ot told you, thickhead? You are not a man any more, you are a
spirit. Once, so it seems, you ruled this people in the past, and now
you will rule them again. You and the Shepherdess are both gods. She is
your mother and you are her child."

"Yes, Baas, no doubt; but once I had another mother, a much uglier one."

"Otter, cease to talk folly, else when you are no more a god I will
beat you. Now you are a god, and we are all your servants, except the
Shepherdess. When you speak to us you must speak roughly, like a great
chief to the lowest of his people, calling us dogs and slaves. If you
name me 'Baas' in public, I will beat you privately when you are no more
a god. You will do best to speak little or not at all, so that none can
take hold of your words, which are always foolish."

"If you say that I am a god, Baas, it is enough, for doubtless you have
met the gods and know their ways, though it is strange that none have
told me this before. They must be an ugly people, the gods! But how will
it be with the Settlement men when they hear that I am a great spirit?
They will say: 'Does a spirit wait upon a man and call him chief? Does
a spirit clean the guns and cook the food of a man?' They will ask many
such things, and the Great people will hear them. And will they think
then that I am a god? No, they will know me for a liar, and will kill me
and all of us."

"That is true," said Leonard. Then he summoned Peter and the Settlement
men and addressed them. He told them that the plot had succeeded, and
that Otter and the Shepherdess were accepted as the gods of the People
of the Mist. Because of this they were left alive and held in honour,
who, but for it, would now be dead, riddled through with the arrows of
the Great People. He explained to them for the second time that it was
necessary to the safety of all that this delusion as to the divinity of
Otter and the Shepherdess should be maintained, since, if the slightest
suspicion of the fraud crossed the minds of the Great People, without
doubt they would all be sacrificed as impostors.

This was the tale that they must tell:--They should say that all of them
were hunting game in a far country with himself, Soa, and Francisco,
when one night they heard a singing, and by the light of the moon they
saw the Shepherdess and the dwarf Otter coming towards them. Then the
Shepherdess and Otter commanded them to be their servants and travel
with them to a new land, and they obe