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The travellers of a remote future will find him, I think, still with his tom-tom and his dug-out canoe just as willing to sell as "big curios" the debris of our importations to his ancestors at a high price. Exactly how much he will ask for a Devos patent paraffin oil tin or a Morton's tin, I cannot imagine, but it will be something stiff such as he asks nowadays for the Phoenician "Aggry" beads.
I saw at the same time their musical instruments, from the tomtom that is, a hoop with a couple of strings of rawhide drawn across it from that tom-tom, up to the instruments we have today, that make the common air blossom with melody, and I said to myself there is a regular advancement.
They were really in equatorial Africa at last, and even as they looked there was a sound borne to their ears that brought home to them strongly how very far away they were from old New York. It was a pulsing, rhythmic beating something like a drum and yet unlike it. They looked questioningly at Sikaso. "Tom-tom," said he briefly. "Is it a friendly village, Sikaso?" inquired Doctor Wiseman.
True, her national consciousness flared suddenly from lethargy to blaze. The evening after the sinking of the Lusitania, she attended a mass meeting in Astor Place with Zoe and Mrs. Blair, beating out an umbrella-and-floor tom-tom for redress, love of country suddenly a lump in her throat.
But I finally observed and identified the loganberry pimple, and realized that the tom-tom beating was merely the pounding of the steam-pipes in that jerry-built western hospital, and remembered that I was still in the land of the living and that the red-headed surgical nurse was holding my wrist.
In one, for example, which was crowded with tall grave men calmly puffing at their pipes and sipping their coffee, we found a danseuse performing a tall female figure, who glided and swayed about in the mazes of a strange dance, while the musician sat cross-legged in a corner of the room playing the inevitable tom-tom.
But a faint animal scent crept to my nostrils, too, and there was a subdued stir about me, infinitely suggestive mysterious. Now my feet sank in a soft carpet, and a curtain brushed my shoulder. A gong sounded. We stopped. The din of distant drumming came to my ears. "Where in Heaven's name are we?" hissed Smith in my ear; "that is a tom-tom!" "S-sh! S-sh!"
On the island our Cree half-breeds enjoyed the first evening's camp by playing the universal button-hiding game called Pugasawin, and which is always accompanied by a monotonous chant and the tom-tom, anything serving for that hideous instrument if a drum is not at hand. They are all inveterate gamblers in that country, and lose or win with equal indifference.
'The tom-tom, the miscreants heard Peter cry; 'an Indian victory! The doomed children answered with a cheer that was music to the black hearts above, and almost immediately they repeated their goodbyes to Peter. This puzzled the pirates, but all their other feelings were swallowed by a base delight that the enemy were about to come up the trees. They smirked at each other and rubbed their hands.
"If we had a few tom-tom players we'd be ready with a fine imitation of an Indian war dance," muttered one of the candidates, gazing about him at his blanketed companions. There was a laugh, of course. These highly nervous youngsters were ready to laugh at anything just now. "Is Mr. Geroldstone ready?" asked the hospital orderly, marching into the room.
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