Captain Jinks, Hero by Ernest Howard Crosby (story read aloud txt) 📕

of tree-houses with platters of meat, and the crowd opened to let them approach.

“Don’t ask what it is,” said Cleary, as he gulped down his rations.

“I can’t eat it!” cried Sam.

“Oh, you must, or you’ll offend them,” said Colonel James.

And they completed their repast with wry faces. When they had finished, one of the warriors, whom they had noticed before on account of his comparative height and the magnificence of his decorations, came up to them and addressed them, to their great surprise, in Castalian. He explained to them that he was the famous savage chief, Carlos, who as head of the Moritos ruled the entire region, and that they were prisoners of war; that he had learned Castalian as a boy from a missionary in the mountains when the land was at peace; and that a palaver would be held on the following day, to which the heads of the neighboring villages would be invited, to determine what to do with them. He showed special interest in Sam’s red hair and mustache, and smoothed them and pulled them, asking him if they had been dyed. When he was informed that they were not, he was filled with admiration and called up his favorites to examine this wonder of nature. Sam had noticed that from the moment of his arrival he had been the object of admiration of the women, and this fact was now accounted for.

The three prisoners had no reason to complain of their treatment during the day. A guard was set upon them, but the ropes by which they were tied were loosened, and they were allowed from time to time to walk about. Most of the morning they passed in much-needed sleep. In the afternoon Carlos visited them again with some of his men, and set to work to satisfy his curiosity as to their country, translating their answers to his friends. His Castalian was very bad, but so was that of his captives; yet they succeeded in making themselves understood without difficulty.

“Do you have houses as high as those?” he asked, pointing to the human nests in the trees.

“Yes, indeed,” said Cleary. “Near my home there is a house nearly a quarter of a mile long and twice as high as that tree, and nine hundred people live in it.”

There were murmurs of astonishment as this information was translated.

“What is that great house for?” asked the chief.

“It’s a lunatic asylum.”

“What is that?”

“A house for lunatics to live in.”

“But what is a lunatic?”

Cleary tried in vain to explain what a lunatic was. The Moritos had never seen one.

“We have plenty of such houses at home,” said Sam, “and we have had to double their size in ten years to hold the lunatics; they are splendid buildings. There was one not very far from the college where my friend and I were educated. But some of our prisons are even larger than our lunatic asylums.”

“What is a prison,” asked Carlos.

“Oh,” said Sam, “don’t you understand that either? It’s a house in which we lock up criminals⁠—I mean men who kill us or rob us.”

“Oh, I see,” replied Carlos. “You mean your enemies whom you take prisoner in battle.”

“No, I don’t. I mean our own fellow citizens who murder and steal.”

“Do you mean that you sometimes kill each other and steal from each other, your own tribe?”

“Yes,” said Sam. “Of course people who do so are bad men, but there are some such among us.”

A great discussion arose among the natives after hearing this.

“What do they say?” asked Colonel James in Castalian.

“They say,” said the chief, “that they can not believe this, as they have never heard of members of the same tribe hurting each other.”

“We do all we can to prevent it,” said Sam. “In our cities we have policemen to keep order; that is, we have soldiers stationed in the streets to frighten the bad men.”

“Do you have soldiers in the streets of your towns to keep you from killing each other!” exclaimed the chief, in astonishment. “Who ever heard of such a thing? I do not understand it,” and, although Sam repeated the information in every conceivable way permitted by his limited vocabulary, he was unable successfully to convey the idea.

“It is strange how uncivilized they are,” he said to his friends.

“Do you live on bananas in your country?” asked Carlos.

“No; we eat them sometimes, but we live on grain and meat,” said Sam.

“You must have to work very hard to get it.”

“Yes, we do, sometimes twelve hours a day.”

“How frightful! And is there enough for all to eat?”

“Not always.”

“And are your people happy when they work so hard and are sometimes hungry?”

“Not always,” said Sam. “Sometimes people are so unhappy that they commit suicide.”

“What?”

“I mean they kill themselves.”

There was now another heated discussion.

“What do they say?” asked Colonel James.

“They say that they did not know it was possible for people to kill themselves. I did not know it either. It is very strange.”

“What limited intelligences they have!” exclaimed Sam.

“They say,” continued Carlos, in a somewhat embarrassed manner, “that if you are condemned to death, they wish one of you would kill himself, so that they can see how it is done.”

“There’s a chance for you, Sam,” said Cleary, but Sam did not seem to see the joke.

“I am very sorry,” said Carlos, seating himself nearer to Sam, “I am very sorry that we may have to kill you, for I like you; but what can we do? It is a rule of our tribe to kill prisoners of war.”

“I really don’t see what they can do, if that is the case,” said Sam in English. “If that is their law, and they have always done it, of course from their point of view it is their military duty. I don’t see any way out of it. Do you?”

“It wouldn’t break my heart if they failed to do their duty in this case,” said Cleary. “For heaven’s sake, don’t tell him what you think. Let’s