The Keepers of the People

1129The full glare of many torches lighted her; and scarlet from head to foot with the blood of a dozen beasts she had slaughtered, she was dancing among their bodies the monotonous, jigging dance of a wire-pulled automaton, as she shrieked. The eyes of the yelling crowd — men, women, and children — were glued to her, save that here and there a woman lay prone in a swoon of exhausted frenzy; half a dozen men were dragging a frightened white heifer towards the altar; and a group of a score of older men, wearing something of a soldierly air, were looking on with angry, disgusted faces. Prince Ralph sat without movement, watching the woman and the crowd; Althea’s heart was beating tumultuously: the reek of blood came pungent to their nostrils. The heifer was dragged to the foot of the altar, and the woman butchered it clumsily. At the sound of its lowing, and the sight of the scarlet bloodstreams on its white hide, the crowd yelled with a yet louder fury; and when it fell, the men who had dragged it to the altar, after staggering to and fro drunken with blood, seeking with drunken eyes a fresh victim, seized a young girl in the front rank of the crowd. They had dragged her a few steps before, in her dazed frenzy, she grasped her fate; then her scream rang above all the din. There came an answering cry from the group of elder men, and they rushed forward. The crowd, mad for blood, fell upon them with bestial roarings and howlings, buffeting them, tearing them, and beat them back. The assistants dragged forward the girl, too numbed by fright to struggle; and at the sight of her staring, imploring eyes, her quivering lips, babbling incoherent prayers, Althea cocked her revolver and covered the nearest of them. At the sight of this new victim the scarlet woman began to foam at the mouth, and her voice came in a continuous, rasping scream.

1130A hush fell on the crowd, as the men forced the girl to her knees before her; and one of them with his hand twisted in her hair, bent back her head, and exposed her throat to the knife. The priestess drew her hand across her eyes, as though clearing her sight, her teeth bare in a fierce snarl; and Prince Ralph rode out from the trees his face muffled in his cloak, and cried, in Varandal, above the uproar, “Stop!”