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“Let the fire be lighted,” Scundoo commanded.

The bright flames rushed upward, revealing faces yet marked with vanishing fear, but also clouded with doubt.

“Surely the thing has failed,” Hooniah whispered hoarsely.

“Yea,” Bawn answered complacently. “Scundoo groweth old, and we stand in need of a new shaman.”

“Where now is the wisdom of Jelchs?” Sime snickered in La-lah’s ear.

La-lah brushed his brow in a puzzled manner and said nothing.

Sime threw his chest out arrogantly and strutted up to the little shaman. “Hoh! Hoh! As I said, nothing has come of it!”

“So it would seem, so it would seem,” Scundoo answered meekly. “And it would seem strange to those unskilled in the affairs of mystery.”

“As thou?” Sime queried audaciously.

“Mayhap even as I.” Scundoo spoke quite softly, his eyelids drooping, slowly drooping, down, down, till his eyes were all but hidden. “So I am minded of another test. Let every man, woman, and child, now and at once, hold their hands well up above their heads!”

So unexpected was the order, and so imperatively was it given, that it was obeyed without question. Every hand was in the air.

“Let each look on the other’s hands, and let all look,” Scundoo commanded, “so that–“

But a noise of laughter, which was more of wrath, drowned his voice. All eyes had come to rest upon Sime. Every hand but his was black with soot, and his was guiltless of the smirch of Hooniah’s pot.

A stone hurtled through the air and struck him on the cheek.

“It is a lie!” he yelled. “A lie! I know naught of Hooniah’s blankets!”

A second stone gashed his brow, a third whistled past his head, the great blood-cry went up, and everywhere were people groping on the ground for missiles. He staggered and half sank down.

“It was a joke! Only a joke!” he shrieked. “I but took them for a joke!”

“Where hast thou hidden them?” Scundoo’s shrill, sharp voice cut through the tumult like a knife.

“In the large skin-bale in my house, the one slung by the ridge-pole,” came the answer. “But it was a joke, I say, only–“

Scundoo nodded his head, and the air went thick with flying stones. Sime’s wife was crying silently, her head upon her knees; but his little boy, with shrieks and laughter, was flinging stones with the rest.

Hooniah came waddling back with the precious blankets. Scundoo stopped her.

“We be poor people and have little,” she whimpered. “So be not hard upon us, O Scundoo.”

The people ceased from the quivering stone-pile they had builded, and looked on.

“Nay, it was never my way, good Hooniah,” Scundoo made answer, reaching for the blankets. “In token that I am not hard, these only shall I take.”

“Am I not wise, my children?” he demanded.

“Thou art indeed wise, O Scundoo!” they cried in one voice.

And he went away into the darkness, the blankets around him, and Jelchs nodding sleepily under his arm.