"Then," replied Baylis, "I demand justice on those who slew two of my men, and plundered our boat."
"But how know we not that one or both killed the fetisher, who was at worship in the Wood of the Devil?" demanded the King, with a dreadful expression in his yellow eyeballs.
"I swear to you that we know nothing of the act you mention," replied Baylis, with great earnestness.
"If we had known, or been guilty of it, would we have ventured ashore to trade or barter with you like brothers?"
"Yes; because the white men are all liars!"
"It was done by the ship of another nation."
"All the white men belong to one tribe, and one big canoe is very like another. You are liars who come over the Sea of Darkness."
*Baylis, on finding that all his assertions of innocence met with utter disbelief, bent all his energy to bribe our release; but his sable Majesty only grinned through _both_ his horrid mouths, and said--
"Enough! the King of the Snake River will keep what he has got, without trusting to getting more. The white men are false. Who of my people would venture to your ship when we know now what we never knew before?"
"Accursed dog and son of a race of dogs!" thundered the King, spitting a quid of something like beetel-nut full in the face of Baylis; "we have learned that you white men take our people away in shiploads to fatten them for food, in a land far beyond the sea!"
On this, a yell similar to that we had first heard made wood and welkin ring. Violent hands were again laid on us, and we expected instant immolation; but their purpose at present was merely to denude us more fully of anything we had about us.
On having his shirt torn from him, poor Hartly endeavoured to protect or conceal a little gold locket, which contained the hair of his dead wife and of their little ones, and which was hung at his neck by a black silk riband. But he received a blow from a carved war-club which covered his face with blood; he reeled backward, and the prized relic was instantly appropriated by the King, who, no doubt, deemed it the white man's fetish, a "great medicine," or amulet.
Mrs. Baylis became insensible, and was delivered over to a crowd of women, who shouted and laughed like devils as they bore her into a wigwam, while her husband, Hartly, six seamen, and I, were, by the King's order, conducted through the town of huts, and driven like a herd towards the summit of a high mountain, where we fully expected to be put to death in some barbarous fashion.