THE DANCE OF DEATH
Then for twenty minutes the negroes were transported to a tropic island in the South Pacific Ocean.
They beheld a bamboo village, the little naked children playing in front of the huts, the dogs lying in the sun or slinking among the cooking-pots, the men and women wearing the rude, barbaric garments of the tribe, their legs and shoulders bare.
They witnessed the preparation for a great feast, the camp filling up with wild, cruel savages, both men and women.
Then the village princess danced before them, a frenzied whirl of bare arms and bare limbs, while a band of musicians beat upon rude instruments whose melody they could not hear.
They beheld a white man appear upon this scene, peep at the dancing princess, through the interstices of the jungle, fall in love with her infatuating grace and beauty, and later seek her out in her bamboo hut.
Betrayed by her white lover, the Black Swan sought revenge.
The white man was captured, bound to a stake, and in the midst of a horrible revelry of torture a posse of white men arrived, rescued the victim of savage hate, slaughtered most of the inhabitants of the village, burned the bamboo huts and departed.
But the Black Swan had escaped the slaughter, and the negroes watched her with breathless interest as she trailed the rescue party until they came to a narrow defile in the mountains. She climbed the mountain side and stood, at last, silhouetted against the sky, as graceful as the bird whose name she bore, looking down upon the posse in the valley below. She called to her faithless lover, hurled a javelin through his body, then turned and fled, leaping like a deer from rock to rock.
With tense bodies and aching eyes, the negroes watched the flight of the girl and the pursuit of the posse until the girl was cornered, stopping at last on a high, sharp crag, overlooking the sea.