It took a long time and many renewals to supply them all; but Blair would not move till it was done, nor until every one had had a drink of water. Then the interrupted conversation was resumed.
Yes, there was a chief there, and Blair ordered the mate to release the man and bring him forward. He came without eagerness, a tall, brown, well-built man of middle age, with a gloomy, but not absolutely forbidding face, pinched just now, perhaps with hunger, perhaps with despair. Experience had taught him to expect nothing but evil at the hands of white men.
But even his dull misery could not but perceive a difference between this clean, white-clad white man and those he had become accustomed to, and he gazed at Blair with a note of sullen inquiry.
"You are a chief?" asked Blair, through Matti.
"I am a king," he said, answering Blair, and bestowing no look on Matti, who, he perceived, was only a voice. And there was that in his tone and manner which carried conviction in spite of the misery of his condition.
"We have come to set you free and to take you back to the island."
And when the words beat through Matti's attempt at his dialect and got into his brain, it was as though an electric shock had galvanised him suddenly into new life.
"Free?—the island?" he stammered, and stared, still doubting. "All?" he asked.
"Yes, all," and he turned and told the news to the rest in quick, clipping words, and after a moment's amazed silence a shout went up, and the fetid hole was filled with a deafening buzz of talk.
It was only after anxious consideration of the point that Blair had decided to tell them the good news. He grudged every lost soul there. He would not lose one. There might be some given over to utter despair, and there is no tonic like hope.