"In the bank, about a dozen riot-guns and half a dozen repeating
rifles. Elsewhere I don't know. Forty or fifty men said they had
revolvers, though."

"We'll give revolvers to the men who go with the fishermen. The
Indians haven't heard firearms and will run at the report, even if
they dare attack our men."

"We can send out the gun-armed men as hunters," some one suggested,
"and send gardeners with them to look for vegetables and such
things."

"We'll have to take a sort of census, really," Arthur suggested,
"finding what every one can do and getting him to do it."

"I never planned anything like this before," Van Deventer remarked,
"and I never thought I should, but this is much more fun than
running a bank."

Arthur smiled.

"Let's go and have our meeting," he said cheerfully.

But the meeting was a gloomy and despairing affair. Nearly every
one had watched the sun set upon a strange, wild landscape. Hardly
an individual among the whole two thousand of them had ever been
out of sight of a house before in his or her life. To look out
at a vast, untouched wilderness where hitherto they had seen the
most highly civilized city on the globe would have been startling