of blue-white smoke drifting slowly away from her deck, and then turned and humped his shoulders and went back the way he had come, and Blair and Cathie followed him.
They were all fast asleep at Maru's house, and not likely to waken in a hurry, if the empty rum bottles scattered about were anything to go by. There were some opened cases of trade lying about, and the scraps and remnants of a feast—in addition to the inert forms of old Maru and his wife, and Kahili and his wife, and some of their people.
"Eighty minutes!" said Blair grimly, as he looked round on this undoing of his work.
"Say, mister, couldn't we come to some arrangement?" began the trader.