The interpreter put a question, and the witch-doctor screamed out a long reply, and then stooped and felt the captive over with his fingers, as men feel cattle at a fair.

“Well?” said Kettle impatiently; “if he doesn’t get back the wooden god, let’s hear what the game is next?”

“Me no sabbey.  He say you too small and thin for chop.”

Captain Kettle’s pale cheeks flushed.  Curiously enough it never occurred to him to be grateful for this escape from a cannibal dinner-table.  But his smallness was a constant sore to him, and he bitterly resented any allusion to it.

“Tell that stinking scarecrow I’ll wring his neck for him before I’m quit of this village.”

“Me no fit,” said the linguister candidly.  “He kill me now if I say that, same’s he kill you soon.”

“Oh, he’s going to kill me, is he?”

The interpreter nodded emphatically.  “Or get dem big ju-ju,” he added.

“Ask him how Cappie Nilssen can be cured.”

The man with the yaws put the question timidly enough, and the witch-doctor burst into a great guffaw of laughter.  Then after a preliminary dance, he took off a little packet of leopard skin, which hung amongst his other charms, and stuffed it deep inside Kettle’s shirt.

The interpreter explained:  “Him say he put ju-ju on Cappie Nilssen, and can take it off all-e-same easy.  Him say you give Cappie Nilssen dis new ju-ju for chop, an’ he live for well one-time.”

“He doesn’t make much trouble about giving it me, anyway,” Kettle commented.  “Looks as if he felt pretty sure he’d get that idol, or else take the change out of my skin.”  But, all the same, when the question was put to him again as to whether he would surrender the image, he flatly refused.  There was a certain pride about Kettle which forbade him to make concessionary treaties with an inferior race.

So forthwith, having got this final refusal, the blacks took him up again, and under the witch-doctor’s lead carried him well beyond the outskirts of the village.  There was a cleared space here, and on the bare, baked earth they laid him down under the full glare of the tropical sunshine.  For a minute or so they busied themselves with driving four stout stakes into the ground, and then again they took him up, and made him fast by wrists and ankles, spread-eagle fashion, to the stakes.

At first he was free to turn his head, and with a chill of horror he saw he was not the first to be stretched out in that clearing.  There were three other sets of stakes, and framed in each was a human skeleton, picked clean.  With a shiver he remembered travellers’ tales on the steamers of how these things were done.  But then the blacks put down other stakes so as to confine his head in one position, and were proceeding to prop open his mouth with a piece of wood, when suddenly there seemed to be a hitch in the proceedings.

The witch-doctor asked for honey—­Kettle recognized the native word—­and none was forthcoming.  Without honey they could not go on, and the captive knew why.  One man was going off to fetch it, but then news was brought that the Krooboy Brass Pan had been caught, and the whole gang of them went off helter-skelter toward the village—­and again Kettle knew the reason for their haste.