Tu-Kila-Kila smiled once more, a ghastly self-satisfied smile of unquestioned power.  “It is well,” he went on.  “My people love me.  They know my strength, how I can wither them up.  They give me their blood to drink freely.  So I will be merciful to them.  I will make my sun shine and my rain drop from heaven.  And instead of taking all, I will choose one victim.”  He paused, and glanced along their line significantly.

“Choose, Tu-Kila-Kila,” the men answered, without a moment’s hesitation.  “We are all your meat.  Choose which one you will take of us.”

Tu-Kila-Kila walked with a leisurely tread down the lines and surveyed the men critically.  They were all drawn up in rows, one behind the other, according to tribes and families; and the god walked along each row, examining them with a curious and interested eye, as a farmer examines sheep fit for the market.  Now and then, he felt a leg or an arm with his finger and thumb, and hesitated a second.  It was an important matter, this choosing a victim.  As he passed, a close observer might have noted that each man trembled visibly while the god’s eye was upon him, and looked after him askance with a terrified sidelong gaze as he passed on to his neighbor.  But not one savage gave any overt sign or token of his terror or his reluctance.  On the contrary, as Tu-Kila-Kila passed along the line with lazy, cruel deliberateness, the men kept chanting aloud without one tremor in their voices, “We are all your meat.  Choose which one you will take of us.”

On a sudden, Tu-Kila-Kila turned sharply round, and, darting a rapid glance toward a row he had already passed several minutes before, he exclaimed, with an air of unexpected inspiration, “Tu-Kila-Kila has chosen.  He takes Maloa.”

The man upon whose shoulder the god laid his heavy hand as he spoke stood forth from the crowd without a moment’s hesitation.  If anger or fear was in his heart at all, it could not be detected in his voice or his features.  He bowed his head with seeming satisfaction, and answered humbly, “What Tu-Kila-Kila says must need be done.  This is a great honor.  He is a mighty god.  We poor men must obey him.  We are proud to be taken up and made one with divinity.”

Tu-Kila-Kila raised in his hand a large stone axe of some polished green material, closely resembling jade, which lay on a block by the door, and tried its edge with his finger, in an abstracted manner.  “Bind him!” he said, quietly, turning round to his votaries.  And the men, each glad to have escaped his own fate, bound their comrade willingly with green ropes of plantain fibre.

“Crown him with flowers!” Tu-Kila-Kila said; and a female attendant, absolved from the terror of the bull-roarer by the god’s command, brought forward a great garland of crimson hibiscus, which she flung around the victim’s neck and shoulders.

“Lay his head on the sacred stone block of our fathers,” Tu-Kila-Kila went on, in an easy tone of command, waving his hand gracefully.  And the men, moving forward, laid their comrade, face downward, on a huge flat block of polished greenstone, which lay like an altar in front of the hut with the mouldering skeletons.