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Gray Ghouls
WHEN there was a job to be done, especially adventurous, entailing skilful diplomacy and undoubted peril, Tom Mansey was summoned partly because he knew Papua as well as a white man may, partly that he seemed indifferent to probable torture and death meted out by head-hunting savages to intruders in hidden empires of the hinterland.
The stout official sat about a table viewing evidence which had promulgated fresh indignation. It had been seized from the trophies of a globe-trotting curio-hunter who parted reluctantly, indignantly from it, and spouted wrath and threats of reprisal. It was a mummied human head no larger than a man's doubled fist, beautifully cured, furnished with balls of cat's-eye chalcedony in the sockets, lips sewn in a kissing pout. The shocking feature was its abundant and flaming red hair. Nowhere in Papua is red hair natural to a native. The idea of a mummied head with ruddy locks threatened the fragile foothold of white civilization on those dark flanks of a land as treacherous as the panther it most resembles.
Mansey added the final note of nausea to the assemblage.
"A woman's head, I should say. Whether a white woman or not I don't know. The curing might brown the skin. This hair is silky, rather fine and waved, certainly not bleached. By the manner of lip-sewing I should say it comes from the north-shore people. I never saw nicer work."
It was uncanny, horrid, weird, to hear him enthuse over the craft of cannibalistic savages, but his remarks were crisp when they asked him to investigate the source of supply, take feasible measures to halt barter in heads, intimate to the most indomitable, hellishly cunning race of blacks the earth endures, that selling human heads to tourists was indelicate, inadvisable and immoral.
"I'd suggest right here that you'd better stop tourists buying heads. So long as they pay big money for them, the heads will be forthcoming, and since heads with Nordic-colored hair bring fatter prices, the
* From WEIRD TALES for July, 1927.
