By GERALD CHITTENDEN
From Scribner's
"There's no doubt about it," said the hardware drummer with the pock-pitted cheeks. He
seemed glad that there was no doubt--smacked his lips over it and went on. "Obeah--
that's black magic; and voodoo--that's snake-worship. The island is rotten with 'em--
rotten with 'em."
He looked sidelong over his empty glass at the Reverend Arthur Simpson. Many human
things were foreign to the clergyman: he was uneasy about being in the Arequipa's
smoke-room at all, for instance, and especially uneasy about sitting there with the
drummer.
"But--human sacrifice!" he protested. "You spoke of human sacrifice."
"And cannibalism. La chèvre sans cornes--the goat without horns--that means an
unblemished child less than three years old. It's frequently done. They string it up by its
heels, cut its throat, and drink the blood. Then they eat it. Regular ceremony--the
mamaloi officiates."
"The mamaloi--the priestess."
Simpson jerked himself out of his chair and went on deck. Occasionally his imagination
worked loose from control and tormented him as it was doing now. There was a grizzly
vividness in the drummer's description. It was well toward morning before Simpson
grasped again his usual certainty of purpose and grew able to thank God that he had been
born into a very wicked world. There was much for a missionary to do in Hayti--he saw
that before the night grew thin, and was glad.
Between dawn and daylight the land leaped out of the sea, all clear blues and purples,
incomparably fresh and incomparably 111 wistful in that one golden hour of the tropic
day before the sun has risen very high--the disembodied spirit of an island. It lay, vague
as hope at first, in a jewel-tinted sea; the ship steamed toward it as through the mists of
creation's third morning, and all good things seemed possible. Thus had Simpson, reared
in an unfriendly land, imagined it, for beneath the dour Puritanism that had lapped him in
its armour there still stirred the power of wonder and surprise that has so often through
the ages changed Puritans to poets. That glimpse of Hayti would remain with him, he
thought, yet within the hour he was striving desperately to hold it. For soon the ruffle of
