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;[pg 213] 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, as[pg 214] before, 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 were all their 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'll[pg 215] have 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.
[pg 216]
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 mysterious[pg 217] errand, 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 of[pg 218] swale 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.
[pg 219]
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, "he would build 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; probably[pg 220] we 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."
o'hara slowly went to the table, leaned over it, and looking incredulously at the paper, as if he could not believe his eyes, burst suddenly into a frenzy of grief and rage.
"lads," he cried, "look there! my name was the last thing he wrote. o bull, i warned ye, i warned ye—how many times i warned ye! and yet ye would, would, would build the house on the king's grave. o bull!"
he drew the yellow paper out from under the fleshless fingers and held it up for all of us to see, and we read in a clear flowing hand the following inscription:—
my dear o'hara:—
not having heard from you this long time, i take my pen in hand to inform you that i am well and that despite your silly fears, no harm has come of building our house on the sightliest spot hereabouts. martin brown, the trader, from whom i bought the hinges and fittings will carry this letter to you and—
there it ended in a great blot. whence had the spear come? why had martin brown never called for the letter? or had he called and gone away again?
what scenes that page of cheap, yellowed paper, from which the faded brown writing stared at us, had witnessed! it was indeed as if a dead man were speaking; and more than that, for the paper on which the man had been writing when he died had remained ever since under his very hands, undisturbed by all that had happened. how long must the man have been dead, i wondered. the stark white bones uncannily fascinated me. i saw that the feather had been stripped from the bare quill of the pen: could moths have done that? a knife could not have stripped it so cleanly.
[pg 222]abe guptil, who had been prowling about, now spoke, and we looked where he pointed and saw on the floor under a window the print of a single bare foot as clearly marked in mud as if it had been placed there yesterday.
"hm! he saw that the job was done and went away again," said gleazen, coolly.
i stared about the hut, from which apparently not a thing had been stolen, and thought that it was the more remarkable, because there were pans and knives in plain sight that would have been a fortune to an african black. the open ink-bottle, in which were a few brown crystals, the pen, which was cut from the quill of some african bird, and the faded letter, which was scarcely begun, told us that the spear, hurled through the open window, had pierced the man's body and snuffed out his life, without so much as a word of warning.
o'hara unsteadily laid the letter down and stepped back. his face was still white. "it's words from the dead," he gasped.
"so it is," said matterson, "but he's panned out a noble lot of stones."
as if matterson's effeminate voice had again goaded him to fury, o'hara burst out anew.
"you'd talk o' stones, would ye? stones to me, that has lost the best friend surely ever man had? a man that would ha' laid down his very life for me; and now the niggers have got him and the ants have stripped his bones! o-o-oh!—" and throwing himself into a rough chair that the dead man himself had made, o'hara sobbed like a little boy.
matterson and gleazen nodded to each other, as much as to say that it was too bad, but that no one had any call to take on to such an extent; and gleazen with a shrug thrust a finger into that heap of stones, slowly, as if he[pg 223] could not quite believe his senses,—little he cared for any man's life!—while those of us who until now had been so hypnotized by horror that we had not laid down our packs dropped them on the floor.
"ants," o'hara had said: i knew now why the bones were so clean and white; why the feather was stripped from the quill.
from the windows of the hut, which stood in a clearing at the very top of the hill, we could see for miles through occasional vistas in the tall timber below us. the edge of the clearing, on all sides except that by which we had approached it, had grown into a tangled net of vines, which had crept out into the open space to mingle with saplings and green shrubs. half way down the hill, where we had passed it in our haste, i now saw, by the character of the vegetation, was the spring from which issued the brook whose course we had followed.
uncle seth, who had been striving to appear at ease since the first shock of seeing the single occupant of the house, came over beside me; and after a few remarks, which touched me because they were so obviously a pathetic effort to win back my friendship and affection, said in a louder voice, "thank god, we, at least, are safe!"
the word to o'hara was like spark to powder.
flaring up again, he shrieked, "safe—you!—and you thank god for it! you white-livered milk-sop of a country storekeeper, what is your cowardly life worth to yourself or to any one else? you safe!" he swore mightily. "you! i tell you, upham, there—" he pointed at the skeleton by the table—"there was a man! you safe!"
withered by the contempt in the fellow's voice, uncle seth stepped back from the window, turned round, and, as if puzzling what to say next, bent his head.
as he did so, a single arrow flew with a soft hiss in[pg 224] through the window, passed exactly where his head had just that moment been, and with a hollow thump struck trembling into the opposite wall. there was not a sound outside, not the motion of a leaf, to show whence the arrow came. only the arrow whispering through the air and trembling in the wall.
uncle seth, as yellow as old parchment, looked up with distended eyes at the still quivering missile.
"safe, you say?" cried gleazen with a hoarse laugh, still letting those little stones fall between his fingers. the man at times was a fiend for utter recklessness. "aye, safe on the knees of mumbo-jumbo!"
i heard this, of course, but in a singularly absent way; for at that moment, when every man of us was staring at the arrow in the wall, i, strangely enough, was thinking of the girl at the mission.
