The Red One | Page 7

heads," old Ngurn explained, as he
drew forth from the filthy matting and placed in Bassett's hands an indubitable white
man's head.
Ancient it was beyond question; white it was as the blond hair attested. He could have
sworn it once belonged to an Englishman, and to an Englishman of long before by token
of the heavy gold circlets still threaded in the withered ear-lobes.

"Now your head . . . " the devil-devil doctor began on his favourite topic.
"I'll tell you what," Bassett interrupted, struck by a new idea. "When I die I'll let you have
my head to cure, if, first, you take me to look upon the Red One."
"I will have your head anyway when you are dead," Ngurn rejected the proposition. He
added, with the brutal frankness of the savage: "Besides, you have not long to live. You
are almost a dead man now. You will grow less strong. In not many months I shall have
you here turning and turning in the smoke. It is pleasant, through the long afternoons, to
turn the head of one you have known as well as I know you. And I shall talk to you and
tell you the many secrets you want to know. Which will not matter, for you will be dead."
"Ngurn," Bassett threatened in sudden anger. "You know the Baby Thunder in the Iron
that is mine." (This was in reference to his all-potent and all-awful shotgun.) "I can kill
you any time, and then you will not get my head."
"Just the same, will Vngngn, or some one else of my folk get it," Ngurn complacently
assured him. "And just the same will it turn here in the and turn devil-devil house in the
smoke. The quicker you slay me with your Baby Thunder, the quicker will your head turn
in the smoke."
And Bassett knew he was beaten in the discussion.
What was the Red One?--Bassett asked himself a thousand times in the succeeding week,
while he seemed to grow stronger. What was the source of the wonderful sound? What
was this Sun Singer, this Star-Born One, this mysterious deity, as bestial-conducted as the
black and kinky-headed and monkey-like human beasts who worshipped it, and whose
silver-sweet, bull-mouthed singing and commanding he had heard at the taboo distance
for so long?
Ngurn had he failed to bribe with the inevitable curing of his head when he was dead.
Vngngn, imbecile and chief that he was, was too imbecilic, too much under the sway of
Ngurn, to be considered. Remained Balatta, who, from the time she found him and poked
his blue eyes open to recrudescence of her grotesque female hideousness, had continued
his adorer. Woman she was, and he had long known that the only way to win from her
treason of her tribe was through the woman's heart of her.
Bassett was a fastidious man. He had never recovered from the initial horror caused by
Balatta's female awfulness. Back in England, even at best the charm of woman, to him,
had never been robust. Yet now, resolutely, as only a man can do who is capable of
martyring himself for the cause of science, he proceeded to violate all the fineness and
delicacy of his nature by making love to the unthinkably disgusting bushwoman.
He shuddered, but with averted face hid his grimaces and swallowed his gorge as he put
his arm around her dirt-crusted shoulders and felt the contact of her rancidoily and kinky
hair with his neck and chin. But he nearly screamed when she succumbed to that caress
so at the very first of the courtship and mowed and gibbered and squealed little, queer,
pig-like gurgly noises of delight. It was too much. And the next he did in the singular

courtship was to take her down to the stream and give her a vigorous scrubbing.
From then on he devoted himself to her like a true swain as frequently and for as long at a
time as his will could override his repugnance. But marriage, which she ardently
suggested, with due observance of tribal custom, he balked at. Fortunately, taboo rule
was strong in the tribe. Thus, Ngurn could never touch bone, or flesh, or hide of crocodile.
This had been ordained at his birth. Vngngn was denied ever the touch of woman. Such
pollution, did it chance to occur, could be purged only by the death of the offending
female. It had happened once, since Bassett's arrival, when a girl of nine, running in play,
stumbled and fell against the sacred chief. And the girl-child was seen no more. In
whispers, Balatta told Bassett that she had been three days and nights in dying before the
Red One. As for Balatta, the breadfruit was taboo to her.