“Cut it out, Mark,” I said. “You ought to know by this time that this horse isn’t yarded with that kind of corn. But if you don’t feel you can lay your golden head on your little pillow tonight without seeing the curio shop, I’ll work it all right. It only means a handful or two of salt.”
As I said before, I hate spending my salt when I haven’t got to; but I opened a tin, took a good handful and offered it to Mo, pointing at the same time to his bag and to our eyes. Koppi Koko had disappeared. I noted the fact, and decided to argue with him—helped by a bit of lawyer cane—later on.
The other natives had all cleared out by this time, and the sound of the dance was growing. Thud-thud went the feet; gallop-gallop the drum, like a horse’s hoofs. The fire was low in the marea, but it cast up a deep red glow toward the roof, giving light enough to see the contents of the wonderful bag, as Mo tumbled them out on the floor beside us. The salt had been too much for him; he accepted it eagerly, and was eating it like sugar, smearing his paint all to bits, and nearly choking himself as he sucked it down. These inland natives hardly ever see salt, and they are as keen for it as an alligator for fish, once they get the chance of a little.
Everything that was in the bag the Marquis handled, weighed, even smelt. I could tell him about most of the things. I did not know the Kata-Kata country, but quite a lot of the charms were familiar enough. This stone, I said, was meant to make the yam crops grow. This one was used for charming down rain. This carved monstrosity, like a pig that was half a beetle, probably was a charm for making war.
All the time he was handling and exclaiming over the trash in the bag, I kept a lookout on the sorcerer’s face. There was something I did not like in the air; the fact that I could not define it made it none the less real. It had to do, maybe, with the wooden demeanor of Mo—or with the disappearance of all the other men from the marea—or with a certain strange pitiful whimpering that had been going on under the house for quite a good while—a dog, perhaps; perhaps not.
Anyhow, I looked at Mo a good deal. If there was mischief in the village—no matter of what kind—the sorcerer was sure to be at the bottom of it.
The drums galloped outside, the dance went on. The moon climbed over the motionless tops of the cocoanut palms, and looked down into the open mouth of the marea. Half in the moonlight, half in the firelight, Mo’s face grew suddenly dark: he made a snatch at something that the Marquis was examining and hid it away—where, I could not see.
It was a trifling object, only a piece cut out of one of the plaited red and yellow belts that nearly every one in the village wore, men, women, and older children. The Marquis had been handling it rather closely, to examine the pattern. A smile crept over the sorcerer’s face when it was gone—a cunning, ugly smile, worse than the stony inexpressiveness that had gone before. I saw he was bent on making us forget that scrap of plaited stuff. He pulled out a lot of other things from the bag—fossils, beaks, bats’ wings, lumps of quartz crystal that glittered in the moon—and began showing them off.
More: by the sound of a certain word I had heard Koppi Koko use, I understood him to say that he was ready to do some magic for us, if we liked. He took down a cocoanut shell from the wall, and intimated that it was to be filled with salt first of all. I filled it, and Mo got up from his crouching posture on the floor and disappeared, making signs to show that he would return.
“How do you find that?” asked the Marquis.