u-Kila-Kila's great spirit laid by in
safety? I know it is in the tree; but where and in what part of it?"

Tu-Kila-Kila drew back with a little cry of surprise. "You know it is in
the tree!" he cried. "You know my soul is kept there! Why, Ula, who told
you that? and you a woman! Bad medicine indeed! Some man has been
blabbing what he learned in the mysteries. If this should reach the ears
of the King of the Rain--" he paused mysteriously.

"What? What?" Ula cried, seizing his hand in hers, and pressing it hard
to her bosom in her anxiety and eagerness. "Tell me the secret! Tell me!"

With a sudden sharp howl of darting pain, Tu-Kila-Kila withdrew his hand.
She had squeezed the finger the parrot had bitten, and blood began once
more to flow from it freely.

A wild impulse of revenge came over the savage. He caught her by the
neck with his other hand, pressed her throat hard, till she was black in
the face, kicked her several times with ferocious rage, and then flung
her away from him to the other side of the hut with a fierce and
untranslatable native imprecation.

Ula, shaken and hurt, darted away toward the door, with a face of abject
terror. For every reason on earth she was intensely alarmed. Were it
merely as a matter of purely earthly fear, she had ground enough for
fright in having so roused the hasty anger of that powerful and
implacable creature. He would kill her and eat her with far less
compunction than an English farmer would kill and eat one of his own
barnyard chickens. But besides that, it terrified her not a little in
more mysterious ways to see the blood of a god falling upon the earth so
freely. She knew not what awful results to herself and her race might
follow from so terrible a desecration.

But, to her utter astonishment, the great god himself, mad with rage as
he was, seemed none the less almost as profoundly frightened and
surprised as she herself was. "What did you do that for?" he cried, now
sufficiently recovered for thought and speech, wringing his hand with
pain, and then popping his finger hastily into his mouth to ease it. "You
are a clumsy thing. And you want to destroy me, too, with your foolish
clumsiness."

He looked at her and scowled. He was very angry. But the savage woman is
nothing if not quick-witted and politic. In a flash of intuition, Ula saw
at once he was more frightened than hurt; he was afraid of the effect of
this strange revelation upon his own reputation for su