“Also I see that you have death sticks in your hands. I have heard of them.”
“Death sticks is good, Chick!” murmured Patsy. “Gee! This will be a fine story to tell when we get back.”
“The death sticks can spurt death from afar,” continued the Bolongu; “making a great noise as they do it. When a white man of your race came and told me that, I did not believe. I thought he was a liar.”
“Yet you speak the same tongue as we,” remarked Nick Carter. “Where did you learn that, without finding out other things the white people know?”
“It has always been our language,” replied the other. “How we came by it I know not. But the death sticks I never heard of till the white man told me.”
“Where is that white man?” asked Nick.
The crafty face of the Bolongu seemed to become a mask to hide everything that might be in his mind. He kept on talking about what he called the death sticks.
“It would please me much to see them work,” he said. “Can you not make one of them spit fire and hit something that is not alive? It might crack that rock over there, eh?”
“Later I may show you what the death stick will do,” answered Nick Carter grimly. “You say a white man has told you about the death stick. We have come to find that white man.”
Up to this moment Leslie Arnold had kept in the background, so that his face had been hidden by the men in front of him.