Page:The Plutocrat (1927).pdf/231

 marching down the tunnelled street a queer procession. At the head of it an aged and blue-black negro, his broken lips frothy with unholy excitements, beat upon a tom-tom hanging by an old scarlet rope from his shoulders. He wore a tall headdress made of the crackling skins of cats, glittering with broken bits of mirrors; about his waist there swung some dozens of jackals' skins; his warped legs and great flat feet were bare. He pranced as he marched, beat pompously his tom-tom and shouted over and over, in a profoundly dissipated old voice, as a herald clearing the way imperiously for those behind: "Bo' jour, Messieurs et Dames! Tout le monde a droit! Bo' jour, Messieurs et Dames! Tout le monde a droit!"

At a little distance behind him Ogle discerned the figures of two women in European dress, walking with a tall young man who carried a heavy stick; but marching before these, almost abreast of the barbaric negro, prancing in step with him and evidently delighting in him, there came a stalwart man, middle-aged but visibly active and audibly deep-lunged. "Bum joor, Mushyoor a Dam!" he shouted as he came. "Toolamond a drot, whatever that means! You said it, grandpa! I'm gettin' to speak so much