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Well, gents, I move that at the first available spot we go ashore, feed our faces, look at the ladies, and perform our morning salute to Umanuh said salute consisting of applying the right thumb to the end of the nose and snappily twiddling four fingers." "Motion carried." McKay's set face relaxed. Then, his glance dropping to the Raposa, it tightened again. "Oh, hullo, Rand! How you feeling?"
"If a Red Bone man abandoned his people and went to another tribe, what would Umanuh do to him when he was found?" A cold glimmer in the chief's eyes showed that he thought he understood. Moreover, he would much like to see what sort of torture this hard-faced Blackbeard would use on a fugitive. It might be something even more fiendish than his own pastimes. So the next reply came promptly.
After that perhaps he intends to find us and get Rand, or perhaps to attack other Mayoruna malocas. At any rate, his first objective is this place. Am I right so far?" "Dead right," Knowlton nodded. "Very well. Now he may figure that, having found the water connection between the two creeks, the Mayorunas will come against Umanuh by the canoe route. Or he may think they'll make the overland trip.
"It has come to the ears of Makkay," Lourenço informed the man of Umanuh, "that a man of the Blackbeards lives among the men of the Red Bones. Makkay would see that man." Again the interpreter awaited his master's voice before answering. "No man of the Blackbeards is among the men of Umanuh," he then denied. "If he is not among them he is near them," was Lourenço's certain reply.
"If that man is found the blackbeard will pay for him?" "There are gifts of friendship for Umanuh," Lourenço nodded. "The Blackbeard leader will pay more than the other Blackbeard?" Lourenço almost blinked. What other Blackbeard? The Raposa himself? But the Brazilian repressed his bewilderment. "Makkay will first see the man to make sure he is the Blackbeard whom Makkay wants," he dodged.
"Then he will pay well." "Umanuh will see the gifts now." "The gifts cannot be shown now. They are packed away. When Makkay has looked on the man Umanuh shall look on the gifts." Another eye duel between the chief and McKay. As before, the captain's eye proved the harder. "Umanuh will think of the matter. Night comes. The man hunted by the Blackbeard is not here.
Some time later more yells of rage sounded, much nearer back at a place on the creek which the last boat had cleared only a few minutes previously. Some of the Umanuh men had made torches and run along one of the Red Bone trails to a bend in the stream, only to find the water bare of everything but dying ripples.
The man who sat was the chief of the Red Bones. In his first words to the visitors the old interpreter revealed that the name of the Red Bone ruler was Umanuh. And whatever the name may have signified in the language of the Red Bones, its Tupi definition fitted with disagreeable precision. For Umanuh was a living cadaver.
For commercial reasons alone, Umanuh had seen to it that the woman flesh he held for sale should remain uninjured. Now, saved from the slave trail or worse, the girls showed no more emotion than if on a mere journey after turtles or fish. A few spoke to men whom they evidently knew. Others gathered in a dumb cluster and awaited whatever might come next.
"He has been seen both by other Blackbeards and by the Mayorunas. I, too, have seen him. He bears on his bones the sign that his mind is out of his skull. His eyes are green and his hair touched with white. Umanuh and his men know well that I speak true." The pause this time was longer than before. "There was such a man, but he is gone." "Then Makkay asks his friend Umanuh to find that one.
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