He sat at the table, busy writing at some report or other, while his faithful pet was seated high above him on the strong crossbeam which held the structure together. She looked down lovingly upon his rather palm-treed head. Its very untidiness seemed to her expressive of all that was boyish, ingenuous, and enthusiastic in his nature. Its color, debased Nordic, was the aesthetic affinity of her own rich chestnut. How she longed for the right to stroke it caressingly, and to supervise, in her motherly way, its entire well-being!

Suddenly a shadow pitched into the doorway, and in such an inexpressibly businesslike fashion that one could imagine that the black figure, which had clicked into being there, had flung down this outermost skin like a gauntlet. The air at once became tense. Yet it was only Loblulya, wife of the headman of the village, carrying fruit.

Who . . . what is she? Ten years ago she was still the reigning toast of Boboma, though she had already had three husbands, each of whom had been ruler of the little village in his time. No sooner did one of them dwindle and die than she married his successor. Mr. Fatigay, when he had arrived there, had heard of this, and had felt it incumbent upon his unofficially magisterial position, to call her before him and put certain questions to her. But on his asking her if, by any chance, juju or potent vegetable decoctions had played part in the premature demise of her successive spouses, she had replied, with a sniff, that while she would have scorned to deny having taken such measures if brutality or neglect had rendered them necessary, the fact was that the deceased had all of them been very good sorts of men, on whom she had never laid hand save in the way of kindness, and therefore she could only attribute the decline of each of them to some insidious weakness of his own. This was received rather dubiously by Mr. Fatigay, as he was aware that tribal custom decreed the position of headman only to the strongest champion in each particular community, but he felt himself unable to press the inquiry any further.

Loblulya had now been for some years a grass widow, the reigning chief, her fourth, having been accosted by a spirit while he was walking in the wood some two months after their marriage, and this spirit warned him that the tribe would perish to a man if he did not confine himself to a solitary hermitage in a mountain range some miles distant from the village, and if his wife did not, at the same time, take upon her the vows and restraints of a vestal. The village elders, feeling that the fates recently attendant on the succession lent much weight to his pronouncement, decreed that he should want for nothing in his retirement, and that a penalty of painful death should await whoever imperiled the village by disregarding the second of the supernatural edicts.

This obedience had brought a double prosperity upon the settlement. Blessed by the unique possession of an absentee and cheaply maintained headman, it grew peaceful and rich, and its tranquillity was singularly undisturbed by malicious manifestations on the part of those spirits which usually play the very devil with the peace of mind of the blacks. Indeed, save for one, which occasionally pursued young men on their way home from feasts or drinking bouts, the wood demons seemed entirely to have withdrawn. And, among themselves, the villagers lived in a state of goodwill, corroded only by the strong vein of shrewishness which had gradually developed in Loblulya.

That beauty, as she grew older, reflected the steatopygous ideal as if in the convex surface of a spoon. Less and less grew the danger of any hot-blooded young warrior incurring the death penalty by violating the taboo placed upon her charms. And less and less, by the way, grew the danger of the sole remaining wood demon’s pursuit. It seemed slower of foot with every passing year, though those young men who were occasionally so fuddled as to be caught by it, testified that the horseplay to which it subjected its victims grew more irresistible, more violent, and more protracted. No man it had once seized in its clutches was ever quite the same again. But for some time, now, it had caught no one.

Loblulya stood in the doorway of Mr. Fatigay’s arbor, with her basket of oranges and plums. This, clutched against her mighty bosom, was dwarfed there to the likeness of a large and tasteless brooch.

When Loblulya laughed, it was like war in the village. When she was somber, it was like witchcraft. But when she smiled a powerful odor of musk filled the room.

Mr. Fatigay had stretched out his hand courteously to examine the fruits she set down on his table.