“He’s come to rest,” said Johnny. “All we have to do now is to coax him down.”
“Ye-e-s,” said Doris, doubtfully. “That’s all.” They sat down side by side on a big flat stone to stare up at the grinning monkey and to catch now and then a fleeting glance of that gleaming stone.
“It’s a diamond all right,” said Johnny. “And my! what a whopper!”
“Wait,” he said a moment later. “Monkeys like bananas. I saw a clump of wild ones back there. Perhaps I can find some ripe ones.”
While he was gone Doris kept her eyes on the monkey, but once when she glanced down at Nieta she found to her surprise that she was paying no attention to the monkey. Instead, she had taken some curious white objects from a small leather sack carried by a string round her neck and was whispering to them.
“Nieta!” she whispered. “What in the world are you doing?”
“These,” said Nieta quite soberly, “are the teeth of a yellow snake killed in the back of a cave in the dark of the moon. They are a powerful voodoo charm. They were given me by a very wise Papa Lou. A Papa Lou is a voodoo priest.”
At once Doris recalled what Dorn had told her of the strange voodoo charm.
“The snake, you know,” Nieta went on quite solemnly, “is able when alive to charm a monkey. When the snake is dead his spirit remains near his teeth. I am telling him to charm the monkey and bring him down to us.”
“Nieta,” said Doris, shocked beyond belief, “you must not think such things. They are not true. It is truly wicked to believe them. There is but one living spirit outside ourselves and that is the spirit of the great Father.”