We halted, breathless with wonder. Softly, in a low, monotonous hum came the itinerant beating. Yes, we all heard it, and with it, as we waited, was mingled the metallic clangor of cymbals or something like them.
“‘Regardless of grammar they all said “That’s them,’” whispered Hopkins, quoting his Ingoldsby.
“Up the tree. They’re coming nearer,” said Goritz.
“Decidedly,” coincided the Professor. “As an exhibition of the prehistoric musical art this will be unique.”
We were not long in clambering among the outspread boughs of a big pine, leaving our instruments and packs at its foot (the species in growth and cyclical arrangement of its limbs resembled the white pine), helping each other until we were finally asylumed among the topmost needles, peering out over the receding road for the approaching procession, if procession it was.
We were not to wait long. The music, disentangled now from the interference and dampening effect of the trees, rose assailingly from the distance, and the thumping drums and the dulcet swish and clatter of the cymbals seemed almost beneath us. We were straining our eyes, and, in our impatience and curiosity, became careless of our position, all half standing on the same bough, clasping the trunk and leaning outward.
There was a glittering, swarming effect in the vista, and we saw the advancing ranks of the strangers. Instantly we recognized the Eskimo, or his modified image, in the first companies. They were lurching ponderously forward, their legs and shoulders advancing together to the irresistible rhythm swelling behind them. They wore short yellow tunics or sacks engirdled by cloth belts with leaden buckles; blue trousers caught at the ankles by leaden anklets and sandals completed their dress, except that on their heads they wore broad, white, hive-shaped straw sombreros not unlike the head covering of the peons in Mexico. Each man swung a short bludgeon comically suggestive of a New York City policeman’s club.
“Cheese it—the Cop,” chuckled Hopkins.
The ranks came on in goodly number and they formed a stalwart, if clumsy and shuffling phalanx. The band, as a proper misappropriation of the word would describe it, succeeded. These, too, were all of the Eskimo type, but men and women mingled together; the men plied the small, stiff, vociferous wooden drums and the women rather gracefully, and with inerrant precision, smashed the cymbals together.
“Gold—by God,” croaked Goritz, and he almost lost his balance in his admiration.