His only other ornament was a
necklace of human finger-bones. At sight of their other prisoner he
chattered in a high querulous falsetto, with puckered brows and troubled,
wild-animal eyes. He was disposed of along the middle of the line, one
of the Poonga-Poonga men leading him at the end of a length of bark-rope.
The trail began to rise out of the jungle, dipping at times into
festering hollows of unwholesome vegetation, but rising more and more
over swelling, unseen hill-slopes or climbing steep hog-backs and rocky
hummocks where the forest thinned and blue patches of sky appeared
overhead.
"Close up he stop," Binu Charley warned them in a whisper.
Even as he spoke, from high overhead came the deep resonant boom of a
village drum. But the beat was slow, there was no panic in the sound.
They were directly beneath the village, and they could hear the crowing
of roosters, two women's voices raised in brief dispute, and, once, the
crying of a child. The run-way now became a deeply worn path, rising so
steeply that several times the party paused for breath. The path never
widened, and in places the feet and the rains of generations had scoured
it till it was sunken twenty feet beneath the surface.
"One man with a rifle could hold it against a thousand," Sheldon
whispered to Joan.
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