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For several days they continued to visit the house, bringing along with them some fresh companion to look at Mrs. Moodie's god! until, vexed and annoyed by the delight they manifested at the sight of the eagle-beaked monster, I refused to gratify their curiosity by not producing him again. The manufacture of the sheath, which had caused me much perplexity, was explained by old Peter in a minute.
From the worldly standpoint, it was a fine match for the Newcastle clergyman beauty, of the eagle-beaked kind; wealth, her share of the family plate; high birth, a sister to the Hon. Theodore Atkinson. But if the exemplary man had cast his eyes lower, peradventure he had found more happiness, though ill-bred persons without family plate are not necessarily amiable.
Men with sunken eyes who had gambled all night, leaving even serape and sombrero on the gaming table; girls with painted faces staring above cheap and gaudy satins, who had danced at fandangos in the booths until dawn, then wandered about the beach, too curious over the movements of the American squadron to go to bed; shopkeepers, black and rusty of face, smoking big pipes with the air of philosophers; Indians clad in a single garment of calico, falling in a straight line from the neck; eagle-beaked old crones with black shawls over their heads; children wearing only a smock twisted about their little waists and tied in a knot behind; a few American residents, glancing triumphantly at each other; caballeros, gay in the silken attire of summer, sitting in angry disdain upon their plunging, superbly trapped horses; last of all, the elegant women in their lace mantillas and flowered rebosas, weeping and clinging to each other.
He sprang from his chariot as he spoke, and Patroclus, when he saw this, leaped on to the ground also. The two then rushed at one another with loud cries like eagle-beaked crook-taloned vultures that scream and tear at one another in some high mountain fastness.
A little to the rear stood a lanky, muscular bushman in very dirty moleskins, with a smooth loose-lipped face, no eyelashes, and a scowling forehead, who was evidently the worse for drink; next to him, a shorter man of the drover type, older, eagle-beaked and with sinister, foxy eyes. This one hailed McKeith. 'Yah! Look at him and his spanking team!
The eagle-beaked individual who condemned you, and whom I have since seen, is the chief priest of this superstition, and within his sphere his power is unlimited. It is solely to the belief which, through Ala, I have succeeded in impressing upon him that we are children of the sun that I owe the success of my efforts in your behalf.
The front of the crowd receded into the form of a semicircle, of which the point where we stood marked the center, and in the middle of the curve, slightly in advance of the others, stood forth the tall form of the eagle-beaked high priest with the terrible face, flanked on one side by Ala and on the other by the Jovelike front of the aged judge before whom our first arraignment had taken place.
He was a spare old gentleman, with a gaunt, eagle-beaked face, cleanly shaven but for a sweeping iron-gray mustache, his iron-gray hair waved over the collar of his black coat a regular mane of hair which flowed out from under the brim of his well-brushed, soft-crowned hat. His face would have been very stern in its expression had it not been for the little twinkle in his bright, dark eyes.
So many eagle-beaked noses, so many hawk-keen eyes, so many smooth-chopped, long-jowled faces, seen here together, made me think of what we are prone to regard as the highwater period of American statesmanship the Clay-Calhoun-Benton-Webster period. Just watching these men pass helped me to know better than any reading I had ever done why the English have faith and confidence in their courts.
Semitic in type he looked, with his eagle-beaked nose and prominent cheek bones, but the blue of his eyes was English. They were intelligent eyes. He looked at me a moment, and I stood silent for his initiative. I remembered that I was dressed roughly, was torn and rumpled by my contest with the forest, and that I must appear an out-at-elbows coureur de bois.
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