Long Arrow brought another Indian, short but enormously broad, and introduced him to the Doctor as Big Teeth, the chief warrior of the Popsipetels.

The Doctor volunteered to go and see the enemy and try to argue the matter out peacefully with them instead of fighting; for war, he said, was at best a stupid wasteful business.  But the two shook their heads.  Such a plan was hopeless, they said.  In the last war when they had sent a messenger to do peaceful arguing, the enemy had merely hit him with an ax.

While the Doctor was asking Big Teeth how he meant to defend the village against attack, a cry of alarm was raised by the look-outs.

“They’re coming!—­The Bag-jagderags-swarming down the mountains in thousands!”

“Well,” said the Doctor, “it’s all in the day’s work, I suppose.  I don’t believe in war; but if the village is attacked we must help defend it.”

And he picked up a club from the ground and tried the heft of it against a stone.

“This,” he said, “seems like a pretty good tool to me.”  And he walked to the bamboo fence and took his place among the other waiting fighters.

Then we all got hold of some kind of weapon with which to help our friends, the gallant Popsipetels:  I borrowed a bow and a quiver full of arrows; Jip was content to rely upon his old, but still strong teeth; Chee-Chee took a bag of rocks and climbed a palm where he could throw them down upon the enemies’ heads; and Bumpo marched after the Doctor to the fence armed with a young tree in one hand and a door-post in the other.

When the enemy drew near enough to be seen from where we stood we all gasped with astonishment.  The hillsides were actually covered with them—­ thousands upon thousands.  They made our small army within the village look like a mere handful.

“Saints alive!” muttered Polynesia, “our little lot will stand no chance against that swarm.  This will never do.  I’m going off to get some help.”  Where she was going and what kind of help she meant to get, I had no idea.  She just disappeared from my side.  But Jip, who had heard her, poked his nose between the bamboo bars of the fence to get a better view of the enemy and said,

“Likely enough she’s gone after the Black Parrots.  Let’s hope she finds them in time.  Just look at those ugly ruffians climbing down the rocks—­ millions of ’em!  This fight’s going to keep us all hopping.”

And Jip was right.  Before a quarter of an hour had gone by our village was completely surrounded by one huge mob of yelling, raging Bag-jagderags.

I now come again to a part in the story of our voyages where things happened so quickly, one upon the other, that looking backwards I see the picture only in a confused kind of way.  I know that if it had not been for the Terrible Three—­ as they came afterwards to be fondly called in Popsipetel history—­ Long Arrow, Bumpo and the Doctor, the war would have been soon over and the whole island would have belonged to the worthless Bag-jagderags.  But the Englishman, the African and the Indian were a regiment in themselves; and between them they made that village a dangerous place for any man to try to enter.