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Her father was a missionary stationed here in Senegal, and Julie gave her faith all the belief and obedience she could. Yet sometimes as she stared at the fringe of trees around the house in which they lived and tried to imagine how deep was the jungle beyond those trees, she could not help wondering about the strange gods who inhabited the shadows there. Her father was busily preaching against something, and he referred to that something as the pagan gods of the people, so there was something, all right, she reasoned. Yet the people to whom he preached never mentioned any names or rival deities. Daranje Kawat she had heard of, but that was the name of their king. Daranje Kawat her father said, was jealous of God and therefore, against the preaching the Reverend Davenport did. There were times when Julie Davenport entertained some very pagan suspicions, like the one that King Daranje Kawat really had a right to his kingdom and that maybe the Davenport’s strange white God ought to stick to his own territory, but she supposed such thoughts emanated from the jungle, a way the mysterious pagan gods had of fighting back.
So in a way, it was no surprise to Julie when one night a coarse snicker broke through the darkness of her room and a coarse hand covered her mouth. The pagan gods had come. She was half asleep, which accounted for her superstitious thoughts. But she was also half awake, which accounted for the fact that her curiosity overcame her terror, at first. Her startled eyes stared into the face of a black man who looked vaguely familiar, but it was too dark in the bedroom to see well. He was not alone and easily spirited her out of the room, out of the house, and through the jungle before she could become aware that it was really happening.
Fictional reading for entertainment purposes only.