tic lunges. The distance
was but a few feet, but the savages pressed round him, half frightened
still, yet gnashing their teeth and distorting their faces with anger.
"He has broken the Taboo," they cried in vehement tones. "He has crossed
the line willingly. Kill him! Kill him! We are free from sin. We have
bought him with a price--with many cocoanuts!"

At the sound of the struggle going on so close outside, Muriel rushed in
frantic haste and terror from the hut. Her face was pale, but her
demeanor was resolute. Before Mali could stop her, she, too, had crossed
the sacred line of the coral mark, and had flung herself madly upon
Felix's assailants, to cover his retreat with her own frail body.

"Hold off!" she cried, in her horror, in English, but in accents even
those savages could read. "You shall not touch him!"

With a fierce effort Felix tore his way back, through the spears and
clubs, toward the place of safety. The savages wounded him on the way
more than once with their jagged stone spear-tips, and blood flowed from
his breast and arms in profusion. But they didn't dare even so to touch
Muriel. The sight of that pure white woman, rushing out in her weakness
to protect her lover's life from attack, seemed to strike them with some
fresh access of superstitious awe. One or two of themselves were wounded
by Felix's knife, for they were unaccustomed to steel, though they had a
few blades made out of old European barrel-hoops. For a minute or two the
conflict was sharp and hotly contested. Then at last Felix managed to
fling the child across the line, to push Muriel with one hand at
arm's-length before him, and to rush himself within the sacred circle.

No sooner had he crossed it than the savages drew up around, undecided as
yet, but in a threatening body. Rank behind rank, their loose hair in
their eyes, they stood like wild beasts balked of their prey, and yelled
at him. Some of them brandished their spears and their stone hatchets
angrily in their victims' faces. Others contented themselves with howling
aloud as before, and piling curses afresh on the heads of the unpopular
storm-gods. "Look at her," they cried, in their wrath, pointing their
skinny brown fingers angrily at Muriel. "See, she weeps even now. She
would flood us with her rain. She isn't satisfied with all the harm she
has poured down upon Boupari already. She wants to drown us."

And then a little knot drew up close to the line of taboo itself, a