“She is a beautiful,” said the Marquis. “She is what you Australians, in your touching symbolism, call a tart. I remember an Australian little girl, in——”
He had got hold of both sides of his mustache—I saw that I was in for the deluge, so I cut it short.
“I believe that’s your sorcerer coming at last,” I said.
There was a noise of throbbing drums in the village, a tramping down the street, that evidently foretold the commencement of the evening dance. Now, it was hardly to be supposed that the village would begin its entertainment before the sorcerer came back from his spells in the forest to join in the revels. I told the Marquis this, and suggested we should have some trade stuff taken out of the packs in readiness. We got one of our boys to untie a sack or so, and selected some beads, knives, salt and tobacco.
“And here is the sorcerer, back from his spelling,” declared the Marquis, peering through the door at a tall, fine-looking man who was striding down the street with a general air of owning the whole place. He carried a big torch in his hand, and had a netted string bag over one shoulder. Slung on his breast was a large, hollow piece of bamboo, which he took some care to keep in a perpendicular position. His face, rather a fine one for a New Guinea native, showed clearly in the light of his torch: it was painted in stripes of black and scarlet, with a very fiendish effect. On his head was a magnificent head-dress of paradise and parrot feathers, rising fully three or four feet above his mat of hair. He had no clothes except a bark belt, and did not wear the bead and shell necklaces affected by most of the other people. There was something slung round his throat like a locket; it swayed about so that I could not see what it was.
“Yes, that’s the sorcerer without a doubt,” I said. “He’s making right here.”
He was; and our interpreter, a timid little lad from the coast, was so terrified at the sight that he ran and hid himself at the back of the marea, and had to be dragged out by force. By the time we had succeeded in quieting him down and assuring him that our weapons would protect us all from any sorcerer, the man was at the steps and mounting them.
In the light of the fire we saw at last what his locket was. I took it, at first, for a monkey’s paw, but, remembering that there are no monkeys in New Guinea, I had another look, and then realized that it was a human hand, dead and dried.
The Marquis looked at the ugly ornament much as a collector of insects looks at a hideous and valuable beetle.
“Flint, this is what you call the real Mackay,” he said. “This is the worth of my money.” He rose, and was about to greet the sorcerer with all the grace of Versailles—in fact, he had already begun a courtly bow—when a small and very ugly man, with ears like a bat, came running out of the dark from nowhere, and grabbed the great man by the foot, as he went up.