preme godship. With
every mark and gesture of deprecatory servility the woman sidled back to
his side like a whipped dog. For a second she looked down on the floor
at the drops of blood; then, without one word of warning or one instant's
hesitation, she bit her own finger hard till blood flowed from it freely.
"I will show this to Fire and Water," she said, holding it up before his
eyes all red and bleeding. "I will say you were angry with me and bit me
for a punishment, as you often do. They will never find out it was the
blood of a god. Have no fear for their eyes. Let me look at your finger."

Tu-Kila-Kila, half appeased by her clever quickness, held his hand out
sulkily, like a disobedient child. Ula examined it close. "A bite," she
said, shortly. "A bite from a bird! a peck from a parrot."

Tu-Kila-Kila jerked out a surly assent. "Yes, the Soul of all dead
parrots," he answered, with an angry glare. "It bit me this morning at
the King of the Birds'. A vicious brute. But no one else saw it."

Ula put the finger up to her own mouth, and sucked the wound gently.
Her medicine stanched it. Then she took a thin leaf of the paper
mulberry, soft, cool, and soothing, and bound it round the place with a
strip of the lace-like inner bark, as deftly as any hospital nurse in
London would have done it. These savage women are capital hands in
sickness. Tu-Kila-Kila sat and sulked meanwhile, like a disappointed
child. When Ula had finished, she nodded her head and glided softly away.
She knew her chance of learning the secret was gone for the moment, and
she had too much of the guile of the savage woman to spoil her chances by
loitering about unnecessarily while her lord was in his present
ungracious humor.

As she stole from the hut, Tu-Kila-Kila, looking ruefully at his wounded
hand, and then at that light and supple retreating figure, muttered
sulkily to himself, with a very bad grace, "the woman knows too much. She
nearly wormed my secret out of me. She knows that Tu-Kila-Kila's life and
soul are bound up in the tree. She knows that I bled, and that the parrot
bit me. If she blabs, as women will do, mischief may come of it. I am a
great god, a very great god--keen, bloodthirsty, cruel. And I like that
woman. But it would be wiser and safer, perhaps, after all, to forego my
affection and to make a great feast of her."

And Ula, looking back with a smile and a nod, and holding up her own
bitten and bleeding hand with a farew