"A white man's head?"
"Yes."
"Ah,—it belonged to M. le Procureur du Roi, at Basse Terre; they caught him when riding near the town one evening, and his head was off almost before he missed it. Well, that is the standard of Scipio, who is now stringing his banjo 'for a song.'"
"I shall teach this modern Scipio Africanus a sharp lesson to-night. But I do not see M. de Thoisy."
"He is in that tent with the fetishes around it," replied my guide, pointing to a booth which was formed of bamboos and yellow grass matting, and on the sides of which there hung nearly a hundred lesser fetishes, as those guardians of the household or person are named by the negroes of Congo and Angola, and which are composed of hoofs, hair, bones of animals, beaks, skulls and claws of birds, fish-bones, parrots' feathers, or old nails, for nothing is too mean to form the Lares of the degraded Angolians.
"So he is there?"
"Yes—bound hand and foot. Why they saved him, and slew M. le Procureur whom he was accompanying for an evening ride, I cannot divine."
"When will they sacrifice him?"
"When the moon rises above the peak of La Souffrière."
"So soon? then, by Jove, we have no time to lose!"