Bomba felt a sick faintness come upon him as he watched with repulsion the loathsome sight. He stepped back a pace or two with an impulse to shut the scene away from him. But at that moment Sobrinini beheld him and called to him.
She halted in her dance, and the snakes, uncoiling themselves from about her arms and neck, as though they knew that their part in the frenzied performance was over, slithered off quietly into the long marsh grass and sought their lairs.
Sobrinini darted through the ring of breathless natives, and before Bomba had guessed her purpose threw her skinny arms about the boy’s neck.
“Bartow! My Bartow!” she cried, in a loud, cracked voice. “Come and dance with Sobrinini. Come!”
But Bomba drew back, striving to disengage himself from the clinging arms of the witch woman. If one of her own loathsome snakes had coiled about his neck, he could hardly have felt a greater repulsion.
“Come! Come, dance with Sobrinini,” the woman said in a wheedling voice, as she untwined her shriveled arms to grasp him by the hand. “I will call back my snakes, and you shall fondle them to show you that they will not fill your veins with poison or crush your bones when Sobrinini is nigh. Come! Why do you draw back? What are you waiting for, Bartow?”
“But I am not Bartow,” blurted out Bomba in his desperation to be rid of her and learn the truth about himself. “Jojasta, the medicine man of the Moving Mountain, called me Bartow also. But I am not he. I am Bomba! Bomba, the jungle boy!”
Sobrinini paused, a look of bewilderment overspreading her sharp features.
“Not Bartow? Not Bartow?” she mumbled, coming close to peer into the lad’s face. “No, no, not Bartow, surely. But then you are Bartow’s ghost.”
“I am no ghost!” cried Bomba. “Bones are in my body. Blood runs through my veins. See—if you prick my flesh, it bleeds.”