Chapter I

On the banks of a bilgy lamahau, the eeliest street-stream in Bordeaux, a row of Negro peasant lodgings warmly slept. It was a vile, backward crescent reeking in brats and fiendish lusts. _Cocabe_ among its inkish rice-growers extended to gorillas sentenced to the dungeons of Surinam, Portuguese settlers who'd gone black, Chinks pauperized in the Georgetown fire of '05, and Calcutta coolies mixing _rotie_ at dusk to the chorus of crickets and _crapeaux_ moaning in the black watery gut.

The dawn rose a dewy crimson, and a blood-curdling sound polluted the vapory silences of a Negro lodging.

"Murdah! Police! Warlah! Hole 'im! Miss Ewin', tek 'e arf me."

Fetid black snorers rolled restively, clawed, dug at bugs or itching veins rising bluely on bare languid bodies, as if to say: _don't worry. It's nothing. Nothing but some Hindu coolie, after the evening's rotie debauch, to the roll of goat drums, outside, on the low lamahau earth, severing the head of some jewel-laden, thirteen-year-old mate, the third on a string of murdered conquests_.

But die the scream would not.

"Lahd--"

"Wha' de mattah wit' yo', gal? Why yo' don' let a po' body res'?"

"Tek it arf me, no--?"

"Tek wha' arf yo', gyrl, yo' mus' be crazy. Foolish t'ing! Tek arf yo' top lip!"

"Wahy--look he crawlin' up me legs! Quick, tek 'e arf me!"

"Sahv yo' right. Tell yo' yo' eat too much hole pea soup 'n cawn meal dumplin'! Go 'long an' le' de mule ride up 'n down yo' belly."

"See 'im, dey! Dey he is! A white one--see 'im, Miss Ewin'? A white snake crawlin' up me foots--tek 'e 'way. Quick--o! Miss Ewin', Ah beg yo'! Help mah!"

"Gyrl, get up! Yo' only dreamin'! It ent no snake fo' true--get up. It's mawnin'. An' go down to de stan' pipe 'n bring up de bucket o' hossah yo' lef' out dey las' night--"

"O! Lahd, Oi wuz frighten so--"

"Yo' heah ne, ni, Seenie? An' don' fuhget to blow de kerosene lamp out befo' yo' go."

The whole thing seemed to follow as a natural sequence. For Jack Captain, a Berbice mulatto, was an energetic wooer.

And then one rosy dawn, a dozen Hindu fires kindling the lamahau, the gold-digging _macaume_ lured from Seenie the seed of her all.