He addressed the man in English, but there was no answer except an intensifying of the savage scowl. Then Nick tried several of the Indian dialects, without success.
Once the man spat at him like an angry cat.
“Well-behaved old scout, isn’t he?” remarked Patsy. “He ought to be yowling along a back fence, somewhere.”
Whatever else this strange creature might have been, certainly he was no coward. He wanted to fight, and it was only because he was bound hand and foot that he did not attack his captors, notwithstanding that they were five to his one.
Evidently he expected no more mercy at their hands than he would have shown them had their positions been reversed. With the philosophy of the true Oriental, he accepted his fate and made no complaint.
“He’s a low-caste blackguard, I guess,” remarked Nick to Jai Singh, loudly enough for the prisoner to overhear.
Instantly the witch doctor began to writhe on his couch, while from his lips poured a whole-hearted and comprehensive stream of blasphemy in English that might have come from some unregenerate habitant of “Hell’s Kitchen,” in New York.
Nick Carter smiled. He had counted on his sarcastic allusion to the man to bring forth some such demonstration which would reveal his origin, as well as the tongue he commonly used.
“That fetched him!” observed Chick quietly. “Anything about their caste gets these fellows going before they know it.”
The man was cursing again, and Nick could not but admire the ingenuity with which he seemed to find new oaths ready for use as he wanted them.