ds, panting and perspiring under the burden of a basket held up
by a strap which passed across their foreheads. Yeo's sneer was but
too just; there were not only old men and youths among them, but women;
slender young girls, mothers with children, running at their knee;
and, at the sight, a low murmur of indignation rose from the ambushed
Englishmen, worthy of the free and righteous hearts of those days, when
Raleigh could appeal to man and God, on the ground of a common humanity,
in behalf of the outraged heathens of the New World; when Englishmen
still knew that man was man, and that the instinct of freedom was
the righteous voice of God; ere the hapless seventeenth century had
brutalized them also, by bestowing on them, amid a hundred other bad
legacies, the fatal gift of negro-slaves.

But the first forty, so Amyas counted, bore on their backs a burden
which made all, perhaps, but him and Yeo, forget even the wretches who
bore it. Each basket contained a square package of carefully corded
hide; the look whereof friend Amyas knew full well.

"What's in they, captain?"

"Gold!" And at that magic word all eyes were strained greedily forward,
and such a rustle followed, that Amyas, in the very face of detection,
had to whisper--

"Be men, be men, or you will spoil all yet!"

The last twenty, or so, of the Indians bore larger baskets, but more
lightly freighted, seemingly with manioc, and maize-bread, and other
food for the party; and after them came, with their bearers and
attendants, just twenty soldiers more, followed by the officer in
charge, who smiled away in his chair, and twirled two huge mustachios,
thinking of nothing less than of the English arrows which were itching
to be away and through his ribs. The ambush was complete; the only
question how and when to begin?

Amyas had a shrinking, which all will understand, from drawing bow in
cool blood on men so utterly unsuspicious and defenceless, even though
in the very act of devilish cruelty--for devilish cruelty it was, as
three or four drivers armed with whips lingered up and down the slowly
staggering file of Indians, and avenged every moment's lagging, even
every stumble, by a blow of the cruel manati-hide, which cracked like
a pistol-shot against the naked limbs of the silent and uncomplaining
victim.

Suddenly the casus belli, as usually happens, arose of its own accord.

The last but one of the chained line was an old gray-headed man,
followed by