Bancroft, in a strained voice, repeated the words.
“Good Lord!” cried Mr. Pauling, “they’re captives of those crazy devil-worshipers.”
“Attaboy!” yelled Rawlins. “Lift her, boys! Pull for your lives!”
CHAPTER XI—THE DEVIL DANCERS
Perhaps the two terrified boys swooned, perhaps they were literally frightened out of their wits. Neither could ever be sure, but whichever it was, everything was a blank from the moment when they felt the hands of the savage figures grasp them until they found themselves surrounded on every side by a ring of half-naked men and women in the full glare of a huge fire under immense trees.
But they were unharmed, not even bound, and as they realized this their courage in a measure returned and they glanced about, still terribly frightened, shaking as if with ague, and marveling that they were still alive.
Then for the first time they realized that their captors were not Indians. They were hideously daubed with paint to be sure, they were nearly nude, but they were not bedecked with feathers and their black skins and wooly heads left no doubt as to their identity. They were negroes, mostly coal black, but a few were brown or even yellow and the dazed, scared boys looked upon them with uncomprehending amazement. To them, negroes were civilized, harmless, good-natured people and why these blacks should be acting in this savage manner was past all understanding.
And still more puzzling was the fact that they were talking together in a strange, unintelligible jargon. To the boys’ minds, all colored people spoke English—either with the broad soft accent of the American negro or the slurring, drawling dialect of the West Indians, and yet here were blacks chattering shrilly in some totally different tongue.
The boys felt as if they had been bereft of their senses, as if, by some magic, they had been transported to the middle of darkest Africa and they wondered vaguely if their fears and worries had driven them mad and the whole thing was a hallucination.
But at this moment four more blacks arrived and to the boys’ further amazement deposited their radio sets upon the smooth, hard-beaten earth beside them. These were real; they seemed somehow to link the boys with the outside world, with civilization, and at sight of them the boys knew they were not dreaming, were not mad.