Chapter 25 - Page 2

as he dropped
like a shadow, naked as on his natal morn, landing springily on his
bent knees, and like a shadow leaping along the run-way. It was
hard for them to realize that it was a man, for he seemed a weird
jungle spirit, a goblin of the forest. Only Binu Charley was not
perturbed. He flung his poisoned spear over the head of the
captive at the flitting form. It was a mighty cast, well intended,
but the shadow, leaping, received the spear harmlessly between the
legs, and, tripping upon it, was flung sprawling. Before he could
get away, Binu Charley was upon him, clutching him by his snow-
white hair. He was only a young man, and a dandy at that, his face
blackened with charcoal, his hair whitened with wood-ashes, with
the freshly severed tail of a wild pig thrust through his
perforated nose, and two more thrust through his ears. His only
other ornament was a necklace of human finger-bones. At sight of
their other prisoner he chattered in a high querulous falsetto,
with puckered brows and troubled, wild-animal eyes. He was
disposed of along the middle of the line, one of the Poonga-Poonga
men leading him at the end of a length of bark-rope.

The trail began to rise out of the jungle, dipping at times into
festering hollows of unwholesome vegetation, but rising more and
more over swelling, unseen hill-slopes or climbing steep hog-backs
and rocky hummocks where the forest thinned and blue patches of sky
appeared overhead.

"Close up he stop," Binu Charley warned them in a whisper.

Even as he spoke, from high overhead came the deep resonant boom of
a village drum. But the beat was slow, there was no panic in the
sound. They were directly beneath the village, and they could hear
the crowing of roosters, two women's voices raised in brief
dispute, and, once, the crying of a child. The run-way now became
a deeply worn path, rising so steeply that several times the party
paused for breath. The path never widened, and in places the feet
and the rains of generations had scoured it till it was sunken
twenty feet beneath the surface.

"One man with a rifle could hold it against a thousand," Sheldon
whispered to Joan. "And twenty men could hold it with spears and
arrows."

They came out on the village, situated on a small, upland plateau,
grass-covered, and with only occasional trees. There was a wild
chorus of warning cries from the women, who scurried out of the
grass houses, and like frightened quail dived over the opposite
edge of the clearing, gathering up their babies and children as
they ran. At the same time spears and arrows began to fall among
the invaders. At Sheldon's command, the Tahitians and Poonga-
Poonga men got into action with their rifles. The spears and