“What care we?  No forests can be thicker than those we have bored through already; why, if one had had but a tail, like a monkey, for an extra warp, one might have gone a hundred miles on end along the tree-tops, and found it far pleasanter walking than tripping in withes, and being eaten up with creeping things, from morn till night.”

“But remember, too,” said Jack, “how they told us to beware of the Amazons.”

“What, Jack, afraid of a parcel of women?”

“Why not?” said Jack, “I wouldn’t run from a man, as you know; but a woman—­it’s not natural, like.  They must be witches or devils.  See how the Caribs feared them.  And there were men there without necks, and with their eyes in their breasts, they said.  Now how could a Christian tackle such customers as them?”

“He couldn’t cut off their heads, that’s certain; but, I suppose, a poke in the ribs will do as much for them as for their neighbors.”

“Well,” said Jack, “if I fight, let me fight honest flesh and blood, that’s all, and none of these outlandish monsters.  How do you know but that they are invulnerable by art-magic?”

“How do you know that they are?  And as for the Amazons,” said Cary, “woman’s woman, all the world over.  I’ll bet that you may wheedle them round with a compliment or two, just as if they were so many burghers’ wives.  Pity I have not a court-suit and a Spanish hat.  I would have taken an orange in one hand and a handkerchief in the other, gone all alone to them as ambassador, and been in a week as great with Queen Blackfacealinda as ever Raleigh is at Whitehall.”

“Gentlemen!” said Yeo, “where you go, I go; and not only I, but every man of us, I doubt not; but we have lost now half our company, and spent our ammunition, so we are no better men, were it not for our swords, than these naked heathens round us.  Now it was, as you all know, by the wonder and noise of their ordnance (let alone their horses, which is a break-neck beast I put no faith in) that both Cortez and Pizarro, those imps of Satan, made their golden conquests, with which if we could have astounded the people of Manoa—­”

“Having first found the said people,” laughed Amyas.  “It is like the old fable.  Every craftsman thinks his own trade the one pillar of the commonweal.”

“Well! your worship,” quoth Yeo, “it may be that being a gunner I overprize guns.  But it don’t need slate and pencil to do this sum—­Are forty men without shot as good as eighty with?”

“Thou art right, old fellow, right enough, and I was only jesting for very sorrow, and must needs laugh about it lest I weep about it.  Our chance is over, I believe, though I dare not confess as much to the men.”