d turn
on the light, growled, and pulled something else from under his
inexhaustible parki. The Boy peered curiously. The Shaman seemed to be
shutting out the offensive light by wrapping himself up in something,
head and all.

"What's he doing now?" the Boy ventured to whisper under cover of the
devil's sudden loud remonstrance, the sick man at this point breaking
into ghastly groans.

"He puts on the Kamlayka. Sh!"

The Shaman, still enveloped head and body, began to beat softly,
keeping time with the eagle's feather. You could follow the faint gleam
of the ivory wand, but on what it fell with that hollow sound no eye
could see. Now, at intervals, he uttered a cry, a deep bass
danger-note, singularly unnerving. Someone answered in a higher key,
and they kept this up in a kind of rude, sharply-timed duet, till one
by one the whole group of natives was gathered into the swing of it,
swept along involuntarily, it would seem, by some magnetic attraction
of the rhythm.

_"Ung hi yah! ah-ha-yah! yah-yah-yah!"_ was the chorus to that deep,
recurrent cry of the Shaman. Its accompanying drum-note was muffled
like far-off thunder, conjured out of the earth by the ivory wand.

Presently a scream of terror from the bundle of skins and bones in the
corner.

"Ha!" Muckluck clasped her hands and rocked back and forth.

"They'll frighten the old man to death if he's conscious," said the
Boy, half rising.

She pulled him down.

"No, no; frighten devil." She was shaking with excitement and with
ecstacy.

The sick man cried aloud. A frenzy seemed to seize the Shaman. He
raised his voice in a series of blood-curdling shrieks, then dropped
it, moaning, whining, then bursting suddenly into diabolic laughter,
bellowing, whispering, ventriloquising, with quite extraordinary skill.
The dim and foetid cave might indeed be full of devils.

If the hideous outcry slackened, but an instant, you heard the sick man
raving with the preternatural strength of delirium, or of mad
resentment. For some time it seemed a serious question as to who would
come out ahead. Just as you began to feel that the old Chief was at the
end of his tether, and ready to give up the ghost, the Shaman, rising
suddenly with a demoniac yell, flung himself down on the floor in a
convulsion. His body writhed horribly; he kicked and snapped and
quivered.

The Boy was for shielding Muckluck from the crazy flinging out of legs
and arms; but she leaned over, breath