Bomba saw that they were squaws of the Araos tribe. The faces of the women, usually so stolid, wore the ghastly gray of terror. They had come from afar and swiftly, for their flesh was torn by thorns and spiked vines and their breath came in gasps.
One of them, who was the squaw of Lodo and seemed to be the leader of the women, came over to her husband and stood before him, striving to regain breath enough to speak.
“What is it, woman?” cried Lodo. “What has happened?”
“The maloca,” she got out at last. “Bucks come. They burn our houses. They carry off the women. They take the children. All gone.”
CHAPTER IX
THE SAVAGE RAIDERS
The news fell with stunning effect upon the assembled bucks already wrought up to a high pitch of fury because of the capture of their chief. There was a hubbub of exclamations of grief and rage.
“Pirah gone, too,” declared the woman, with a sweeping gesture of her hands.
“Pirah!” This was Bomba’s voice, harsh and unlike his own, as he pushed through the group of scowling Indians. “You say Pirah taken too? Who were the bucks?”
“No know.” The squaw shook her head. She had recovered her breath now, and, with the other women, was regaining her habitual stolid look. “They come—many come.” She extended her ten fingers, closing and opening her hands several times to indicate an indefinite number. “Take women. Take children. We run away. Hide in bushes till they go. Then we come here.”
Her story roused the Indians even more than the loss of their chief. That their native village, or maloca, should have been invaded, their women and children carried off, was a crime that by their code merited only one punishment, and that torture and death.