d behind each "sheik"--all seemingly alike eager to perform
the act of decapitation.

So near seemed the old sailor's head to being cut off, that for some
seconds he was not quite sure whether it still remained upon his
shoulders! He could not understand a word that passed between the
contending parties, though there was talk enough to have satisfied a
sitting of parliament, and probably with about the same quantity of
sense in it.

Before he had proceeded far, the sailor began to comprehend,--not from
the speeches made, but the gestures that accompanied them,--that it was
not the design of either party to cut off his head. The drawn scimitars,
sweeping through the air, were not aimed at his neck, but rather in
mutual menace of one another.

Old Bill could see that there was some quarrel between the two sheiks,
of which he was himself the cause; that the camp was not a unity
consisting of a single chief, his family, and following; but that there
were too 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 XXII.

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 wizen-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