And the little cases with their black fiber panels and shining nickel-plated knobs and connections had a strange effect upon the circle of negroes also. With low murmurs and sharp ejaculations they drew a step farther from the boys and looked furtively at the instruments, while the men who had brought them from the boat leaped nimbly away the instant they had set them down as if afraid the harmless things might bite them.
“Gosh!” murmured Tom, finding his voice at last. “They’re afraid of us!”
“I believe they are,” responded Frank, who, finding that the savage-looking crowd seemed of no mind to harm them, had regained confidence.
Scarcely knowing why he did so, Tom reached forward, connected the batteries and turned the rheostat. The result was astounding. As the tiny filament in the bulb glowed at his touch an awed “Wahii!” arose from the negroes, and with one accord they retreated several yards.
“Say, we’ve got ’em going!” exclaimed Tom jubilantly. “They’re as much afraid of us as we are of them. It all gets me, Frank. I wonder——”
What Tom wondered Frank never knew, for at this moment the surrounding blacks uttered a weird wailing cry and flung themselves upon the ground.
“Gee!” ejaculated Frank, “look there.”
Over the prostrated blacks, approaching through a lane between their bodies, came an amazing, fantastic, awful figure. Naked, save for a loin cloth, painted to resemble a skeleton, with great horns bound to his head and with a cow’s tail dragging behind him, he came prancing and leaping towards the fire and the boys, shaking a rattle in one hand and waving a horse-tail in the other.
Speechless with wonder, the boys gazed at him. They realized that he was the leader of the crowd, a chief probably, and in his fantastic garb they recognized a faint resemblance to pictures they had seen of wild African tribesmen, but that such a being should be here—here in an island in the West Indies and only a few miles from railways, cities, great sugar mills, wireless stations and even their own submarine, seemed incredible, monstrous, absolutely unbelievable—as dream-like and amazing as the savage-looking figures who had captured them.
But they had little time to think. Suddenly the tom-tom burst forth in thunderous sounds, deep, sonorous, blood-curdling, savage, wild, and to the deafening “turn—turn, turn, turn—turn—turn, turn, turn,” the huge horned figure pranced and danced about the two boys, chanting a wailing song, keeping time to his steps with his gourd-rattle and shaking and waving his horse-tail.