"Hi!" echoed Nikka.
And they pranced around the fire while the music commenced an air so fiercely wild that it made the blood tingle to listen to it. Then she flung down her torch, and tore free from Nikka's arm. He followed her. She eluded him. Bound and round they tore, keeping step the while. Now she accepted him, now she rejected him. At last he turned from her, arms folded, contemptuously unmoved. She wooed him with rhythmic ardor. He denied her. She drew her knife; he drew his. Eyes glaring, lips pinched, they circled one another, feinting, striking, leaping, posturing.
"Click!" The blades struck together.
"Hi! Hi!" they cried.
"Click! Clack! Click!" went the knife-blades.
"Ho! Ho!" they shouted.
The game was to see how near you could come without cutting. To avoid hurt the dancers required quick eyes and agile bodies. The blades flashed like meteors in the shifting light, wheeling and slashing and stabbing. In the beginning Kara forced the pace. Nikka retired before her, rather than risk doing her harm. But slowly he assumed the mastery. His knife was always at her throat, and active as she was, he refused to be shaken off. She fended desperately, panting now, bright-eyed and flushed. But he pressed her. Their blades clashed, he gave his a twist and hers dropped from her hand.
He seized her, forcing her back across his knee, knife up-raised to strike, while the fiddles clutched at one's nerves and the cymbals clanged with wicked glee. The scene—Nikka's tall figure, with the poised knife, and the lithe, slender form he held, expressing in every curve and line its tempestuous, untamed soul—brought to my memory the song I had heard him sing one morning in the music-room at Chesby:
And best of all, I shall hear
The wild, mad Tzigane songs,
Cruel and gay and lustful,
Like fiddles and clanging gongs.
And in the glare of the campfires
I shall see the Tziganes dance—
Women with lithe, round bodies,
Men straight as a heiduck's lance.