Bassett's opinion. Yet therein was usually to be found his
favourite crony and gossip, Ngurn, always willing for a yarn or a
discussion, the while he sat in the ashes of death and in a slow
smoke shrewdly revolved curing human heads suspended from the
rafters. For, through the months' interval of consciousness of his
long sickness, Bassett had mastered the psychological simplicities
and lingual difficulties of the language of the tribe of Ngurn and
Balatta and Vngngn--the latter the addle-headed young chief who was
ruled by Ngurn, and who, whispered intrigue had it, was the son of
Ngurn.

"Will the Red One speak to-day?" Bassett asked, by this time so
accustomed to the old man's gruesome occupation as to take even an
interest in the progress of the smoke-curing.

With the eye of an expert Ngurn examined the particular head he was
at work upon.

"It will be ten days before I can say 'finish,'" he said. "Never
has any man fixed heads like these."

Bassett smiled inwardly at the old fellow's reluctance to talk with
him of the Red One. It had always been so. Never, by any chance,
had Ngurn or any other member of the weird tribe divulged the
slightest hint of any physical characteristic of the Red One.
Physical the Red One must be, to emit the wonderful sound, and
though it was called the Red One, Bassett could not be sure that
red represented the colour of it. Red enough were the deeds and
powers of it, from what abstract clues he had gleaned. Not alone,
had Ngurn informed him, was the Red One more bestial powerful than