THE DEVIL DANCERS
Perhaps the two terrified boys swooned, perhaps they were literally
frightened out of their wits. Neither could ever be sure, but
whichever it was, everything was a blank from the moment when they
felt the hands of the savage figures grasp them until they found
themselves surrounded on every side by a ring of half-naked men and
women in the full glare of a huge fire under immense trees.
But they were unharmed, not even bound, and as they realized this
their courage in a measure returned and they glanced about, still
terribly frightened, shaking as if with ague, and marveling that they
were still alive.
Then for the first time they realized that their captors were not
Indians. They were hideously daubed with paint to be sure, they were
nearly nude, but they were not bedecked with feathers and their black
skins and wooly heads left no doubt as to their identity. They were
negroes, mostly coal black, but a few were brown or even yellow and
the dazed, scared boys looked upon them with uncomprehending
amazement. To them, negroes were civilized, harmless, good-natured
people and why these blacks should be acting in this savage manner was
past all understanding.
And still more puzzling was the fact that they were talking together
in a strange, unintelligible jargon. To the boys’ minds, all colored
people spoke English—either with the broad soft accent of the
American negro or the slurring, drawling dialect of the West Indians,
and yet here were blacks chattering shrilly in some totally different
tongue.
The boys felt as if they had been bereft of their senses, as if, by
some magic, they had been transported to the middle of darkest Africa
and they wondered vaguely if their fears and worries had driven them
mad and the whole thing was a hallucination.
But at this moment four more blacks arrived and to the boys’ further
amazement deposited their radio sets upon the smooth, hard-beaten
earth beside them. These were real; they seemed somehow to link the
boys with the outside world, with civilization, and at sight of them
the boys knew they were not dreaming, were not mad.
And the little cases with their black fiber panels and shining
nickel-plated knobs and connections had a strange effect upon the
circle of negroes also. With low murmurs and sharp ejaculations they
drew a step farther from the boys and looked furtively at the
instruments, while the men who had brought them from the boat leaped
nimbly away the instant they had set them down as if afraid the
harmless things might bite them.
“Gosh!” murmured Tom, finding his voice at last. “They’re afraid of
us!”
“I believe they are,” responded Frank, who, finding that the
savage-looking crowd seemed of no mind to harm them, had regained
confidence.
Scarcely knowing why he did so, Tom reached forward, connected the
batteries and turned the rheostat. The result was astounding. As the
tiny filament in the bulb glowed at his touch an awed “Wahii!” arose
from the negroes, and with one accord they retreated several yards.
“Say, we’ve got ’em going!” exclaimed Tom jubilantly. “They’re as much
afraid of us as we are of them. It all gets me, Frank. I wonder——”
What Tom wondered Frank never knew, for at this moment the surrounding
blacks uttered a weird wailing cry and flung themselves upon the
ground.
“Gee!” ejaculated Frank, “look there.”
Over the prostrated blacks, approaching through a lane between their
bodies, came an amazing, fantastic, awful figure. Naked, save for a
loin cloth, painted to resemble a skeleton, with great horns bound to
his head and with a cow’s tail dragging behind him, he came prancing
and leaping towards the fire and the boys, shaking a rattle in one
hand and waving a horse-tail in the other.
Speechless with wonder, the boys gazed at him. They realized that he
was the leader of the crowd, a chief probably, and in his fantastic
garb they recognized a faint resemblance to pictures they had seen of
wild African tribesmen, but that such a being should be here—here in
an island in the West Indies and only a few miles from railways,
cities, great sugar mills, wireless stations and even their own
submarine, seemed incredible, monstrous, absolutely unbelievable—as
dream-like and amazing as the savage-looking figures who had captured
them.
But they had little time to think. Suddenly the tom-tom burst forth in
thunderous sounds, deep, sonorous, blood-curdling, savage, wild, and
to the deafening “turn—turn, turn, turn—turn—turn, turn, turn,” the
huge horned figure pranced and danced about the two boys, chanting a
wailing song, keeping time to his steps with his gourd-rattle and
shaking and waving his horse-tail.
Nearer and nearer he circled, stooping low, leaping high, working
himself into a frenzy; twisting, swaying, contorting, while,
fascinated, almost hypnotized, the two boys watched speechless and
rooted to the spot. Then, so abruptly that the boys jumped, the drum
ceased, the dancing figure halted as if arrested in mid-air, with one
foot still raised, and then, with a wild yell, he darted towards the
boys.
With a startled cry they cowered away. Surely, they thought, he was
about to seize them, to kill them. But the next instant the man
stooped, and grasping the shining copper resonance coil whirled it
about, facing the ring of negroes and waving the coil about his head,
while, upon the copper wire, the firelight gleamed and scintillated as
though living flames were darting from it.
And then a marvelous, a miraculous thing happened. As the gigantic
negro slowly swung the coil, a great hush fell upon the others and
clear and distinct in the silence a voice seemed to issue from the
black box upon the ground.
“Tom! Frank!” came the words.
At the sounds, pandemonium broke loose. With a wild, terrified scream
the horned man flung down the coil and with a tremendous bound burst
through the circle of onlookers who, screaming and yelling, turned and
fled in every direction. In a breath, the boys were alone. Alone by
the fire and their instruments while, crouching behind trees, flat on
the ground, wailing like lost souls, the negroes watched from a
distance with wildly rolling eyes and terror-stricken faces.
But the boys at the time gave little heed to this. At the sound of
their names from the receiver they had been galvanized to life and
action. Their friends were near, they were calling them! They were
saved! Leaping to the coil, Frank grabbed it up and moved it slowly,
until again to Tom’s anxious ears came the sound of a human voice.
“It’s Bancroft!” came the words. “We’re near! We can hear a drum and
are making for a fire. Where are you? Can you see the fire or hear the
noise?”
“Can we?” muttered Tom, his sense of humor coming to him even in his
excitement. “I’ll say we can, as Rawlins says.”
Then, scarcely daring to hope that he could send his voice through
space by the coil, he adjusted the sending instruments and called into
the transmitter.
“We hear!” he cried. “Come quick! We don’t know where we are, but
we’re here by the fire—we’re prisoners—a lot of savages have us!”
Breathlessly Tom listened. Had they heard? Would the resonance
coil—that marvelous instrument which had worked the miracle—act as a
sending antenna? Tom wondered why they had never tried it, why they
had been so stupid, why it had never occurred to them. Had Bancroft
heard? Would they come? All this flashed through his mind with the
speed of light. And then came another thought. Of course they’d come.
Even if they had not heard they would come. Bancroft had said they
were making for the fire. They would be there anyway and as Tom
realized this a tremendous load lifted from his mind. Whether or not
their coil had served to send the waves speeding through the ether,
they were sure of being rescued. But the next instant a still greater
joy thrilled him. Again from the receiver came Bancroft’s voice. “Hold
fast!” it said, “we’re coming! We hear you!” Even Frank had heard.
The boys’ tensed strained nerves gave way. The coil dropped from
Frank’s hand, he staggered to Tom’s side and, throwing their arms
around each other, the two burst into wild hysterical laughter.
Suddenly they were aware of some one speaking near them. In their wild
delight, the terrific reaction, they had forgotten their captors, had
forgotten the weird dancer whose act had saved them. But at the low
moaning voice close to them they came back to earth with a start and
wheeled about. Within a few paces, his head bobbing up and down
against the ground, flat on his stomach, was the giant negro, and from
his lips, muffled by their contact with the earth, came the pleading
wail which had roused the boys.
“What on earth does he want?” asked Tom, who could make nothing of the
words.
“I don’t know, but he’s scared to death like all the others,” replied
Frank, “and I don’t wonder. That voice from the phones was enough to
scare any savage. I think he’s begging forgiveness or something.”
“Gosh! I wish he understood English,” said Tom, and then, in a louder
voice, “Here, get up!” he ordered. “Can you speak English?”
Slowly and hesitatingly the man raised his wooly head and with wildly
rolling eyes gazed fearfully at the boys. His lips moved, his tongue
strove to form words, but no sound came from him. So abject, so
thoroughly terror-stricken was his appearance that the boys really
pitied him, but now, at last, he had found his voice again.
“Messieu’s!” he pleaded. “Messieu’s! Moi pas save. Moi ami, Beke. Ah!
Ai! Beke no un’stan’. Moi spik Eenglees liddle. Moi mo’ sorry! Moi
fren’ yes! Moi no mek harm Messieu’s! Ai, Ai! Moi mek dance, moi
people mek fo’ Voodoo! No mek fo’ harm Beke! Pa’donez Moi, Messieu’s!”
“Gosh, I can’t get it!” exclaimed Tom. “He’s asking us to forgive him
and wants to be friends, but what he means by ‘Beke’ and ‘Voodoo’ and
those other words I don’t know. But I’m willing to be friends.” Then,
addressing the still groveling negro, “All right!” he said. “Get up.
You’re forgiven. We’ll be friends. But stop bumping your head on the
ground and take off those horns. You give me the shivers.”
Whether the devil-dancer understood more than half of Tom’s words is
doubtful, but he grasped the meaning and with unutterable relief upon
his black face he grinned and tearing off his fantastic headdress cast
it into the flames and rose slowly to his feet.
As he did so, his watching companions also rose and edged cautiously
from their hiding places, but still keeping a respectful distance and
eyeing the black radio sets with furtive, frightened glances. Very
evidently, to their minds, these white boys were powerful Obeah men,
they possessed magic of a sort not to be despised or molested, and
with the primitive man’s simple reasoning they felt that to propitiate
such powerful witch doctors was the only way to insure their own
safety. Although, to the boys, they had appeared savages yet, had Tom
and Frank happened upon them at any other time, they would have found
nothing at all savage about them. Indeed, they would never have had
reason to think them other than happy-go-lucky, good-natured colored
folk, harmless and as civilized as any of the West Indian peasantry,
for they were merely French West Indian negroes, and aside from the
fact that they spoke only their native Creole patois were
indistinguishable from others of their race. But like the majority of
the French negroes they were at heart firm believers in Voodoo and
Obeah and when worked into a fanatical frenzy at one of these African
serpent-worshiping orgies they became temporarily transformed to
fiendish savages, reverting to all the wild customs and ways of their
ancestors and drawing the line only at actual cannibalism.
But of all this the boys knew nothing. They did not dream that such
people or such customs existed, and they could not fathom the reasons
or understand what to them were the mysterious and almost incredible
sights they had witnessed.
And of a far more important matter the boys were equally ignorant. Had
they but known, they would have thanked their lucky stars that they
had stumbled upon the Voodoo dancers and, had they been able to
understand and speak Creole and thus been able to converse with the
negroes, they would have made a discovery which, would have amazed
them even more than the savage dance and the remarkable results
brought about by their radio instruments.
But being unable to carry on any but the most limited conversation,
the boys sat there by the fire waiting for the sound of the expected
boat and surrounded by the colored folk who now had discarded their
paint and fantastic garb and were clothed in calico and dungaree. Even
the chief, or rather the Obeah man, was now so altered in appearance
that the boys could scarcely believe he was the same being who had
pranced and danced with waving horse-tail and rattlebox before them
and when, timidly and half apologetically, he brought them a tray
loaded with fruit and crisp fried fish with tiny rolls of bread
wrapped in banana leaves, they decided that it must all have been some
sort of a masquerade and that their imaginations had filled them with
unwarranted and ridiculous fears.
They were terribly hungry and never had food been more welcome; both
boys ate ravenously.
“He’s a good old skate after all!” declared Tom, nodding towards the
big negro who sat near. “I guess they were just trying to scare us.”
“Well, they succeeded all right,” replied Frank. “Say, I thought we
were going to be roasted and eaten when they grabbed us.”
“Yes, but our radio scared them a lot worse,” said Tom. “Gosh! that
_was_ wonderful, the way the old boy grabbed up the coil and
those words came in just right. I’ll bet Dad’s worried though. We
ought to call them and tell them we’re all right.”
“Golly, that’s so!” agreed Frank. “I’d forgotten we hadn’t.”
Still munching a mouthful of food, Frank rose to pick up the coil, but
at that instant several of the negroes jumped up, their voices rose in
excited tones and they turned wondering faces toward the waterside. At
the same instant the boys distinctly heard the splash of oars.
“They’re here!” yelled Tom, and with one accord the two rushed towards
the landing place.
Before they had reached it a boat shot from the shadows, its keel
grated on the beach and Mr. Pauling and Rawlins leaped out, each with
a rifle in his hands, while behind them, armed and ready for battle,
came Sam, Bancroft, the quartermaster and Smernoff.
But as the shouting, laughing boys dashed toward them, free and
unharmed, the gun dropped from Mr. Pauling’s hand and clattered on the
pebbles and the next instant he was clasping the boys in an embrace
like a bear’s.
Behind the boys, gathered in little knots and chattering excitedly
like a flock of parrots, the surprised negroes had gathered at the
edge of the forest and as Rawlins stared at them and then at the boys
a puzzled expression was on his face.
“Say, what’s the big idea?” he demanded, as the boys capered and
danced about, talking and laughing. “You said you were the prisoners
of savages and here you are free as birds and no sign of a savage.
Just a bunch of ordinary niggers. It gets me!”
“But we thought they were savages,” Tom tried to explain. “And we
_were_ prisoners.”
Then in hurried, disjointed sentences the two boys related the gist of
their story while the others listened in amazement.
“Hello!” cried Rawlins. “Is this the old Bally-hoo coming?”
As Rawlins spoke, the big negro was approaching and with a rather
sickly grin on his face he spoke to the new arrivals in his odd jargon
of Creole and broken English.
“Yep, I guess so!” grinned Rawlins. “Here you, Sam. You’ve lived in
the French Islands. Can you understand this bird?”
Sam, still suspicious and with the memory of Voodoo and devil dancers’
tom-toms in his mind, stepped forward.
“Yas, sir, Chief,” he replied, “Ah can talk Creole, Chief.”
“Well, get busy and spiel then,” Rawlins ordered him. “Ask him what he
says first and then we’ll give him the third degree for a time.”
Rapidly Sam spoke to the other in Martinique patois and at the sounds
of his native tongue the other’s face brightened.
“He says he’s sorry,” Sam informed the waiting men and boys. “He says
he’s a mos’ good friend an’ tha’ young gentlemen were safe from
molestation, Chief. He says he an’ his people were makin’ to have a
spree, Chief, an’ thought as how the young gentlemen were enemies, at
the first, Sir. He mos’ humbly arsks yo’ pardon an’ forgiveness,
Chief.”
“All right,” said Rawlins. “He’s forgiven. Ask him if we can stop here
for the night and if he has anything to eat. I’m famished and I’ll bet
the others are. It’s nearly morning.”
In reply to Sam’s queries the negro, who Sam now informed them was
named Jules, assured them that everything was at their disposal and
with quick orders in patois he sent a number of the women scurrying
off to prepare food. Leading the way, he guided the party to a cluster
of neat, wattled huts in a small clearing and told them to make
themselves at home.
Then, the first excitement of their meeting over, the boys began to
give an intelligible and sane account of their adventures.
As they told of the submarine and their spying on the men Mr. Pauling
uttered a sharp exclamation and Rawlins made his characteristic
comment.
“I’ll say you had nerve!” he cried. “Too bad they saw you though. Now
they know we’re here.”
“Not necessarily,” declared Mr. Pauling. “They may have seen that the
boat contained merely two boys and they may have thought them natives
or from some vessel. They probably know where the destroyer is and
they imagine our submarine is lying at the bottom of the Caribbean. In
that case they would hardly connect Tom and Frank with members of the
Service. Unless they have heard our calls tonight I doubt if the boys’
presence alarmed them.”
“That may be so,” admitted Rawlins, “and by the same token if they
heard us to-night it wouldn’t scare ’em. They’d think ’twas some of
the boys’ friends searching for ’em, same as ’twas. We didn’t say
anything that would give them a hint and radio’s too common nowadays
to mean much—as long as it’s not under-sea stuff. By glory! Perhaps
we can get ’em yet. Can you find that place again, boys?”
“I don’t see how we can,” replied Tom. “We were too scared to notice
where we went and we haven’t any idea where we drifted with the tide
while we slept.”
“That’s dead rotten luck,” commented Rawlins. “But by the Great Horn
Spoon we can find ’em if they’re here! This swamp’s not so
everlastingly big and a sub can’t hide in a mud puddle. I’ll bet my
hat to a hole in a doughnut we find ’em!”
“But who do you suppose that man on the bank was?” asked Tom. “He
didn’t look like a ‘red’ or a Russian or a crook. He looked like a
real gentleman.”
Mr. Pauling hesitated a moment. “Boys,” he said, lowering his voice,
“that was the man that of all men we want. That was the head, the
brains, the power of the whole vast organization. The man who has
schemed to overturn nations and carry a rave of fire and blood around
the world! He is the arch fiend, the greatest criminal, the most
coldly cruel and unscrupulous being alive! He is the incarnation of
Satan himself!”
The boys’ eyes were round with wonder. “Gosh!” exclaimed Tom. “Gosh!”
“Jehoshaphat!” cried Frank.