ory or even legend extended. From whence
those white people had come, or how long they had inhabited the land of
which they held such stubborn possession, there was no record to tell;
but the grievance of the blacks seemed to consist in the fact that the
interlopers--as they chose to regard them--occupied the whole of a
peculiarly rich and fertile tract of country from which, though they
were relatively few in number, they resolutely refused to be dislodged;
while the surrounding territory, occupied by the blacks, was
comparatively poor, sterile, and ill-watered, affording an ever more
scanty subsistence to the steadily growing population. Also there was a
widespread belief, amounting to conviction among the blacks, that their
white neighbours were wont to punish such attempts as were made from
time to time to drive them out, by putting all prisoners to death in a
variety of peculiarly hideous forms--although it was by no means clear
how this belief arose, since no prisoners ever returned to throw any
light upon the subject.

It is not, perhaps, greatly to be wondered at if, under such
circumstances, the blacks had gradually come to regard the possessor of
a white skin as the incarnation of everything that was superlatively
detestable, and a person to be destroyed promptly with as little
hesitation or compunction as one would destroy a particularly venomous
snake; and such was the feeling which Grosvenor and Dick inspired in the
breasts of those natives in whose hands they found themselves upon a
certain memorable day. It was at first proposed to put them to the
torture _sans ceremonie_; but a certain petty chief, anxious to curry
favour with the king, intervened in the nick of time, and, having made
prisoners of the entire party, sent the whole of them, including the
wagon, oxen, horses, and animals generally, to the king's village, in
order that His Majesty might have his full share of such sport as the
torture of the white men might furnish. This journey, however, occupied
five days, during the progress of which the two white men proved to be
so different in every respect from the only other white men whom the
blacks had ever encountered, to be possessed of such strange powers, and
to be, generally, such "kittle cattle" to deal with, that the king,
learning that these strangers were bent upon entering the territory of
his white neighbours, ultimately came to the somewhat cynical conclusion
that he could kill two