She approached slowly, fearfully, and the music became low as the chief, squatting, drew out a bag, extracted from it some herbs which he threw into the fire.
At once a great pillar of whitish, dense smoke rose, straight upward toward the wings.
“Clever, isn’t it?” whispered Garry. “They must have a fan under the trapdoor of the stage, just below that fire, to make those flames leap and the smoke go straight up.”
“It makes me feel sort of creepy, and as if it was real!” Chick responded. Then they watched, in surprise.
In that white, thick, ascending pillar of smoke, as though on a screen, there slowly appeared a vision!
There was the girl. There were two men. But they were Indians.
A quick pantomime in the moiling, upcurling smudge revealed hatred between the men, and fury when the girl chose the rival.
Into that vision blended another so that as one vanished the other was visible. It showed the two men, again with the girl, but as they actually stood on the stage, almost the same in appearance, as near as the men engaged by the theatre could be matched to the vision.
That picture of hatred was again enacted in the new garb, and the vision was once more displaced by another—and the chums gasped.
In that smoke column, black against white, two biplanes flew one after the other toward the audience—they seemed to merge, to blend, to vanish, and then—as Chick made an involuntary little scream of amazement—the smoke was filled by the vision of two black, bi-winged shapes coming together.