The struggle in the dual nature of the man between the contending forces of the innate and the acquired was obvious in the reluctant tone in which, while he admitted that he would obey the innate, he lamented the abandonment of the acquired.
“I must go, I feel that I must! My destiny was written ere Shem, Ham and Japhet separated to people the world. I bow to the inevitable! I am pledged to Dupree for dinner tomorrow evening, but I shall excuse myself early, and keep my appointment with Mother Sybella, and accompany her to the meeting of my kindred.”
XVI.
The cleared spot selected by Mother Sybella as the scene of her mystic ceremonies and the gathering place of the worshipers of Voo Doo, though scarcely beyond the outskirts of the city, was so screened by the umbrageous growth of tropical forest, interlaced with vanilla and grape-vines that festoon every woodland of Haiti, that its presence was not even suspected save by the initiated.
On the night that Dictator Dupree entertained, among other guests the wealthy Haitian, Walter Burton, partner in the great American house of “J. Dunlap,” and husband of the heiress to the millions accumulated by the long line of “J. Dunlaps” which had controlled the Haitian trade with the United States, a strange and uncanny drama was enacted almost within sound of the music that enlivened the Dictator’s banquet.
Through trees entwined by gigantic vines, resembling monstrous writhing serpents, glided silently many dark forms carrying blazing torches of resinous wood to guide the flitting figures through the intricacies of the hardly definable pathways that ran in serpentine indistinctness toward the clear spot, where Mother Sybella had set up the altar of Tu Konk, and was calling her children to worship by the booming of an immense red drum upon which she beat at short intervals.
In the center of the clearing, coiled upon the stump of a large tree, was a huge black snake, that occasionally reared its head and, waving it from side to side, emitted a fearful hissing sound as it shot forth its scarlet, flame-like tongue.