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Author of "The Ocean Leech," "Men Who Walk Upon the Air," etc.
"BUT a man's head is such a little thing!"
Mpatanasi smiled and stroked his brittle yellow beard. His daughter sat in the corner and scowled. She was silent through sheer indignation.
"Mu-senyui, I did not ask for philosophy. A man's head is his own, and who am I to rob a man of his property? Still, were I certain—"
"But I assure you that the wretch abuses his head frightfully. He has little use for it. And when you consider that it is a king's head that he abuses!—Mpatanasi, who is a just man, may well consider!"
Mpatanasi blew circles of yellow smoke into the thin air, screwed up his lips and studied the disintegrating rafters above him. A squalid procession of bluish bat ticks wound in and out over a balcony of lianas. Mpatanasi was a tall, lean man, with the malachite sky in his eyes and the sun in his hair. His lips were monstrous and they seemed to overlap his face; and his ears were distended by wooden plugs. He was naked to the waist, but he wore a straw hat and a flaming red four-in-hand, which did not become him. He sat by the open door, and puffed on a ridiculous pipe, and blinked at Mu-senyui.
"I shouldn't feel justified in asking for a king's head," he said, and made a grimace.
His daughter beat a horrified and irrelevant tattoo upon the soles of her burnished feet.
Mu-senyui was reprehensibly and gloriously drunk. He fell into a revery, and later, upon the floor. The frown on his face grew in volume. It would never do, of course, to deliberately antagonize Mpatanasi. Mpatanasi entertained men with magnificent jests and well-turned figures of speech, and sent them away with their heads under their arms. Was not Mpatanasi emissary of the forest-god, and did he not hold in his shriveled black hands the key to a dozen enigmas! Even the king feared Mpatanasi, and it was because of a king’s fear that Mu-senyui had dared to suggest—oh, the days and nights that poor, tired Mu-senyui had schemed under the shadow of blasphemy, with his soul knee-deep in sin, and with his eyes turned nervously toward the forest! For Mpatanasi was master of the forest; and as Mu-senyui was a man of taste he did not care to face what the forest concealed.
