# The Sorcerer's Stone

   Here begins a series of stories that will take you into the tropic wildness of New Guinea—almost as far away from baseball, and tariff reform, and woman's suffrage as you can get and still remain on this earth. Savages, and strange magic, palms and pearl-fishing, dense woods and tropic seas....
The SORCERER'S STONE
By
BEATRICE GRIMSHAW
AUTHOR OF “VAITI OF THE ISLAND,” “WHEN THE RED GODS CALL,” ETC.
ILLUSTRATIONS BY CHARLES SARKA
   Editor's Note—Here begins a series of stories that will take you into the tropic wildness of New Guinea—almost as far away from baseball, and tariff reform, and woman's suffrage as you can get and still remain on this earth. Savages, and strange magic, palms and pearl-fishing, dense woods and tropic seas—here you enter a kingdom with more of the primitive South Sea life than ever Stevenson gave you. The author has traveled alone throughout the remotest southern tropics—Malaysia, Fiji, the New Hebrides, New Caledonia, she knows them all. The cannibal country of Papua, the Solomon Islands, and Borneo—all have told her their strange tales. She is the master story-teller of the South Seas. Each story is complete in itself—you can read any one alone, with satisfaction; yet the quest of the Sorcerer's Stone holds them together with unrelieved suspense until the end.
IT WAS dark in the marea, yet not so dark but that the Marquis and I could see about us. We had been inside this New Guinea temple, or club-house, or Parliament building—you might call it a little of all three, and not go very far wrong—for over half an hour, and our eyes were getting accustomed to the gloom.
There were thirty or forty men in it, squatting about the floor, or lying on the bamboo shelves they used as beds. In the brown dusk of the unwindowed building, they seemed to melt into their surroundings like ghosts, for they were brown too, and wore no clothes save a bark loin-cloth. You could see the whites of their eyes, and their bead necklaces, and the halos of color ed feathers they wore in their hair—little more. They were smoking, chewing-betel-nut, and spitting its blood-red juice out on the floor—grunting, scratching, staring at us. They had heads like a soldier's fur busby; their bodies were small, according to white men's standards, but they were notably well-made and muscled, and evenly developed. Most of them had wooden spears and tall war-bows lying on the ground within reach; and the walls of the marea were covered with clubs, shields, spears, and bunches of barbed arrows.
The scene was old to me—old to weariness. I had been in these temples, or others like them, more times that I could count, recruiting boys for some inland trip, trading, getting food. It was true that I had never been in this especial district of New Guinea, but I did not see much difference between the savages I knew and the savages I didn't know. And anyhow, I had long since lost interest in them, save as a means of making money.
But the Marquis, I think, felt it to be the moment of his life.
There he sat, on a pile of our baggage, as on a throne, holding his head erect, and swelling out from the chest even more than usual—which is to say something, for the Marquis is six feet four, and weighs near eighteen stone. He had come the whole way from France to study—what do you think? Magic—of which he had heard there was plenty in New Guinea. So there is: it is the greatest nuisance in the country, and I for my part would as soon think of going out to look for red ants or for stinging-tree. But the Marquis took what he called a scientific interest in the occult—which meant that he was bored for want of a little honest hard work to do, and didn't know it—and I had had bad luck with my last prospecting trip into the interior: lost four carriers (clubbed and eaten) and two mates (blackwater fever) and found nothing.
So I was rather glad to take on the Marquis, when he turned up in Port Moresby wanting a resident of the country to find carriers for him and lead a trip through the country lying about the coast. I thought I might light on payable gold after all—I've always had an idea that there might be something in the Kata-Kata country, and I thought, too, that I could do with a quiet, peaceful, easy sort of trip for once, after the kind of thing I had been having.
Quiet! Peaceful! Just wait till I have done.
It looked peaceful enough that evening, at all events. We had had a fairly long tramp to get to the village—which is celebrate all over Kata-Kata as the headquarters of local sorcery—and had not arrived till sundown. The Marquis, on hearing that the Kata-Kata people were not cannibals, had insisted on sleeping in the marea instead of in our tents. It would be better for his purpose of studying the natural man and his connection with the occult—so he said. I thought it might turn out in his seeing a little more natural man than he wanted, since the Kata-Kata folk were by reputation a nasty lot, and had been man-eaters ten years ago, though the Government had sent punitive expeditions in often enough to reform them since then.
Unless the Marquis was asleep, or eating, he never stopped talking. His English was not quite English, but you could understand it all right; at any rate, he did not talk like a Frenchman on the stage. He was talking now, and I was not listening closely; it went in at one ear and out at the other. The village men, crouched on the ground, chewed, and spat red, and looked out at him from under their sullen brows. They did not like us very much, it struck me. They were not accustomed to white people up there, except with punitive expeditions, which do not exactly smooth the way for those who come after.
Our interpreter—who could not interpret very much of the Kata-Kata talk after all—had told us that Mo, the big sorcerer, was out in the forest making spells, but that he would be in at sundown, and then perhaps he might consent, if we gave him plenty of tobacco and a lot of salt, to show us something. We had been waiting for him a good while, but there was no sign of Mo.
I was getting quite sleepy, as I sat on the ground, smoking and thinking. It had grown darker; the men had thrown some cocoanut shells on the pile of hot ashes in the center of the floor, and a small, fierce blaze had sprung up, showing the white boar-tusk bracelets on the brown arms, and the quiver of the long head-feathers. The Marquis, I knew without listening, was telling me about a “dear woman who loved him—a beautiful, a kind”—because he was twisting the ends of his mustache while he talked—he always did that when he began sentimental confidences, and the ends of his mustache, in consequence, were like nothing but long, sharp pins.
Of a sudden, he dropped his hands, sprang off the throne of sacks like a wallaby—he was wonderfully light on his feet, for his size—and went down the ladder leading from the door to the ground, in two jumps. I had been sitting with my back to the doorway, and could not see what it was that had agitated him; however, I got up, without undue haste, undid the fastening of the revolver holster that was strapped to my belt, and went down the ladder after the Marquis.
The village street was wide and sandy, reflecting back the light; there was a young moon coming up now above the cocoanut palms, and the sharp brown gables of the houses stood out clear among the stars. I could see the natives slipping like shadows in and out among the platforms and sup porting piles all down the street; I saw a wolf-like kangaroo dog sitting in the moon, and a small tame cassowary taking a running kick at it, as it went past. But I could not see the Marquis.
This did not altogether please me, for Kata-Kata is a good way outside Government influence, and things might happen, though they are not likely to. I walked about in the soft sand for a minute or two, and stopped to look and listen. I could hear nothing of the Marquis, but I heard what located him for me just as well as a flood of French or English conversation—the coy, pleased, flattered giggle of a girl.
I made straight for the sound, and there in the growing moonlight, behind the white stems of a clump of betel-palm, was the Marquis—dancing.
I have not mentioned it—being unaccustomed to writing, and apt to lose my way—but I ought to have said that the Marquis had two special fads, and they were sorcery and dancing. He knew all about every dance that had ever been danced in the history of the world, from David's fandango before the ark, down to Genée's latest pirouette at the Empire. And, in spite of his height and weight, he could dance them all himself, more or less, but mostly more.
You might have thought he would look ridiculous when he danced, but he did not: no man looks ridiculous doing that which he does supremely well. He did not look ridiculous even now—pink, fat, a bit disheveled, stepping and springing, advancing and retreating, and wreathing his fat arms above his bullet head, here in the moonlight, behind a clump of betel, with a grass-kilted, giggling New Guinea girl looking on at the mad procedure.
“Hallo, Mark!” I said (I used to call him that, because, being only a plain Australian without much schooling, I never could remember or pronounce his own extraordinary name). “What are you dancing?”
“It is the Love Dance of the Red Men of Roraima,” said the Marquis, doing something quite extraordinary—I think with the calves of his legs, but he was too quick for one to see.
“Why the Love Dance, and why Red Men?” I asked.
“Because,” said the Marquis, beginning to walk with a cross-swaying motion that really was fine—like Indian corn blowing in the wind—“I desire to find the key to the heart of this little beautiful, since I saw her on the steps of the marea; and the dance talks, even when one does not know a word of their own blessed language. And the Red Men—I chose their dance because they will, without doubt, be spiritually akin to the soul of this boshter little kid.”
The girl drew up one leg under her grass crinoline like a hen, and giggled as if she understood. She was really pretty—if a New Guinea girl is ever pretty; I do not admire them myself, but it is all a matter of taste. She was lighter in color than most, a sort of golden brown, and of course, being a young savage, and not a civilized person, she had a perfect figure. She had the little, aristocratic-looking hands these Papuans often have (their hands, I reckon, are like those of the old families among white people, because neither Papuans nor old families ever do a stroke of work that they can help), and she had big eyes, and a bush of hair, and was a good deal dolled up with red and yellow flowers and pearl-shell necklaces and things.
All the same, she was just a little nigger, and the Marquis never ought to have flattered her by taking notice of her. It puts them out of their place.
Still, he went on dancing, and I really forgot about the girl for a little, watching him. It was so good, and the scene was so extraordinary—the open space of sandy soil, all lit up by the moon, and that great figure, dancing with incomparable lightness, against the background of long banana leaf and slender betel palm, like a very new sort of fairy in a very strange kind of fairy glade.
Then I happened to glance at the girl, and immediately all my amusement went out like a candle in the wind, and I fell to counting up what this especial freak of the Marquis's might be likely to cost us. For the little Papuan, who had been standing some way off at first, chewing her neck lace and giggling, had suddenly turned quite grave—solemn, even—and was advancing, step by step, like some one in a dream, toward the space where the Marquis danced. Her hands were spread out as if she were blind, and her eyes never looked at the ground, or the moonlight, or the village houses showing through the trees—only at the Marquis, dancing. And she stepped nearer and nearer.
I don't go about with cotton-wool in my ears in the Papuan bush country, even when things are—or seem—as quiet as Sun day evening church in Sydney with the wrong girl alongside of you. I heard something moving in the scrub that wasn't a pig or a dog; the Marquis didn't hear it, for he was whistling softly to himself all the time he danced, and the girl didn't, for she was hypnotized, or something like it. But I thought it as well to stop the circus just there; so, without looking round, I went forward, grabbed the Marquis by the shoulder, and said—“Cut it out!”
He had been long enough in my company by this time to know that I had generally very good reasons for anything I might say or do.
He stopped—not without a turn or two to finish it off nicely—and, responding to a pinch on the arm, moved away with me quite amicably. When we got back to the marea—the girl had vanished, somehow, as these natives can, without one's even seeing how—he asked me what the matter was.
I did not answer him at first, for I was annoyed at the whole proceeding. Of course, I knew that he was only bent on a little trifling amusement—the Marquis let off most of his feelings in talk, and never took anything what you might call seriously—but all the same, he ought to have remembered, I thought, that we were in a strange, possibly a hostile country, and not have started flirting with any “little beautiful” before we had been an hour in the town.
So I sat down on the floor of the marea again, and lit my pipe, before I would answer.
“Flint, my very good friend, I fear that you are in a blooming wax,” said the Marquis. “Why should you wax with me. What have I done?”
I took out my pipe. “You don't seem to remember,” I said, “that we're in a hostile country. I'd be obliged if you would.” I put back my pipe.
“What did you see?” asked the Marquis, quite grave and sensible now.
“I saw nothing,” I said. “I don't know that there was anything. But I think I heard—the little creak that some of these big blackwood bows make.”
“When you take them to your bosom and pull hard?” asked the Marquis, who had been trying his strength on some of these weapons, and had been a good deal impressed by their power.
“Just that,” I said. “I wouldn't dance the Love Dance of the Red Men of Roraima any more, if I were you. Or I wouldn't dance it at that particular girl. Or at any girl.”
“She is a beautiful,” said the Marquis. “She is what you Australians, in your touching symbolism, call a tart. I remember an Australian little girl, in——”
He had got hold of both sides of his mustache—I saw that I was in for the deluge, so I cut it short.
“I believe that's your sorcerer coming at last,” I said.
There was a noise of throbbing drums in the village, a tramping down the street, that evidently foretold the commencement of the evening dance. Now, it was hardly to be supposed that the village would begin its entertainment before the sorcerer came back from his spells in the forest to join in the revels. I told the Marquis this, and suggested we should have some trade stuff taken out of the packs in readiness. We got one of our boys to untie a sack or so, and selected some beads, knives, salt and tobacco.
“And here is the sorcerer, back from his spelling,” declared the Marquis, peering through the door at a tall, fine-looking man who was striding down the street with a general air of owning the whole place. He carried a big torch in his hand, and had a netted string bag over one shoulder. Slung on his breast was a large, hollow piece of bamboo, which he took some care to keep in a perpendicular position. His face, rather a fine one for a New Guinea native, showed clearly in the light of his torch: it was painted in stripes of black and scarlet, with a very fiendish effect. On his head was a magnificent head-dress of paradise and parrot feathers, rising fully three or four feet above his mat of hair. He had no clothes except a bark belt, and did not wear the bead and shell necklaces affected by most of the other people. There was something slung round his throat like a locket; it swayed about so that I could not see what it was.
“Yes, that's the sorcerer without a doubt,” I said. “He's making right here.”
He was; and our interpreter, a timid little lad from the coast, was so terrified at the sight that he ran and hid himself at the back of the marea, and had to be dragged out by force. By the time we had succeeded in quieting him down and assuring him that our weapons would protect us all from any sorcerer, the man was at the steps and mounting them.
In the light of the fire, we saw at last what his locket was. I took it, at first, for a monkey's paw, but, remembering that there are no monkeys in New Guinea, I had another look, and then realized that it was a human hand, dead and dried.
The Marquis looked at the ugly ornament much as a collector of insects looks at a hideous and valuable beetle.
“Flint, this is what you call the real Mackay,” he said. “This is the worth of my money.” He rose, and was about to greet the sorcerer with all the grace of Versailles—in fact, he had already begun a courtly bow—when a small and very ugly man, with ears like a bat, came running out of the dark from nowhere, and grabbed the great man by the foot, as he went up.
“Mo! Mo!” he cried; and then came a flood of native, intermingled with the wildest gestures. The ugly little man beat the air with his hands, thumped himself in the ribs, jumped up and down till the feathers on his head waved like cocoanut leaves in a hurricane, and all the time yelled, chattered, gasped, and choked. Mo, who had come down the ladder again at the first word, stood looking at the furious little creature with an absolutely inexpressive face.
[Illustration: JUST AS MY HAND MADE A SUDDEN CLUTCH AT THE CRYSTAL, HIS HAND MET IT, AND THE TWO HANDS CLOSED ON EACH OTHER.]
“What's he saying?” I asked our interpreter, Koppi Koko.
The native's face grew purposely blank and dull. “I no savvy,” he said.
“You do savvy,” I told him, beginning to unbuckle my belt.
“I savvy, I savvy,” he cried nervously. “Savvy little bit. That fellow man, him telling Mo some one make gammon along him, he no like. That fellow, he brother along Mo. 'Fore God, Taubada [master], I no more I savvy.”
He seemed a good deal scared about something, and when a Papuan is thoroughly scared, you may leave him alone for all you will get out of him. I said no more, and the furious little man, after a final jump and yell, shoved something into Mo's hand, and bolted away under the house like a rat. The sorcerer put his hand into his string bag for a moment, drew it out empty, and mounted the ladder once more.
You could not tell what he thought, or if he thought anything, so complete was the veil of indifference he had drawn over his face. He had of course heard of our arrival so I was not surprised at his taking our visit as calmly as he did. But I did not—quite—like the way he had accepted the plaint of the battered little man.
The rickety floor of sago-sheath creaked and dipped as Mo strode up the building. He went straight to where the Marquis and I were standing, folded his arms over his breast, and uttered something in native that was evidently a greeting. The Marquis bowed, took his hand, and shook it. I nodded at him. Mo turned aside a minute to hang up the hollow bamboo he carried so carefully (we could see it was plugged at one end with wood), and then swept Koppi Koko to him with a gesture of one hand.
We were great chiefs, no doubt, he said; he was glad we had come to see his village. Did we belong to the Government?
We assured him we did not—knowing that Kata-Kata had probably been saving up a good long score to settle with His Majesty's representatives, since the last punitive expedition. This great chief, I said (through Koppi-Koko), had come a very long way from his village, which was many, many moons away, to see Mo and hear about his wonderful doings. If Mo would show him any sorcery, he would give much tobacco and salt and beads, and other treasures. And (since sorcery is illegal) he would promise not to tell the Government anything about it.
While I talked, I could hear the dance getting ready in the village: feet were stamping; drums were throbbing with the intoxicating triple beat that all Papuan travelers know; loud, brassy voices were rising and falling in a monotonous chorus. I was glad to hear them, for I know the difference between songs of peace and songs of war, and this was not one of the latter.
Still—many years in New Guinea have given me an instinct for danger that has nothing at all to do with sight or hearing; and it was stirring, ever so slightly, now. I watched the sorcerer's face as I talked.
It was still a blank; you could no more have read it than you could read a stone wall. Mo replied to my address that he had been making magic all day, and was tired. Another day, he said, he would show us some. To-night we could give him that tobacco and salt he saw, and he would in the village, think and prepare himself. Magic, he explained, took much preparation.
I did not care for the whole thing—a nigger is a nigger to me, and I can't stand seeing them put on airs. Besides, I do not believe in their nonsense. But the Marquis did, and he was very anxious to see something; so I swallowed my own feelings, and told Mo we should be glad to see his performance to-morrow, if that would suit him, and in the meantime, he might have the tobacco—not the salt: that would come when he had done something to earn it. Salt is precious in the interior of New Guinea, and I was not minded to throw any of it away.
The Marquis was almost ready to cry—he had been looking forward to an immediate satisfaction of his curiosity, and he was like a child when disappointed.
“Ask him something,” he demanded. “Ask him at least what it is that he has in his bamboo, and why he carries a human hand round his neck, and what is in that string bag of his. Not to hear anything to-night, my Flint, that would indeed be the long lane that breaks the camel's back, I'm not made of patience!”
“That's right; you're not,” said I. “Well, Koppi Koko, ask him.”
But here our interpreter went on strike. He was “too much fright,” he declared. He would not ask Mo what was in the bamboo, or about the hand, or anything else. It struck me that he already knew, since he came from the coast, only a few days away. But if he did, he would not tell.
“You need not worry,” I said to the Marquis. “I know all that's in his old bag without looking. I've seen other sorcerers' bags. There'll be a lot of trash like lizards' tails and bats' wings, and frogs' feet, and there'll be queer-shaped stones he has picked up, and bits of carved wood, and dried leaves and plants, and there's sure to be some quartz crystals—that's great magic, with them—and there'll very likely be a dagger made of human bone, and a native fork or two, and a betel-chewing outfit—poker-worked gourd, with a boar-tooth stopper, nuts, nice little spatula with carved head. That's about all.”
“There could be nothing of more interest in the world,” declared the Marquis. “Ethnologically, you can see, without doubt, the connection between the Witches of Macbeth——”
“Cut it out, Mark,” I said. “You ought to know by this time that this horse isn't yarded with that kind of corn. But if you don't feel you can lay your golden head on your little pillow to-night without seeing the curio shop. I'll work it all right. It only means a handful or two of salt.”
As I said before, I hate spending my salt when I haven't got to; but I opened a tin, took a good handful, and offered it to Mo, pointing at the same time to his bag, and to our eyes. Koppi Koko had disappeared. I noted the fact, and decided to argue with him—helped by a bit of lawyer cane—later on.
The other natives had all cleared out by this time, and the sound of the dance was growing. Thud-thud went the feet; gallop-gallop the drum, like a horse's hoofs. The fire was low in the marea, but it cast up a deep red glow toward the roof, giving light enough to see the contents of the wonderful bag, as Mo tumbled them out on the floor beside us. The salt had been too much for him; he accepted it eagerly, and was eating it like sugar, smearing his paint all to bits, and nearly choking himself as he sucked it down. These inland natives hardly ever see salt, and they are as keen for it as an alligator for fish, once they get the chance of a little.
Everything that was in the bag the Marquis handled, weighed, even smelt. I could tell him about most of the things. I did not know the Kata-Kata country, but quite a lot of the charms were familiar enough. This stone, I said, was meant to make the yam crops grow. This one was used for charming down rain. This carved monstrosity, like a pig that was half a beetle, probably was a charm for making war.
All the time he was handling and exclaiming over the trash in the bag, I kept a lookout on the sorcerer's face. There was something I did not like in the air; the fact that I could not define it made it none the less real. It had to do, maybe, with the wooden demeanor of Mo—or with the disappearance of all the other men from the marea—or with a certain strange pitiful whimpering that had been going on under the house for quite a good while—a dog, perhaps; perhaps not.
Anyhow, I looked at Mo a good deal. If there was mischief in the village—no matter of what kind—the sorcerer was sure to be at the bottom of it.
The drums galloped outside, the dance went on. The moon climbed over the motionless tops of the cocoanut palms, and looked down into the open mouth of the marea. Half in the moonlight, half in the firelight, Mo's face grew suddenly dark: he made a snatch at something that the Marquis was examining and hid it away—where, I could not see.
It was a trifling object, only a piece cut out of one of the plaited red and yellow belts that nearly every one in the village wore, men, women, and older children. The Marquis had been handling it rather closely, to examine the pattern. A smile crept over the sorcerer's face when it was gone—a cunning, ugly smile, worse than the stony inexpressiveness that had gone before. I saw he was bent on making us forget that scrap of plaited stuff. He pulled out a lot of other things from the bag—fossils, beaks, bats' wings, lumps of quartz crystal that glittered in the moon—and began showing them off.
More: by the sound of a certain word I had heard Koppi Koko use, I understood him to say that he was ready to do some magic for us, if we liked. He took down a cocoanut shell from the wall, and intimated that it was to be filled with salt first of all. I filled it, and Mo got up from his crouching posture on the floor, and disappeared, making signs to show that he would return.
“How do you find that?” asked the Marquis.
“Lucky he had that rag in his collection,” I said. “He evidently forgot it was there, didn't want us to see it, and is going to do some of his nonsense to put it out of our heads. It's a throw-in for us, Mark.”
“If that signifies a bit of good luck, I am entirely of accord,” said the Marquis. “Flint, I am joyous; I must dance.”
And dance he did, lightly as a girl of sixteen, there in the huge dusk marea, in the moonlight and the firelight, holding out his arms like wings, and whistling as he danced. Before he had done, Mo appeared again, with something in his hand; and for an instant, the stony veil was lifted altogether from his face, and he shot such a look of hate at the Marquis that I felt my hand slip involuntarily round to my hip.
“The old curio dealer doesn't like your dancing, Mark,” I warned. “Somehow your accomplishments don't seem popular here.”
“It was the dance of Marianne before Herod,” said the Marquis, stopping at the end of a pirouette. “I dance that dance when I am glad. The second part of it, I mean—the part when Marianne has got the head of John the Baptist, and is satisfied of that.”
“Old Ikey Mo isn't satisfied about something or other,” I said. “Let's get him to work; perhaps he'll forget his troubles then.”
“What has he got in his hand?” asked the Marquis, with interest.
It was a lizard, about ten inches long, yellowish in color, and quite dead. He gave it to us to handle. We both saw that it was dead and beginning to grow stiff; it seemed to have died naturally, as there were no marks upon it. Mo squatted down on the floor, and motioned us to keep quiet. He laid the lizard out upon a banana-leaf, shut his eyes, and began to chant something in a low, monotonous voice. We could not hear very clearly, for the drums throbbed on and on in the village, and the distant dance had risen to a thundering chorus of feet and voices, like the beat of the trade-wind surf on the long beaches of Papua.
By and by he stopped, opened his eyes, and took something out of his bag. The dance still thundered on; through all its far-off roar, we could hear the dog that cried under the house—if it was a dog.
Mo had taken a crystal out of his bag—the biggest one—and unwrapped it from its covering of leaves. It was a pretty thing, like the end off a chandelier luster, and just about the same size, only it was double-ended, with two points. The lizard lay still and dead upon the ground. Mo pointed the crystal at it, and began stroking the air just above the little corpse, without actually touching it. Over and over it he went with the crystal, making lines of light as the dying fire caught the quartz and drew violet and green and crimson colors out of it.
He was breathing very hard all the time, and sweat was pouring off his naked body. One could see that he was making a tremendous effort, but where, or how, one could not understand.
At last he stopped, laid the crystal down on the banana-leaf, and looked intently at the lizard. We looked too.
I know that no one will believe what happened next, but I must tell the thing as it occurred. The lizard moved.
We watched it, holding our breath. It moved again. It drew its legs under it.
The sorcerer took the crystal up, and drew more lines in the air, breathing hard and narrowing down his eyes till they were two black sparks beneath his beetling eyebrows.
The lizard got up, staggered, and walked away. It was alive.
I never wished I knew French until that minute. It would have been something to understand the expletives that the Marquis was pouring out, in a sharp, rattling, musketry fire of amazed profanity and delight. I said a thing or two myself, but it sounded meek and mild by comparison. And he did not stop for a good three minutes. Then he got up—the sorcerer was standing now—and seized the greasy savage in his arms, rocking him about as if he were a child.
“I have found it—the true occult power—genuine article, all-wool and a yard wide—my God, yes!” he exclaimed. In his excitement, he was going to our stores to give the sorcerer I don't know what or how much of our invaluable food, but I stopped him in time.
“Don't do it, Marky,” I said. “Never let these brutes know how much you have, or they'll loot you, first chance. You've given him quite enough. I allow it's wonderful, but there may be some very simple explanation after all.”
“You do not understand,” said the Marquis. “You have no faith. Let me look yet again at the crystal. It is of course but an instrument of the power—still——”
He took it in his hands, and began examining it. Mo kept a close watch on it, hovering over us like a hen over her chickens when a hawk is about. It was plain that he valued his charm quite a good deal.
“The finest crystal I ever saw, with any one of these sorcerers,” I declared, handling it.....
I don't know how the idea came into my head, but it did come, like a shock from a battery—just about as hard, and as quick. And what was queer, it came into the Marquis's head at exactly the same moment. For just as my hand made a sudden clutch at the crystal, his hand met it, and the two hands closed on each other. Our eyes met, and if mine were as glaring and excited as his——
I think they must have been. Mo had the thing out of our two hands before we knew where we were. It was gone, back in the bag like a conjuring trick, and the stony veil had fallen before the sorcerer's face again.
We were both breathing hard, like men who have run a race, but I think we kept pretty cool. It was the Marquis who begged then, by signs, to see the crystal again, and succeeded in getting Mo to show the end of it, shining out of the green wrapping of fresh banana-leaf, between the string meshes of the bag. But it was I who pulled my watch out, and got the face of it up against the point of the crystal—all of it that Mo would let us touch now. The sharp end of the thing scored into the glass of it as if it had been butter.
What the Marquis said that time I have always wanted to know—it sounded much livelier than the last. I cut him short with a kick.
“For God's sake, keep cool,” I said. “Don't let him suspect anything; it's our only chance. You don't know how they value those charms of theirs—it's no question of buying...... Come away and leave him alone. Don't let him think we care about it.”
I almost dragged him away. It was deliciously cool and fresh in the moon outside; there was a smell of coming rain, and the wind brought whiffs of pawpaw blossom from somewhere in the forest, heavy and treacly-sweet. The noise of the dance was dying down: it was almost quiet.
Under the marea, in the space among the piles, that doglike whimper went on. But the Marquis and I were too excited to notice it. Afterward, I remembered how we had heard it.
“It's bigger than the Kohinoor, but not near so big as the Cullinan,” I said, when we were out of earshot.
“Nevertheless, it is a king's fortune,” affirmed the Marquis. He was quite pale, and almost trembling. “And this sorcerer is using it to make charms!”
“If we can get it—” I began.
“Where shall there be any difficulty? It is only to buy.”
“Is it? You don't know these sorcerers. Probably he thinks his whole power depends on it.”
“Flint, my Flint, it would be hard to say what it depends on. He has power, we know it. He has power of life and death. What a man!”
“Oh, he's only a greasy nigger after all, whatever conjuring tricks he can play,” I said irritably. “They claim a lot, these sorcerers. They say they can kill any one by wishing, and bring him to life again by making spells. If you listened to what they say——”
“But the lizard, he was dead,” said the Marquis, in a solemn voice.
“Hang the lizard! It's the diamond we are after now. First to get it, and then to find out where it came from—if that's possible.”
“Flint, my friend, I am not rich—you know that,” said the Marquis, with something like tears in his fat voice. “I have strained myself—have, what is it you say? bust—have bust my resources, to make this voyage in New Guinea. But if we can get that diamond—see, the glories of my house are restored; I am once more the proper kind of a marquis, you bet! And you, you are rich. You are a gentle and a spiritual, Flint—I shall be glad to think of you rich.”
All this time we had been making away from the marea, but the cry under the house never ceased to follow us. I could not stand it at last. There are many things in a New Guinea inland town which you had better not inquire into, unless you are prepared to put up a fight. But some how I felt I wanted to look into this, and I told the Marquis so.
“Is it not a dog?” he asked, surprised.
“I don't think it is,” I said. “Anyhow, give me your box of matches, and we'll go back and see. It gets me, somehow.”
The marea was dark and empty when we returned; the sorcerer was gone. The dance was taking new life—it roared like a forest fire, down there at the end of the village. There was not a soul in sight, as we got under the marea, and struck our matches to look.
It was not a dog. It was the girl who had been so fascinated with the Marquis's dancing a few hours earlier. She was crouching on the ground like a sick monkey, her head on her knees, moaning in a cold, frightened Sort of way, as if she did not expect that any one would hear, or heed.
“Hold! the little beautiful!” cried the Marquis. I got him by the slack of his trousers, just in time. He was springing forward to catch her in his arms and console her—a kind and a manly impulse, no doubt, but one that, I judged, might cost the little creature dear.
She did not even notice him. She went on softly wailing, like a thing that was doomed to die, and knew and feared it. In one slight brown hand she held something that was half wrapped round her waist, half torn loose. I struck another match, and looked at it. It was a red and yellow waist-belt, with a piece cut out. The gap was just about the size of the piece of red-and-yellow stuff we had seen in the sorcerer's bag.
She would not listen when we spoke to her; she only drew away and shivered. I judged it best to leave her, for the present at all events. We crept along under the piles, walking half doubled up, till we were out in the moonlight once more. The street was still quiet, but the ugly little man with the bat-like ears, who had been so angry earlier in the evening, was coming up toward the house. He seemed to hear the crying: he turned half round as he passed, and shook his spear at the marea, glaring at the little, crouching shadow below.
Then he looked at us, and deliberately spat toward the Marquis; turned, went on, and entered another house.
“That throws some light,” I said. “Mark, I reckon that the girl has been too much struck with that beautiful performance of yours, and that the ugly little man is her lover, and doesn't like it. I rather think he has complained to his brother, Mo, and got him to puri-puri her, and she's half mad with fright.”
“What is puri-puri?” asked the Marquis, looking grave.
“They've another word here. All over Papua, mostly, it means the same—sorcery. He's got a bit of her waist-belt to make a spell of, and she thinks she's going to die in consequence. Of course she won't, but she's badly scared.”
“Flint, he has the power of life and death—that man,” said the Marquis. “What can we do?”
“Rats, he hasn't power of life and death!” I said. “We can give him a talking to, and keep him from scaring the poor little soul any more, or she might really die of fright. Don't go talking to her—it would only make things worse.”
“The first thing in the morning we must talk to him, isn't it?”
“First thing. We might as well have our tent, Marky; I think it would be more healthy than the marea, somehow.”
We had, and slept in it—part of the night. About the small chill hour that comes near dawn, we were roused out by a wild crying from one of the houses near at hand—a house into which we had seen the little maiden creep, still sobbing, before we turned in ourselves, for, needless to say, the Marquis and I had been keeping as much of a lookout over her as we could. But this was not the girl's crying; it was horrified yells from the other inmates of the house—yells of such dismay that we wasted no time in catching up our arms and running in.
The house was nothing but a brown thatch roof, set on a sago-palm floor. It was dimly lighted by a fire; in the short interval before I could get my hurricane lantern alight, I saw a dozen or two brown naked forms, moving about distractedly, and howling. Something was visible on the floor among their feet.
I got the lantern alight, and held it up. There lay the pretty little girl, dead and stiff. She had not a wound or a mark on her, but she seemed to have been cold for hours. Probably the growing chili of her small body was what had attracted the attention of her companions.
“Flint, my friend, she is dead, the little beautiful, and I have been her murderer, by gum!” said the Marquis, in a low, shocked whisper.
“You haven't anything of the kind, Mark; don't be morbid...... Poor little girl!” I said, looking at her again, as the women, howling loudly, picked her up and carried her away.
“Life and death—life and death!” said the Marquis. “Flint, we are in deep water.”
“If it's only water, we're lucky,” I said, leading the way out of the house again. “Sentries after this, Mark. I take no chances.”
The Marquis was looking at the marea, where the sorcerer, no doubt, was coolly sleeping.
“Blood—blood!” he said. “Always, where there is a great diamond, there shall be blood. The stone is blooded now, my Flint. When will be the next?”
“Death in the Pot”—another story in the quest of “The Sorcerer's Stone”—will be published in the September number.
This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published before January 1, 1929.
The longest-living author of this work died in 1953, so this work is in the public domain in countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 70 years or less. This work may be in the public domain in countries and areas with longer native copyright terms that apply the rule of the shorter term to foreign works.
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