Thus disguised, with a silk sash round his middle and a pistol stuck in it, Leonard might well have been mistaken for the most ferocious of slave-traders.
Otter too looked sufficiently strange, robed as an Arab and wearing a turban.

Being a dwarf, the difficulty was that all the dresses proved too long for him.

Finally it was found necessary to cut one down by the primitive process of laying it on a block of wood and chopping through it with a sabre.
When this change of garments had been effected, and their own clothes with the spare arms were hidden away in the rushes on the somewhat remote chance that they might be useful hereafter, they prepared for a start on foot across the marshes.

By an afterthought Leonard fetched the bag of gold and put it in his pocket.

He felt few scruples in availing himself of the money of the slave-driver, not for his own use indeed, but because it might help their enterprise.
Now their road ran along marshes and by secret paths that none save those who had travelled them could have found.