e, but Mackay put a bold front on it. He answered indignantly that
he and his friend had come in peace to visit the chief, and that he was
neither kind nor honorable in trying to get his visitors to fight his
battles.

The interpreter translated and for a moment several pairs of savage
eyes gleamed angrily at the bold white man. But second thoughts proved
calmer. After another council the savages moved on.

They were now at the top of a range, and every one was ordered to halt
and remain silent. Mackay thought that advice was again to be asked of
some troublesome little birds, but instead the savages raised a
peculiar long-drawn shout. It was answered at once from the opposite
mountain-top, and immediately the whole party moved on down the slope.

Here was the same lovely tangle of vines and ferns and beautiful
flowers. Monkeys sported in the trees and chattered and scolded the
intruders. Down one range and up another they scrambled and at last they
came upon the village of the head-hunters.

It lay in a valley in an open space where the forest trees had been
cleared away. It consisted of some half-dozen houses or huts made of
bamboo or wickerwork, and the place seemed literally swarming with women
and children and noisy yelping dogs. But even these could not account
for the terrible din that seemed to fill the valley. Such unearthly
yells and screeches the white men had never heard before.

"What is it?" asked Captain Bax. "Has the whole village gone mad?"

Mackay turned to one of his guides, and the man explained that the noise
came from a village a little farther down the valley. A young hunter had
returned with a Chinaman's head, and his friends were rejoicing over it.
The merrymaking sounded to the visitors more like the howling of a pack
of fiends, for it bore no resemblance to any human sounds they had ever
heard.

Fortunately they were invited to stop at the nearer village and were not
compelled to take part in the horrible celebration. They were taken at
once to the chief's house. It was the best in the village, and boasted
of a floor, made of rattan ropes half an inch thick. All along the
outside wall, under the eaves, hung a row of gruesome ornaments, heads
of the boar and deer and other wild animals killed in the chase, and
here and there mingled with them the skulls of Chinamen. The house held
one large room, and, as it was a cold evening, a fire burned at either
end of it. At one end the men stood c