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Occasionally some familiar sound came from the world outside: the clang of the Tenth Avenue car or the whistle of a tugboat out in the river, but these sounds were of another existence they seemed distant and unfamiliar and wholly out of place in the mystery and terror of the Voodoo seance. The minutes slid by, and nothing happened. The suspense was worse than ever.
In spite of all that he had heard he could not believe that voodoo was so powerful in the island; this was the twentieth century, he insisted, and the most enlightened country in the world was less than fifteen hundred miles away; he forgot that opinions and not figures number the centuries, and refused to see that distance had nothing to do with the case.
"Give me a calabash of water from that spring of yours, your grace, and I'll take myself off," said he. "But, mind, there are to be no more dances here, no more voodoo practice." Old Niña left the room grumbling to herself, while Fernandez talked with Juanita, quite disregarding the sour and silent pair of black men.
And because you associate the activities of Voodoo with the full moon, you believe that the old menace has again become active?" The Colonel nodded emphatically. He was busily engaged in rolling one of his eternal cigarettes. "This belief of yours was recently confirmed by the discovery of the bat wing?" "I no longer doubted," said Colonel Menendez, shrugging his shoulders. "How could I?"
"Something that pays big." Thrackles supplied the desired answer. "Dat chis' " suggested Perdosa. "Voodoo " muttered the Nigger. "That's to scare us out," said Handy Solomon, with vast contempt. "That's what makes me sure it is the chest." Pulz muttered some of the jargon of alchemy. "That's it," approved Handy Solomon. "If we could get " "We wouldn't know how to use it," interrupted Pulz.
Their mammies had told them about the Voodoo Eye. They remembered the tales whispered in the slave quarters about people being prayed to death by these baleful creatures of ill omen! They weren't going to take any chances! Ambrose, for all his natural courage, was shaken. He remembered old Tom Blue, the Texas Voodoo, who poisoned twenty-one people and came to life after the white men lynched him.
"That is the question which we are here to answer, but I am as sure as it is humanly possible to be sure of anything that whatever Colonel Menendez may tell us to-night, one point at least he will withhold." "What do you expect him to withhold?" "The meaning of the sign of the Bat Wing." "Then you think he knows its meaning?" "He has told us that it is the death-token of Voodoo."
"Voodoo, Inspector, also known as Obeah, a cult which has spread from the West Coast of Africa throughout the West Indies and to parts of the United States. The bat wing is said to be a sign used by these people." Inspector Aylesbury scratched his chin. "Now let me get this thing clear," said he: "Colonel Menendez believed that people called Voodoos wanted to kill him?
"Disastrous hurricanes, furious thunderstorms, yellow fever, poisonous reptiles, the horrible mysteries of voodoo worship, and so on, and so on," I cut in. "Oh, you be hanged!" retorted Jack recklessly. "It's a precious sight better than this pestilential West Coast at all events, say what you will. And as to work, that's all right; I don't care how hard you work me in reason, Dick.
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