A tremendous roll from the drum woke rumbling echoes all around. Pointing dramatically with his drum-stick into the sky, Tom cried: "Behold!"
The crowd turned as one man. A huge blazing globe was advancing slowly towards them out of the darkness. The effect was stupendous. For a moment the throng was inarticulate with dread. Then murmurs of fear arose. Some of the women shrieked; many of the children buried their faces in their mothers' bosoms. Most of the men sank into their customary abject attitude of supplication; others were too terrified to move, and gazed upwards in stupefaction at the advancing and ascending ball of fire. It came slowly along on the breeze, passed almost directly over the village, then mounted higher and higher into the sky as it drifted eastward. The crowd watched it in awe-struck silence as it grew smaller and smaller in the distance, and at last disappeared as a tiny speck on the horizon.
A gasp of relief rose from the throng. Barega cried again for torches; by their light Mabruki could be seen shaking like an aspen, the evidence of superior medicine having overpowered him altogether. Among the people there was the inevitable reaction. Their fear being removed, they turned against the medicine-man and assailed him with vehement cries of scorn. Barega sent for his executioner, and announced his immediate intention of having Mabruki's head. But Tom called aloud for silence, and beckoning Mbutu, who with the torches had suddenly appeared at his side, said:
"Barega and Barega's men," he said, "you have seen with your own eyes. You saw that with Mabruki's own bell I proved against him, if such childish folly can be called a proof, what he had proved against me. You saw that when he tried to fell me with his weighty fist, with a mere turn of the hand I laid him low. And now you have seen how, striking your own king-drum, Bugandanwe, I summoned a globe of fire from the trees yonder, and how it sailed away out of sight with a message to the morning chamber of the sun. The trial is made; who has the stronger medicine--Mabruki or I?"
"You, the muzungu!" shouted every creature in the throng.
"And do you, O Barega, any longer believe that I caused the death of your cattle?"