“What news?” exclaimed Biglow and Clensy, as they looked up from their cards. Then Adams, with an awestruck look in his eye, proceeded, “Why, these ’ere damned Hoytians are blasted cannibals; got a kinder relygion that they call Voody-worship on ther brain.”
“What’s that to do with us?” said Clensy quietly, as he puffed his cigarette and reshuffled the cards. Bartholomew Biglow’s ears were alert at once; he lifted his hand and, smashing at a fly that had settled on Adams’s sweating bald head, said, “What have ye heard to make ye so excited, man?”
Thereupon, Adams loosened his red neckcloth, and swallowed the proffered glass of cognac, began to gesticulate and tell his comrades all which he had heard. It appeared that Adams had that same day heard how thousands of the Haytians were adherents to the vaudoux-worship. Some one had told him how the vaudoux folk went in for bloodthirsty orgies, drank human blood and sacrificed children on the fetish altars, doing such revolting, blood-curdling things as would have made a pre-Christian South-Sea islander shiver with disgust.
De Cripsny, who sat curling the tips of his moustachios while Adams narrated all that he had heard when visiting some grog-shanty in the lower quarter of the town, astounded Clensy and Biglow by calmly corroborating all that Adams had told them. “’Tis nothing new to me, monsieurs,” said the half-caste Frenchman. Then he calmly sat there and told the wondering Englishmen how many of the Haytians were staunch devotees to vaudoux worship, secretly attending the orgy temples, which were situated somewhere by the mountains, a few miles away. De Cripsny, who was a friend of Biglow’s and had some connection with that worthy’s successful exploits in the gun-running line, pulled his moustache and told Adams to shut the door. Then the Frenchman calmly informed the three men that they were liable to be strangled and offered up as sacrifices to the deities of the vaudoux if they went into the forest near Port-au-Prince after dark!
Adams opened his one eye and his mouth wide. Then he hitched his trousers up and said he had been seriously thinking of taking to the sea again; “nothing like the open seas!” he said, as he looked with fright at the door.
“Don’t you worry, monsieurs; I tink you are quite safe; you are Angleseman, and p’r’aps it would not be good for you to die on the vaudoux sacrificial altars.”
“Thank Gawd for that much,” exclaimed Adams, as he took another drink.
Then de Cripsny told them that the authorities had lately discovered that many children were missing each week from the villages round Port-au-Prince.
“What do you think has become of them?” exclaimed Clensy and Biglow.
“Why, monsieurs, they have surely been caught while strolling or playing in the jungle and taken away to the mountain temples to the papaloi, who do strangle them and drink blood—like so.”