It was noticeably quiet outside. Doubtless the Indians were enjoying an early-morning siesta after some grilling orgy of the night before. Oliver groaned with the movements necessary to searching his pockets for cigarette materials. His groan was mimicked by a familiar voice in the doorway.
Jessamy Selden entered.
"I've been listening for a sound from you," she chirruped. "My, how you slept! All in?"
"Pretty nearly," he said.
She came and sat beside him on a box.
"Are you badly burned?"
"Oh, no. I guess your courtplaster helped some. But I'm terribly sore. And, worst of all, I feel like an utter ass!"
"Why, how so?"
He snorted indignantly. "I went nutty," he laughed shortly. "I have lost the supreme contempt which I have always had for people who go batty in any sort of fanatical demonstration, like that last night. I've seen supposedly intelligent white folks go absolutely wild at religious camp meetings in the South, and I always marvelled at their loss of control. Now I guess I understand. Hour after hour of what I went through the other night, with the chanting and wailing and the constant rattle of those confounded cherry stones, and the terrible heat, and men and women giving out all about me, and the perpetual thud-thud of bare feet—ugh! I wouldn't go through it again for ten thousand dollars."
"I thought it best not to warn you of the severity of it beforehand," she announced complacently. "Very few white men have ever danced the fire dance, and only one or two have held out to the end. Of course failure to do so signifies that the powers working against the affiliation are too strong to be overcome. These men who failed, then, did not become brothers of the Showut Poche-dakas."