wo separate leaders, each with his adherents, perhaps temporarily
associated together for purposes of plunder.

That they had collected the wreck of the corvette, and divided the
spoils between them, was evident from the two heaps being kept carefully
apart, each piled up near the tent of a chief.

The old man-o'-war's-man made his observations in the midst of great
difficulties; for while noting these particulars, he was pulled about
the place, first by one sheik, then by the other, each retaining his
disputed person in temporary possession.

From the manner in which they acted, he could tell that it was his
person that was the subject of dispute, and that both wanted to be the
proprietor of it.

CHAPTER TWENTY ONE.

THE TWO SHEIKS.

There was a remarkable difference between the two men thus claiming
ownership in the body of Old Bill. One was a little weazen-faced
individual, whose yellow complexion and sharp angular features
proclaimed him of the Arab stock; while his competitor showed a skin of
almost ebon blackness, a frame of herculean development, a broad face,
with flat nose and thick lubberly lips, a head of enormous
circumference, surmounted by a mop of woolly hair, standing erect
several inches above his occiput.

Had the sailor been addicted to ethnological speculations, he might have
derived an interesting lesson from that contest, of which he was the
cause. It might have helped him to a knowledge of the geography of the
country in which he had been cast, for he was now upon that neutral
territory where the true Ethiopian, the son of Ham, occasionally
contests possession, both of the soil and the slave, with the wandering
children of Japhet.

The two men who were thus quarrelling about the possession of the
English tar, though both of African origin, could scarce have been more
unlike had their native countries been the antipodes of each other.

Their object was not so different, though even in this there was a
certain dissimilation. Both designed making the shipwrecked sailor a
slave. But the sheik of Arabs aspects wished to possess him, with a
view to his ultimate ransom. He knew that by carrying him northwards
there would be a chance to dispose of him at a good price, either to the
Jew merchants at Wedinoin, or the European consuls at Mogador. It would
not be the first Saaran castaway he had in this manner restored to his
friends and his country, not from any motives of humanity, but