Early the next day, before the sun was yet up, a bustle woke him.  He awoke in fear, for he thought the tribe had caught him napping:  but it was no such matter.  Only, on the beach in front of him, the bodiless voices called and shouted one upon another, and it seemed they all passed and swept beside him up the coast of the island.

“What is afoot now?” thinks Keola.  And it was plain to him it was something beyond ordinary, for the fires were not lighted nor the shells taken, but the bodiless voices kept posting up the beach, and hailing and dying away; and others following, and by the sound of them these wizards should be angry.

“It is not me they are angry at,” thought Keola, “for they pass me close.”

As when hounds go by, or horses in a race, or city folk coursing to a fire, and all men join and follow after, so it was now with Keola; and he knew not what he did, nor why he did it, but there, lo and behold! he was running with the voices.

So he turned one point of the island, and this brought him in view of a second; and there he remembered the wizard trees to have been growing by the score together in a wood.  From this point there went up a hubbub of men crying not to be described; and by the sound of them, those that he ran with shaped their course for the same quarter.  A little nearer, and there began to mingle with the outcry the crash of many axes.  And at this a thought came at last into his mind that the high chief had consented; that the men of the tribe had set-to cutting down these trees; that word had gone about the isle from sorcerer to sorcerer, and these were all now assembling to defend their trees.  Desire of strange things swept him on.  He posted with the voices, crossed the beach, and came into the borders of the wood, and stood astonished.  One tree had fallen, others were part hewed away.  There was the tribe clustered.  They were back to back, and bodies lay, and blood flowed among their feet.  The hue of fear was on all their faces; their voices went up to heaven shrill as a weasel’s cry.

Have you seen a child when he is all alone and has a wooden sword, and fights, leaping and hewing with the empty air?  Even so the man-eaters huddled back to back, and heaved up their axes, and laid on, and screamed as they laid on, and behold! no man to contend with them! only here and there Keola saw an axe swinging over against them without hands; and time and again a man of the tribe would fall before it, clove in twain or burst asunder, and his soul sped howling.

For awhile Keola looked upon this prodigy like one that dreams, and then fear took him by the midst as sharp as death, that he should behold such doings.  Even in that same flash the high chief of the clan espied him standing, and pointed and called out his name.  Thereat the whole tribe saw him also, and their eyes flashed, and their teeth clashed.

“I am too long here,” thought Keola, and ran further out of the wood and down the beach, not caring whither.