Page:In Black and White - Kipling (1890).djvu/29

 gracious lady will that we have done good work with their own eyes see, and—yes—we will him our converts in all their new clothes by their own hands constructed exhibit. It will a great day be—for the Lord always," said Justus; and Lotta said "Amen".

Justus had, in his quiet way, felt jealous of the Basel Weaving Mission, his own converts being unhandy; but Athon Dazé had latterly induced some of them to hackle the glossy silky fibres of a plant that grew plenteously on the Panth Hill. It yielded a cloth white and smooth almost as the tappa of the South Seas, and that day the converts were to wear for the first time clothes made therefrom. Justus was proud of his work.

"They shall in white clothes clothed to meet the Collector and his well-born lady come down, singing—'Now thank we all our God'. Then he will the chapel open, and—yes—even Gallio to believe will begin. Stand so my children, two by two, and—Lotta, why do they thus themselves bescratch? It is not seemly to wriggle, Nala, my child. The Collector will be here and be pained."

The Collector, his wife, and Gallio climbed the hill to the Mission station. The converts were drawn up in two lines, a shining band nearly forty strong. "Hah!" said the Collector, whose acquisitive bent of mind led him to believe that he had fostered the institution from the first. "Advancing, I see, by leaps and bounds."

Never was truer word spoken! The Mission was advancing exactly as he had said—at first by little hops and shuffles of shame-faced uneasiness, but soon by the leaps of fly-stung horses and the bounds of maddened kangaroos. From the Hill of Panth the Red Elephant Tusk delivered a dry and anguished blare. The ranks of the converts wavered, broke and scattered with yells and shrieks of pain, while Justus and Lotta stood horror-stricken.

"It is the judgment of Dungara!" shouted a voice. "I burn! I burn! To the river or we die!"