"
"Let them haunt me if they can," he answered furiously. "I don't believe
in ghosts, and defy them all."
At this moment, looking up, Benita saw a figure gliding out of the
darkness into the ring of light, so silently that she started, for it
might well have been one of those ghosts in whom Jacob Meyer did not
believe. In fact, however, it was the old Molimo, who had a habit of
coming upon them thus.
"What says the white man?" he asked of Benita, while his dreamy eyes
wandered over the three of them, and the hole in the violated tomb.
"He says that he does not believe in spirits, and that he defies them,"
she answered.
"The white gold-seeker does not believe in spirits, and he defies them,"
Mambo repeated in his sing-song voice. "He does not believe in the
spirits that I see all around me now, the angry spirits of the dead,
who speak together of where he shall lie and of what shall happen to
him when he is dead, and of how they will welcome one who disturbs their
rest and defies and curses them in his search for the riches which he
loves. There is one standing by him now, dressed in a brown robe with a
dead man cut in ivory like to that," and he pointed to the crucifix in
Jacob's hands, "and he holds the ivory man above him and threatens him
with sleepless centuries of sorrow, when he is also one of those spirits
in which he does not believe.
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