She got up and shook the clinging twigs from her hair.
"I am dry. I must go and dress. The one thing which calms my fear of serpents is a discovery that if you keep still when they are about, and leave them alone, they invariably leave you alone."
CHAPTER XVIII
On returning home, they passed close to their own village which seemed unusually noisy.
Half-way across the Settlement John came to meet them in charge of Naomi, the shining light among Jellybrand's converts. John was armed to the teeth, a shaped coco-nut husk upon his head and a wooden spear in his hands.
"Mother," he called out, on sighting them, "there was a deaded man took out of one kennel, only they have tooken him away to Heaven now and everybody are very angry about it."
"You appear to have been seeing life during our absence, John," said Cyprian, as Ferlie questioned Naomi.
"One man make himself dead," that lady explained pleasantly. "'Nother village angry with his family."
The Settlement, when they reached it, appeared also, to be on the defensive. Little Jellybrand, bustling about with a shot-gun, which Cyprian instinctively recognized as a more dangerous weapon to its owner than to anything he aimed it at, explained that James Snook had, indeed, hanged himself from one of the stilts of his hut, having had trouble of some sort with his family while not in particularly good health. One of his sons had, lately, caught an evil spirit and launched it triumphantly on the deep in a small model canoe. The canoe landed its invisible occupant near the hut of an enemy's village and, hence, these furious preparations to meet a revengeful raid.