Avon Fantasy Reader No. 11 — page 46: what you’re looking at

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

village, accompanied them through the jungle, trying to dissuade the two white men from their dangerous enterprise. The tall black man’s earnestness in describing the hazards of the adven- ture and the wickedness of the heathen Baloongas could not be doubted. He, Mokato, himself, was once a heathen Baloonga and he knew them. Their hearts were black with wickedness and treachery. They told lies. They murdered without reason or enmity and devoured their victim without re- morse. As a matter of fact Mokato was a very recent convert of the Anglican- minister in Ghandis and he had the warmth and zeal of a new faith-upon Hate When he spoke to the white men he called them brothers in Biblical ashton. As he talked thus, swinging along the trail at the heels of the pack-mules, the head-man glanced down consciously now and then at his clothes. He wore the white man’s regulation trousers and shirt and had discarded his ear plates. The lobes of his ears from which the plates had been taken hung down in loops almost to his shoulders. These black empty loops were the chief sign that Mokato had given up savagery and had become a civilized man. He kept hngering them as he strode along as if conscious of them without the ear- ates. P Mogglesby inquired why some effort had not been made to civilize these eastern Baloongas. Brother Spence, the Anglican minister in Ghandis, had not got to them yet. He, Mokato, was the head-man of the most eastern village which Brother Spence had converted. The ponderous, sagging Englishman with his gin-shot face told Mokato that he, in a way, he supposed, was on the very errand Mokato described; that 1s, the conversion of the uncivilized Baloongas. “Why, you will be killed!” cried Mokato, staring at him. “How is it,” asked the wizened doctor, ‘‘that Parson Spence can go among the Baloongas in safety, while I and Mr. Mogglesby can not?” Mokato was surprised. Brother Spence was protected by the angels. Did not his white brothers recall how an angel came down and broke open the jail to deliver Saint Paul? Did any one imagine that angel could forget Brother Spence among the savage Baloongas? The doctor screwed up his eyes and glanced aloft at the crown of a palm tree hanging high above the jungle trail. “I would think, Brother Mokato, that an angel who had seen active duty under Saint Paul would be getting a bit old for service among the Baloon- as. . Mokato was astonished. ‘An angel in heaven get old, brother?” The big Englishman glanced around at his partner and said in an under- tone— “Shut up!” “How is it,” asked the wizened doctor, “that Parson Spence can go among on the clinking mules. Presently he began on another tack— A4 comicbooks.com