This one larger village had outlasted. Dwindling year by year, before it, at no great term, death and absorption, when all the island would be desert, it yet showed a number of irregularly placed, circular huts woven of branch and reed and thatched with palm. To this village Joan and Aderhold were swept together with the escaped slaves, the returned exiles. Besides the tenanted huts there were others from which the last of the occupants had died, but which were not yet fallen to the earth and become a part of the forest floor. Joan and Aderhold were given one of these abodes standing under tamarind and palm, and here food was brought them. All the village was in commotion, restless and excited, for seldom and most seldom in all the years did any one come back.... When night fell there ensued feasting and revelry, a strange picture-dance, performed by men and women, long recitatives wherein some sonorous voice told of this people’s woes, of their palmy days, and how the white men came in the time of their fathers, and they took them for gods and they proved themselves not so—not gods but devils! The torrent expression of wrongs flowed on. Sharp cries and wailings came from the dusky figures seated in an ellipse about the narrator. Eyes looked angrily across to where the white man and woman sat and watched. Among the Indians of the sailboat had been an old man with a finer, more intelligent face than was to be found among his fellows. It was he, principally, who had talked with the castaways. Now, on land, he constituted himself their advocate and protector. He had been, it seemed, the chief man of a vanished village, and this present village, being without a strong man, looked to him with deference. Now he rose and spoke and the threatening looks faded. These Indians were not of a fierce and cruel temper—and the two strangers were not Spanish, but came from a tribe whom the Spanish fought.... Danger to the two from their hosts or captors passed away. The night went by in noise and feasting. With the dawn the village sank into sleep. The home-coming ones needed, after long adventure and strain, rest and repose, while the friends and kindred at home were used to swift and calm descendings to immobility and profound sleep. Within and without the tent-like huts lay the dusky, well-shaped forms, almost bare, still as death, lying as though they had been shot down by invisible arrows. The projecting palm thatch, the overhanging, thick foliage, kept out the fierce sun, made a green and brown gloom.