Before he could say another word, I cried, "So help me, unless we three go with you and those three stay, we'llkeep Seth Upham back and sail away in the Adventure and leave you here forever."
Never before could I have spoken thus lightly of what my uncle should, or should not, do. The thought made me feel even more keenly how helpless the poor man had become, and confirmed me in my purpose.
It was on the tip of my tongue to add that Gideon North was to come, too, but I thought of how essential it was that someone whom we—Arnold and I—could trust should stand guard upon the brig, and said nothing more, which probably was better, for my words seemed to have struck home.
When I threatened to sail away with the Adventure, Gleazen glared at me hard and murmured, with a respect and admiration in his voice that surprised me, "You young cock, I didn't think you had it in you."
Throwing overboard the butt of his cigar, which made a bright arc in its flight through the darkness and fell into the water with a smart hiss, he smiled to himself.
Matterson whispered to O'Hara, who touched Gleazen's arm. I thought I heard him say, "Too honest to make trouble," as they drew apart and conferred together, glancing now and then at my uncle; then Gleazen nodded and said, "Very well, Joe"; and I knew that for once I had come off victorious.
At least, I thought, we are strong enough to stand up for our rights and Uncle Seth's.
The men quietly turned away and went forward, a little disappointed that the trouble had blown past and the episode had come to naught. But it had added one more issue to be fought out between Cornelius Gleazen and myself; and though it was over, it was neither forgotten nor forgiven.
I had gone into the waist, where I was watching thearms and provisions that the men were loading into the boat we were to take, when I heard a voice at my ear, "I guess—ha-ha!—you come back with plenty nigger, hey?"
It was Pedro with his monkey riding on his shoulder. The beast leered at me and clicked its teeth.
"No," I replied, "of that I am sure. We are not going after any such cargo as that."
"I wonder," he responded. "I t'ink, hey, queer way to get nigger—no barracoon—go in a boat. But dah plenty nigger food below. Plenty lumber. Plenty chain'. What you get if not nigger?"
I said nothing.
"Maybe so—maybe not," Pedro muttered. His earrings tinkled as he shook his head and moved away.
I was surprised to observe that for the moment all work had stopped.
Seeing that O'Hara was pointing into the swamp, I stepped over beside him to ascertain what had caught his attention, but found the darkness impenetrable.
"I'm telling ye, some one's there," O'Hara muttered with an oath.
I saw that Gleazen and Matterson were on the other side of him.
Now the men were whispering.
"Sh!"
"See there—there—there it goes!"
"What—Oh! There it is!"
I myself saw that something vague and shadowy was moving indistinctly toward us down one of the long lanes of water.
Suddenly out of the swamp came a piercing wail. It was so utterly unhuman that to every one of us it brought, I believe, a nameless terror. Certainly I can answer formyself. It was as if some creature from another world had suddenly found a voice and were crying out to us. Then the wail was repeated, and then, as if revealed by some preparation of phosphorus, I indistinctly saw, in the dark of the swamp, an uncouth face, black as midnight, on which were painted white rings and patches.
For the third time the cry came out to us; then a voice shrieked in a queer, wailing minor:—
"White man, I come 'peak. Long time past white man go up water. Him t'ief from king spirit. Him go Dead Land.
"White man, I come 'peak. We no sell slave. White man go him country so him not go Dead Land. White man, I go."
The dim, mysterious face drew away little by little and disappeared. A single soft splash came from the great marsh, then a yell so wild and weird that to this very day the memory of it sometimes sets me to shivering, as if I myself were only a heathen savage and not a white man and a Christian.
Three times we heard the wild yell; then far off in the fastnesses of the swamp, we heard an unholy chanting. It was high and shrill and piercing, and it brought to us across the dark water suggestions of a thousand terrors.
I felt Bud O'Hara's hand on mine, and it was as cold as death.
"By Heaven!" O'Hara gasped, "the voice has spoke."
"Aye, so it has," said Gleazen slowly.
"Neil, Molly, sure and we'd best put out to sea. This is no time for us, surely. A month from now, say, we could slip in by night with a boat—"
"O'Hara," said Matterson's light, almost silvery voice, "haveyouturned coward?"
"No, not that, Molly! 'T is not I am scairt of any man that walks the green earth, Molly, but spirits is different."
"Spirits!" Matterson was softly laughing. "I didn't think, O'Hara,you'dbe one to turn black."
"Laugh, curse you!" O'Hara cried hotly. "If 'twas you had seen a glimmer of the things I've seen with my own two eyes; if 't was you had seen a man die because he went against taboo; if 't was you had seen a witch doctor bring the yammering spirit back unwilling to a cold body; if 't was you had seen a man three weeks dead get up and dance; if 't was you had seen a strong man fall down without the breath of life in him at all, and all for nothing else but a spell was on him, maybe then you'd believe me. I swear by the blessed saints in heaven, it's throwing our lives away to go up river now; and all I've got to say for Bull is, God help him!"
The others were looking at O'Hara curiously. The lantern light on their faces brought out every scar and wrinkle and showed that strong passions were contending within each of them.
"It ain't spirits that worries me," said Gleazen, at last,"and it ain't niggers. It's men." He now seemed quite to shake off the spell of the strange voice. "What say, Seth?" He turned to my uncle.
To my surprise, Seth Upham rose manfully to the occasion. "Spirits?" he cried. "Nonsense!"
O'Hara uneasily shifted his feet. "Ah, say what you like, men," he very earnestly replied, "say what you like against spirits and greegrees and jujus and all the rest. I'll never be one to say there's nothing in them, nor would you, if you'd seen all that I have seen. And I'll be telling you this, men: that voice we heard then was speaking the thoughts of ten thousand fighting niggers up and down this river."
"Pfaw!" said Gleazen, stretching his arms. "Niggers won't fight."
"That from you, Neil!"
I never learned just what lay behind O'Hara's simple thrust, but there was no doubt that it struck a weak link in Gleazen's armor, for he flushed so deeply that we could see it by lantern light. "Well, now," said he, with a conciliatory inflection, "of course I meant it in moderation."
All this time Arnold and Gideon North and I stood by and looked and listened.
Now, with a glance at us, Matterson said shortly, "Come, come! Enough of that. All hands lay to and load the boat."
"I've warned ye," said O'Hara.
"At midnight," said Matterson, "we'llgoupthe river, and Gideon North'll take the brigdownthe river. Come morning there'll be no stick nor timber of us here. They'll bother no more about us then."
"Ye'll never fool 'em," said O'Hara.
Matterson turned his back on him, and the work went forward, and for an hour there was only the low murmurof voices. The boat, now ready for the journey, rode at the end of her painter, where the current made long ripples, which converged at her bow. Here and there, lights shone in the clearing and set my imagination and my memory hard at work, but elsewhere the impenetrable blackness of a cloudy night blanketed the whole world. And meanwhile the others were holding council in the cabin.
"I think," Arnold Lamont said, "that Matterson and Gleazen underestimate the ingenuity and resources of that black yelling devil."
"So they do," said Abe Guptil. "So they do, and I'd be glad enough to be back home, I tell you."
What would I not have given to be sleeping once more in Abe's low-studded house beside our wholesome northern sea!
Now the others came from the cabin. They walked eagerly. Their very whispers were full of excitement. Even Uncle Seth seemed to have got from somewhere a new confidence and a new hope, so smartly did he step about and so sharply did he speak; and the faint odor of brandy that came with them explained much.
We climbed down into the loaded boat and settled ourselves on the thwarts, where Abe Guptil and I took oars.
"It's turn and turn about at the rowing," Matterson announced. "We've a long way to go and a current dead against us."
I saw Gideon North looking down at us anxiously, and waved my hand. Then someone cast off, and we pulled out into midstream and up above the brig, where we held our place and watched and waited.
Soon we heard orders on board the brig. Sails fell from the gaskets and shook free. The men began to heave at the windlass. The brig first came up to the anchors, then, with anchors aweigh, she half turned in the current.
Now orders followed in quick succession. We could hear them rigging the fish tackle and catching the hooks on the flukes of the anchors. Blocks rattled, braces creaked, the yards swung from side to side according to the word of command. The sails filled with the light breeze, and coming slowly about, the Adventure gathered steerage-way and went down the river as if she were some gigantic water bird lazily swimming between the mangroves. We watched her go and knew that we seven were now irrevocably left to fend for ourselves.
When Gleazen whispered to us to give way, we bent to the oars with a will. For better or for worse, we had embarked on the final stage of our great quest.
The lights in the clearing fell astern. The tall trees seemed to close in above us. Alone in the wilderness, we turned the bow of our boat toward the heart of Africa.
That we had set forth in complete secrecy on our voyage up river we were absolutely confident. What eyes were keen enough to tell at a distance that the brig had left a boat behind her when she sailed?
Gleazen now laughed derisively at O'Hara. "You'd have had us sail away, would you? And wait a month? Or a year, maybe, or maybe two. Ha, ha!"
"Don't you laugh at me, Neil," O'Hara replied. "We're not yet out o' the woods."
At the man's solemn manner Gleazen laughed again, louder than before.
As if to reprove his rashness, as if to bear out every word O'Hara had said, at that very moment the uncanny yell we had heard before rose the second time, far off in the swamp. Three times we heard the yell, then we heard the voice, faint and far away, "White man, I come 'peak. White man boat him sink. White man him go Dead Land."
Three times more the wordless wailing yell drifted to usout of the darkness; then we heard a great multitude of men wildly and savagely laughing.
Never again did Cornelius Gleazen scoff at O'Hara. His face now, I verily believe, was grayer than O'Hara's. He turned about and stared downstream as if he could see beyond the black wall of mangroves.
"Now what'll we do?" he gasped, with a choking, profane ejaculation. "Did you hear that?"
Had we heard it! There was not one of us whom it had not chilled to the heart. Our own smallness under those vast trees, our few resources,—we had only the goods that were piled in the boat,—our unfathomable loneliness, combined to make us feel utterly without help or strength. But it was now too late to return. So we bent to our oars and rowed on, and on, and on, against the current of the great river.
The only help that remained to us lay in our own right hands and in the mercy of divine Providence. Would Providence, I wondered, help such men as Gleazen and Matterson and O'Hara?
Nor was that the only doubt that beset us. Although the three accepted us, and in actual fact trusted us, they made no attempt to conceal their enmity; and I very well knew that, besides danger from without our little band, Arnold, Abe, and I must guard against treachery from within it.
Land at last.
Men in a boat.
Pulling hard at our oars, we rowed up the river, along the shore and so near it that the shadows of the mangroves almost concealed us. My breath came in quick, hard gasps; the sweat started from my body and dripped down my face; every muscle ached from violent exertion. As I dizzily reeled, I saw, as if it were carved out of wood or stone, Gleazen's staring, motionless face thrust forth squarely in front of my own. Then I flopped forward and Gleazen himself caught the oar from my hands.
We had taken the gig for our expedition, because it was light and fast; but although we carried four oars, we used only two of them, mainly because it had been Gleazen's whim to load our baggage between the after thwarts, so that while two men rowed for comparatively short spells, the others could take their ease in bow and stern. And indeed, had our plan to set forth with utmost secrecy not gone awry, it would have been a comfortable enough arrangement.
I had not dreamed that Gleazen was so strong; he set a stroke that no ordinary oarsman could maintain; and when Abe Guptil lost time and reeled on the thwart, Matterson slipped into his place and fairly lifted the boat on the water.
Of course we could not keep up such a pace for long; but the hard work in a way relieved our anxiety, as hard work does when one is troubled; and after each of us, including Uncle Seth, had taken his turn at the oars until he was dog-tired, we settled down to a saner, steadier stroke, andthus began in earnest the long journey that was to be the last stage of our pilgrimage.
By watching the gray lane overhead, where the arching trees failed to meet above the river, since it was literally too dark to see the water, we were able to mark out our course; and skirting the tangled and interwoven roots as nearly as we could, we doggedly fought our way against the current to the monotonous rhythm of swinging oars, loud breathing, and hoarse grunts. The constant whisper of the river so lulled me, weary as I was, that by and by my head drooped, and the next thing that I knew was a hand on my shoulder and a voice at my ear calling me to take my turn at rowing.
I woke slowly and saw that Abe Guptil like me was rubbing his eyes, and that my uncle and Arnold Lamont were lying fast asleep on the bottom of the boat.
"Come, come," said Gleazen, quietly. "See, now! Mr. Matterson and I've brought us well on our way. Come, get up and row till it is fairly light. Wake us then, and we'll haul the boat up and lie in hiding for the day."
Matterson handed over his oar without a word, and Abe and I fell to our task.
As the dawn grew and widened in the east, we could see how thickly the roots of the mangroves intertwined. From the ends of the limbs small "hangers," like ropes, grew down and took root in the ground. The trees, thus braced and standing from six to twelve feet in air on their network of tangled, interwoven roots, were the oddest I had ever seen.
After a time we came to a large stretch of bush, where innumerable small palms were crowded together so thickly that among them an object would have been completely invisible, even in broad day, at a distance of six feet. In the midst of the bush a great tree grew, and in the top ofit a band of monkeys was swinging and racing and chattering in the pale light. In an undertone I spoke to Abe about the monkeys, and he, too, still rowing, turned his head to watch them. Then, at the very moment when we were intent on their antics, a new mood seemed to come over them.
I cannot well describe the change, because at first it was so subtle that I felt it, as much as saw it, and I was inclined to doubt if Abe would notice it at all. Yet as I watched the little creatures, which had now ceased their chattering, I suddenly realized that the boat was beginning to drift with the current. By common impulse, attracted by the very same thing, both Abe and I had stopped rowing.
As I leaned forward and again swung out my oar, Abe touched my arm. "Hush!" he whispered. "Wait! Listen!"
Pausing with arms outstretched, ready to throw all my strength into the catch, I listened and heard a faintcrack, as of a broken stick, under the tree in which a moment since the monkeys had been hard at play.
We exchanged glances.
I now realized that daylight, coming with the swiftness that is characteristic of it in the tropics, had taken us unawares. The sun had risen and found Abe and me so intent on a band of monkeys playing in a tree, that we had neglected to wake the others.
I put out my hand and leaned over the bags to touch Gleazen, the nearest of the sleepers, when Abe again pressed my arm. Turning, I saw that his finger was at his lips. Although his gesture puzzled me, I obeyed it, and we remained silent for a minute or two while the current carried the boat farther and farther downstream.
Every foot that we drifted back meant labor lost, andI was so sorely tempted to put an end to our silence that I was on the point of speaking out, when, distinctly, unmistakably, we heard another crackle in the bush.
"Pull," Abe whispered, "pull, Joe, as hard as you can."
I leaned back against my oar, heard the water gurgle from under it, saw bubbles go floating down past the stern, and knew that by one stroke we had stopped our drifting. With a second swing of the long blades, we sent the boat once more up against the current. Now we got back into the old rhythm and went on past the dense palms, until we again came to the tangled roots of mangroves.
Laying hold of one of the roots, Abe whispered, "Wake 'em, Joe!"
They woke testily, and with no thanks to us, even though it was by their orders that we called them.
In reply to their questions we told them the whole story, from the strange hush that came over the monkeys to the second crackling among the palms; but they appeared not to take our apprehensions seriously.
"Belike it was a snake," said O'Hara, "a big feller, Them big fellers will scare a monkey into fits."
"Or some kind of an animal," said Gleazen, curtly. "Didn't I say we was to be called at daylight? When I say a thing I mean it." He impatiently turned from us to his intimates. "How about it, Bud; shall we haul up here for the day?"
"Belike it was only a snake," O'Hara replied, "but 'twas near, despite of that. Push on, I say."
There was something in the expression of his face as he stared downstream that made me even more uneasy than before.
"Not so! The niggers will see us in the open and end us there and then," interposed Matterson. "Moreover, unlessthe place has changed with the times, there's a town a scant three miles ahead."
"Belike 'twas only a serpent," O'Hara doggedly repeated, "but 'tis no place for us here. Let us fare on just half a mile up stream t'other side the river, in the mouth of the little creek that makes in there, and, me lads, let us get there quickly."
As we once more began to row, I was confident that O'Hara's talk of a great serpent was poppy-cock for us and for Uncle Seth, and that in any case neither Gleazen nor Matterson nor O'Hara cared a straw about a serpent half a mile away. At the time I would have given much to know just what shrewd guess they had made at the cause of that strange crackling; but they dismissed the subject absolutely, which probably was as well for all concerned; and refusing to speak of it again, they urged Abe and me to our rowing until at their direction we bore across the current and slipped through the trailing branches of the trees, and through the thick bushes and dangling vines, into the well-hidden mouth of a little creek.
By then the sun was shining hotly and I was glad enough to lean on my oar and get my breath.
All that day we lay in the thick vegetation of the creek, which to a certain extent shielded us from the sun, although the warm, damp air became almost unendurable. Much of the time we slept, but always one or another of us was posted as a guard, and at high noon an alarm called us to our weapons.
O'Hara, who happened to be standing watch, woke us without a sound, one after another, by touching us with his hand.
For a while we saw only the great trees, the sluggish creek, the slow river, and the interwoven vines; then weheard voices, and into our sight there swept a long canoe manned by naked negroes, who swung their paddles strongly and went racing past us down the river.
How, I wondered, had O'Hara known that they were coming? Human ears could not have heard their voices as far away as they must have been when he woke us.
It was evident, when the blacks had gone, that Matterson and O'Hara had made sense of their mumbled gutteral speech.
"I warned ye," O'Hara whispered, glaring at Matterson and Gleazen. "Had we waited, now, say only a month, they'd not be scouring the river in search of us."
"Pfaw! Niggers with bows and arrows," Gleazen scornfully muttered.
"Yes, niggers with bows and arrows," O'Hara returned. "But I'd no sooner die by an arrow than by a musket-ball."
"Die? Who's talking o' dying?" Gleazen whispered. And calmly laying himself down again, he once more closed his eyes.
"Sure, and I'd not be one to talk o' dying," O'Hara murmured, as he resumed his guard with a musket across his knees, "was not the curse o' rash companions upon me."
Matterson, holding aloof from their controversy, solemnly looked from one of the two to the other. There was that in his eyes which I did not like to see—not fear, certainly, but a look of understanding, which convinced me that O'Hara had the right of it.
And now Seth Upham, who had followed all this so sleepily that he did not more than half understand the significance of what had occurred, as of old spoke up sharply, even pompously. In that confused state between sleeping and waking his mind seemed to have gone back to somemood of months before. "That's all nonsense, O'Hara; we're safe enough. Gleazen's right." His words fairly shattered the silence of the marshy woods.
He was the first of us to speak in an ordinarily loud voice, and almost before he had finished his sentence a bird about as big as a crow and as black as jet except for its breast and neck, which were snowy white, rose from a tree above us, and with a cry that to me sounded for all the world like a crow cawing, circled high in the air.
Hot with anger, O'Hara struck Seth Upham on the mouth with his open hand.
That it had been arrant folly for my uncle thus to speak aloud, I knew as well as any other; and the bird circling above us and crying out in its slow flight was liable to draw upon us an attack from heaven only knew what source and quarter. But that O'Hara or any other should openly strike the man who in his own way had been so kind to me was something that I could not endure, and my own temper flamed up as hotly as ever did O'Hara's.
Quick as a flash I caught his wrist, even before he had withdrawn his hand, and jerked him from the thwart to his knees. With a devilish gleam in his eye, he threw off my grip and clubbed his musket.
Before I could draw my pistol he would have brained me, had not Matterson, with no desire whatever to save me from such a fate, but apparently only eager to have a hand in the affair, seized me from behind, lifted me bodily from my seat, and plunged me down out of sight into the creek.
Of what followed, I know only by hearsay, for I was too much occupied with saving myself from drowning to observe events in the boat. But the creek was comparatively shallow, and getting my feet firmly planted on bottom, I pushed up my head and breathed deeply.
Meanwhile it seems that Arnold Lamont quietly thrust his knife a quarter of an inch through the skin between two of Matterson's ribs, thus effectually distracting his attention, while Abe Guptil deftly caught O'Hara's clubbed musket in his hands and wrenched it away.
As I hauled myself back into the boat, Gleazen sat up and stared, first at the others who, now that Matterson had knocked Arnold's knife to one side, were momentarily deadlocked, then at me dripping from my plunge, then at Seth Upham upon whose white face the marks of O'Hara's hand still showed red.
"Between you," he whispered angrily, "youwillhave half the niggers in Africa upon us."
"He talked," O'Hara muttered, pointing at Uncle Seth.
"You struck him," I retorted.
"'Twas a bird told me they was coming by. 'Twill be that bird surely will tell them we are here."
Arnold and Abe and I glared angrily at O'Hara and Matterson and Gleazen, but by common consent we dropped the brief quarrel, and when, after an anxious time of waiting, the canoe had not reappeared, we again lay down to sleep.
Yet I saw that Uncle Seth's hand was trembling and that he was not so calm as he tried to appear; and I knew that, although we might go on with a semblance of tolerance, even of friendship, the rift in our little party had grown vastly wider.
Waking at nightfall, we made our evening meal of such cooked provisions as we had brought from the Adventure, and pushed through the screen of dense branches, and out on the strongly running, silent river. Again we bent to the oars and rowed interminably on against the stream and into the black darkness.
That night we passed a town with wattled houses andthatched roofs rising in tall cones high on the riverbank, and a building that O'Hara said was abarreor courthouse. In the town, we saw against the sky, which the rising moon now lighted, a few orange trees and palms, and under it, close beside the bank of the river, we indistinctly made out a boat, which, Gleazen whispered, was very likely loaded with camwood and ivory. We passed it in the shadow of the opposite shore, rowing softly because we were afraid that someone might be sleeping on the cargo to guard it, and went by and up the river till the pointed roofs of the houses were miles astern.
O'Hara and Gleazen and Matterson talked together, and part of their talk was bickering among themselves, and part was of the man Bull who, all alone in the wilderness, was waiting for us somewhere in the jungle, and part was in Spanish, which I could not understand. But when they talked in Spanish, they looked keenly at Arnold and Abe and me, and I found comfort then in thinking that, although Arnold and I now had no chance to exchange confidences, he was hearing and remembering every word of their conversation. And all the time that I watched them, I was thinking of the girl at the mission.
Remembering my talk with Arnold long ago, when I had expressed so poor an opinion of all womankind, I felt at once a little amused at myself and a little sheepish. Who would have thought that, at almost my first sight of the despised continent of Africa, I should see a girl whose face I could not forget? That when she spoke to me for the first time, her low, firm voice would so fasten itself upon my memory, that I should hear it in my dreams both sleeping and waking?
Poor Uncle Seth! Never offering to take an oar, never exchanging a word with any of the rest of us, he sat with his elbows on his knees and his head bowed. Gleazen andMatterson had dropped even their unkindly humorous pretense of deferring to him. In our little band of adventurers he who had once been so assertive, so brimful of importance, had become the merest nonentity.
All that night we went up the river, and all the next day we lay concealed among the mangroves; but about the following midnight we came to a place where the banks were higher and the current swifter. Here O'Hara stood up in the bow of the boat and studied the shore and ordered us now to row, now to rest. For all of two miles we advanced thus, and heartily tired of his orders we were, when he directed us to veer sharply to larboard and enter a small creek, along the banks of which tall water-grass grew right down to the channel.
There was barely room for the boat to pass along the stream between the forests of grass which grew in the water on the two sides; but as we advanced, the tall grass disappeared, and the stream itself became narrower and swifter, and the banks became higher. The country, we now saw, was heavily timbered, and we occasionally came to logs, which we had to pry out of the way before we could pass. One moment we would be in water up to our necks, another we would be poling the boat along with the oars, until at last we grounded on a bar over which only a runlet gurgled.
There was a suggestion of dawn in the east, which revealed above and beyond the wood a line of low, bare hills; but when I looked at the wood itself, through which we must find our way, my courage oozed out by every pore and left me wishing from the bottom of my heart that I were safe at sea with Gideon North.
Piling all our goods on the bank, we hid the boat in the bushes and made camp.
"Hard upon daylight, well be starting," said O'Hara,hoarsely. "Sleep is it, you ask? Don't that give you your while of sleep? Be about it. By dark, we'll reach him surely; and if not, we'll be in the very shadow of the hill."
The man was all a-quiver with excitement. He jerked his shoulders and twitched his fingers and rolled his eyes. Matterson and Gleazen, too, were softly laughing as they stepped a little apart from the rest of us.
I looked at Arnold.
He stood with one hand raised. "What was that?" he asked in a low voice.
Very faintly,—very, very far away,—we heard just such a yell as we had heard that night when in defiance of the wizard's warning we left the Adventure.
Coming to our ears at the particular moment when we most firmly believed that by consummate craft we had so concealed our progress up the river as to escape every prying eye and deceive every hostile black, it both taunted us and threatened us. Three times we heard it, faintly, then silence, deep and ominous, ensued.
To sleep at that moment would have required more than human self-control. Forgetting every personal grudge, every cause of enmity, we huddled together, seven men alone in an alien wilderness, and waited,—listened,—waited. I, for one, more than half expected, and very deeply feared, to hear coming from the darkness that ghostly voice which had cried to us twice already, "White man, I come 'peak." But, except for the whisper of the wind and the ripple of the creek, there was no sound to be heard.
The wind gently stirred the leaves, and the creek sang as it flowed down over the gravel and away through the reeds. The moon cast its pale light upon us, and the remote stars twinkled in the heavens. The cries, after that second repetition, died away, and at that moment did not come back. But our night of adventure was not yet at an end.
O'Hara deliberately leveled his index finger at the bed of the stream above us. "Sure, now, and there do be someone there," he whispered. "Watch now! Watch me!"
Stepping forward, with a slow, tigerish motion, he slightly raised his voice. "Come you out!" he said distinctly. Then he spoke in a gibberish of which I could make no more sense than if it had been so much Spanish.
Before our very eyes, silently, there rose from the undergrowth a great negro with a spear.
Arnold Lamont gave a quick gasp and I saw steel flash in the moonlight as his hand moved. Gleazen swore;Matterson started to his feet; Abe Guptil came suddenly to a crouching position. But O'Hara, after one sharply in-drawn breath, uttered a name and whispered something in that same language, which I knew well I had never heard before, and the negro answered him in kind.
For a moment they talked rapidly; then O'Hara turned to his comrades and in a frightened undertone said, "The black devils know the worst."
"Well?" retorted Gleazen, angrily. "What of it?"
"This"—O'Hara's leveled finger indicated the negro—"is Kaw-tah-bah."
"Well?" Gleazen reiterated, still more angrily.
"The war has razed his village to the ground."
Matterson now stepped forward and looked closely into the negro's face. Gleazen followed him.
"He laid down eight slave money," said O'Hara. "It was no good. They knew he was our friend. His wives, his children, his old father, all are dead."
Now Matterson spoke in the same strange tongue, slowly and hesitantly, but so that the negro understood him and answered him.
"He says," O'Hara translated, "that Bull built the house on the king's grave, and they feared him, because he is a terrible man; and because they feared him they left him alone in his house and brought the war to his friend, Kaw-tah-bah. Kaw-tah-bah's people are slaves. His wives, his children, his old father, all are dead. But he did not betray the secret."
Again Matterson spoke and again the negro answered.
"He says," cried O'Hara, "that Bull is waiting there on the hill by the king's grave."
The negro suddenly uttered a low exclamation.
Standing as still as so many statues, we heard yet again that faint, unearthly wail far off in the night, a wail, asbefore, twice repeated. The third cry had scarcely died away, when the negro, with a startled gasp, darted into the brush.
O'Hara raised his hand and called to him to come back; but, never turning his head, he disappeared like a frightened animal.
Again we were alone in the wilderness.
To me, now, all that formerly I had understood only in vague outline had become clear in every detail. I knew, of course, that, after their own ship was wrecked, our quartette of adventurers had sent Gleazen back to America, to get by hook or crook another vessel to serve their godless purposes; and I knew that they had implicated my deluded uncle in something more than ordinary slave trade. Their talk of the man who had stayed behind for a purpose still further convinced me that Arnold had been right; I remembered the rough stones on the table in the cabin the night when I took the four by surprise. But it was only common sense that, if our first guess werealltheir secret, they would have smuggled such a find down to the coast, and have taken their chance in embarking in the first vessel that came to port. There was more than that of which to be mindful, and I knew well enough what.
"I say, now, push forward this very minute," cried O'Hara. "Better travel a bad road by dark in safety than a good road by day that will land every mother's son of us in the place where there's no road back."
"The black devils are hard upon us," Gleazen cried. "Lay low, I say. Come afternoon we'll sneak along easy like."
"I stand with Bud O'Hara," said Matterson, slowly. "It'll not be so easy to hit us by moonlight as by sunlight."
"And once we're with Bull in the little fort that he'llhave made for us," Bud persisted, "we'll be safe surely."
"It is harder to travel by night," said Arnold. "But it is easier by night than by day to evade an enemy."
The others looked at him curiously, as if surprised by his temerity in speaking out; but, oddly, his seemed to be the deciding voice. Working with furious haste, we sorted our goods and made them up into six packs, which we shouldered according to our strength. But as we worked, we would stop and look furtively around; and at the slightest sound we would start and stare. Our determination to go through to the end of our adventure had not flagged when at last we gathered beside the thicket where we had concealed the boat; but we were seven silent men who left the boat, the creek, and the river behind us, and with O'Hara to guide us set off straight into the heart of Africa.
O'Hara's long sojourn on the continent, which had made him a "black man" in the sense that he had come to believe, or at least more than half believe, in the silly superstitions of the natives, had served him better by giving him an amazing knowledge of the country. That he was following a trail he had traveled many times before would have been evident to a less keenly interested observer than I. But though he had traveled it ever so many times, it was a mystery to me how he could follow it unerringly, by moonlight alone, through black tangles of forest growth so dense that scarcely a ray stole down on the deeply shadowed path.
Passing over some high hills, we came, sweaty and breathless, down into a rocky gorge, along which we hurried, now skirting patches of cotton and corn and yams, now making a long détour around a sleeping village, until we arrived at a wood in a valley where a deep stream rumbled. And all this time we had seen no sign whatever of any living creature other than ourselves.
It was already full daylight, and throwing off our burdens, we flung ourselves down and slept. Had our danger been even more urgent, I believe that we could not have kept awake, so exhausted were we; and indeed, we were in greater peril than we had supposed, for all that day, whenever we woke, we heard at no great distance from our place of concealment the thump of a pestle pounding rice.
Twelve hours of daylight would easily have brought us to our destination. But it was slow work traveling in the darkness, and we still had far to go. Pushing on again that night, we pressed through a country thickly wooded with tall trees, many of which elephants had broken down in order to feed on the tender upper branches.
As we passed them, I was thrilled to see with my own eyes the work of wild elephants in their native country, and should have liked to stop for a time; but there was no opportunity to loiter, and leaving the woods behind us, we came at daylight to a brook, which had cut a deep channel into dark slate rock and blue clay.
Here I conjectured that we should camp for another day, but not so: our three leaders were strangely excited.
"Sure," O'Hara cried, pointing at a low hill at a distance in the plain, "sure, gentlemen, and there's our port. Where's the man would cast anchor this side of it?"
O'Hara, Gleazen, and Matterson stood at one side, and Arnold, Abe, and I at the other, with my poor uncle in the middle. We had not concerted to divide thus. Instinctively and unconsciously we separated into hostile factions, with poor Seth Upham—neither fish, flesh, nor fowl, as they say—standing weakly between us. But even so, the enthusiasm of the three was contagious. Weary though we were, we strongly felt it. We had come so far, all of us, and had wondered so much and so often about our mysteriouserrand, that now, with the end in sight, not one of us, I believe, would have stopped.
Casting caution to the winds, we swung down into a wild country and across the broad plain, where, after some three hours of rough hard travel, we came to the foot of the hill. And in all this time, except the patches of tilled land that we had passed, the towns that we had avoided, the thumping of pestles and the occasional sounds of domestic animals, we had seen and heard no sign of human life. It is not strange that for the moment I forgot the threats that had caused us such anxiety. Stopping only to catch our breath and drink and dash over our faces water from a brook, we started up the hill.
O'Hara, ahead of us all, was like a mad man in his eagerness, and Matterson and Gleazen were not far behind him. Even Uncle Seth caught something of their frenzy and assumed an empty show of his old pompousness and sharp manner.
Up the hill we went, our three leaders first, then, in nervous haste, between the two parties literally as well as figuratively, my uncle, then Arnold and Abe and I, who were soon outdistanced, in that fierce scramble, by all but Uncle Seth.
"Do you know, Joe," Abe said in a low voice, as he gave me a hand up over a bit of a ledge, "I'd sooner be home on my little farm that Seth Upham sold from under me, with only my crops and fishing to look forward to, than here with all the gold in Africa to be got? I wonder, Joe, if I'll ever see my wife and the little boy again."
"Nonsense!" I cried, "of course you will."
"Do you think so? I'm not so sure."
As we stood for a moment on the summit of the ledge, I saw that we had chosen a rougher, more circuitous path than was necessary. The others had gone up a sort ofswale on our right, where tall, lush grass indicated that the ground was marshy. It irritated me that we should have scrambled over the rocks for nothing; my legs were atremble from our haste.
"Of course you will," I repeated testily. Then I saw something move. "See!" I cried. "There goes an animal of some kind."
While for a moment we waited in hope of seeing again whatever it was that had moved, I thought, oddly enough, of the girl at the mission; then my thoughts leaped back half round the world to little Topham, and returned by swift steps, through all our adventures, to the spot where we stood.
Now the others were bawling at us to come along after them, so Abe and I turned, not having seen distinctly whatever animal there may have been, and followed them up the hill.
"Here's the brook!" O'Hara cried, "the brook from the spring!"
He was running now, straight up through the tall grass beside the tiny trickle, and we were driving along at his heels as hard as we could go.
"Here's the clearing, and never a blade of grass is changed since I left it last! O Bull! Here we are! See, men, see! Yonder on the old grave is the house all wattled like a nigger hut! O Bull! Where are you? But it's fine inside, men, I'll warrant you. He was laying to build it good. He said he'd fix it up like a duke's mansion. O Bull! I say, Bull!"
There indeed was the house, on a low mound, which showed the marks of sacrilegious pick and shovel. The posts on which it stood were driven straight down into the hillock. But in reply to O'Hara's loud hail no answer came from that silent, apparently deserted dwelling.
O'Hara turned and, as if apologizing, said in a lower voice, but still loud enough for us to hear, "Sure, now, and he must be out somewhere."
Then he waited for us, and we gathered in a little group and looked at the wattled hut as if in apprehension, although of course there was no reason on earth why we should have been apprehensive.
"Well, gentlemen," said Arnold, very quietly, "why not go in?"
Not a man stirred.
O'Hara faced about with moodily clouded eyes. "Well, then," he gasped, "hewouldbuild it on the king's grave."
I am sure that my face, for one, told O'Hara that he only mystified me.
"Sure, and he was like others I've seen. More than once I warned him, but he didn't believe in nigger gods. He didn't believe in nigger gods, and he built the house on the king's grave! On the king's grave, mind you! He was that set and reckless."
"Gentlemen," said Arnold, again, very quietly, very precisely, "why not go in?"
All this time my uncle, as was his way except in those rare moments when he made a pitiful show of regaining his old peremptory manner, had been standing by in silence, looking from one to another of our company. But now he hesitantly spoke up.
"He has not been here for some time," he said.
Gleazen turned with a scornful grunt. "Much you know whether he has or not," he retorted.
"See!" My uncle pointed at the door. "Vines have grown across the top of it."
Gleazen softly swore, and Matterson said, "For once, Neil, he's right."
Why we had not noticed it before, I cannot say; probablywe were too much excited. But we all saw it now, and Gleazen, staring at the dark shadow of the leaves on the door, stepped back a pace.
"By Heaven," he whispered, "I don't like to go in."
"Gentlemen," said Arnold, speaking for the third time, ever quietly and precisely, "I am not afraid to go in."
When he boldly went up to the house ahead of us, we, ashamed to hang back, reluctantly followed.
To this day I can see him in every detail as he laid his hand on the latch. His blue coat, which fitted so snugly his tall, straight figure, seemed to draw from the warm sunlight a brighter, more intense hue. His black hair and white, handsome face stood out in bold relief against the dark door, and the green leaves drooped round him and formed a living frame.
Setting his shoulders against the door, he straightened his body and heaved mightily and broke the rusty latch. The hinges creaked loudly, the vine tore away, the door opened, and in we walked, to see the most dreadful sight my eyes have ever beheld.
There in a chair by the table sat a stark skeleton dressed in good sound clothes. The arms and skull lay on the table itself beside a great heap of those rough quartz-like stones,—I knew now well enough what they were,—and the bony fingers still held a pen, which rested on a sheet of yellow foolscap where a great brown blot marked the end of the last word that the man they called Bull had ever written. Between the ribs of the skeleton, through the good coat and into the back of the chair in such a way that it held the body in a sitting posture, stuck a long spear.
Of the seven of us who stared in horror at that terrible object, Matterson was the first to utter a word. His voice was singularly meditative, detached.
"He never knew—see!—it took him unawares."