THE
SORCERER’S
STONE

frontis

I saw Mrs. Daisie’s little hand pause for a moment at the odd lump under his shirt and feel it with the dexterity of a pickpocket

THE
SORCERER’S STONE

BY

BEATRICE GRIMSHAW

Author of “Vaiti of the Island,” “When the
Red Gods Call,” etc.

ILLUSTRATED BY
CHARLES SARKA

PHILADELPHIA
THE JOHN C. WINSTON COMPANY
PUBLISHERS

Copyright, 1914, by
The John C. Winston Co.
Copyright, 1913, 1914, by
The Ridgway Company

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

11

I
THE SORCERER’S STONE

CHAPTER I

THE SORCERER’S STONE

It was dark in the marea, yet not so dark but that the Marquis and I could see about us. We had been inside this New Guinea temple, or club-house, or Parliament building—you might call it a little of all three, and not go very far wrong—for over half an hour, and our eyes were getting accustomed to the gloom.

There were thirty or forty men in it, squatting about the floor, or lying on the bamboo shelves they used as beds. In the brown dusk of the unwindowed building, they seemed to melt into their surroundings like ghosts, for they were brown too, and wore no clothes save a bark loin-cloth. You could see the whites of their eyes, and their bead necklaces, and the halos of colored feathers they wore in their hair—little more. They were smoking, chewing betel-nut, and spitting its blood-red juice out on the floor—grunting, scratching, staring at us. They had heads like a soldier’s fur busby; their bodies were small, according to white men’s standards, but they were notably well-made and muscled, and evenly developed. Most of them had wooden spears and tall war-bows lying on the ground within reach; and the walls of the marea were covered with clubs, shields, spears and bunches of barbed arrows.

The scene was old to me—old to weariness. I had been in these temples, or others like them, more times than I could count, recruiting boys for some island trip, trading, getting food. It was true that I had never been in this especial district of New Guinea, but I did not see much difference between the savages I knew and the savages I didn’t know. And anyhow, I had long since lost interest in them, save as a means of making money.

But the Marquis, I think, felt it to be the moment of his life.

There he sat, on a pile of our baggage, as on a throne, holding his head erect, and swelling out from the chest even more than usual—which is to say something, for the Marquis is six feet four, and weighs near eighteen stone. He had come the whole way from France to study—what do you think? Magic—of which he had heard there was plenty in New Guinea. So there is: it is the greatest nuisance in the country, and I for my part would as soon think of going out to look for red ants or for stinging-tree. But the Marquis took what he called a scientific interest in the occult—which meant that he was bored for want of a little honest hard work to do, and didn’t know it—and I had had bad luck with my last prospecting trip into the interior: lost four carriers (clubbed and eaten) and two mates (blackwater fever) and found nothing.

So I was rather glad to take on the Marquis, when he turned up in Port Moresby wanting a resident of the country to find carriers for him and lead a trip through the country lying about the coast. I thought I might light on payable gold after all—I’ve always had an idea that there might be something in the Kata-Kata country, and I thought, too, that I could do with a quiet, peaceful, easy sort of trip for once, after the kind of thing I had been having.

Quiet! Peaceful! Just wait till I have done.

It looked peaceful enough that evening, at all events. We had had a fairly long tramp to get to the village—which is celebrated all over Kata-Kata as the headquarters of local sorcery—and had not arrived till sundown. The Marquis, on hearing that the Kata-Kata people were not cannibals, had insisted on sleeping in the marea instead of in our tents. It would be better for his purpose of studying the natural man and his connection with the occult—so he said. I thought it might turn out in his seeing a little more natural man than he wanted, since the Kata-Kata folk were by reputation a nasty lot, and had been man-eaters ten years ago, though the Government had sent punitive expeditions in often enough to reform them since then.

Unless the Marquis was asleep, or eating, he never stopped talking. His English was not quite English, but you could understand it all right; at any rate, he did not talk like a Frenchman on the stage. He was talking now, and I was not listening closely; it went in at one ear and out at the other. The village men, crouched on the ground, chewed, and spat red, and looked out at him from under their sullen brows.

They did not like us very much, it struck me. They were not accustomed to white people up there, except with punitive expeditions, which do not exactly smooth the way for those who come after.

Our interpreter—who could not interpret very much of the Kata-Kata talk after all—had told us that Mo, the big sorcerer, was out in the forest making spells, but that he would be in at sundown, and then perhaps he might consent, if we gave him plenty of tobacco and a lot of salt, to show us something. We had been waiting for him a good while, but there was no sign of Mo.

I was getting quite sleepy, as I sat on the ground, smoking and thinking. It had grown darker; the men had thrown some cocoanut shells on the pile of hot ashes in the center of the floor, and a small, fierce blaze had sprung up, showing the white boar-tusk bracelets on the brown arms, and the quiver of the long head-feathers. The Marquis, I knew without listening, was telling me about a “dear woman who loved him—a beautiful, a kind”—because he was twisting the ends of his mustache while he talked—he always did that when he began sentimental confidences, and the ends of his mustache, in consequence, were like nothing but long, sharp pins.

Of a sudden, he dropped his hands, sprang off the throne of sacks like a wallaby—he was wonderfully light on his feet, for his size—and went down the ladder leading from the door to the ground, in two jumps. I had been sitting with my back to the doorway, and could not see what it was that had agitated him; however, I got up, without undue haste, undid the fastening of the revolver holster that was strapped to my belt, and went down the ladder after the Marquis.

The village street was wide and sandy, reflecting back the light; there was a young moon coming up now above the cocoanut palms, and the sharp brown gables of the houses stood out clear among the stars. I could see the natives slipping like shadows in and out among the platforms and supporting piles all down the street; I saw a wolf-like kangaroo dog sitting in the moon, and a small tame cassowary taking a running kick at it, as it went past. But I could not see the Marquis.

This did not altogether please me, for Kata-Kata is a good way outside Government influence, and things might happen, though they are not likely to. I walked about in the soft sand for a minute or two, and stopped to look and listen. I could hear nothing of the Marquis, but I heard what located him for me just as well as a flood of French or English conversation—the coy, pleased, flattered giggle of a girl.

I made straight for the sound, and there in the growing moonlight, behind the white stems of a clump of betel-palm, was the Marquis—dancing.

I have not mentioned it—being unaccustomed to writing, and apt to lose my way—but I ought to have said that the Marquis had two special fads, and they were sorcery and dancing. He knew all about every dance that had ever been danced in the history of the world, from David’s fandango before the ark, down to Genée’s latest pirouette at the Empire. And, in spite of his height and weight, he could dance them all himself, more or less, but mostly more.

You might have thought he would look ridiculous when he danced, but he did not: no man looks ridiculous doing that which he does supremely well. He did not look ridiculous even now—pink, fat, a bit disheveled, stepping and springing, advancing and retreating, and wreathing his fat arms above his bullet head, here in the moonlight, behind a clump of betel, with a grass-kilted, giggling New Guinea girl looking on at the mad procedure.

18

I made straight for the sound, and there in the growing moonlight, behind the white stems of a clump of betel-palm, was the Marquis—dancing

“Hallo, Mark!” I said (I used to call him that, because, being only a plain Australian without much schooling, I never could remember or pronounce his own extraordinary name). “What are you dancing?”

“It is the Love Dance of the Red Men of Roraima,” said the Marquis, doing something quite extraordinary—I think with the calves of his legs, but he was too quick for one to see.

“Why the Love Dance, and why Red Men?” I asked.

“Because,” said the Marquis, beginning to walk with a cross-swaying motion that really was fine—like Indian corn blowing in the wind—“I desire to find the key to the heart of this little beautiful, since I saw her on the steps of the marea; and the dance talks, even when one does not know a word of their own blessed language. And the Red Men—I chose their dance because they will, without doubt, be spiritually akin to the soul of this boshter little kid.”

The girl drew up one leg under her grass crinoline like a hen, and giggled as if she understood. She was really pretty—if a New Guinea girl is ever pretty; I do not admire them myself, but it is all a matter of taste. She was lighter in color than most, a sort of golden brown, and of course, being a young savage, and not a civilized person, she had a perfect figure. She had the little, aristocratic-looking hands these Papuans often have (their hands, I reckon, are like those of the old families among white people, because neither Papuans nor old families ever do a stroke of work that they can help), and she had big eyes and a bush of hair, and was a good deal dolled up with red and yellow flowers and pearl-shell necklaces and things.

All the same, she was just a little nigger, and the Marquis never ought to have flattered her by taking notice of her. It puts them out of their place.

Still, he went on dancing, and I really forgot about the girl for a little, watching him. It was so good, and the scene was so extraordinary—the open space of sandy soil, all lit up by the moon, and that great figure, dancing with incomparable lightness, against the background of long banana leaf and slender betel palm, like a very new sort of fairy in a very strange kind of fairy glade.

Then I happened to glance at the girl, and immediately all my amusement went out like a candle in the wind, and I fell to counting up what this especial freak of the Marquis’ might be likely to cost us. For the little Papuan, who had been standing some way off at first, chewing her necklace and giggling, had suddenly turned quite grave—solemn, even—and was advancing, step by step, like some one in a dream, toward the space where the Marquis danced. Her hands were spread out as if she were blind, and her eyes never looked at the ground, or the moonlight, or the village houses showing through the trees—only at the Marquis, dancing. And she stepped nearer and nearer.

I don’t go about with cotton-wool in my ears in the Papuan bush country, even when things are—or seem—as quiet as Sunday evening church in Sydney with the wrong girl alongside of you. I heard something moving in the scrub that wasn’t a pig or a dog; the Marquis didn’t hear it, for he was whistling softly to himself all the time he danced, and the girl didn’t, for she was hypnotized, or something like it. But I thought it as well to stop the circus just there; so, without looking round, I went forward, grabbed the Marquis by the shoulder, and said, “Cut it out!”

He had been long enough in my company by this time to know that I had generally very good reasons for anything I might say or do.

He stopped—not without a turn or two to finish it off nicely—and, responding to a pinch on the arm, moved away with me quite amicably. When we got back to the marea—the girl had vanished, somehow, as these natives can, without one’s even seeing how—he asked me what the matter was.

I did not answer him at first, for I was annoyed at the whole proceeding. Of course, I knew that he was only bent on a little trifling amusement—the Marquis let off most of his feelings in talk, and never took anything what you might call seriously—but all the same, he ought to have remembered, I thought, that we were in a strange, possibly a hostile country, and not have started flirting with any “little beautiful” before we had been an hour in the town.

So I sat down on the floor of the marea again, and lit my pipe before I would answer.

“Flint, my very good friend, I fear that you are in a blooming wax,” said the Marquis. “Why should you wax with me? What have I done?”

I took out my pipe. “You don’t seem to remember,” I said, “that we’re in a hostile country. I’d be obliged if you would.” I put back my pipe.

“What did you see?” asked the Marquis, quite grave and sensible now.

“I saw nothing,” I said. “I don’t know that there was anything. But I think I heard—the little creak that some of these big blackwood bows make.”

“When you take them to your bosom and pull hard?” asked the Marquis, who had been trying his strength on some of these weapons, and had been a good deal impressed by their power.

“Just that,” I said. “I wouldn’t dance the Love Dance of the Red Men of Roraima any more, if I were you. Or I wouldn’t dance it at that particular girl. Or at any girl.”

“She is a beautiful,” said the Marquis. “She is what you Australians, in your touching symbolism, call a tart. I remember an Australian little girl, in——”

He had got hold of both sides of his mustache—I saw that I was in for the deluge, so I cut it short.

“I believe that’s your sorcerer coming at last,” I said.

There was a noise of throbbing drums in the village, a tramping down the street, that evidently foretold the commencement of the evening dance. Now, it was hardly to be supposed that the village would begin its entertainment before the sorcerer came back from his spells in the forest to join in the revels. I told the Marquis this, and suggested we should have some trade stuff taken out of the packs in readiness. We got one of our boys to untie a sack or so, and selected some beads, knives, salt and tobacco.

“And here is the sorcerer, back from his spelling,” declared the Marquis, peering through the door at a tall, fine-looking man who was striding down the street with a general air of owning the whole place. He carried a big torch in his hand, and had a netted string bag over one shoulder. Slung on his breast was a large, hollow piece of bamboo, which he took some care to keep in a perpendicular position. His face, rather a fine one for a New Guinea native, showed clearly in the light of his torch: it was painted in stripes of black and scarlet, with a very fiendish effect. On his head was a magnificent head-dress of paradise and parrot feathers, rising fully three or four feet above his mat of hair. He had no clothes except a bark belt, and did not wear the bead and shell necklaces affected by most of the other people. There was something slung round his throat like a locket; it swayed about so that I could not see what it was.

“Yes, that’s the sorcerer without a doubt,” I said. “He’s making right here.”

He was; and our interpreter, a timid little lad from the coast, was so terrified at the sight that he ran and hid himself at the back of the marea, and had to be dragged out by force. By the time we had succeeded in quieting him down and assuring him that our weapons would protect us all from any sorcerer, the man was at the steps and mounting them.

In the light of the fire we saw at last what his locket was. I took it, at first, for a monkey’s paw, but, remembering that there are no monkeys in New Guinea, I had another look, and then realized that it was a human hand, dead and dried.

The Marquis looked at the ugly ornament much as a collector of insects looks at a hideous and valuable beetle.

“Flint, this is what you call the real Mackay,” he said. “This is the worth of my money.” He rose, and was about to greet the sorcerer with all the grace of Versailles—in fact, he had already begun a courtly bow—when a small and very ugly man, with ears like a bat, came running out of the dark from nowhere, and grabbed the great man by the foot, as he went up.

“Mo! Mo!” he cried; and then came a flood of native, intermingled with the wildest gestures. The ugly little man beat the air with his hands, thumped himself in the ribs, jumped up and down till the feathers on his head waved like cocoanut leaves in a hurricane, and all the time yelled, chattered, gasped and choked. Mo, who had come down the ladder again at the first word, stood looking at the furious little creature with an absolutely inexpressive face.

“What’s he saying?” I asked our interpreter, Koppi Koko.

The native’s face grew purposely blank and dull. “I no savvy,” he said.

“You do savvy,” I told him, beginning to unbuckle my belt.

“I savvy, I savvy,” he cried nervously. “Savvy little bit. That fellow man, him telling Mo some one make gammon along him, he no like. That fellow, he brother along Mo. ’Fore God, Taubada [master], I no more I savvy.”

He seemed a good deal scared about something, and when a Papuan is thoroughly scared, you may leave him alone for all you will get out of him. I said no more, and the furious little man, after a final jump and yell, shoved something into Mo’s hand and bolted away under the house like a rat. The sorcerer put his hand into his string bag for a moment, drew it out empty and mounted the ladder once more.

You could not tell what he thought, or if he thought anything, so complete was the veil of indifference he had drawn over his face. He had of course heard of our arrival in the village, so I was not surprised at his taking our visit as calmly as he did. But I did not—quite—like the way he had accepted the plaint of the bat-eared little man.

The rickety floor of sago-sheath creaked and dipped as Mo strode up the building. He went straight to where the Marquis and I were standing, folded his arms over his breast and uttered something in native that was evidently a greeting. The Marquis bowed, took his hand and shook it. I nodded at him. Mo turned aside a minute to hang up the hollow bamboo he carried so carefully (we could see it was plugged at one end with wood), and then swept Koppi Koko to him with a gesture of one hand.

We were great chiefs, no doubt, he said; he was glad we had come to see his village. Did we belong to the Government?

We assured him we did not—knowing that Kata-Kata had probably been saving up a good long score to settle with His Majesty’s representatives, since the last punitive expedition. This great chief, I said (through Koppi Koko), had come a very long way from his village, which was many, many moons away, to see Mo and hear about his wonderful doings. If Mo would show him any sorcery, he would give much tobacco and salt and beads, and other treasures. And (since sorcery is illegal) he would promise not to tell the Government anything about it.

While I talked, I could hear the dance getting ready in the village: feet were stamping; drums were throbbing with the intoxicating triple beat that all Papuan travelers know; loud, brassy voices were rising and falling in a monotonous chorus. I was glad to hear them, for I know the difference between songs of peace and songs of war, and this was not one of the latter.

Still—many years in New Guinea have given me an instinct for danger that has nothing at all to do with sight or hearing; and it was stirring, ever so slightly, now. I watched the sorcerer’s face as I talked.

It was still a blank; you could no more have read it than you could read a stone wall. Mo replied to my address that he had been making magic all day and was tired. Another day, he said, he would show us some. Tonight we could give him that tobacco and salt he saw, and he would think and prepare himself. Magic, he explained, took much preparation.

I did not care for the whole thing—a nigger is a nigger to me, and I can’t stand seeing them put on airs. Besides, I do not believe in their nonsense. But the Marquis did, and he was very anxious to see something; so I swallowed my own feelings and told Mo we should be glad to see his performance tomorrow, if that would suit him, and in the meantime he might have the tobacco—not the salt: that would come when he had done something to earn it. Salt is precious in the interior of New Guinea, and I was not minded to throw any of it away.

The Marquis was almost ready to cry—he had been looking forward to an immediate satisfaction of his curiosity, and he was like a child when disappointed.

“Ask him something,” he demanded. “Ask him at least what it is that he has in his bamboo, and why he carries a human hand round his neck, and what is in that string bag of his. Not to hear anything tonight, my Flint, that would indeed be the long lane that breaks the camel’s back. I’m not made of patience!”

“That’s right; you’re not,” said I. “Well, Koppi Koko, ask him.”

But here our interpreter went on strike. He was “too much fright,” he declared. He would not ask Mo what was in the bamboo, or about the hand, or anything else. It struck me that he already knew, since he came from the coast, only a few days away. But if he did, he would not tell.

“You need not worry,” I said to the Marquis. “I know all that’s in his old bag without looking. I’ve seen other sorcerers’ bags. There’ll be a lot of trash like lizards’ tails and bats’ wings, and frogs’ feet, and there’ll be queer-shaped stones he has picked up, and bits of carved wood, and dried leaves and plants, and there’s sure to be some quartz crystals—that’s great magic, with them—and there’ll very likely be a dagger made of human bone, and a native fork or two, and a betel-chewing outfit—poker-worked gourd, with a boar-tooth stopper, nuts, nice little spatula with carved head. That’s about all.”

“There could be nothing of more interest in the world,” declared the Marquis. “Ethnologically, you can see, without doubt, the connection between the Witches of Macbeth——”

“Cut it out, Mark,” I said. “You ought to know by this time that this horse isn’t yarded with that kind of corn. But if you don’t feel you can lay your golden head on your little pillow tonight without seeing the curio shop, I’ll work it all right. It only means a handful or two of salt.”

As I said before, I hate spending my salt when I haven’t got to; but I opened a tin, took a good handful and offered it to Mo, pointing at the same time to his bag and to our eyes. Koppi Koko had disappeared. I noted the fact, and decided to argue with him—helped by a bit of lawyer cane—later on.

The other natives had all cleared out by this time, and the sound of the dance was growing. Thud-thud went the feet; gallop-gallop the drum, like a horse’s hoofs. The fire was low in the marea, but it cast up a deep red glow toward the roof, giving light enough to see the contents of the wonderful bag, as Mo tumbled them out on the floor beside us. The salt had been too much for him; he accepted it eagerly, and was eating it like sugar, smearing his paint all to bits, and nearly choking himself as he sucked it down. These inland natives hardly ever see salt, and they are as keen for it as an alligator for fish, once they get the chance of a little.

Everything that was in the bag the Marquis handled, weighed, even smelt. I could tell him about most of the things. I did not know the Kata-Kata country, but quite a lot of the charms were familiar enough. This stone, I said, was meant to make the yam crops grow. This one was used for charming down rain. This carved monstrosity, like a pig that was half a beetle, probably was a charm for making war.

All the time he was handling and exclaiming over the trash in the bag, I kept a lookout on the sorcerer’s face. There was something I did not like in the air; the fact that I could not define it made it none the less real. It had to do, maybe, with the wooden demeanor of Mo—or with the disappearance of all the other men from the marea—or with a certain strange pitiful whimpering that had been going on under the house for quite a good while—a dog, perhaps; perhaps not.

Anyhow, I looked at Mo a good deal. If there was mischief in the village—no matter of what kind—the sorcerer was sure to be at the bottom of it.

The drums galloped outside, the dance went on. The moon climbed over the motionless tops of the cocoanut palms, and looked down into the open mouth of the marea. Half in the moonlight, half in the firelight, Mo’s face grew suddenly dark: he made a snatch at something that the Marquis was examining and hid it away—where, I could not see.

It was a trifling object, only a piece cut out of one of the plaited red and yellow belts that nearly every one in the village wore, men, women, and older children. The Marquis had been handling it rather closely, to examine the pattern. A smile crept over the sorcerer’s face when it was gone—a cunning, ugly smile, worse than the stony inexpressiveness that had gone before. I saw he was bent on making us forget that scrap of plaited stuff. He pulled out a lot of other things from the bag—fossils, beaks, bats’ wings, lumps of quartz crystal that glittered in the moon—and began showing them off.

More: by the sound of a certain word I had heard Koppi Koko use, I understood him to say that he was ready to do some magic for us, if we liked. He took down a cocoanut shell from the wall, and intimated that it was to be filled with salt first of all. I filled it, and Mo got up from his crouching posture on the floor and disappeared, making signs to show that he would return.

“How do you find that?” asked the Marquis.

“Lucky he had that rag in his collection,” I said. “He evidently forgot it was there, didn’t want us to see it, and is going to do some of his nonsense to put it out of our heads. It’s a throw-in for us, Mark.”

“If that signifies a bit of good luck, I am entirely of accord,” said the Marquis. “Flint, I am joyous; I must dance.”

And dance he did, lightly as a girl of sixteen, there in the huge dusk marea, in the moonlight and the firelight, holding out his arms like wings, and whistling as he danced. Before he had done, Mo appeared again with something in his hand; and for an instant the stony veil was lifted altogether from his face, and he shot such a look of hate at the Marquis that I felt my hand slip involuntarily round to my hip.

“The old curio dealer doesn’t like your dancing, Mark,” I warned. “Somehow your accomplishments don’t seem popular here.”

“It was the dance of Marianne before Herod,” said the Marquis, stopping at the end of a pirouette. “I dance that dance when I am glad. The second part of it, I mean—the part when Marianne has got the head of John the Baptist, and is satisfied of that.”

“Old Ikey Mo isn’t satisfied about something or other,” I said. “Let’s get him to work; perhaps he’ll forget his troubles then.”

“What has he got in his hand?” asked the Marquis, with interest.

It was a lizard, about ten inches long, yellowish in color and quite dead. He gave it to us to handle. We both saw that it was dead and beginning to grow stiff; it seemed to have died naturally, as there were no marks upon it. Mo squatted down on the floor and motioned us to keep quiet. He laid the lizard out upon a banana-leaf, shut his eyes and began to chant something in a low, monotonous voice. We could not hear very clearly, for the drums throbbed on and on in the village and the distant dance had risen to a thundering chorus of feet and voices, like the beat of the tradewind surf on the long beaches of Papua.

By and by he stopped, opened his eyes and took something out of his bag. The dance still thundered on; through all its far-off roar we could hear the dog that cried under the house—if it was a dog.

Mo had taken a crystal out of his bag—the biggest one—and unwrapped it from its covering of leaves. It was a pretty thing, like the end off a chandelier luster, and just about the same size, only it was double-ended, with two points. The lizard lay still and dead upon the ground. Mo pointed the crystal at it and began stroking the air just above the little corpse, without actually touching it. Over and over it he went with the crystal, making lines of light as the dying fire caught the quartz and drew violet and green and crimson colors out of it.

He was breathing very hard all the time and sweat was pouring off his naked body. One could see that he was making a tremendous effort, but where, or how, one could not understand.

At last he stopped, laid the crystal down on the banana-leaf and looked intently at the lizard. We looked too.

I know that no one will believe what happened next, but I must tell the thing as it occurred. The lizard moved.

We watched it, holding our breath. It moved again. It drew its legs under it.

The sorcerer took the crystal up and drew more lines in the air, breathing hard and narrowing down his eyes till they were two black sparks beneath his beetling eyebrows.

The lizard got up, staggered and walked away. It was alive.

I never wished I knew French until that minute. It would have been something to understand the expletives that the Marquis was pouring out in a sharp, rattling, musketry fire of amazed profanity and delight. I said a thing or two myself, but it sounded meek and mild by comparison. And he did not stop for a good three minutes. Then he got up—the sorcerer was standing now—and seized the greasy savage in his arms, rocking him about as if he were a child.

“I have found it—the true occult power—genuine article, all-wool and a yard wide—my God, yes!” he exclaimed. In his excitement he was going to our stores to give the sorcerer I don’t know what or how much of our invaluable food, but I stopped him in time.

“Don’t do it, Marky,” I said. “Never let these brutes know how much you have, or they’ll loot you, first chance. You’ve given him quite enough. I allow it’s wonderful, but there may be some very simple explanation after all.”

“You do not understand,” said the Marquis. “You have no faith. Let me look yet again at the crystal. It is of course but an instrument of the power—still——”

He took it in his hands, and began examining it. Mo kept a close watch on it, hovering over us like a hen over her chickens when a hawk is about. It was plain that he valued his charm quite a good deal.

“The finest crystal I ever saw, with any one of these sorcerers,” I declared, handling it....

I don’t know how the idea came into my head, but it did come, like a shock from a battery—just about as hard and as quick. And what was queer, it came into the Marquis’ head at exactly the same moment. For just as my hand made a sudden clutch at the crystal, his hand met it and the two hands closed on each other. Our eyes met, and if mine were as glaring and excited as his——

I think they must have been. Mo had the thing out of our two hands before we knew where we were. It was gone, back in the bag like a conjuring trick, and the stony veil had fallen before the sorcerer’s face again.

We were both breathing hard, like men who have run a race, but I think we kept pretty cool. It was the Marquis who begged then, by signs, to see the crystal again, and succeeded in getting Mo to show the end of it, shining out of the green wrapping of fresh banana-leaf, between the string meshes of the bag. But it was I who pulled my watch out and got the face of it up against the point of the crystal—all of it that Mo would let us touch now. The sharp end of the thing scored into the glass of it as if it had been butter.

What the Marquis said that time I have always wanted to know—it sounded much livelier than the last. I cut him short with a kick.

“For God’s sake, keep cool,” I said. “Don’t let him suspect anything; it’s our only chance. You don’t know how they value those charms of theirs—it’s no question of buying.... Come away and leave him alone. Don’t let him think we care about it.”

I almost dragged him away. It was deliciously cool and fresh in the moon outside; there was a smell of coming rain, and the wind brought whiffs of pawpaw blossom from somewhere in the forest, heavy and treacly-sweet. The noise of the dance was dying down: it was almost quiet.

Under the marea, in the space among the piles, that doglike whimper went on. But the Marquis and I were too excited to notice it. Afterward, I remembered how we had heard it.

“It’s bigger than the Kohinoor, but not near so big as the Cullinan,” I said, when we were out of earshot.

“Nevertheless, it is a king’s fortune,” affirmed the Marquis. He was quite pale, and almost trembling. “And this sorcerer is using it to make charms!”

“If we can get it—” I began.

“Where shall there be any difficulty? It is only to buy.”

“Is it? You don’t know these sorcerers. Probably he thinks his whole power depends on it.”

“Flint, my Flint, it would be hard to say what it depends on. He has power, we know it. He has power of life and death. What a man!”

“Oh, he’s only a greasy nigger after all, whatever conjuring tricks he can play,” I said irritably. “They claim a lot, these sorcerers. They say they can kill any one by wishing, and bring him to life again by making spells. If you listened to what they say——”

“But the lizard—he was dead,” said the Marquis, in a solemn voice.

“Hang the lizard! It’s the diamond we are after now. First to get it, and then to find out where it came from—if that’s possible.”

“Flint, my friend, I am not rich—you know that,” said the Marquis, with something like tears in his fat voice. “I have strained myself—have, what is it you say? bust—have bust my resources, to make this voyage in New Guinea. But if we can get that diamond—see, the glories of my house are restored; I am once more the proper kind of a marquis, you bet! And you—you are rich. You are a gentle and a spiritual, Flint—I shall be glad to think of you rich.”

All this time we had been making away from the marea, but the cry under the house never ceased to follow us. I could not stand it at last. There are many things in a New Guinea inland town which you had better not inquire into unless you are prepared to put up a fight. But somehow I felt I wanted to look into this, and I told the Marquis so.

“Is it not a dog?” he asked, surprised.

“I don’t think it is,” I said. “Anyhow, give me your box of matches and we’ll go back and see. It gets me, somehow.”

The marea was dark and empty when we returned; the sorcerer was gone. The dance was taking new life—it roared like a forest fire, down there at the end of the village. There was not a soul in sight as we got under the marea and struck our matches to look.

It was not a dog. It was the girl who had been so fascinated with the Marquis’ dancing a few hours earlier. She was crouching on the ground like a sick monkey, her head on her knees, moaning in a cold, frightened sort of way as if she did not expect that any one would hear or heed.

“Hold! the little beautiful!” cried the Marquis. I got him by the slack of his trousers just in time. He was springing forward to catch her in his arms and console her—a kind and a manly impulse, no doubt, but one that, I judged, might cost the little creature dear.

She did not even notice him. She went on softly wailing like a thing that was doomed to die and knew and feared it. In one slight brown hand she held something that was half wrapped round her waist, half torn loose. I struck another match and looked at it. It was a red and yellow waist-belt, with a piece cut out. The gap was just about the size of the piece of red-and-yellow stuff we had seen in the sorcerer’s bag.

She would not listen when we spoke to her; she only drew away and shivered. I judged it best to leave her, for the present at all events. We crept along under the piles, walking half doubled up, till we were out in the moonlight once more. The street was still quiet, but the ugly little man with the bat-like ears, who had been so angry earlier in the evening, was coming up toward the house. He seemed to hear the crying: he turned half round as he passed, and shook his spear at the marea, glaring at the little, crouching shadow below.

Then he looked at us and deliberately spat toward the Marquis; turned, went on and entered another house.

“That throws some light,” I said. “Mark, I reckon that the girl has been too much struck with that beautiful performance of yours, and that the ugly little man is her lover and doesn’t like it. I rather think he has complained to his brother, Mo, and got him to puri-puri her, and she’s half mad with fright.”

“What is puri-puri?” asked the Marquis, looking grave.

“They’ve another word here. All over Papua, mostly, it means the same—sorcery. He’s got a bit of her waist-belt to make a spell of, and she thinks she’s going to die in consequence. Of course she won’t, but she’s badly scared.”

“Flint, he has the power of life and death—that man,” said the Marquis. “What can we do?”

“Rats, he hasn’t power of life and death!” I said. “We can give him a talking to and keep him from scaring the poor little soul any more, or she might really die of fright. Don’t go talking to her—it would only make things worse.”

“The first thing in the morning we must talk to him, isn’t it?”

“First thing. We might as well have our tent, Marky; I think it would be more healthy than the marea, somehow.”

We had, and slept in it—part of the night. About the small chill hour that comes near dawn we were roused out by a wild crying from one of the houses near at hand—a house into which we had seen the little maiden creep, still sobbing, before we turned in ourselves, for, needless to say, the Marquis and I had been keeping as much of a lookout over her as we could. But this was not the girl’s crying; it was horrified yells from the other inmates of the house—yells of such dismay that we wasted no time in catching up our arms and running in.

The house was nothing but a brown thatch roof set on a sago-palm floor. It was dimly lighted by a fire; in the short interval before I could get my hurricane lantern alight I saw a dozen or two brown naked forms, moving about distractedly, and howling. Something was visible on the floor among their feet.

I got the lantern alight, and held it up. There lay the pretty little girl, dead and stiff. She had not a wound or a mark on her, but she seemed to have been cold for hours. Probably the growing chill of her small body was what had attracted the attention of her companions.

“Flint, my friend, she is dead, the little beautiful, and I have been her murderer, by gum!” said the Marquis, in a low, shocked whisper.

“You haven’t anything of the kind, Mark; don’t be morbid.... Poor little girl!” I said, looking at her again, as the women, howling loudly, picked her up and carried her away.

“Life and death—life and death!” said the Marquis. “Flint, we are in deep water.”

“If it’s only water, we’re lucky,” I said, leading the way out of the house again. “Sentries after this, Mark. I take no chances.”

The Marquis was looking at the marea, where the sorcerer, no doubt, was coolly sleeping.

“Blood—blood!” he said. “Always, where there is a great diamond, there shall be blood. The stone is blooded now, my Flint. When will be the next?”

55

II
THE JUMPING BAMBOO

CHAPTER II

THE JUMPING BAMBOO

To enter an unknown, hostile town in the heart of New Guinea—to have trouble over a village beauty, see a sorcerer restore the dead to life, discover a huge diamond, and be involved in a sudden death—all within twenty-four hours—is adventure enough for any one. Enough even for the Marquis.

It was more than enough for me—I do not go out looking for adventures, any more than I suppose a confectioner’s boy would go out looking for cakes; and for the same reason—I am sick of them. I go looking for gold, as a rule; sometimes I find it, and sometimes I don’t. If I do, I can have a good time with it in Sydney or Melbourne; if I didn’t, I can look again. But I never saw the adventure that you could pay in over the counter of a bar, or at the box-office of a theater. Adventures are a nuisance and a hindrance, so far as I have experienced them; and as to going out actually hunting for them——

Well, that was very much what the Marquis was doing. I will say this much for him—he wasn’t any sort of a coward. I have seen him cry like a girl; I have seen him shiver with excitement, but I never saw him frightened, and I never saw him give anything the best of it. That would have kept me in his company, even if the big diamond had not.

But now we were inevitably linked by that double interest. It shows what a good sort the Marquis was, that we hadn’t a word’s dispute as to who found it first, or whose was the right to claim it—if we ever got it. We just assumed that, being in the thing together, it was “halves.” I was to stick to the Marquis, and he to me, till the business was through.

Good Lord! if we had had an idea of how much that meant!...

We were beginning to have an inkling, no more, the morning after the poor little pretty girl had been buried. They carried her away, wrapped in mats, to some burial place in the forest as soon as the daylight broke, and we did not get a chance to examine the corpse, as I had wished to do. That hurried look-over in her own house, when we found her dead, had shown me that there was no obvious trace of injury; but I thought her slightly swollen. I suspected poison—the sorcerers of New Guinea are clever poisoners, and very ready to use their powers. But nothing would ever tell us now.

Under ordinary circumstances I would have cleared out of the town straight away, for I knew well that some kind of trouble was sure to follow such an unlucky introduction. But with a diamond the size of a chandelier-luster knocking about in a sorcerer’s bag, within a few yards of us, we were not likely to move on in a hurry.

The Marquis and I, on the morning following that eventful night, held a council of war in front of our tent where we could see all that went on in the village street, and keep an eye on the whereabouts of Mo. So long as we saw him, we knew that he could not be doing much mischief.

The bat-eared little man was not to be seen that day. (I had ascertained through Koppi Koko that the dead girl was his promised wife, and that she had told him, after watching the Marquis dance, that she never would marry an ugly little thing like him.) He was the sorcerer’s youngest and favorite brother, so the useful Koppi Koko had found out—being very anxious to retrieve his character, and save himself the hammering that he feared his desertion might bring down on him. I did not touch him as it happened, not because I thought he didn’t deserve it, but because I knew he would be more useful if he were kept in suspense.

I thought his information interesting, but by no means reassuring. It was too much to suppose that the matter would be allowed to end there. The little man must have developed a worse grudge against us than against his late unlucky fiancée, and if her fate was an example of what we had got to expect, things were looking lively.

So I told the Marquis. We were sitting on the ground outside our tent and watching the villagers moving about their daily tasks—water-carrying, net-making, wood-cutting, fetching sago from the forest, going out to dig yams, or to hunt pig. They looked peaceable enough, and it was a peaceful, pretty scene, with the sun just rising over the tall green palms and the smoke curling thin and blue from under the deep thatch roofs.

But the old hand in New Guinea knows well—too well—that the Papuan is most dangerous when, apparently, most friendly. The quiet aspect of the place meant nothing—or worse.

“There is a feeling of sadness upon me this morning; I have the blooming hump,” said the Marquis, his fat chin resting upon his pink fat hand. “If you offered me the—the big diamond itself—in payment, I could not dance a step.”

“That’s right. I reckon you’d better keep on feeling that way as long as you can,” I said. “We’ve trouble enough on our hands without making any more, and your accomplishments do seem to bring the thunder about one’s ears, somehow. Mark, let’s talk it all out.”

“Perfectly,” said the Marquis, turning his full-moon face round upon me.

“Look here. We’ve got to get that diamond. And we’ve got to avoid being poisoned, as the girl was. And we’ve got to get our carriers out safe with ourselves, and be on our way to the coast inside of a day or so at the most: it isn’t healthy to stop here too long.”

“Perfectly. That’s right.”

“Well, then, I reckon the sorcerer’s not going to go on keeping the diamond where he did, because a blind baby could have seen that we wanted it. We must get some idea of likely hiding-places——”

“Hold a minute. Could we not buy it, quite simply?”

“No, Mark; I’ve tried.”

“Already?”

“This morning, while you were choosing between your heliotrope shirt with the green tie, and your pink one with the blue, I went and had a talk with the brute—I’d rather have pounded him to a jelly, but you can’t always do the thing you ought to do, up-country in Papua. Told him we had a fancy for his magic crystal; said you were a bit of a sorcerer yourself, and would give a lot for it; offered all it was safe to offer. No go; he didn’t rise to it worth twopence. You see, if I had shown him all we had, he would simply have looted our stores and had us knocked on the head—or tried to—and anything I offered didn’t tempt him, in comparison with the stone. We have pretty short tucker, you know, Mark—I’m not blaming you, for I know you couldn’t afford a big outfit, but there it is: we can’t bid high even if it was safe to show everything.”

“But, see then!” exclaimed the Marquis. “Could we not promise him?”

“Oh, you could promise him anything, but he wouldn’t believe you. They never keep promises themselves, and can’t understand any one else doing it. And I put it to you: Would even a white man part with something he valued quite a lot, to a couple of strangers, just on a promise?”

“No,” said the Marquis thoughtfully. “Assuredly he would say that a bird in the bush blows nobody good, and laugh in your nose at you.”

“Well, what I propose to do is just to take the diamond any way we can get it—steal it, if you like to say so—and when we get back to Port Moresby, send him a big equivalent for it—a case of valuable goods of some kind or other. That would be treating him as fairly as we can. Anyhow, there is one thing we aren’t going to do, Marky, and that is, leave a chunk of a rough diamond you could break a man’s head with knocking loose about Kata-Kata in a sorcerer’s bag.”

“I am all of accord with you—no blooming fear!” said the Marquis. “But, Flint, there is one thing that I must not forget, even on account of the diamond—my seek for the occult. Can we not get this Mo to show us more things of his magic?”

“If Mo doesn’t intend to show you more of his ‘magic’ without being asked or wanted, you may call me a yellow Chow,” I said. “Don’t you worry about that; you’ll get all you want, I reckon.”

We had left the tent now, as it was growing very hot in the village, and we were walking along the bank of the river that ran close beside the street. It was a pretty river, shallow and foamy, and full of big rocks covered with moss and fern. Here and there you could see a pink or purple orchid, and the cocoanuts cast wonderful shadows on the pools.

Just where the shadow was deepest and coolest something stirred in the brown of the water—something that was brown itself and that glittered with wet. It was Mo, bathing.

I pulled the Marquis back into the shade. “This is luck!” I whispered. “The village is quiet; we can very likely get into Mo’s own house, and have a look round. Come on as quick as you can.”

... How still the wide brown street was, under the terrible mid-day sun! Noon is the lonely hour in Papua, when the heat is at its worst; no man stirs about who is not compelled to do so. The women were in the yam fields, taking their mid-day rest from toil beneath the shelter of the bush. The men were loafing about somewhere in the depths of the forest, pretending to hunt. In the town itself there were only a few old people and children, all asleep. The main street was a river of white fire; the shadows beneath the long-legged houses were like pools of tar. Not a dog stirred out from shelter. Not a footstep rustled or a palm-sheath floor gave forth a creak. It was undoubtedly the moment.

We knew where Mo’s house was—a fine building with a high-gabled roof, and an extraordinary amount of ornament in the way of carved birds and crocodiles, and fringes of waving fiber. We scuttled up the ladder silently and swiftly, like two thieves, and dodged in under the low door. Inside, the house was high and cool and empty. A pleasant amber light filtered down from somewhere in the lofty roof; but there were no windows, and the door was buried in the overhanging thatch. Straining our eyes, we looked about us.... Mats, wooden sleeping-pillows shaped like alligators; lime gourds carved and poker-worked; tall shields with devilish faces carved upon them; a string of human skulls, extending from the gable to the floor; a dagger carved from a thigh-bone; dancing-masks made in the semblance of sharks and birds and kangaroos; arrows; pineapple-shaped stone clubs; long, barked, ebony spears....

In one corner hung the sorcerer’s great feather bonnet, taken off for bathing; his ugly human-hand locket was tidily laid away on a rafter. The thick bamboo that we had seen him carrying like a wand lay on the floor—tightly corked up. But what interested us more than anything was the big charm-bag, hung on the wall, and bursting full.

We had it down in a moment, and tumbled the things out on the floor, tossing them recklessly here and there, in the search for our wonderful stone. I took the opportunity of looking at all the quartz crystals it contained—there were a good many—and opening all the little banana-leaf parcels, hoping to find another diamond in the absence of our first discovery, which (I saw almost at once) was not there. But there was nothing.

This did not surprise me much, for Koppi Koko had told me (under pressure of certain threats) that the crystal, which was well known to all the natives, had been the property of innumerable sorcerers from time to time, and had, in all probability, passed about over half Papua. Nothing could be more impossible, in that country of Babel-dialects, than to find out where the stone had originally come from. However, if we could only get hold of it, I was not bothering much about anything else.

“It seems to me,” said the Marquis, drawing himself erect and kicking aside the bag with his foot, “that our friend, Monsieur Mo, is not such a fool as he glitters.”

67

I have never been called a nervous man; but I was down the ladder and out in the street almost before the Marquis

“That’s right,” I answered, looking round again. Rolled-up mats?—gourds?—clay water-pots? Impossible to say. At all events, we might——

“My God, Flint!” said the Marquis, in a low, horrified voice. “My God of Gods, look at that!”

The flimsy flooring shook as he bounded back toward the door. I jumped back with him—and then looked.

The bamboo was rolling about on the floor, and trying to stand on its end!

We stood with our backs against the thatch by the door, breathing very hard, and staring still harder. The thing kept on jumping and rolling. It was rolling toward us.

I have never been called a nervous man; but I was down the ladder and out in the street almost before the Marquis. It has always seemed to me a special Providence that we did not meet, and stick, in the door.

We were scarcely out, and beginning to feel a little foolish—I, for one, had made up my mind already to go back and investigate the thing, sorcery, trick, or whatever it was—when we saw the tall, wet figure of Mo coming up through the trees from the river. It did not seem a happy time to continue our investigations, so we made for the tent, trying to look as if we had only been out for a stroll, and (I dare say) succeeding just about as well as a couple of small boys caught coming away from the fruit garden.

“No go,” I said, flinging myself down on the pile of sacks inside our tent. “Mark, we’ll have a smoke and a game of cards, and then we’ll go to sleep.”

“What for, to sleep?” asked the Marquis.

“Because I don’t propose to sleep much tonight—nor will you. It seems to me that things are given to happening here at night, and I intend to keep a look-out instead.”

“We will sleep, then,” agreed my companion. And we did, after our smoke and our game—all through the burning afternoon, until the sun began to drop behind the cocoanuts, and the leather-necks commenced their evening squawking and squabbling, and the smoke of supper fires stole out, smelling pleasant and peaceful and homey and everything that it particularly was not—here in the heart of cannibal Papua, in the sorcerer’s town.

When we woke up we were thoroughly rested, for we had slept long and deep, after our broken rest the night before. I called up Koppi Koko, and bade him get the supper ready. The Marquis yawned, stretched, and sat up on his mat.

“Hallo!” I said. “There’s another of your singlets going; you won’t have enough clothes to carry you back to Port Moresby, at this rate.” For the Marquis, being big and fat, stretched his clothes terribly, and, in consequence, they were wearing very fast.

“I do feel like a cool window in my back; have a look, kindly,” he said, trying to see over his own shoulder.

I looked at his back. “Mark,” I said, “take off your singlet and look at it. I don’t like this.”

I had to peel him out of it, for it had shrunk and was tight. When he was clear, and had the garment on his knee, he gave it one glance and then looked at me.

“My friend, as I said yesterday, we are in deep waters,” he remarked. “This, while I lay asleep, has been cut. This cut, it has taken out a piece, and the piece is the same size as——”

“As the piece out of the girl’s belt,” I finished.

We looked at each other; the leather-necks squawked outside; the dogs of the village began that peculiarly mournful, wolf-like howling that native dogs always do set up about sunset.

“And the girl, the little beautiful, that night she died,” observed the Marquis. He whistled softly to himself: an air I did not know—a crying, sobbing sort of tune it was, and not calculated to raise any one’s spirits if they had needed it—which I should have thought the Marquis’ might.

“See, I will dance her requiem,” he said. “Perhaps my own, good Flint. One never knows.”

Singing the air gently to himself—I can not describe how mournful and calling-you-to-come-back it sounded, or how the horrid wailing of the native dogs chimed in and became a part—he danced, in the twelve-by-fourteen space of the tent.... I have seen something like it in the Islands, when the warriors were dancing for the funeral of a great dead chief—something, but not so good. It was grief, and death, and despair put into motion, and translated, by the Marquis’ huge limbs, into a language that even the Papuans themselves would have understood. All, too, as lightly as—as—well, as the feathers waving in the wind upon a hearse.

When he had done he sat down, and smiles broke out all over his pink, fat face.

“Good, eh?” he said. “That was a funeral dance of prehistoric Crete, that I found among the buried carvings of the palace of Minos, which they have lately——”

“Come back,” I said. “This isn’t ancient Crete, it’s modern New Guinea, and we’re in a hole. Mark, I propose, for tonight, that we let on to go to sleep, but don’t—and then we’ll see what happens. As for supper, I’m going out to cook that myself. I’m not taking any chances just now.”

“As you wish,” said the Marquis. “But you can not deny that it is all most interesting.”

“Oh, very—damned—interesting,” I said. “I hope it doesn’t get any more so. I’d like a little boredom for a change, if you ask me.” And I went to cook the supper—not that I thought it really necessary, but just—in case. One does a lot of things for that reason, in the queer places of Papua.

We had a little coffee in our stores, and I brewed a billy-can full, for I did not want any mistakes made about going to sleep. At the usual hour we put out our light and lay down on the rough sack-beds I had fixed up. The Marquis and I were near enough together to touch each other if we wished. We turned in all standing, even to our boots. The carriers were camped in a little hut close by; our stores were mostly piled up in the tent, and we had our revolvers strapped round our waists.

It was arranged that we were to take watch and watch about, for two hours each, and that the man on watch should sit on his bed, not lie. I could guess the time easily enough, and the Marquis thought he could also. In any case, there should be no striking of matches.

The night wore on but slowly. At first there were constant stirrings in the village—talking, squabbling, moving here and there; then the dogs began to fight; then some of the roosters waked up and crowed, and roused out the rest a good many hours too soon. But by degrees the town settled to rest. I had taken the first watch; had lain down—not to sleep—through the Marquis’; and now my second watch was well on its way.

After a time it grew so still that the silence seemed to tingle, in the way it does when you are awake at night and listening. There was not a breath of wind, no moon, and few stars; the weather had been heavy and thunderous all day, and the sky was clouded. In the triangle made by the opening of the tent I could see—when I had been straining my eyes into the dark for quite a long time—the dim grayness of the village street, and the black bank of palms beyond.

I say there was not a sound, nor anything to see. Seated there on my rough bed, every sense alert, I might have been alone at the end of the world, with the last man dead beside me.

But it came to me, not suddenly, quietly and surely, that we were not alone. I do not know whence the first warning conveyed itself; it came, however, and I found myself listening and looking expectantly, with a certainty in my mind that something was going to happen.

Sight and hearing are not the only senses that a bushman can use to good effect. I smelt, cautiously and without noise.

There was the marshy odor of the river behind the palms. There was the indescribable smell of a native village—dry, sun-baked earth, insanitary whiffs of decaying stuff, the hay-like odor of old thatch. And something more—the smell of cocoanut-oil warm and fresh, and very near.

I remembered that the Papuan always oils himself after bathing. I recollected having seen Mo in the river.

Very cautiously I stretched out and touched the Marquis’ hand. He was awake—he was not the kind of man to sleep when he ought to have been waking, for all his flummery—and his hand met mine with a squeeze. We listened hard. There was not the ghost of a sound, but the smell grew stronger, passed, and died away. And, just after, the faintest possible shadow crossed the gray of the road.

We listened again, and I for one did not like it, for I knew that whatever Mo had meant to do was done. Then, suddenly, the Marquis’ hand caught hold of mine in a grip that was painful.

“Flint, a light!” was all he said. I had my matches in my hand, and I struck one almost before he had done speaking. The Marquis was sitting up on his bed, looking white and drawn.

“It is the ‘touch of death,’” he said. “I have felt it—cold as—as nothing but death is cold.” He sat like a statue; his hand had let mine go and was gripping tight to the edge of the bed. I was up in a moment, and looking all round the tent. There was not a thing to be seen. Having searched, I put out the light again and waited. It is not a good thing to make yourself a target for possible arrows shot in the dark. I could hear the Marquis breathing heavily.

Then, in a moment, he gave a terrible cry, leaped right on to my bed, and brought it and me and himself down to the earth together in one tremendous crash.

There was no use trying to “lie low” after that. I struggled out somehow, lit the hurricane lamp, and asked the Marquis, who was sitting half-dazed in the midst of the ruins, what he supposed had happened.

He was still deadly pale.

“I don’t know, my Flint,” he answered, looking at me with the fixed expression of a man who has had a shock. “I know only that the hand of death itself was laid upon me, there in the dark—first it has touched my arm, and then my heart where my clothes were open for the heat.”

“How do you know it was the hand of death?” I asked, getting a bottle of whisky out of one of our swags. “How do you know you weren’t asleep after all, and having a bad dream?”

“I was not asleep; you will remember I clasped your hand. And that thing was death, I know, because in these plains where it is all the time hot there is nothing cold at all, and that which has touched me was the cold of death.”

“Rats! You aren’t dead. Have some whisky,” I said, pouring it out.

“Yes, I am escaped; that’s what I don’t comprehend,” said the Marquis thoughtfully. “That is good whisky; that warms the muscles of the heart. Flint—” with a sudden revival— “you can not but must allow, this is the very devil interesting!”

We were rather sleepy in the morning, I remember—the effect of the coffee having worn off. I had an idea or two as to what course we had best follow for the capturing of the stone; but nothing could be done before midday. So I and the Marquis kept watch for each other to sleep, and we got in a good three hours apiece before noon.

When the white blaze of twelve o’clock was searing the palms once more, and the village folk were away or asleep, and Mo had gone down to the river again to bathe, I beckoned the Marquis out. We wore the rubber-soled shoes that one uses for easy bush-walking, and made not a sound as we passed along the street. The shadows of the palms were ink upon white paper; the dogs slept beneath the houses; the tame cockatoos and parrots drowsed upon the eaves. The heat was awful: it seemed as though the village in its stillness lay dead beneath a torrent of white fire from the implacable sky.

We gained the sorcerer’s house without being seen and slipped into the cool interior, gasping like creatures that find water after drought.

“What a day!” choked the Marquis, in a whisper—we feared, somehow, to talk aloud. “You may have thankfulness that you are as lean as a herring, Flint. If you had my weight——”

He sat down on the floor to cool off—and it promptly gave way beneath him. I hauled him out with some trouble, and set him in a safe place.

“I believe that’s a trap-door,” I said, looking at it. “Seems to be meant for a hurried get-away in case of trouble. Not a bad idea. I wonder how he came to leave it open.”

We looked about us. The bamboo that had given us such an unpleasant start on the day before was nowhere to be seen. Otherwise the house was the same. Still—whether it was the effect of the alarm in the night, or simply the discouragement that always treads close on the heels of excited hope—I did not feel that we were nearer our goal. Rather, I felt farther away.

“We must look,” said the Marquis, who evidently did not share my discouragement. “You will look one side of the house, I will look the other, and before Mo will come back——”

He did not finish the sentence, for up the long ladder leading to the door (Mo’s house was the highest in the village) came, at that moment, a slowly creaking step.

With one consent we dived through the trap-door and pulled it flat after us. Then we halted under the house, listening and looking eagerly.

“If he doesn’t see us—” I whispered.

“I think he can not,” answered the Marquis, cautiously. “But we can see him through these cracks—What chance! What chance!”

... It is long ago now, but to this day I am vexed when I think how easily the greasy old villain took us in—how readily we dropped into his snare. That Mo had been perfectly aware of our visit the day before, that he guessed we would come again, had returned early in order to hurry us out, had left the trap-door open in order that we might go through it and watch him underneath the house—had indeed planned the whole thing from start to finish—never occurred to either of us at the time, though, indeed, we might have guessed that the chief sorcerer of the chief town of sorcery-riddled Kata-Kata was not likely to be quite so simple as he seemed.

At any rate, there we stood in the dark under the house, looking breathlessly through the cracks in the floor, and watching Mo. And Mo knew it, little as we thought it.

First of all, he took the long bamboo off his breast—it had accompanied him to the river today, seemingly—uncorked the top, and looked cautiously in. We could not see what was inside. He put his palm over the opening, and with the other hand drew toward him one of the large clay water-pots standing on the floor. These water-pots narrowed to a mouth about four inches across; some of them had baked-clay lids on the top. He chose one that had a lid, uncovered it, and dropped something in.

Where had he produced it from? The man was like a conjurer. I had not seen anything in his hand a moment before—but it was undoubtedly the great diamond that he dropped into the jar. I even heard it tinkle against the hard clay bottom as it fell. The Marquis, in his excitement, pinched my arm so hard that it was black and blue afterward. I knew he was simply boiling with corked-up speech, and I wondered how long he could hold on.

Now the sorcerer, after a hurried look round the empty house (he really was a splendid actor), removed his palm from the top of the bamboo, and inverted it over the jar. We could see by his motions that he was pouring something from the one to the other; it seemed to come slowly, and take some time. When he had done, he put the clay cover on the jar, shook the empty bamboo, and threw it down.

After this he produced a small trade looking-glass, oiled his hair, put feathers in it, painted his face, took his bag of charms off the wall, slung a tall bow on his shoulder, and whistled to his dog. It was plain that he was going hunting—probably courting also, the two occupations often mixing and overlapping a good deal in the Papuan forests.

We waited. We waited till Mo and his dog and his bow and his bag had disappeared down the village street, pale and unsubstantial in the glaring overhead sun. We waited another ten minutes after. Silence: the village slept beneath the fiery enchantment of noon; the birds were voiceless in the forest; the giant leaves hung still.

“Now!” I said, and we crept back through the trap-door.

For a moment we stood silent in the lonely house, the scene of Satan alone knew what deviltries. The hideous dancing-masks grinned at us from the walls; the skulls showed their teeth. The sorcerer’s bamboo lay on the floor, empty, open, defying us to solve its mystery. And at our very feet stood the water-jar, its wide-splayed mouth covered only by the lid of baked clay.

Was the prize really in our grasp at last? I hesitated, stretched out a hand, and took it back—stopped, listened....

There certainly was a sound somewhere. It was a familiar sound, and yet I could not say exactly what it was. It was near and it was not near. It was—What in the name of the devil was it?

“See, Flint, I tire of this!” shouted the Marquis suddenly and imprudently. (I judge that he had heard it too, and it and other things had “got on his nerves,” as women say.) “Faint heart gathers no moss—here goes for France, my brave!” He made a dart at the jar and snatched off the lid.

Do you know what is the swiftest thing in the animal kingdom? Did you ever see a brown flash of lightning get up from the ground and strike?

I know, and I had seen just such a thing before. So I didn’t have to stop and think.... The Marquis got my punch fair in the chest; it doubled him up and sent him half across the house. My right hand being thus occupied, I hadn’t time to attend to my left and it got in the way. It was on the first joint of the third finger that the snake got me. He held on like a bulldog.

Now, I must have knocked the wind pretty well out of the Marquis, in throwing him out of the way as I did; but you never saw a man recover quicker. He was up on his feet before one would have time to tell of it. He had got a great steel clearing-knife down from the wall (evidently Mo did a bit of coastal trading) in two seconds or thereabouts, and had slashed the snake clean through before I got it shaken off. I pulled its head away then and threw it on the floor. I had had a look at it and saw that there was only one thing to do.

“Give me the knife,” I said. The Marquis gave it and, as I am alive, he was crying as he did.

There was nothing to make a fuss about. I had the top joint of the finger off in two clean chops. And there is no finger a man can spare better than the left-hand third.

I tied it up and put a sort of tourniquet on. Then I remembered the diamond—it was not so strange that I’d forgotten it for a minute or two, all things considered—and put my right hand into the jar that had lately held such an unpleasant occupant. I pulled out—not the diamond, but a bit of common stone tied up in a leaf.

The sorcerer had us again. No doubt he had palmed the jewel, somehow or other, when setting his trap.

I was feeling a bit sick, what with loss of blood and the small amount of poison that had got into circulation before I took the finger off. I was sure now that we had not a chance of getting the stone—as things were. Mo was thoroughly awake, and there was nothing for it but to retreat—for the present.

“Wait till I come back with an R. M. and a score of armed native constabulary, you heathen beast,” I said to myself. “Just wait. You’ve earned what you’ll get—richly earned it.”

“We’ve got to go, Mark,” I said aloud. “Get the carriers together for me as quick as you can; it’s the best time, with all the people away. If we stay on, there’ll be a row tonight as sure as Fate, and the Government don’t like unofficial people to do its killing for it. We’ll come back, and give them what-for with the chill off. Oh, Lord, don’t do that!”

For the Marquis was hanging round my neck—a pretty solid weight—and had already kissed me loudly on both cheeks.

“My brave retainer!” he said, with tears in his voice (I reckoned he meant preserver, but it was all one), “what can I ever do to recompense you of my life that you have saved?”

“I told you what to do just now,” I said. “Get the carriers under way, and sharp. I want to drink some ammonia.”

I did, and it did me good; I was able to walk almost as well as usual in half an hour. I slung my arm up in a long sheaf of grass, and we set off from the village as hard as we could, keeping a look-out for ambushes all the way. But the noonday hush lay on all the forest and the track, and there was not a sign of life.

When we were an hour or two away, I halted for a rest; the bite was getting at me a little, and I felt slightly giddy, though I knew by now that there was no danger.

“Tell me, what was all this thing that has happened?” demanded the Marquis, dropping on a log at my side and fanning himself with his hat. “I am bursting of curiosity, but I would not disturb you.”

“Well,” I said, “if I had known Kata-Kata as I know other districts in New Guinea, none of them would have happened at all. The whole thing might have been foreseen. It’s true I had heard silly yarns about this part of the country, but I didn’t believe them, they seemed so exaggerated—and they quite went out of my head, anyhow, for I was hardly more than a kid when I did hear them. But I’ve remembered them today.”

“What were they, then?”

“People—natives, I mean—said that the Kata-Kata sorcerers know how to tame snakes and make them like dogs, and that the brutes would bite any one their masters told them to. The sorcerers would get a bit of a man’s clothing, taken next his skin where it had the scent of his body, and worry and tease the snake with it so that it would know the smell, and hate it. And then they said the sorcerer would let loose his snake at night in the house of the man he wanted to kill, and the brute would bite him, and the sorcerer would get it and take it home again before he was seen.”