The Argosy, Vol. 81, No. 4 — page 105: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

FOOLS OF SACRIFICE. contained some of the milk she always kept half a-boil at her fireplace. Into the pail she poured the remaining contents of the flask of white liquid and stirred the two ingredients with the neck of the bottle. The latter, with its cork duly inserted, she put back carefully into her pocket. Gagging at the throat and shivering all over, the unconscious castaway took the small quantity of this aliment that Mother Juliet poured into his mouth. She watched him swallow it convulsively and waited pa- tiently a few moments. Then she administered a second table- spoonful. This, her sharp eyes noted with encouragement, went down with less diff- culty. Placing the tin pail of milk on the floor, she picked up the coconut-oil again. This time she used it only on his arms and hands. As she gently applied it to his left hand she slipped from his little finger and the third finger four gold rings, each of which was studded with as many big diamonds. In the glow of the lantern she studied the rings hungrily. She flashed the stones against the light. They sparkled like magic white fire. She rubbed dirt from the floor on them and flashed them again against the lantern’s flame. Still the wonderful gleam shone in specks which the dirt had not cov- ered. She bit into the gold bands, one after the other, with all the strength of her sound teeth. When she saw the marks she had made on each one of them in the yielding metal she grinned over their grouped bril- liance in her black palm with unholy’ glee. There could be no doubt of their genuine- ness. With a glance over her shoulder at the man on the mattress lying still, eyes shut and breathing heavily, Mother Juliet sprang up and went forth to encounter Jolly George, who was striking the ship’s gong outside. She paused for a moment before her dim- ly blazing hearth, in the shadows of which were a number of sleeping coiled things, on whose varicolored skins the flames shone weirdly. The seeress unclasped a heavy brass chain that hung about her neck inside her bodice. A dozen strange ornaments of odd metals were strung upon the chain, on 671 which also she threaded, with a caressing glance, the four diamond rings of the cast- away. CHAPTER IV. BLACK HENRY’S MESSAGE. 2 spirit elate, a saturnine smile on her pudgy face, and cuddling with one hand the four diamond rings against the oily skin of her breast through its covering of yellow satin, Mother Juliet waddled along the crooked path of the grove toward the pedestal. Here Jolly George stood waiting with her sun-umbrella. He held it out folded as she approached, with a look and poise that meant he would take to his heels as soon as he had delivered it. Anticipating his move, she gave no no- tice to the umbrella, but seized his free hand and drew him close to her away from the pedestal into a covert of long grass and shrubs. The boy could not but gaze into her sleepy eyes that searched his command- ingly. “You can go on along now, son,” she told him. ‘But first you listen to me. Great things are a comin’ to you for what you’ve done to-day in finding that man. But you got to do what I say. Remember the white box there in your pocket. Feel it burn wher I talk?” The seeress thrust the boy’s hand back into his pocket. “Feel it burn—burn—burn!” peated, crooning. “VYes—it burns—it burns!” the boy as- serted in a trembling whisper. “And I can make it burn worse; you know that,” the woman insinuated with a grisly smile of menace. Jolly George nodded, and his knees shook under him. She patted his cheek reassuringly as she went on: ‘When we get through with this work we have to do quickly and carefully—nobody knowing about it at the Settlement or up at the big house, mind—then I'll make you really my son, Jolly George, and we'll have bags full of gold, you and I. ‘We'll sail far away from this lonely isl- and to a great, lovely city, where we’ll dress gorgeous, eat gorgeous, do everything we want to do and nothing we don’t want to. You won’t be poor, foolish Jolly George she re- CORNICGLOOOKS (C@)