Deppingham was transfixed with astonishment.
"How--how the devil do you--does he bring 'em to time like that ?" he murmured.

He afterward said that if he had had Saunders there at that humiliating moment he would have kicked him.
"They're afraid of the American battleship," said Browne.
"But where is the American battleship ?" demanded Deppingham, looking wildly to sea.
"They understand that there will be one here in a day or two if we need it," said Browne with a sly grin.

"That's the bluff we've worked." He looked around for his wife, and, finding that she had gone inside, politely waved his hand to the Englishman and followed.
At three o'clock, Britt returned with the recalcitrant servants--or at least the "pick" of them, as he termed the score he had chosen from the hundred or more.

He seemed to have an Aladdin-like effect over the horde.

It did not appear to depress him in the least that from among the personal effects of more than one peeped the ominous blade of a kris, or the clutch of a great revolver.