"
"And now what's to be done?" she asked. "You've treed your game, but you
can't keep it treed."
"No; but I can teach them a lesson."
Sheldon walked over to the big bell.
"It is all right," he replied to her gesture of protest. "My boys are
practically all bushmen, while these chaps are salt-water men, and
there's no love lost between them. You watch the fun."
He rang a general call, and by the time the two hundred labourers trooped
into the compound Satan was once more penned in the living-room,
complaining to high heaven at his abominable treatment. The plantation
hands were dancing war-dances around the base of every tree and filling
the air with abuse and vituperation of their hereditary enemies. The
skipper of the _Flibberty-Gibbet_ arrived in the thick of it, in the
first throes of oncoming fever, staggering as he walked, and shivering so
severely that he could scarcely hold the rifle he carried. His face was
ghastly blue, his teeth clicked and chattered, and the violent sunshine
through which he walked could not warm him.
"I'll s-s-sit down, and k-k-keep a guard on 'em," he chattered. "D-d-dash
it all, I always g-get f-fever when there's any excitement. W-w-wh-what
are you going to do?"
"Gather up the guns first of all.
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