"Well, I don't know what he's done yet, sir. Mr. Slade said he had wiped out Malla-Nulla factory and killed you and all the boys, but that seems, well, exaggerated."
"Slade always takes the gloomy view. The King talked; and I'll admit things looked ugly for a bit. You see you'd walked off with the Firm's artillery."
"Good heavens, do you mean that my tin-pot ten-and-sixpenny revolver was the only gun about the place?"
"Certainly I do. You see--er--Mr. Carter, one occasionally--er--dines rather heavily here, and once after dining too well I saw a man shoot another whose loss he regretted afterwards. So as I wished to spare myself those regrets, I saw to it that there was nothing more deadly about the place than trade guns, and you wouldn't catch me loosing off one of those, however drunk I might be. I regret to say the King didn't continue to carry his liquor like a gentleman after you'd left; he grew quarrelsome; and finally I had to pull him up with some sharpness. Then came the ultimatum. He said I should find the roads stopped already--the old scoundrel had been playing me like a trout, it seems, till everything had been got ready, and he told me that as a fine for your lèse-majesté he should help himself to the contents of the factory as they stood."
"But you headed him off there, sir, at any rate."
Swizzle-Stick Smith chuckled. "Well, I haven't been on this Coast for twenty-five years without knowing a thing or two. I told the King I was rather glad to hear him say that because it showed that a prophecy made a year ago was now going to be fulfilled. He asked what it was. I spouted to him
'Maecenas Atavis edite regibus O et præsidium et dulce decus meum, Sunt, quos curriculo pulverem Olympicum Conlegisse juvat, ...
as the first thing that came into my head, and fine pompous lines they are, as you'd remember if you'd ever been to a public school, which you haven't."
"I've written out all Horace twenty times over in impositions and know the bulk by heart, but I can't say I ever got a taste for construing it."
"Well, we won't argue out the value of a classical education just now. Anyway the King of Okky was impressed. Of course he twigged the stuff was not English, or Okky, or Kroo, or Arabic, or any of the tongues hereabouts. He asked what it was. I said it was a priest's tongue. He asked what the words meant. I romanced then and told him they prophesied that the factory would be looted by a King who had made himself a King--the old scoundrel was born a slave, you'll remember, and made the throne vacant by killing his predecessor--and that two days afterwards a new and very curious sort of ju-ju would be put on that King, who would thereupon die a new and very painful sort of death."