Here and there, along the edge of the forest, men darted into the moonlight. They carried spears, which flashed now and then when the moon fell just so on the points. First they gathered by the body of the wizard and carried it back into the woods. We saw them, a little knot of men with the heavy weight of the fallen mummer in their midst, moving slowly to the wall of vines and through it into the mysterious depths beyond. Then, coming slowly out again, they moved back and forth before the hut as if to appraise our chances of defending it. Then they once more disappeared.
All this time they had walked as if in a world of death. Although we had seen their every gesture, we had not heard a sound loud enough to rival the almost imperceptible drone of insects in the grass. But now we heard again that grimly familiar, haunting, wild cry. Three times we heard it, terribly mournful and prolonged; then we heard a voice wailing, "White man, I come 'peak: white man all go Dead Land."
The voice died away, a few formless shrieks and yells followed it, and a silence, long and deep, settled upon the clearing.
Once more Arnold, Abe, and I stood on one side of the hut, and Gleazen, Matterson, and O'Hara on the other, with poor Seth Upham wandering aimlessly between us.
There was war within and without. There was almost no food. There was no water at all. I thought, then, that I should never see the town of Topham again; and—which oddly enough seemed even harder to endure—I thought that I never again should see the mission on the river.
"I swear," O'Hara whispered,—so clearly did I hear the words, as I stood with one eye for the inside of the hut and one for the outside, that I jumped like a nervous girl,—"I swear we've started a war that will reach from here to Barbary before it's done. Hearken to that!"
We heard afar off the throbbing of native drums, the roar of distant angry voices, a strange chant sung in some remote African encampment.
