“Oh, he is killed! he is killed!” cried Emily, who had hitherto stood terror-stricken, running to Oliver and kneeling down by him. She heard the report, and probably thought that he had been wounded by the gun.
“No, no, Miss Emily; do not be alarmed, I am not much hurt,” said Oliver, trying to lift himself up. “The creature only tore my flesh, and I have sprained my foot in falling. I have been mercifully preserved.”
For some time, however, Emily could scarcely be convinced of the fact. There lay the monstrous mias, still struggling violently, while Merlin pertinaciously hung on to him. I had now reached Oliver, and assisted Emily in supporting him, while we put a safer distance between the creature and ourselves. Grace, who was far more timid than Emily, had stood transfixed, as it were, to the ground, unable to advance or fly. The rest of the party now came up, and a blow from Dick’s hatchet deprived the mias of life.
“I suppose he good for dinner,” observed Potto Jumbo, surveying him. “I cut steak out of him before we go away.”
“Out on you for a cannibal!” exclaimed Tarbox, with a look of horror. “I would as soon think of eating a nigger boy.”
“No, no, Massa Tarbox,” answered Potto, in an indignant tone. “Nigger boy got soul. Dis,” and he gave the brute a kick with his foot, “just like hog or cow.”
“You may spare yourself the trouble of cutting a steak out of him,” said Roger Trew. “I do not think any of us would make up our minds to eat him, whatever he may be.”
“If it was not so far off, I should have liked the skin, though,” said Mr Sedgwick. “However, we will hang him up in a tree, and some day I may have his skeleton, when the ants have picked it clean.”
Under his direction the men now got some ratan, with which they surrounded the body of the monster, and then, in a sort of framework, they hoisted him up to the stoutest branch of a tree which they could manage to reach. We left him there, for all the world, as Roger Trew observed, like a pirate hanging in chains, and then began our homeward march with greater speed than before, to make amends for the time we had lost.