CHAPTER XX
UP STREAM

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, and thus 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 of it 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 faint crack, 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, and I 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, unless the 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 we heard 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 some mood 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, "you will have 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 and thatched roofs rising in tall cones high on the riverbank, and a building that O'Hara said was a barre or 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 and Matterson 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.

CHAPTER XXI
A GRIM SURPRISE

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, as 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 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.

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 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 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.

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 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."

There in a chair by the table sat a stark skeleton dressed in good sound clothes. 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. 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 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 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.

CHAPTER XXII
SIEGE

Much as I hated and distrusted Cornelius Gleazen,—and in the months since I first saw him sitting on the tavern porch in Topham he had given me reason for both,—I continually wondered at his reckless nonchalance.

As coolly as if he were in our village store, with a codfish swinging above the table, instead of a skeleton leaning against it, and with a boy's dart trembling in a beam, instead of an arrow thrust half through the wall—with just such a grand gesture as he had used to overawe the good people of Topham, he stepped to the door and brushed his hair back from his forehead. The diamond still flashed on his finger; his bearing was as impressive as ever.

"Well, lads," he said,—and little as I liked him, his calmness was somehow reassuring,—"there may be a hundred of 'em out there, but again there may be only one. First of all, we'll need water. I'll fetch it."

From a peg on the wall he took down a bucket and, returning to the door, stepped out.

In the clearing, where the hot sun was shining, I could see no sign of life.

Pausing on the doorstone, Gleazen shrugged his great shoulders and stretched himself and moved his fingers so that the diamond in his ring flashed a score of colors. He was a handsome man in his big, rakehell way; and in spite of all I knew against him, I could but admire his bravado as he turned from us.

Boldly, deliberately, he stepped down into the grass, while we crowded in the door and watched him. After all, it seemed that there was really nothing to be afraid of. The rest of us were startled and angry when O'Hara suddenly called out, "Come back, you blithering fool! Come back! You don't know them, Neil; I say, you don't know them. Come back, I say!"

With a scornful smile Gleazen turned again and airily waved his hand—I saw the diamond catch the sunlight as he did so. Then he gave a groan and dropped the bucket and cried out in pain and stumbled back over the threshold.

With muskets we sprang to guard door and window. But outside the hut there was no living thing to be seen. There was not even wind enough to move the leaves of the trees, which hung motionless in the sunlight.

It was as if we were in the midst of a nightmare from which shortly we should wake up. The whole ghastly incident seemed so utterly unreal! But when we looked at Gleazen, we knew that it was no mere nightmare. It was terrible reality. Blood was dripping from his left hand and running down on his shoe.

Through his hand, half on one side of it, half on the other, was thrust an arrow. A second arrow had passed just under the skin of his leg.

From the door I could see the bucket lying in the grass where he had dropped it; but except for a pair of parrots, which were flying from tree to tree, there still was no living thing in sight.

The vine-hung walls of the forest, which reached out long tendrils and straggling clumps of undergrowth as if to seize upon and consume the space of open ground, stood tall and green and silent. The deep grass waved in the faintest of breezes. Above a single big rock the hot air swayed and trembled.

Without even wincing, Gleazen drew the arrow from his hand and, refusing assistance, bound the wound himself.

Turning from the door, Arnold went to the table and touched an arm of the skeleton, which fell toward the body and collapsed inside the sleeve with a low rattle.

O'Hara raised his hand with an angry gesture.

"I mean no irreverence," said Arnold.

For a moment the two stood at gaze, then, letting his hand fall, O'Hara stepped over beside Arnold, and they lifted the bones, which for the most part fell together in the dead man's clothes, and laid them by the north wall.

"And what," asked Matterson, curiously, "are you two doing now?"

Without answering, Arnold coolly swept the stones on the table together between his hands into a more compact pile.

"Hands off, my boy," said Gleazen, quietly.

"Well?" Gleazen's words had brought a flush to Arnold's cheeks. He himself was nearly as old as Gleazen and was quick to resent the patronizing tone, and his very quietness was more threatening than the loudest bluster.

"Hands off," Gleazen repeated; and raising his musket, he cocked it and tapped the muzzle on the opposite side of the table. "This says 'hands off,' too." He glanced around so that we could see that he meant us all. "Matterson, ain't there a sack somewhere hereabouts?" But for the blood on his shoe and the stained cloth round his hand, he gave no sign of having been wounded.

From under the table Matterson picked up a bag such as might have been used for salt, but which was made of strong canvas and was grimy from much handling.

"He was always a careful man," Gleazen remarked with a glance at the skeleton heaped up in the shadow of the wall. "I thought he would have provided a bag."

Gleazen and Matterson then, with pains not to miss a single one, picked up the stones by handfuls and let them rattle into the bag like shot.

"And now," said Gleazen, when the last one was in and the neck of the bag was tied, "once more: hands off!"

Laying the bag beside the skeleton, he took his stand in front of it, with Matterson and O'Hara on his right and left.

So far as the three of them were concerned, we might have been killed a dozen times over, had anyone seen fit to attack us. But Abe and I, all the time keeping one eye on the strange scene inside the cabin, had kept watch also for trouble from without, and all the time not a thing had stirred in the clearing.

"What," Matterson again asked, still watching Arnold curiously, "what are you going to do now?"

Tipping the table up on one side and wrenching off one of the boards that formed the top of it, Arnold placed it across a window, so that there was a slit at the bottom through which we could watch or shoot.

"Now, there's an idea!" Gleazen exclaimed. But he never stirred from in front of the skeleton and the bag.

"There are nails in the table," said Arnold.

Matterson smiled, and taking the board in one hand, tapped a nail against the table to start it, and with the thumb and forefinger of the other hand drew it out as easily as if it had been stuck in putty. "For a hammer," he said lightly, "use the butt of a musket."

"Look!" my uncle exclaimed: he was pointing at a good claw-hammer, which hung over the door.

The hut fell far short of the duke's mansion that its luckless builder had promised O'Hara, but it had a window in each of three walls, and the door in the fourth, so that, by cutting a hole through the door, we were able, after we had barricaded the windows, to guard against surprise from any quarter without exposing ourselves to a chance shot; and as we had brought four muskets, we were able to give each sentry one well loaded.

The silence deepened. The air was fairly alive with suspicion. When Uncle Seth nervously moistened his lips, we all heard him; and when he flushed and shifted his feet, the creaking of a board seemed harsh and loud.

"Well," said Gleazen, slowly, "I'll stand in one watch and Matterson here will stand in the other. For the rest, suit yourselves."

Another long, uncomfortable silence fell upon us.

"Then," said Arnold, at last, "since no one else suggests an arrangement, I would suggest that Mr. Matterson, O'Hara, Mr. Upham, and I stand the first watch; that Mr. Gleazen, Joe Woods, and Abe Guptil stand second watch; and in order to put four men in each watch in turn, since we must have four to guard against surprise from any direction, I suggest that each man, turn and turn about, stands a double watch of eight hours. I myself will take the double watch first."

"That is good as far as it goes," Matterson interposed in his light voice. "But a single watch of two hours, with the double watch of four, is long enough. A man grows sleepy sooner with his eye at a knothole than if he is walking the deck."

Arnold nodded, "We agree to that," he replied.

"Lads," said Gleazen, quite unexpectedly, "let's have an end of hard looks and hard words. Come, Joe,—come, Arnold,—don't take sides against us and good Seth Upham. We're all in this fix together, and, by heaven! unless we stand together and come out together, not one of us'll come out alive."

The man now seemed so frank, and in the face of our common danger so genial, that, if I had not still felt the sting of the flattery by which he had deceived me so outrageously in the old days in Topham, I should have been convinced that he was sincere in every word he uttered. As it was, sincere or false, I knew that for the moment he was honest. However his attitude toward us might change when our troubles were past, for the time being we did share a common danger, and it was imperative that we stand together. But to speak of my poor uncle as if he were hand in glove with the three of them and on equal terms exasperated me.

Seth Upham's face was drawn and anxious. It was plain that his spirit was broken, and I believed, when I looked at him, that never again would he make a show of standing up to the man who had virtually robbed him of all he possessed.

"Sir," said Arnold Lamont, thoughtfully and with that quaint, almost indefinable touch of foreign accent, "that is true. We might say that we don't know what you mean by offering us a truce. We might pretend that we have always been, and always shall be, on the friendliest of terms with you. But we know, as well as you, that it is not so. Since we share a common danger and since our safety depends on our mutual loyalty, we, sir, agree to your offer. A truce it shall be while our danger lasts, and here's my hand that it will be an honest truce."

It was easy to see that Gleazen and Matterson were not altogether pleased by his words. They would have liked, I think, to have us apprehend the situation less clearly. But there was nothing to do but make the best of matters; so Gleazen shook Arnold's hand, and we took an inventory of our provisions, which were quite too few to last through a siege of any length.

"To-morrow night, surely we can run for it," said O'Hara. "To-night they'll watch us like hawks, but to-morrow night—"

Plainly it was that for which we must wait.

We divided our food into equal portions, each to serve for one meal,—the meals, we saw, were to be very few,—ate one portion on the spot and settled ourselves to watch and sleep. But before I fell asleep I heard something that still further enlightened me.

"Now, why," asked Gleazen, sourly, as he faced the other two in the darkness, "couldn't one of you ha' stayed with Bull, even if the other was fool enough to go a-wandering?"

Matterson quietly smiled. "Bud, here, swore he'd never leave him."

"We-e-ell," O'Hara drawled, irritably, "you was both of you too long gone and Bull was set in his ways. It was 'Step this side,' and 'Step that!' And 'Those stones are yourn and those are mine and those are for the company.' Says I at last, 'Them that you've laid out for me, I'll take to the coast. Keep the rest of them if you wish.' Says he, 'You'll leave me here to rot.' 'Not so,' says I. 'By hook or by crook Neil will get the vessel surely, and Molly will arrange the market surely, for they're good men and not to be turned lightly off. Do you clean the pocket, and build the house. Surely the pocket that has sent Neil home like a gentleman, and has sent Molly west like a man of business, will provide us at least the wherewithal to buy one cargo. And with a cargo under our own hatches,' says I, 'four fortunes will soon be made.' 'Do you go,' says he, 'and I'll build a house like a duke's mansion to live in, and dig the pocket out and make friends with the niggers, which eventually we will catch, and four fortunes we will make.' So I come away, and you two surely would 'a' done the same if you'd been in my breeches instead of me; and then he went and built his house on the king's grave!"

As I lay on the floor, not three feet from the skeleton and from the round bag of quartz-like stones, through half-closed eyes I saw against the door, beyond which the sun was shining with intense heat, the great black shadow that I knew was Matterson, with a musket across his knees; then, so exhausted was I, that I forgot the grim object within arm's length of where I lay, forgot our feud with Matterson and Gleazen and O'Hara, forgot every ominous event that had happened since the Adventure had set sail four days before and moved down the river toward the open sea, and, falling asleep, dreamed of someone whom, strangely, I could not forget.

The sun had set and the moon was up when my turn came to go on guard. Taking Matterson's musket and his place by the open door where I could see all that went on without, but where no one outside could see me in the dark of the hut, I settled myself with my back against the jamb. In Matterson's motions as he handed me the musket and went over by the skeleton and lay down, there was the same lithe strength that he had revealed when he lifted himself to the taffrail and boarded the Adventure in Havana harbor. I marveled that he could endure so much with so little drain on his physical powers.

"Watch sharply, Joe, there's a brave lad," he said in his light voice.

As he crossed the hut and laid his great body on the floor, so slowly yet so lightly, I thought to myself that I had never seen a lazier man. What a power he might have been at sea or ashore, had he had but a tithe of Gleazen's bold effrontery! Although he had shown none of Gleazen's passionate recklessness, he had given no sign of fear under any circumstances that we had yet encountered. I wondered if it were not likely that the man's very quietness, the complete absence of such petulance as Gleazen sometimes showed, sprang from a deep, well-proved confidence in his own might.

I was glad that it had fallen to me to guard the door rather than a window. Whereas from the windows one could see only a short space of rough open park and then the intermatted tangle of vines, from the door the vista ran far down the hill to the open glade where, hidden in deep grass, the spring lay. But though I sat with the musket beside me for hours, and though the moon rose higher and higher, revealing every tree and bush, in all my watch I did not see one thing astir outside the hut.

I must repeat that we seemed to be living in a dream. We had seen no enemy, heard no enemy. For all the signs and sights that those walls of tangled creepers revealed to us, there might have been no human being within a hundred miles. Yet from behind those walls had come three arrows, and for the time being those three arrows locked us in the hut as fast as if they had been bolts and chains and padlocks.

As I watched, I heard someone get up and walk around the hut; and when I glanced over my shoulder, I saw that it was my uncle. To my surprise he was talking in a low voice. Now what, I wondered, possessed him to stay awake when he might be sleeping.

"I must be getting home," I heard him say as he came nearer; and his voice startled me because, although it spoke softly, it was the old sharp, domineering voice that I had known so long and so well in Topham; "I must be getting home. I don't know when I've stayed so late at the store."

CHAPTER XXIII
SORTIE

Night and morning we got little rest. We ate another meal from our slender store; but it was a fearful thing to see how few meals remained; and though in part we satisfied our hunger, our thirst seemed more unendurable than ever.

"Eat light and belt tight," O'Hara muttered. "Last night they was watching like cats at a rat-hole. To-night surely they'll not be so eager. It'll be to-night that we can make our dash to the river."

Once more the sun was shining on the green, open space around the hut. A huge butterfly, blazing with gaudy tropical colors, fluttered out from some nook among the creepers where it had been hidden, and on slow wings sailed almost up to us, loitered a moment beside a blue flower, and again took flight through the still air to the opposite forest wall.

"If Neil Gleazen had as much brains under his hair as he has hair to cover his head," Matterson softly remarked, "we'd have brought enough food so that we'd not have to go hungry."

"Food!" Gleazen roared. "Food, is it? You eat like a hog, you glutton. And who was to know that Bull would not have a house full of food to feast us on? Who was to know that Bull would be dead?"

At that a silence fell upon us.

As usual, though we had agreed to a truce between our two parties, Gleazen, Matterson, and O'Hara sat on one side of the room, the side where the skeleton and the bag of pebbles lay, and Arnold, Abe and I sat on the other, with poor Uncle Seth wandering about at will between us.

There was that in my uncle's manner which I could not understand; and as I watched him, Abe Guptil touched my elbow.

"Something queer ails Seth Upham," he whispered.

"I know it," I replied.

"I don't like to see him act that way."

"Nor I."

Abe regarded me thoughtfully. "Now ain't it queer how things turn out?" he whispered. "I mind the day you come to my house and told me I'd got to flit. It was a bitter day for me, Joe, and yet do you know, I'd kind o' like to be back there, even if it was all to go through again. I swear, though, I'd never sail again with Mr. Gleazen."

There was something so ingenuous in Abe's way of saying that he wished he had never come, that I smiled; but it touched me to remember all that Abe and I had faced together; and Abe himself, with keen Yankee shrewdness, added in an undertone, "It's all very well for O'Hara to talk of making our break to-night. I'm thinking, Joe, it is upon us a storm will break before we get free and clear of this camp."

As the sun rose higher and higher, the sunlight steadily grew warmer. The air shimmered with heat, and the house itself became as hot, it seemed, as an oven over a charcoal fire. Sweat streamed from our faces and, having had no water now for nearly twenty-four hours, we suffered agonies of thirst.

Never were men in a more utterly tantalizing predicament. Whether or not it was cooler outside the hut than within, it surely could have been no hotter; and from the door straight down the hill to the spring there led a broad, open path. The spring was only a short distance away, and there was, so far as we could see, not a living creature between us and cold water in abundance. Hour after hour the green, deep grass around it mocked us. Yet in the wattled hut, under the thatched roof, we were prisoners.

Three arrows, shot by we knew not whom, every one of them now in our own hands, were the only warnings that we had received; but not a man of us dared disobey the message that those three arrows had brought.

The day wore on, through the long and dreary watches of the morning, through the tortures of high noon, and through the less harsh afternoon hours. We ate another of our few remaining meals and watched the sun set and the darkness come swiftly. The shadows, growing longer and longer, reached out across the clearing to the trees on the opposite side; and suddenly, darkly, swept up the eastern wall of the forest. As the light vanished, night enfolded us. The stars that flashed into the sky only intensified the utter blackness of the woods.

O'Hara uneasily stirred and stretched himself in the darkness like a dog.

"Now, lads," he whispered, "now's the time to gather things together. At two in the morning we'll run for it. Then's the hour they'll be sleeping like so many black pigs."

Gleazen moved and groaned,—it was almost the first time that he had yielded in the least to the pain of his wound.

"Can you travel by yourself, Neil?" Matterson asked. "Or shall I carry you on my back?"

When it came to me that the question was no joke, that Matterson actually meant it, I could not keep from staring at him in amazement. He was a tremendous man, but there was something honestly heroic in his offering to carry Cornelius Gleazen's weight back over all those miles.

Gleazen smiled and shook his head. "Thanks, Mat," he replied, "but I'll make out to scramble along."

The word "scramble," it seemed, caught Uncle Seth's attention, and with a curt nod, he said, "Yes, scramble them; use them any way but boiled. We can't sell cracked eggs in the store, but they're perfectly good to use at home."

We all looked in amazement, and Gleazen, in spite of his pain, hoarsely laughed.

"Why, Seth," he cried, "are you gone crazy?"

My uncle stared blankly at him and continued to pace the room.

In the silence that ensued, Gleazen's words seemed to echo and reËcho; though they were spoken quietly, even in jest, their significance was truly terrible.

"Gentlemen," said Arnold Lamont in a very low voice, "Seth Upham, I fear, is not well. We must not let him stand guard. We cannot trust him!"

"Name of heaven!" whispered Matterson, "the man's right. Upham is turning queer."

As I watched my uncle, my mother's only brother, the last of all my kin, a choking rose in my throat. He did not see me at all. He saw none of us. In mind and spirit he was thousands of miles away from us. I started toward him, but when his eyes met mine dully and with no indication that he recognized me, I swallowed hard and turned back.

Never was a night so long and ghastly! With all prepared for our dash to the river, with Uncle Seth wandering back and forth, and with the rest of us divided into three watches of two each, that overlapped by an hour, so that four men were always on guard, we watched and waited until midnight passed and the morning hours came.

When the moon was at the zenith, O'Hara woke Matterson, and we gathered by the packs, which were made up and ready.

"Poor Bull!" said O'Hara, brushing his hand across his eyes. "Sure, and I hate to leave him thus. If ever man deserved a decent burial, it's him."

"If men got what they deserved," Gleazen briefly retorted, "Bull would never have drove the ship on the island, and we'd never have had to divide up this here find which Bull dug up for us, and Bull would never have had to stand by the hill to get himself killed, in the first place."

Each man had tied up his own belongings to suit himself, and had put in his pocket his share of what little food was left. The different packs stood in the middle of the hut, but it was noticeable that, although each man was nearest his own, Matterson was eyeing Gleazen's with a show of keener interest.

"Let me carry your bundle, Neil, you with a hole in your leg," he said.

"No," Gleazen replied.

"I'll never notice the weight of it."

"Keep your hand off, Molly. I'll carry my own bundle."

"As you please."

Matterson turned away and stepped to one side.

All this I noticed, at first, mainly, if the truth be known, because I saw how closely Arnold Lamont was noticing it, but later because the manner of the two men convinced me that Gleazen's pack held the bag that the others were so carefully guarding.

Now that our food was almost gone, there remained so very little baggage of any kind for us to carry, that there was no good reason that I could see for not putting our odds and ends of clothing and ammunition into, say, two convenient bundles, at which we could take turns during our forced march to the river, or, indeed, for not abandoning the mere baggage altogether. But Gleazen, Matterson, and O'Hara had planned otherwise. Having allotted to each of us his share of the food that remained, and an equal seventh of our various common possessions, they kept three of the muskets themselves, and gave the fourth to poor Seth Upham, which seemed to me so mad an act that I was on the point of questioning its wisdom, when Arnold caught my eye and signaled me to be still.

Gathering in the door of the hut, we looked out into the silent, moonlit glade that led down the hill and through the valley toward the distant river.

"Are we all ready, lads?" Matterson asked in his light voice.

"Push on, Molly, push on," Gleazen replied.

Shouldering his pack, Matterson stepped out into the moonlight. "Now, then," he whispered,—for although we were confident that no enemy within earshot was then awake (it had not been hard for O'Hara to persuade us to his own way of thinking), a spell of silence and secrecy was upon us,—"it's straight for the river, lads, and the devil take the hindermost. If you're too lame to travel, Neil, so help me, I'll carry you."

"Push on!" Gleazen returned hoarsely. "Push on to the spring. After that we'll talk if you wish."

"We're going home," I thought. Home, indeed! It seemed that at last we had turned the corner; that at last we had passed the height of land and were on the point of racing down the long slope; that at last our troubles were over and done with. A score of figures to express it leaped into my mind. And first of all, best of all, at last we were to get water!

Arnold said sharply, "Come, Abe; come, Joe; step along."

Bending low, Matterson led the way, I followed close at his heels, and the others came in single file behind me. Seven dark figures, silently slipping from shadow to shadow, we left behind us the hut,—we believed forever!—and headed straight down the hill to the spring; for more than anything else we longed to plunge our faces into cold water and drink until we had quenched our burning thirst.

Down the hill to the spring we went, slipping along in single file. All night and all day, without a word, we had endured agony; for it was by showing no sign of life whatever to those who were guarding the hut from the forest that we hoped so to lull their watchfulness that we could escape them just after midnight. And now we were eager almost beyond words for that water which we had so vividly imagined. As we darted into the tall grass, it seemed so completely assured that I swung my pack from my shoulder and broke into a quick trot after Matterson, whose long, swift strides, as he straightened up, had carried him on ahead of me.

If a thousand people read this tale, not one of them, probably, will know the full meaning of the word thirst; not one will understand what water had come by then to mean to me.

I ran—I tried to run faster—faster! But as I dragged my pack along, bumping at my knees, I was amazed to see Matterson stop. He threw his musket to his shoulder. The hollow boom of it went rolling off through the woodland and echoed slowly away into silence among the mighty trees. Then he threw his hands up, and with a cry fell into the grass, and lay so still that I could not tell where he had fallen.

By the flash of his musket I and those behind me had for an instant seen by the spring a grotesque figure dressed in skins and rags, and painted with white rings and bars. When the flash died away, we could see nothing, not even the waving grasses and the black trees against the sky, because momentarily the sudden glare had blinded us.

As if impelled by another will than mine, I drew back step by step until I was standing shoulder to shoulder with the others. Whatever quarrels we had had among ourselves were for the time forgotten.

"Now, by heaven," Gleazen gasped, "it's back to the hut for all of us!"

"But Neil—now, Neil, sure now we can't run away and leave old Molly," O'Hara cried.

"Leave him?" Gleazen roared. "We've got to leave him! Where is he? Tell me if you can! Go find him if you like! Hark! See!"

With a thin, windy whistle a spear came flying out of the night and passed just over Gleazen's shoulder and his pack. Another with a soft chug struck into the ground at my feet; then, my eyes having once more become accustomed to the moonlight, I saw sneaking into the clearing a score of dark, slinking figures.

"They're coming!" I cried. "They're cutting us off! Quick! Quick!" In panic I started back to the hut, with the others at my heels.

When they saw the figures that I had seen, Gleazen and O'Hara both fired their muskets, whereupon the figures disappeared and we, deafened by the tremendous reports and blinded again by the bright flashes, ran back as hard as we could go to the hut that so short a time since we had eagerly abandoned; and with Gleazen limping in the rear, fairly threw ourselves across the threshold.

Whether our gunfire had done any real damage, we gravely doubted; and now we were both a man and a weapon short. But bitterest of all, and by far the most discouraging, was our intense thirst.

"Ah, the black devils," O'Hara muttered between grinding teeth. "Sure, and they planned all that—planned to let us get the water almost between our lips and then drive us back here. The black cowards, they dare not meet us man to man, though they are forty to our one."

It was significant that no one spoke of Matterson. The silence as regarded his name marked a certain fatalism, which now possessed us—something akin to despair, yet not so ignoble as despair; something akin to resolution, yet not so praiseworthy as resolution. There seemed, indeed, nothing to say about him. Bull was dead, I thought, and Matterson was dead; and even if the blacks dared not rush upon us and take the hut by storm, they would soon kill us by thirst. We had done our best; if worst came to worst, we would die with our boots on.

Meanwhile queer low cries out in the forest were rising little by little to shrill yells and hoots and cat-calls. If we could judge by the sounds, there were hundreds of blacks, if not thousands.

"O Bull! You poor, deluded fool!" O'Hara cried. "Now why—why—why did he go and build the house on a king's grave?"

Why indeed?

It was a fearful thing to hear those cries and yells; yet, although we watched from door and windows a long while, we did not actually see any further sign of danger, until Arnold Lamont, who was guarding the door, said in a subdued voice, "Look—down the hill—half-way down. Something has moved twice."

As we gathered behind him, he turned and with a quick gesture said, "Do not leave the windows. Who knows what trick they may try upon us?"

My uncle, who seemed for the moment to comprehend all that was going forward, and Abe Guptil and Gleazen, went back to the windows, although it was evident enough that their minds were not so much on their own duty as on whatever it was that had caught Arnold's attention.

"See!" said Arnold.

There was nothing down there now that seemed not to belong by nature to the place, and I surmised that Arnold had seen only some small animal. But that a black object, appearing and disappearing, had revealed more to the others than to me, I immediately apprehended.

"It was fifty feet farther down the hill when I first distinguished it," said Arnold.

O'Hara went over to my uncle and I heard him say, "Let me take your gun, since it's loaded, Mr. Upham, and thank you kindly."

Returning, he sat down in the door beside Arnold, who had begun meanwhile to load the empty musket that O'Hara had carelessly laid aside. When the thing, whatever it was, moved again, O'Hara raised the gun to his shoulder.

"Don't shoot!" Arnold whispered.

"And why not?"

The thing moved once more.

"Will ye look, now! It's come ten feet in this direction," O'Hara whispered.

Now Arnold raised his own musket.

Again we saw the thing, but so briefly that neither Arnold nor O'Hara had time to fire.

Suddenly O'Hara laid his hand on Arnold's shoulder and repeated Arnold's own words:—

"Don't shoot."

"This time," Arnold whispered, "I shall shoot."

"Wait a bit, wait a bit!" O'Hara gently pressed down the muzzle of the gun.

Meanwhile, you must understand, the yelling and hooting had first grown loud and near, then had drawn slowly farther away. It was not easy to let that creature, be it animal or human, come crawling up the hill in the full light of the moon. As the cries died in the distance, the thing moved faster and with less concealment, and I fiercely whispered, "Shoot, Arnold, shoot!"

"Wait," he replied and lifted a restraining hand.

At the moment I could not understand why he did not do as I said; but as the thing came out into open ground, the same thought that had caused the two to hold their fire occurred likewise to me; and now we saw that we were right.

The thing crawling up the hill was a man, and when the man came into the open clearing directly in front of our camp, we saw that it was Matterson.

Without a word, followed closely by O'Hara, who laid his gun on the threshold, I leaped out past Arnold and ran down to Matterson and helped him to his feet and led him groaning up to the hut.