"Opeki," he said. The line grew in length until it proved to be an
island with great mountains rising to the clouds, and, as they drew
nearer and nearer, showed a level coast running back to the foot of
the mountains and covered with a forest of palms. They next made out a
village of thatched huts around a grassy square, and at some distance
from the village a wooden structure with a tin roof.
"I wonder where the town is?" asked the consul, with a nervous glance
at the fishermen. One of them told him that what he saw was the town.
"That?" gasped the consul. "Is that where all the people on the island
live?"
The fisherman nodded; but the other added that there were other
natives further back in the mountains, but that they were bad men who
fought and ate each other. The consul and his attache of legation
gazed at the mountains with unspoken misgivings. They were quite near
now, and could see an immense crowd of men and women, all of them
black, and clad but in the simplest garments, waiting to receive them.
They seemed greatly excited and ran in and out of the huts, and up and
down the beach, as wildly as so many black ants. But in the front of
the group they distinguished three men who they could see were white,
though they were clothed, like the others, simply in a shirt and a
short pair of trousers. Two of these three suddenly sprang away on a
run and disappeared among the palm-trees; but the third one, when he
recognized the American flag in the halyards, threw his straw hat in
the water and began turning handsprings over the sand.
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