Page:Rowland--The Mountain of Fears.djvu/89

  starvation and vermin" (he scratched his shoulder with a squirm)—"I itch yet when I think of it—after a month of all this I became ennuyé and decided to leave." His voice grew ominously hard. "So one evening I took Frederick and we came away. Frederick was at pretty low ebb by that time, and it took about three days' skillful jockeying to coax his German blood to the top; but eventually I got it there in sufficient volume to make me think that it would remain for an hour or two—and it did!—long enough to enable him to kill one of the devilish nigger guards with his naked hands. I crushed the skull of an other with a jagged piece of rock, and then we wandered down the beach, found a rotten old canoe and paddled out to sea.

"The canoe was half waterlogged, and I knew that it would not carry us very far, so I decided to try and get to Margherita and take our chances on the rest. When the day broke I could just distinguish the outlines of the island, with the usual big cloud hanging [ 73 ]