All these things belong to the history of many months, and throughout
those months the white-haired Athon Dazé meditated revenge for the
tribal neglect of Dungara. With savage cunning he feigned friendship
towards Justus, even hinting at his own conversion; but to the
congregation of Dungara he said darkly: “They of the Padri’s flock have
put on clothes and worship a busy God. Therefore Dungara will afflict
them grievously till they throw themselves, howling, into the waters of
the Berbulda.” At night the Red Elephant Tusk boomed and groaned among
the hills, and the faithful waked and said: “The God of Things as They
Are matures revenge against the back-sliders. Be merciful, Dungara, to
us Thy children, and give us all their crops!”
Late in the cold weather, the Collector and his wife came into the Buria
Kol country. “Go and look at Krenk’s Mission,” said Gallio. “He is doing
good work in his own way, and I think he’d be pleased if you opened the
bamboo chapel that he has managed to run up. At any rate, you’ll see a
civilised Buria Kol.”
Great was the stir in the Mission. “Now he and the gracious lady will
that we have done good work with their own eyes see, and—yes—we will him
our converts in all their new clothes by their own hands constructed
exhibit. It will a great day be—for the Lord always,” said Justus; and
Lotta said, “Amen.” Justus had, in his quiet way, felt jealous of the
Basel Weaving Mission, his own converts being unhandy; but Athon Dazé
had latterly induced some of them to hackle the glossy silky fibres of a
plant that grew plenteously on the Panth Hills. It yielded a cloth white
and smooth almost as the _tappa_ of the South Seas, and that day the
converts were to wear for the first time clothes made therefrom. Justus
was proud of his work. “They shall in white clothes clothed to meet the
Collector and his well-born lady come down, singing ‘Now thank we all
our God.’ Then he will the Chapel open, and—yes—even Gallio to believe
will begin. Stand so, my children, two by two, and—Lotta, why do they
thus themselves bescratch? It is not seemly to wriggle, Nala, my child.
The Collector will be here and be pained.”
The Collector, his wife, and Gallio climbed the hill to the
Mission-station. The converts were drawn up in two lines, a shining band
nearly forty strong. “Hah!” said the Collector, whose acquisitive bent
of mind led him to believe that he had fostered the institution from the
first. “Advancing, I see, by leaps and bounds.”
Never was truer word spoken! The Mission _was_ advancing exactly as he
had said—at first by little hops and shuffles of shamefaced uneasiness,
but soon by the leaps of fly-stung horses and the bounds of maddened
kangaroos. From the hill of Panth the Red Elephant Tusk delivered a dry
and anguished blare. The ranks of the converts wavered, broke and
scattered with yells and shrieks of pain, while Justus and Lotta stood
horror-stricken.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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