“What?  What?” Ula cried, seizing his hand in hers, and pressing it hard to her bosom in her anxiety and eagerness.  “Tell me the secret!  Tell me!”

With a sudden sharp howl of darting pain, Tu-Kila-Kila withdrew his hand.  She had squeezed the finger the parrot had bitten, and blood began once more to flow from it freely.

A wild impulse of revenge came over the savage.  He caught her by the neck with his other hand, pressed her throat hard, till she was black in the face, kicked her several times with ferocious rage, and then flung her away from him to the other side of the hut with a fierce and untranslatable native imprecation.

Ula, shaken and hurt, darted away toward the door, with a face of abject terror.  For every reason on earth she was intensely alarmed.  Were it merely as a matter of purely earthly fear, she had ground enough for fright in having so roused the hasty anger of that powerful and implacable creature.  He would kill her and eat her with far less compunction than an English farmer would kill and eat one of his own barnyard chickens.  But besides that, it terrified her not a little in more mysterious ways to see the blood of a god falling upon the earth so freely.  She knew not what awful results to herself and her race might follow from so terrible a desecration.

But, to her utter astonishment, the great god himself, mad with rage as he was, seemed none the less almost as profoundly frightened and surprised as she herself was.  “What did you do that for?” he cried, now sufficiently recovered for thought and speech, wringing his hand with pain, and then popping his finger hastily into his mouth to ease it.  “You are a clumsy thing.  And you want to destroy me, too, with your foolish clumsiness.”

He looked at her and scowled.  He was very angry.  But the savage woman is nothing if not quick-witted and politic.  In a flash of intuition, Ula saw at once he was more frightened than hurt; he was afraid of the effect of this strange revelation upon his own reputation for supreme godship.  With every mark and gesture of deprecatory servility the woman sidled back to his side like a whipped dog.  For a second she looked down on the floor at the drops of blood; then, without one word of warning or one instant’s hesitation, she bit her own finger hard till blood flowed from it freely.  “I will show this to Fire and Water,” she said, holding it up before his eyes all red and bleeding.  “I will say you were angry with me and bit me for a punishment, as you often do.  They will never find out it was the blood of a god.  Have no fear for their eyes.  Let me look at your finger.”

Tu-Kila-Kila, half appeased by her clever quickness, held his hand out sulkily, like a disobedient child.  Ula examined it close.  “A bite,” she said, shortly.  “A bite from a bird! a peck from a parrot.”

Tu-Kila-Kila jerked out a surly assent.  “Yes, the Soul of all dead parrots,” he answered, with an angry glare.  “It bit me this morning at the King of the Birds’.  A vicious brute.  But no one else saw it.”