Trembling with happiness, Ru strode forward to meet them. "My people! My people!" it was on his lips to say, when he observed that his arrival was creating a peculiar effect.
Immediately upon his emergence, some of the nearer tribesmen had sprung to their feet, startled and amazed—as well they might be! As if at an electrical signal, others followed their example, with little shocked and horrified exclamations, until, almost in a flash, the entire tribe stood confronting him speechlessly.
Overpowered though he was by his own astonishment, Ru could see that the eyes of some were distended with terror; that the limbs of others were quivering; that the lips of one were moving silently as if in frightened prayer.
Before he could find words to demand the reason for this strange reception, the explanation was shrilled into his ears.
"It's Ru! It's the Sparrow-Hearted! It's his dead spirit come back!" shrieked one of the younger tribesmen, taking to his heels. And the others took up his cry, "It's his dead spirit come back!" until those fearsome words echoed and reechoed in a terrified din, and on all sides the panic-stricken people were fleeing toward the woods.
For an instant the bewildered Ru did not quite grasp what was happening. Then, as full understanding came to him, his paralyzed tongue was loosened, and he shouted, at the top of his voice, "It is no spirit you see! It is I, Ru! It is Ru come back to you!"
But so thoroughly alarmed were the people that most of them continued full-tilt toward the woods, as if the shouted words only confirmed their belief that they had seen a ghost.
Yet two or three, less timorous than their fellows, did turn at the sound of Ru's voice. While he continued to cry, "It is only I come back! I will not harm you!" they seemed half convinced that he spoke the truth, and began tentatively and hesitatingly to approach.
By some peculiar chance, these audacious spirits were all women. And among them Ru recognized, with a tremor of delight, Zubu the Prattling Brook and Yonyo the Smiling-Eyed!
It did not now seem to matter that the tribe had fled. As Yonyo drew near, Ru entirely forgot his vanished kinsmen under the fascination of those glittering black eyes.