“We’ve got to go, Mark,” I said aloud. “Get the carriers together for me as quick as you can; it’s the best time, with all the people away. If we stay on, there’ll be a row tonight as sure as Fate, and the Government don’t like unofficial people to do its killing for it. We’ll come back, and give them what-for with the chill off. Oh, Lord, don’t do that!”
For the Marquis was hanging round my neck—a pretty solid weight—and had already kissed me loudly on both cheeks.
“My brave retainer!” he said, with tears in his voice (I reckoned he meant preserver, but it was all one), “what can I ever do to recompense you of my life that you have saved?”
“I told you what to do just now,” I said. “Get the carriers under way, and sharp. I want to drink some ammonia.”
I did, and it did me good; I was able to walk almost as well as usual in half an hour. I slung my arm up in a long sheaf of grass, and we set off from the village as hard as we could, keeping a look-out for ambushes all the way. But the noonday hush lay on all the forest and the track, and there was not a sign of life.
When we were an hour or two away, I halted for a rest; the bite was getting at me a little, and I felt slightly giddy, though I knew by now that there was no danger.
“Tell me, what was all this thing that has happened?” demanded the Marquis, dropping on a log at my side and fanning himself with his hat. “I am bursting of curiosity, but I would not disturb you.”
“Well,” I said, “if I had known Kata-Kata as I know other districts in New Guinea, none of them would have happened at all. The whole thing might have been foreseen. It’s true I had heard silly yarns about this part of the country, but I didn’t believe them, they seemed so exaggerated—and they quite went out of my head, anyhow, for I was hardly more than a kid when I did hear them. But I’ve remembered them today.”
“What were they, then?”
“People—natives, I mean—said that the Kata-Kata sorcerers know how to tame snakes and make them like dogs, and that the brutes would bite any one their masters told them to. The sorcerers would get a bit of a man’s clothing, taken next his skin where it had the scent of his body, and worry and tease the snake with it so that it would know the smell, and hate it. And then they said the sorcerer would let loose his snake at night in the house of the man he wanted to kill, and the brute would bite him, and the sorcerer would get it and take it home again before he was seen.”