Oh, those awful skulls! "Is everything good and beautiful in Nature," she could not help asking herself, "except mankind?"
Here was the faint odour of death, and she beheld on many of these skulls the mark of the axe, reminding her of murder. She shuddered. Her palace was but a charnel-house. Those crouching creatures around her, waiting to do her bidding or obey her slightest behest, were but slaves of tyrant masters, and every day she missed one of the youngest and fairest, and knew what her doom would be.
And out beyond the gate yonder were her soldiers, her guards. Alas, yes! and they were her keepers also.
But behold! yonder comes the great chief Kaloomah, her prime minister, and walking beside him is Kalamazoo.
Kaloomah walks erect and stately, as becomes so high a functionary. He is stern in face even to grimness and ferocity, but as handsome in form as some of the heroes of Walter Scott.
And Kalamazoo is little more than a boy, and one, too, of somewhat fragile form, with face more delicate than is becoming in a cannibal Indian.
Kalamazoo is the only son of the late queen. For some reason or other he wears a necklace of his mother's red-stained teeth. Probably they are a charm.
Both princes kneel at Leeboo's feet. Leeboo strikes both smartly on the shoulders with her sceptre and bids them stand up.
"I would not have you grovel round me," she says in their own tongue, "like two little pigs of the forest." They stand up, looking sheepish and nonplussed, and Leeboo, placing one on each side of her--a spear-length distant,--looks first at Kaloomah and then at Kalamazoo and bursts into a silvery laugh.
Why laughs Queen Leeboo? These two men are both very natural, both somewhat solemn. Not even little pigs of the forest like to be laughed at.