Now hell itself broke forth. No longer were the worshipers men and women. The lid was lifted from hell’s deepest, most fiendish caldron. A crew of damned demons was spewed out upon earth. With demoniac screams that rent the calmness of the night, they beat and gashed themselves, their slabbering, thick lips slapping together as they gibbered, like insane monkeys, sending flying showers of foam over their bare and bleeding bodies. Human imps of hell’s creation fell senseless to the ground or writhing in hideous, inhuman convulsions twined their distorted limbs about the furious dancers who stamped upon their hellish faces and brought the dancers shrieking to the earth. In the midst of this pandemonium, redolent with the odor of inferno, a dark figure, that, crouched in the deep shade of the clustering palm plants, and covered with a dark mantle, had remained unnoticed a spectator of the scene, sprang up, hurled to one side the concealing cloak and bounded toward the stump whereon the serpent hissed defiance at his adorers. With an unearthly yell, half-groan, half-moan, but all insane, frantic and wild, the neophyte leaped about in erratic gyrations of adoration before the snake, that embodiment of Tu Konk, the Voo Doo divinity. As whirling and, in an ecstacy of emotion, waving aloft his hands the howling dancer turned and the light of the bonfire fell upon his face, the brutalized features of Walter Burton were revealed. Those refined, aesthetic features that had made the man “the observed of all observers” at Miss Stanhope’s musicale in Boston, had scarcely been recognized as the same in the strangely flattened nose, the thickened lips, the popped and rolling eyes of the man who, in the forest glade of Haiti danced before the Voo Doo god Tu Konk the serpent. Burton’s evening dress was torn and disarranged, his hair disheveled, his immaculate linen spotted with blood, his shoes broken and muddy, his face contorted and agonized, as twisting and squirming in every limb he sprang and leaped in a fiercely violent dance before the snake. Yells of long pent-up savage fury rang through the dank night air, as Burton threw back his head and whooped in barbarous license. Sybella’s flashing eyes gleamed with joy as she gazed at this reclaimed scion of the negro race. She stole toward the flying figure that spun around, transported to the acme of insane emotion, singing in triumphant screeches as she crept forward, “Tu Konk, the Great one Tu Konk, I thank thee Back comes black blood No longer childless Tu Konk, I praise thee.” * * * * * Mr. Dunlap was aroused at daylight by a messenger wearing the naval uniform of the United States, who waited below with an important communication from Lieutenant Maxon.