"Cimbula!" gasped Dick.
"What is that old fool up to?" Dan exclaimed.
"They are leading some prisoner among them," said Dick. "It looks like a girl, but her face is covered with her hair."
"It's a Taharan girl. Cimbula must be trying to buy off the Arabs with the gift of a slave."
"What a dog!"
"He is wrecking our whole plan of battle."
The boys looked on in suspense as the witch-doctor approached the Arab camp, capering and shaking his rattling gourd. The others who followed were imitating him, for Cimbula had decided that a magic dance of demons would terrify the raiders, and therefore he had dressed up a dozen of Wabiti's men in a garb like his own and painted their bodies with stripes and daubs of white.
Whirling and leaping the demon dancers approached the Arab camp, while one of the natives brandished a flint knife above the head of the bound victim.
"If the Arabs take fright at this hocus-pocus, they are bigger fools than I take them to be," growled Dick.
"More likely they are laughing at the medicine-man," Dan exclaimed. "Look, they are rushing the procession."