all swore to stand by us to a man, and to keep themselves free from Ja Ja's tyrannical rule. After making this round we returned to the mouth of the river and turned our attention to the defence of the new villages that were about to be built.
A little accident occurred to us while leaving the last village, called Ikoropata, that may be worth mentioning as a warning to others who might be placed in a similar situation. We had just started after having a long palaver with the chiefs, our men, about twenty, marching in single file, I near the leading man. All at once I noticed he was carrying his gun in a very alarming and unsuitable way. Had it gone off by accident, which is not an unusual occurrence, the man behind him was bound to receive the contents, with perhaps fatal results. Having stopped them and explained the danger of carrying guns in this position, we started off again, every man with his weapon to his shoulder. Strange to say, a few minutes after the very man's gun I had noticed at first blew off into the air with a tremendous report. Had this happened before, I fear we might have had to take one of our comrades back more dead than alive. The escape was a marvellous one, and not easily forgotten by any of us.
Now being back amongst our own people, we set about to get all the guns we could together, and all able bodied men I told off for gun practice and defence drill. This I carried on day after day, until we had quite a little band of well-trained men. All this time we were continually receiving rumours from the Opobo side as to what Ja Ja's next intentions were, and to keep up the excitement he sent about 200 men as near the mouth of the river as he dared. They settled themselves in a creek two or three
