The man turned a look of compassion upon him. “You will never know why, because you have never known what it is to live without the push and pull of many human beings striving for mastery all about you. In a well-populated land, this would all be very wonderful. Here it is nothing. Nothing!”
As he spoke, the man bent over and opened a small box made of heavy driftwood.
Having peered into its depth for a second, he uttered a sharp cry:
“The gold! It is gone!”
“Was there much?” asked Dave.
“Around a hundredweight. Who could have taken it? Yesterday we would have given it away for a song. To-day, with hopes of deliverance at hand, it is indispensable. Who could the robbers be?”
“The ’eathen, the unnatural, bloody, bloomin’ ’eathen,” exclaimed Jarvis. “Find them and you find the gold.”
The “unnatural ’eathen” were not to be found. Had the earth opened up and swallowed them, they could not have more completely vanished from the region of the City of Gold.
When a search far and wide had been made for them, with no results, attention was turned to the problem of a journey to other lands, for, even robbed of their gold as they were, these former exiles were eager to escape and to try their hand at making a living in more populated lands.
Three days were spent in futile attempts to start that oriental engine. When this was given up, it was decided that they should inflate the balloon, await a favorable wind and try their fortunes at drifting back to the land whence they came.