Tollemache and Suarez are best able to form an
opinion. What do you say, Tollemache?"
"Not a bit of use; they are insatiable. The more you give the more
they want. The only way to deal with those rotters is to stir them up
with a Gatling or a twelve-pounder."
Suarez, when appealed to, shook his head.
"Last winter," he said, "the man sitting aft, he with the single
albatross feather sticking in his hair, seized his own son, aged six,
and dashed his brains out on the rocks because the little fellow
dropped a basket of sea-eggs he was carrying. The woman nearest to him
is his wife, and she raised no protest. You might as well try to
fondle a hungry puma. I am the only man they have ever spared, and
they spared me solely because they thought I gave them power over their
enemies. If you had a cannon, you might drive them off. As it is, we
shall be compelled to fight for our lives; they are brave enough in
their own way."
The experience of the miner from Argentina was not to be gainsaid. The
predicament of the giant _Kansas_--inert, immovable, lying in that
peaceful bay at the mercy of a horde of painted savages--was one of the
strange facts almost beyond credence which men encounter at times in
the byways of life.
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