Immediately four canoes full of natives put off to visit the stranger; but on reaching her they were sternly told to keep off, and the order was silently enforced by the protruding muzzle of a carronade, and the forbidding aspect of several armed men who looked over the side. “We are men of peace,” said Waroonga, who was in the foremost canoe, “and come as Christian friends.”
“We are men of war,” growled one of the men, “an’ don’t want no friends, Christian or otherwise.”
“We came to offer you hospitality,” returned the missionary in a remonstrative tone.
“An’ we came to take all the hospitality we want of you without waitin’ for the offer,” retorted the sailor, “so you’d better go back to where you came from, an’ keep yourselves quiet, if ye don’t want to be blowed out o’ the water.”
This was sufficient. With disappointed looks the natives turned their canoes shoreward and slowly paddled home.
“Depend upon it, this is another pirate,” said Orlando, when Waroonga reported to him the result of his visit.
“What would you advise us to do?” asked Waroonga.
Lest the reader should be surprised at this question, we must remind him that Orlando had, in the course of these three years, grown up almost to manhood. The southern blood in his veins, and the nature of the climate in which he had been born and brought up, may have had something to do with his early development; but, whatever the cause, he had, at the early age of eighteen, become as tall and nearly as powerful as his father had been, and so like to him in aspect and manner, that the natives began to regard him with much of that respect and love which they had formerly entertained towards Antonio. Of course Orlando had not the sprinkling of grey in his short black curly hair which had characterised the elder Zeppa; but he possessed enough of the black beard and moustache, in a soft rudimental form, to render the resemblance to what his sire had been very remarkable. His poor little mother left the management of all her out-of-door affairs with perfect confidence to her son. Tomeo and Buttchee also had begun to regard him as his father’s successor.
“I would advise you to do nothing,” said Orley, in reply to Waroonga’s question, “beyond having all the fighting men of the village prepared for action, and being ready at a moment’s notice to receive the strangers as friends if they choose to come as such.”
“Well, then, Orley, I will be ready for them, as you tell to me, if they comes in peace; if not, you must go and carry out your own advice, for you is manager of all secular affairs here.”