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When he had ceased speaking the Swede strove to assume an air of composure

that his listener might not have his suspicions aroused as to the truth of the

statements that had just been made.

Momulla sat for some time in silence, eyeing Gust. At last he rose.

"You are a great liar," he said. "If you don't get us on our way by tomorrow you'll

never have another chance to lie, for I heard two of the men saying that they'd

like to run a knife into you and that if you kept them in this hole any longer

they'd do it."

"Go and ask Kai Shang if there is not a wireless," replied Gust. "He will tell you

that there is such a thing and that vessels can talk to one another across

hundreds of miles of water. Then say to the two men who wish to kill me that if

they do so they will never live to spend their share of the swag, for only I can get

you safely to any port."

So Momulla went to Kai Shang and asked him if there was such an apparatus as

a wireless by means of which ships could talk with each other at great distances,

and Kai Shang told him that there was.

Momulla was puzzled; but still he wished to leave the island, and was willing to

take his chances on the open sea rather than to remain longer in the monotony of

the camp.

"If we only had someone else who could navigate a ship!" wailed Kai Shang.

That afternoon Momulla went hunting with two other Maoris. They hunted

toward the south, and had not gone far from camp when they were surprised by

the sound of voices ahead of them in the jungle.

They knew that none of their own men had preceded them, and as all were

convinced that the island was uninhabited, they were inclined to flee in terror on

the hypothesis that the place was haunted--possibly by the ghosts of the

murdered officers and men of the Cowrie.

But Momulla was even more curious than he was superstitious, and so he

quelled his natural desire to flee from the supernatural. Motioning his

companions to follow his example, he dropped to his hands and knees, crawling

forward stealthily and with quakings of heart through the jungle in the direction

from which came the voices of the unseen speakers.

Presently, at the edge of a little clearing, he halted, and there he breathed a deep

sigh of relief, for plainly before him he saw two flesh-and-blood men sitting upon

a fallen log and talking earnestly together.

149

The Beasts of Tarzan