[CHAPTER I.]
THE SERPENT CHARMER.
A brown man in a white turban sat by the river. It was night, and a little fire of sticks sent strange gleams sparkling across the water, and touched the form of the brown man with splashes of golden light.
The man was playing on a gourd flute. The music—if such it could be called—was in a high key, but stifled and subdued. Under the man, to keep his crouching body from the earth, had been spread a piece of scarlet cloth. In front of him was a round wicker basket, perhaps a foot in diameter by six inches high.
As the man played, the notes of the flute coming faster and faster, the lid of the basket began to tremble as by some pent-up force. Finally the lid slid open, and a hooded cobra lifted its flat, ugly head. With eyes on those of the serpent charmer, the cobra began weaving back and forth in time to the music. Now and then the snake would hiss and dart its head at the man. The latter would dodge to avoid the striking fangs, meanwhile keeping up his flute-playing.
It was an odd scene, truly, to be going forward in a country like ours—cut bodily from the mysteries of India and dropped down on the banks of the Wabash, there, near the intensely American city of Lafayette.
While the brown man was playing and the cobra swayed, and danced, and struck its lightning-like but ineffectual blows, another came into the ring of firelight, stepping as noiselessly as a slinking panther. He, like the other, wore a turban, and there was gold in his ears and necklaces about his throat.
The first man continued his flute-playing. The other, with a soft laugh, went to the player's side, sank down, and riveted his own snakelike orbs upon the diamond eyes of the cobra. Once the serpent struck at him, but he drew back and continued to look. With one hand the newcomer took the flute from the player's lips and laid it on the ground; then, in a silence broken only by the crackling fires, the eyes of the man snapped and gleamed and held those of the cobra.
The effect was marvelous. Slowly the cobra ceased its rhythmical movements and dropped down and down until it retreated once more into the basket; then, with a quick hand, the lid of the receptacle was replaced and secured with a wooden pin.
"Yadaba!" exclaimed the first man.