The boys’ tensed strained nerves gave way. The coil dropped from Frank’s hand, he staggered to Tom’s side and, throwing their arms around each other, the two burst into wild hysterical laughter. Suddenly they were aware of some one speaking near them. In their wild delight, the terrific reaction, they had forgotten their captors, had forgotten the weird dancer whose act had saved them. But at the low moaning voice close to them they came back to earth with a start and wheeled about. Within a few paces, his head bobbing up and down against the ground, flat on his stomach, was the giant negro, and from his lips, muffled by their contact with the earth, came the pleading wail which had roused the boys.
“What on earth does he want?” asked Tom, who could make nothing of the words.
“I don’t know, but he’s scared to death like all the others,” replied Frank, “and I don’t wonder. That voice from the phones was enough to scare any savage. I think he’s begging forgiveness or something.”
“Gosh! I wish he understood English,” said Tom, and then, in a louder voice, “Here, get up!” he ordered. “Can you speak English?”
Slowly and hesitatingly the man raised his wooly head and with wildly rolling eyes gazed fearfully at the boys. His lips moved, his tongue strove to form words, but no sound came from him. So abject, so thoroughly terror-stricken was his appearance that the boys really pitied him, but now, at last, he had found his voice again.
“Messieu’s!” he pleaded. “Messieu’s! Moi pas save. Moi ami, Beke. Ah! Ai! Beke no un’stan’. Moi spik Eenglees liddle. Moi mo’ sorry! Moi fren’ yes! Moi no mek harm Messieu’s! Ai, Ai! Moi mek dance, moi people mek fo’ Voodoo! No mek fo’ harm Beke! Pa’donez Moi, Messieu’s!”
“Gosh, I can’t get it!” exclaimed Tom. “He’s asking us to forgive him and wants to be friends, but what he means by ‘Beke’ and ‘Voodoo’ and those other words I don’t know. But I’m willing to be friends.” Then, addressing the still groveling negro, “All right!” he said. “Get up. You’re forgiven. We’ll be friends. But stop bumping your head on the ground and take off those horns. You give me the shivers.”
Whether the devil-dancer understood more than half of Tom’s words is doubtful, but he grasped the meaning and with unutterable relief upon his black face he grinned and tearing off his fantastic headdress cast it into the flames and rose slowly to his feet.
As he did so, his watching companions also rose and edged cautiously from their hiding places, but still keeping a respectful distance and eyeing the black radio sets with furtive, frightened glances. Very evidently, to their minds, these white boys were powerful Obeah men, they possessed magic of a sort not to be despised or molested, and with the primitive man’s simple reasoning they felt that to propitiate such powerful witch doctors was the only way to insure their own safety. Although, to the boys, they had appeared savages yet, had Tom and Frank happened upon them at any other time, they would have found nothing at all savage about them. Indeed, they would never have had reason to think them other than happy-go-lucky, good-natured colored folk, harmless and as civilized as any of the West Indian peasantry, for they were merely French West Indian negroes, and aside from the fact that they spoke only their native Creole patois were indistinguishable from others of their race. But like the majority of the French negroes they were at heart firm believers in Voodoo and Obeah and when worked into a fanatical frenzy at one of these African serpent-worshiping orgies they became temporarily transformed to fiendish savages, reverting to all the wild customs and ways of their ancestors and drawing the line only at actual cannibalism.
But of all this the boys knew nothing. They did not dream that such people or such customs existed, and they could not fathom the reasons or understand what to them were the mysterious and almost incredible sights they had witnessed.