and dirges, melancholy and
depressing, which had terrified them in their childhood, seemed to blend
with the voice of the old man, and the eyes which had been dull and
heavy began to grow bright and to glitter. Soon the breasts began to
heave as the men breathed faster; the white of a man's teeth gleamed as
he opened his mouth to speak, and closed it again in anger as he
realized that the words which came to his lips were words in the white
man's tongue. Quickly a man sprang to his feet, and stood with the red
glow of the embers playing over his swarthy skin and the spots and
streaks of the wet white clay. Another sprang up and leaped away into
the darkness, but returned a moment later with a bundle of long, thin,
pointed sticks, which he flung to the ground by the fire. They were the
spears the men had made, rough, crude implements compared with the
balanced and decorated weapons their fathers had known, but such as
would serve to satisfy the hereditary impulse of a decadent race for the
weapons of their sires. With one accord the men reached out and seized
them, springing to their feet, and standing, with quivering muscles and
tremulous hands, as the struggle between inherited instinct and acquired
fear went on for the mastery of their beings.

The man who had brought the spears, and in whom the old spirit lingered
more powerfully than in the others, took a spear in either hand, and
pranced round the fire, stooping down over the points of the weapons,
and chanting, in a subdued voice, a fragment of a war-song. The old man
caught the rhythm and the words and took them up, beating time with his
withered hands; and as he did so, the others joined in the dance, the
instincts of the black-fellow only in their beings--the instincts which
brought back to them the impulses which moved their forbears, the
instincts which made them fling aside the methods and the fear of the
white man, as they had flung away the clothes of which they had learned
the need from him.

The self-constituted leader, alive with the spirit of revenge, moved,
still chanting, away from the fire--away in the direction the white men
took when they rode off from the raid. Upon his heels the others
followed, stepping as he stepped, moving as he moved; and the old man,
glancing after them as they crossed a patch of moonlight and disappeared
into the shadow beyond, hugged his arms together and laughed within
himself--the untrained, slothful decadents had gone