It was not a sensation of fear but of humiliation--the
humiliation of defeat, the knowledge of his own weakness in the hands of
this man who had so quickly and so surely blocked his claim. His quick
brain saw the futility of argument. He possessed no absolute proof and
he had thought that he needed none. Strang saw the flash of doubt in his
face, the hesitancy in his answer; he divined the working of the other's
brain and in his soft voice, purring with friendship, he followed up his
triumph.
"I sympathize with you," he spoke gently, "and my sympathy and word
shall help you. We do not welcome strangers among us, for strangers have
usually proved themselves our enemies and have done us wrong. But to you
I give the freedom of our kingdom. Search where you will, at what hours
you will, and when you have found a single proof that your stolen
property is among my people--when you have seen a face that you
recognize as one of the robbers, return to me and I shall make
restitution and punish the evil-doers."
So intensely he spoke, so filled with reason and truth were his words,
that Nathaniel thrust out his hand in token of acceptance of the king's
terms. And as Strang gripped that hand Captain Plum saw the young girl's
face over the prophet's shoulder--a face, white as death in its terror,
that told him all he had heard was a lie.
"And when you have done with my people," continued the king, "you will
go among that other race, along the mainland, where men have thrown off
the restraints of society to give loose reign to lust and avarice; where
the Indian is brutified that his wife may be intoxicated by compulsion
and prostituted by violence before his eyes; where the forest cabins and
the streets of towns are filled with half-breeds; where there stalk
wretches with withered and tearless eyes, who are in nowise troubled by
recollection of robbery, rape and murder.
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