---

CHAPTER XXIV
SPEARS IN THE DARK

"O-o-oh!" he moaned. "They got me. It's a wonder they didn't kill me. But here I am along with old Neil Gleazen."

"Where's your bundle?" Gleazen demanded.

"Down in the grass by the spring."

"Let me tell you, Matterson, it's good I carried my own."

Matterson repressed another groan and made no answer.

Blood was running from a great gash above his ear and across his cheek, which we hastened to bind to the best of our ability, and he lay down on the floor with his head on his hand.

"I'm on the sick list," he said at last, "but I've had water, and if those black sons of hell have not poisoned the spring, I'll call it quits."

Matterson's face was a ghastly sight, and already blood had reddened the strip of sacking round his head; but I believe there was not a man of us who would not have taken his wound to have got his chance at water.

"If only we could catch a king," Gleazen remarked thoughtfully. "That's the way to end a war in Africa. Catch us a king and make peace on him."

"That's one way surely to end a war," said O'Hara, darkly, "but not this war."

"And why not this war?"

"Because," said O'Hara, "Bull built the house on a king's grave. It's the spirits that are offended."

Gleazen laughed unkindly.

"Aye, laugh," cried O'Hara, "that's all you know about spirits. Now I'll tell ye, believe me or not as it pleases ye, that the spirit of a nigger is a bad thing to cross. And care as little as ye please for jujus and fetishes and nigger gods, the times are coming when they'd serve you well if you'd not turned them off by laughing at them."

"Spirits—" said my uncle in an undertone. "Hm! Hollands, Scotch, and Rye. We must lay in more Hollands, Sim; the stock's getting low. And while you are about it, we'd best take an inventory of our cordials."

Gleazen fluently swore, and watched Seth Upham with a keen, appraising look. There was no doubt that in his own wandering mind my uncle was back again in his store in Topham.

"I'm thirsty," he said suddenly. "I must get a drink of water. Now where's the bucket? Sim, where's the bucket?"

As he fumbled along the wall, we stared at one another with eyes in which there was fear as well as horror. I swallowed hard. Poor, poor Uncle Seth, I thought. What was to become of him? And indeed, for the matter of that, of us all?

By this time I had come to see clearly that poor Seth Upham was in no condition to stand up for his own rights, and that, whether or not he could stand up for his rights, he had no chance of getting them from that precious trio, his associates, without a stronger advocate than mere justice.

They had promised unconditionally that half the profits of their mad voyage should be his, and by that promise alone they had so cruelly persuaded him to sell home and business and embark in their enterprise. Now, deceived, bullied, flouted, he bade fair to lose not only those gains which were rightfully his, but also his vessel, his stores, and every cent that he had ventured. If there was to be a copper penny saved for him, Arnold, Abe, and I must save it.

Through the rough, less pleasant memories of his abrupt, sharp ways—and so often, even when he was in the abruptest and sharpest of moods he had betrayed unconsciously, even unwillingly, his thought of my future, for which he was building, as well as for his own—there came memories of old days, when he and my mother and I had lived so quietly and happily together in Topham.

I started up, all at once awakened from my reveries, with Abe's dazed voice ringing in my ears. "Look! Look!" he cried. "Look there!"

For the moment, in our horror at my uncle's condition, we had almost forgotten our danger from without.

"Look!" Abe cried again. "In heaven's name look there!"

We crowded shoulder to shoulder by the window where Abe had stationed himself and saw in the moonlit clearing a strange creature, which came dancing and rolling along from the edge of the forest. It was dressed in skins and rags. It was painted with big white rings and bars. Now it began to utter strange whines and squeals and whimpers, in an unearthly tone that it might have produced by blowing on a split quill.

From the corner of my eye I saw that Matterson was biting his lip. At my side I felt O'Hara violently trembling.

Out in the moonlight, where the swaying creepers cast dim, spectral shadows, the gibbering, murmuring creature was coming nearer. Its boldness was appalling. I had been brought up in a Christian country and given a Christian education, but even to me that clumsy, dancing wizard, with his unearthly squeals and cries, brought a superstitious fear so keen that I could scarcely control my wits. Small wonder that such tricks impose on credulous savages!

"Watch, now!" Gleazen said quietly. He leveled a musket across the window-sill. "Spirits is it? I'll show them."

"Don't shoot," O'Hara cried. "Don't shoot, Neil, don't shoot!"

He reached past me toward Gleazen; but before he could lay hands on the gun, Gleazen fired. A spurt of flame shot from the muzzle, and as the report went thundering off into the forest the medicine man—wizard—devil—call him what you will—seemed curiously to wilt like a drought-killed plant, but more suddenly than ever plant wilted, and fell in a crumpled heap in the moonlight.

"You fool!" O'Hara cried, "you cursed fool! First it was Bull that built the house on a king's grave and now it is you that's killed a devil!"

"He's dead enough," Gleazen calmly replied.

"Look!"

Here and there, along the edge of the forest, men darted into the moonlight. They carried spears, which flashed now and then when the moon fell just so on the points. First they gathered by the body of the wizard and carried it back into the woods. We saw them, a little knot of men with the heavy weight of the fallen mummer in their midst, moving slowly to the wall of vines and through it into the mysterious depths beyond. Then, coming slowly out again, they moved back and forth before the hut as if to appraise our chances of defending it. Then they once more disappeared.

All this time they had walked as if in a world of death. Although we had seen their every gesture, we had not heard a sound loud enough to rival the almost imperceptible drone of insects in the grass. But now we heard again that grimly familiar, haunting, wild cry. Three times we heard it, terribly mournful and prolonged; then we heard a voice wailing, "White man, I come 'peak: white man all go Dead Land."

The voice died away, a few formless shrieks and yells followed it, and a silence, long and deep, settled upon the clearing.

Once more Arnold, Abe, and I stood on one side of the hut, and Gleazen, Matterson, and O'Hara on the other, with poor Seth Upham wandering aimlessly between us.

There was war within and without. There was almost no food. There was no water at all. I thought, then, that I should never see the town of Topham again; and—which oddly enough seemed even harder to endure—I thought that I never again should see the mission on the river.

"I swear," O'Hara whispered,—so clearly did I hear the words, as I stood with one eye for the inside of the hut and one for the outside, that I jumped like a nervous girl,—"I swear we've started a war that will reach from here to Barbary before it's done. Hearken to that!"

We heard afar off the throbbing of native drums, the roar of distant angry voices, a strange chant sung in some remote African encampment.

---

CHAPTER XXV
CARDS AND CHESS

Hunger and thirst were stripping away the last vestige of our pretended good-will, and our two parties glared at each other in a sullen rage, which seemed visibly to grow more intense, until it was the most natural thing in the world that Arnold should touch with the toe of his shoe a board that ran from one end of the hut to the other and divided the floor approximately into halves.

"That side," he said, "is yours. This side is ours. You shall not cross that line. You shall guard the hut from that side; we, from this."

Gleazen looked at Matterson, then at O'Hara, then both he and Matterson nodded grim assent.

But although a board across the hut divided us into two hostile camps, we shared a peril so imminent and so overwhelming that we dared not for an instant relax our watchfulness toward our enemies in the forest.

With one eye on our foes without and one on our foes within, we settled ourselves for another night, which I remember by the agonies of thirst that we endured; and with a certain grim confidence, shared by both parties in the hut, that neither would betray the other, since to do so would be to throw away its own one chance for life, we watched and waited for the dawn.

And meanwhile we heard in the forest such a clamor and din as few white men have ever been so unlucky as to hear. First, we heard unseen people running about and furiously screaming; then, here and there through the trees and vines we caught glimpses of flaming torches, which they swung in great circles and again and again touched to the ground. I was convinced that it preluded an attack, and I screwed up my courage and fingered my pistols and tried not to show my fear; but in a brief lull I learned from something that O'Hara was saying to his companions that they were not preparing for an attack; they were mourning for the wizard whom Gleazen had killed, and with the flaming torches they were driving away evil spirits. Now far down the valley we caught glimpses of moving lights; and once in a while, through pauses in the nearer din, we heard a distant droning, by which we knew that the blacks of the countryside were converging upon us from the remotest districts, along their narrow trails, in thin streams like ants. Minute by minute the cries became more general, and rose to such a hideous intermingling of wails and shrieks as I should not have believed could issue from merely human throats.

By its volume and extent the uproar was an appalling revelation of the number of those who had surrounded us, and I tell you that we seven men in that hut in the clearing were properly frightened. It seemed a miracle that they did not sweep over us in one great irresistible wave and bear us down and blot us out. Yet such was their superstitious fear of things they did not understand, that from the cover of our frail little hut our few firearms still held them at a distance.

Never dreaming that their own power was infinitely superior to ours, attributing the death of their wizard to a witchcraft stronger than his own, they circled round and round us under cover of the forest and dared not come within gunshot.

As day broke, and the sun rose like a ball of fire and blazed down on us and doubled the tortures that we had suffered in the night, we heard the drummers who had come to pound their drums by the body of the dead wizard. The drumming throbbed and rolled in waves; bells rang and hands clapped; and all the time there was shrieking and wailing and moaning.

They drummed the stars down and the sun up, and when at noon there had been no respite from the din, which by then fairly tortured us, the other three, who had been talking together among themselves, called us to the board across the hut for conference.

"Now, men," O'Hara began, "we'll make no foolish talk of being friends together; surely we and you know how much such talk is worth. But we and you know, surely, that if one party of us is killed, the others will be killed likewise; for we are too few to fight for our lives, even supposing as now that every man jack of us is alive and bustling. Is not that so?

"Now, lads, there's a chance we can break through their line and run for the river while the niggers is praying and mourning over that corpse yonder."

O'Hara stopped as if for us to reply, and I glanced at Arnold, who, meeting my glance, turned to Abe Guptil and thoughtfully said, "Shall we take that chance, Abe?"

"Take any chance, is my feeling, Mr. Lamont. Chances are all too few."

With a nod at O'Hara, Arnold replied, "We are agreed, I think. As you say, there is a chance. You three shall go first. We will follow."

"It's a chance," O'Hara repeated, almost stubbornly.

"We are in a mood for chances," Arnold returned. "But you three must go first."

When O'Hara frowned, hesitated, and acceded, I wondered if he thought we were gullible enough to let them come behind us.

Arnold was quietly smiling, but the others, as they gathered in the door, were grave indeed. There was not one of us who did not know in his heart that our hope was utterly forlorn. Only Arnold—time and again I marveled at him!—sustained that amazing equanimity.

Gleazen shouldered his pack, but the others let theirs lie.

"How about the rest of the baggage?" Arnold asked, as composedly as if he were setting out from the store in Topham upon a two days' journey.

"Leave it to the devils and the ants," Matterson thickly retorted.

Both he and Gleazen were lame from their wounds and must have suffered more than any of the rest of us. How they could face the long, forced march, I did not understand; for though hunger and thirst were my only troubles, my head swam when I moved quickly and my limbs were now very light, now heavier than so much lead. But Gleazen had long since shown his mettle, and Matterson, although he staggered when he walked, set his teeth as he leaned against the wall and waited to start.

If the truth were told, we had no real hope of getting away; and immediately whatever desperate dreams we clung to were frustrated; for, as we appeared in front of the hut and weakly started down the hill, there came a sudden lull in the mad wailing over the dead wizard; black warriors appeared on all sides of us, and a line of them, like hornets streaming out of their nest, emerged from the forest and massed between us and the spring.

"Come, men, it's back to the house," said O'Hara; and back we went, each party to its own side as before, but each turning to the others as if for what pitiful mutual reassurance there could be in such a situation.

"There's war from here to the coast," Matterson muttered. "Such a war as never was before."

The voice that issued from his dry throat was so thick and husky that I should never have known it for the light, effeminate voice of Matterson.

"It's bad," said Gleazen, "but so help me, they'll be cleaning out old Parmenter and putting an end to the sniveling psalm-singers on this river. And then, lads! Ah, then'll be great times ahead, if once we get free and clear of this accursed hornets' nest."

In the face of our desperate danger, the man was actually exultant. But I thought of the girl at the mission, and a dread filled my heart, so strong that the room went black and I sat down, literally too sick to stand.

With never a word poor Uncle Seth was pacing back and forth across the hut. Of us all, he alone had the liberty of the entire place; but it was a tolerant, contemptuous liberty that the others gave him, and nothing else would have testified so vividly to the way he had fallen in their regard.

It seemed incredible that this pale, gaunt, voiceless man, who suffered so much in silence, who without comment or remark let matters take their own course, who resented no indignity and aspired to no authority, could be that same Seth Upham who had made himself one of the leading men of our own Topham. And indeed it was not the same Seth Upham! Something was broken; something was lost. In my heart of hearts, I knew well enough what it was, but I could not bear to put the thought into words. No man in my place, who had a tender regard for old times and old associations, could have done so.

There had been no life at all in our last attempt to leave the hut. We faced the future now in the listlessness of despair. Still the extraordinary situation continued unchanged. Apparently, so long as we remained in the hut, we were to be ignored. It seemed as if the black fiends must know how bitterly we were suffering as hour after hour the clamor of their mourning rose and fell; as if they were deliberately torturing us.

When Matterson sat down on the floor with his back against the wall, and began to whittle out bits of wood from one of the legs of the table, I watched him with an inward passion that I made no effort to control. He, for one, was responsible for Seth Upham's sad plight, but with a heart as hard as the blade of his knife he calmly sat for hours whittling, and smiling over his work.

All that day we heard the tumult in the forest; all that day the sun blazed down on the hut and doubled and trebled the tortures of our thirst; all that day Seth Upham paced the hut in silence; and from noon till late afternoon Matterson whittled at little sticks of wood.

Piece by piece there grew before our eyes a set of chessmen. Rough and crude though the men were, they slowly took the familiar shapes of kings and queens and bishops and knights and pawns. When they were done, Matterson hunted through the pockets of the coat that the skeleton still wore, and found a carpenter's pencil, with which he blackened half the men. Then, grunting with pain as he moved, he drew a crude chessboard on the floor squarely in the middle of the hut.

"Lamont," said he, "shall we play?"

Arnold smiled. "I will play you a game," he said.

And with that the two sat down by the board and tossed for white and set up the crudely carved men, and began perhaps the most extraordinary game of chess that ever two men played.

There was something admirable in their very bravado. While the rest of us watched the clearing, every man of us suffering from thirst and hunger, the tortures of the damned, those two, swaying sometimes from sheer weakness, played at chess as coolly as if it were one of the games that Arnold and Sim had played of old in my uncle's store at Topham; and although to this day I have never really mastered chess, I knew enough of it to perceive that it was no uneven battle that they fought. As the pawns and knights advanced, and the bishops deployed, and the queens came out into the board, the two players became more and more absorbed in their game, which seemed to take them out of themselves and to enable them to forget all that had happened and was happening.

And with that the two sat down by the board ... and began perhaps the most extraordinary game of chess that ever two men played.

Indeed, it well-nigh hypnotized those of us who were only watching. The ghastly calm of the two, the fierceness with which they fixed their eyes on each move, the coolness with which they ignored the wild clamor, all helped to compose the rest of us, and by their example they made us ashamed of revealing to one another the fears we were struggling against.

"Neil," said O'Hara suddenly,—his harsh, hoarse voice startled even the chess-players,—"shall we have a turn at cards? I do believe there's a wonderful solace in such hazards."

"Cards!" Gleazen echoed. His own voice was stranger than O'Hara's. "We have no cards."

From the pocket of the blue coat on the skeleton O'Hara drew out a dingy old pack, which a dead man's fingers had placed there.

"Sure, and I know where to find them," he said. "Never did Bull travel without them."

With that the two squatted on the floor, and shuffled the cards with a pleasant whir, and dealt and played and dealt again.

It was as if our party had suddenly been transported back to Topham. Such nonchalance was almost beyond my understanding. Matterson, by his cool, bold defiance of danger, seemed to have aroused emulation in every one of us; and Gleazen, always reckless, now talked as lightly and gayly of the games as if it were a child's play to while away the dull hours of a holiday afternoon.

For the time, abandoning the agreement that neither side should trespass on the other's half of the hut, Abe and I watched from window to window lest the blacks take us by surprise, and now and then we would see someone observing the hut from under the trees a long gunshot away. But although the wails and yells and moans and the constant drumming over the dead wizard never ceased, no man came from the cover of the vines into the clearing.

Now Arnold precisely and clearly said, "Check."

Matterson swore and snapped his fingers and moved.

Again Arnold moved, and again he said, "Check!"

Matterson bent over the board and frowned. After a long delay he moved once more.

Instantly Arnold moved again and in his calm voice repeated, "Check!"

Matterson looked up at him with a strange new respect in his eyes.

"You win!" he cried with an oath. "You've done well. I didn't think you could. You are a chess-player."

"I have played a good deal," Arnold quietly replied.

"You have played with better men than Sim Muzzy."

"Yes." For a moment Arnold hesitated, then he added: "I have beaten at chess a great man. It was like to have cost me my sword and my head."

"Your sword?" Matterson repeated slowly. "Your sword and your head?"

There was a question in his voice, but Arnold did not answer it. Returning a curt, "Yes," as if regretting that he had said so much, he brushed Matterson's chessmen together, and looked out of the door and down the long slope at the tall green grass beside the spring, which seemed as far away from us as did our own well, thousands of miles away in Topham.

And still Gleazen and O'Hara played on. Time and again we heard the whir of shuffling and the slap of cards flung on top of one another.

Now the sun was setting. The swift twilight came upon us and faded into darkness, and the card-players also stopped their game.

---

CHAPTER XXVI
AN UNSEEN FOE

All day Seth Upham had scarcely said a word. From dawn until dark he had paced the hut, apparently buried deep in thought. Only his gaunt, pitiful face revealed the extent to which he shared our tortures.

Now for the first time in all that day, to our surprise, he spoke; and his first words confirmed every fear we had felt for him.

"The boys ought not to make so much noise," he said. "I must speak to the constable about it."

Matterson softly swore and shifted the bandage on his face. Gleazen significantly looked over at me. Abe Guptil stood with his mouth open and stared at Seth Upham.

Never boys of a New England town made such an uproar as was going on outside. Those wails and yells and hideous drummings and trumpetings were African in every weird cadence and boisterous hoot and clang.

Then, as if the first words had broken a way through his silence, Seth Upham began to talk in a low, hurried voice; and however reluctant we had hitherto been to believe that he was mad, there was no longer any hope for him at all. The man had lost his mind completely under the terrific strain that he had endured.

Small wonder when you think of all that had happened: of how, for Cornelius Gleazen's mad project, he had thrown away a place of honor and assured comfort back in Topham;
of how he had been driven deeper and still deeper
into Gleazen's nefarious schemes by blackmail for we knew not what crimes that he had committed in his young-manhood; of how, even in that alliance of thieves, he had fallen from a place of authority to such a place that he got not even civil treatment; of how he had lost reputation, livelihood, money, and now even his vessel.

"I declare, we must put in another constable," he muttered. "Johnson can't even keep the boys in order—In order, did you say? Who else should keep the place in order?—O Sim, if only you had wits to match your good intentions! How can you expect to keep books if you can't keep the stock in order?—" He stopped suddenly and faced the door. "Hark! Who called? I declare, I thought I was a lad again."

Moment by moment, as he paced the hut, we watched his expression change with the mood of his delirium,—sometimes I have wondered if the fever of the tropics did not precipitate his strange frenzy,—and moment by moment his emotions seemed to become more intense.

Now, pursuing that latest fancy, he talked about his boyhood and told how deeply he repented of the wicked life he had led as a young man; told us, all unwittingly, of unsuspected ambitions that had led him from wild ways into sober ones, and of his youthful determination to win a creditable place in the community; told us of the hard honest work that he had given to accomplish it. Now he revealed the pride he had taken in all that he had succeeded in doing and building, and—which touched me more than I can tell you—how he had counted on me, his only kinsman, to take his place and carry on his work. All this, you understand, not as if he were talking to us or to anyone else, but as if he were thinking out loud,—as indeed he was,—merely running over in his own mind the story of his life.

Now he reverted again to his repentance for the wicked youth that he had lived. And now, suddenly, his manner of speaking changed, and from merely thinking aloud he burst out into wild accusation.

"The dice are loaded," he cried,—his voice was hoarse and strained with the agonies that he, like all of us, had endured and was still enduring,—"the dice are loaded. I'll not play with loaded dice, Neil Gleazen!"

At that Gleazen gasped out a queer whisper.

But already Seth Upham's mind was racing away on another tack.

"Aye, loaded with the blessed weight of salvation. Didn't my old mother, God bless her, teach me at her knee that a man's soul can never die? Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name—"

Staring at him in horror, we saw that he was not blasphemous. The words came reverently from his weak lips. He simply was mad.

Suddenly in a high-pitched voice, he began to sing,

"Low at Thy gracious feet I bend,
My God, my everlasting friend."

He sang three stanzas of the hymn in a way that appalled every one of those three men who of us all, I think, were least easily appalled—indeed, I think that for once they were more appalled than the rest of us; certainly none of them had Arnold's composure or Abe's obvious, almost overpowering sympathy for poor Seth Upham. Then he stopped and faced about with eyes strangely aflame. In his manner now there was all his old imperiousness and something more, an almost noble dignity, a commanding enthusiasm, which, whether it came from madness alone or whether it had always been in him, got respect even from Matterson and O'Hara.

"I am going to meet my God face to face at the throne of Judgment," he cried.

It was the first time in days that he had addressed us directly, and he spoke with a fierce intensity that amazed us; then, before we guessed what was in his disordered mind, before a man of us could stop him, he stepped outside the door and flung his arms straight out like a cross, and with his head thrown back marched, singing, into the darkness.

"By Heaven!" Gleazen gasped, "he has set sail now for the port of Kingdom Come!"

We who remained in the hut, where a spell of silence had fallen, could hear him strongly and clearly singing as he strode down the long, dark vista toward the spring:—

"Lo what a glorious sight appears
To our believing eyes!
The earth and seas are past away,
And the old rolling skies!"

It may seem strange to one who reads of that fearful night that we did not rush after him and drag him back. But at the time we were taken completely by surprise, literally stupefied by the extraordinary climax of our days and nights of suffering and anxiety; and even then, I think,—certainly I have later come to believe it,—we felt in our inmost hearts that it was kinder to let him go.

He went down the hill, singing like an innocent child. His voice, which but a moment before had been pathetically weak, had now become all at once as clear as silver. And still the words came back from the tall grass by the spring, where creatures ten thousand times worse than any crawling son of the serpent of Eden lay in wait for him:—

"Attending angels shout for joy,
And the bright armies sing,
Mortals, behold the sacred feet;
Of your descending King."

Then the song quavered and died away, and there came back to us a queer choking cry; then the silence of the jungle, enigmatic, ominous, unfathomable, enfolded us all, and we sat for a long time with never a word between us.

The wailing and drumming over the body of the dead wizard had suddenly and completely ceased. At what was coming next, not a man of us ventured to guess.

Gleazen was first to break that ghastly silence. "They got him," he whispered. For once the man was awed.

"No," said Arnold Lamont, very quietly, "they have not got him. Unless I am mistaken, his madness purged his soul of its black stains, and he went straight to the God whose name was on his lips when he died."

Of that we never spoke again. Some thought one thing; some, another. We had no heart to argue it.

Poor Uncle Seth! What he had done in his youth that brought him at last to that bitterly tragic end, perhaps no other besides Cornelius Gleazen really knew, and Cornelius Gleazen, be it said to his everlasting credit, never told. But for all that, I was to learn a certain story long afterward and far away. Not one man in hundreds of thousands pays such a penalty for blasphemous sins of his mature years; and whatever Seth Upham had done, however dark the memory, it had been a boy's fault, which he had so well lived down that, when Cornelius Gleazen came back to Topham, no one in the whole world, except those two, would have believed it of him.

In that grim, threatening silence, which enfolded us like a thick, new blanket, we forgot our own quarrel; we almost forgot the very cause for which we had risked, and now bade fair to lose, our lives.

We were six men, two of us wounded, three of us arrant desperadoes, but all of us at least white of skin, surrounded by a black horde that was able, if ever it knew its own power, to wipe us at one blow clean off the face of the earth. Now that the terrible thing which had just happened had broken down and done away with every thought of those trivial enmities that fed on such unworthy motives as desire for riches, our common danger bound us, in spite of every antagonism, closer together than brothers. By some strange power that cry which had come back to us when Seth Upham's song ended not only enforced a truce between our two parties, but so brought out the naked sincerity of each one of us, that we knew, each and all, without a spoken word, that for the time being we could trust one another.

Gleazen, always reckless, was the first to break the silence. From the wall he took down a pewter mug, which the dead man they called Bull had hung there. Pretending to pour into it wine from an imaginary bottle, he looked across it at Arnold.

"This is not the vintage I should choose for my toast," he said with a wry mouth, "but it must serve. Yes, Lamont, it must serve." He raised the mug high. "In half an hour we'll be six dead men. I drink—to the next one to go."

Arnold coolly smiled. Pretending to raise a glass and clink it against the mug, he, too, went through the pantomime of drinking.

I was not surprised that Abe Guptil was staring at them, his lips parted, or that his face was pale. Although drunk only in make-believe, it was a toast to make a man think twice. I drew a deep breath; I could only admire the coolness of the two.

Yet now and then there flashed in Arnold's eye a hint of resourceful determination such as Gleazen probably never dreamed of, a hint of scorn for such theatrical trickery.

We were all on our feet now, standing together in our silent truce, when we heard for the last time that sound, so unhappily familiar, the long-drawn wailing cry that, whenever the wizard spoke, had preceded and followed his harangue. Coming from the dark forest beyond the clearing, it brought home to us more vividly than ever the ominous silence that had ensued since Seth Upham fell by the spring. Then that familiar, accursed voice, faint but penetrating, came from the wall of vines:—

"White man, him go Dead Land!

"White man, him go Dead Land!

"White man, him go Dead Land!"

---

CHAPTER XXVII
THE FORT FALLS

"Now, by the holy," O'Hara whimpered, "it's fight for our lives, or hand them away like so many maundy pennies."

"Fight, is it?" Gleazen roared. And forgetting his stiff wounds, he sprang to his feet. "Load those guns! Name of heaven, be quick!"

Why at this particular time the bawling voice of the native should thus have called us to action is not easy to say, for you would think that, having become familiar with it, we should have regarded it with proverbial contempt. But we knew that the deadlock could not last forever; Seth Upham's fate was all too vivid in our minds; and I really think that, in the strange voice itself, there was more than a hint of what was to follow.

Forgotten now was the edict that one party should stay on one side of the hut, the other on the opposite side. Forgotten, even, was the bag of stones in Gleazen's pack. Armed with every weapon that the hut afforded, we stood behind door and window and saw a sight that appalled the bravest of us.

Straight up the hill from the spring where they had killed Seth Upham there streamed a raging black horde. The rising moon shone on their spears and revealed the endless multitudes that came hard at the heels of the leaders. Their yells reverberated from wall to wall of the forest and even, it seemed to us, to the starry sky above them.

As we fired on them, the streamers of flame from our guns darted into the night and the acrid smoke drifted back to us. But though they faltered, this time they came doggedly on. Already in the moonlight we could distinguish individuals; now we could see their contorted features alive with rage and vindictiveness. That they would take the hut by storm, there was not the slightest doubt; nor was there a ray of hope that we should survive its fall.

It was a long, long way from Topham to that wattled hut in a clearing on the side of an African hill, and in more ways than one it was a far call from Higgleby's barn. But it was Higgleby's barn that I thought of then—Higgleby's barn in the pasture, with a light shining through a crack between the boards, and a boy scaling the wall under the window; Higgleby's barn in the dark, with tongues of flame running out from it through the grass. Truly, I thought in metaphor, which was rare for me, the fire that sprang up so long ago in Higgleby's barn had already killed Seth Upham, and now it was going to enfold and engulf us all.

Then I thought of the mission on the river, and the girl whom I had seen first among the mangroves, then in the darkness on the mission porch. Did the war actually reach to the coast? And would the war wipe out "old Parmenter" as Gleazen had said? By heaven, I thought, it would not and it should not!

All this, of course, takes far longer to tell, than it took to go coursing through my mind. In the time it took to think it out, not one black foot struck the ground; not one left the ground. Before that racing army of negroes had advanced another step, the answer had come to me; and now, no longer the boy who had climbed in idle curiosity the wall of Higgleby's barn, but a man to think and act, I cried from my dry throat:—

"Out of the back window, men! O'Hara, help me brace the door! Out of the window and over the hill!"

With an oath Gleazen cried, "He's right! They're all coming on us up the hill! The back way's our only chance!"

O'Hara, in spite of my call for help, led the way out of the back window; but Arnold paused to jam chairs and boards against the door; and Gleazen, ever reckless, stooped in the darkness and picked something up. As we sprang to the window, he came last of all, and I saw that he, the only one to think of it in that hour of desperate peril, was of a mind to bring his pack—the pack that had held the thing for which we had left our homes and crossed the seas. I saw Matterson clinging to brave Abe Guptil's shoulder, and striving desperately, with Abe's help, to keep pace with O'Hara, who in all this time had not got so much as a scratch. I saw the forest wherein lay our sole hope of safety, and terribly far off it seemed. Then I rolled out into the moonlight, and ran as if the devil were at my heels.

Almost at once I heard Gleazen come tumbling after me, and gasp with a frightful oath that the pack had caught and he had left it.

As we ran, we kept, as far as possible, the house between us and the blacks, and so intent were they on attacking our little citadel, that for a moment or two they overlooked our flight.

We heard their cries as they battered down the door, their eager shouts, their sudden silence, and then the fierce yell of discovery when they saw us in the moonlight. It occurred to me then that, but for my poor uncle's death down by the spring, which had very likely caused them to break their circle and gather there in the open, we should not have had so easy a time of it when we fled over the hill behind the hut. Weak though we were, despair was a mighty stimulus and we ran desperately for the woods; but although we had got a fair start, the pack was now yelping in full cry on our trail.

The pitiful futility of it all, I thought. Seth Upham was dead—the stones were lost—we ourselves were hunted for our lives! As I staggered after the others straight into the wall of almost impenetrable vines, I turned in the act of wriggling through it and let fly with my pistol. Compared with the muskets, the pistol made a dainty little spit of fire and sound, but it served to delay the foremost negroes, and with our scanty hopes a little brighter for their hesitation, I struggled on to come up with the others.

It was well for us, after all, that O'Hara had taken the lead. Say what you will against him, the man knew the country. First, guided by the general lay of the land, he led us down the hill, through rocks and brush, straight to a stream where we drank and—warned by Arnold Lamont —fought against the temptation to drink more than a tiny fraction of what we desired.

Revived by the plunge into water, we turned and followed O'Hara up the stream-bed, bending low so that no onlooker could see us, climbed a great precipitous hill down which the stream tumbled in noisy cascades that hid every sound of our flight, drank again, and kept on up into the rocks away from the water. Not daring to raise our heads above the dry bed of the rainy-season torrent along which we now hurried, we never once looked back down the slope up which we had toiled, panting and puffing and reeling; but behind us, far behind us now, we could hear the shrieks and yells of the disappointed savages, who, having outflanked the timber into which we disappeared, and having wasted many minutes in beating through it, a manoeuvre that their wholesome respect for our firearms had much delayed, had now come out on the brow of the rocky declivity leading down to the creek, and were losing much time, if we could judge by their clamor, in arguing which way we were likely to have gone.

I wonder if the whole performance to which we owed our lives was not characteristic of the natives of the African coast? If therein did not lie just the difference between a people so easily led into slavery and a people that never, whatever their weaknesses have been, have yielded to their oppressors? It all happened long ago, and it was my only acquaintance with black warfare; but surely we could never thus have thrown American Indians off the scent.

It seemed to me, then, that we had made good our escape and could run straight for the river, and in my enthusiasm I said as much. But Arnold and Abe Guptil shook their heads, and O'Hara significantly raised his hand. "Hark!"

I listened, and realized that an undertone of sound, which I had heard without noticing it, as one hears a clock ticking, was the rumble of drums miles and miles away. While I listened, another drum far to the north took up the grim throbbing note, then another to the east. Then, mingling with the swelling voice of all the drums,—how many of them there were, or in how many villages, I had not the vaguest notion,—I heard human voices down the hill on our right, and after a time other voices down the hill on our left. I then knew that however stupid our pursuers might seem, to reach the river was no such easy task as I had hoped.

For an hour we lay hidden among the rocks, with the world spread out before us in the moonlight. Here and there were small points of fire, which shone as if they were stars reflected on water,—we knew, of course, that there was no water, and that they must, therefore, be lights of village or camp,—and twice, at a distance of half a mile, men passed with torches. But for the most part we lay shoulder to shoulder, with only the moon and the twinkling points of light to awaken our meditations.

I thought of Uncle Seth dead in the grass by the spring down to which he had gone so bravely. I thought of the hut in which, so far as we knew, still lay the skeleton and the bag of pebbles. And while I was thinking thus, I heard to the southeast the sound of gunshots.

First came several almost together like a volley, then another and another, then two or three more, and after that, at intervals, still others.

O'Hara looked first at the sky and then in the direction of the shooting. "They're attacking a trader's caravan," he said. "There'll be white men in it, surely. The thing for us to do, my lads, is to join up with them. They'll have food."

"Aye, but how?" asked Gleazen.

As if in answer to his question,—a terribly discouraging answer!—we heard, when we stopped to listen, coming up to us out of the night from every side, near and far, the throbbing of drums.

"Aye, 'how?'" O'Hara repeated.

"Can we not," I asked, "work down toward them and break through the blacks?"

"The war has gone to the coast by now, and they are attacking all comers. But it's us they're keen on the trail of, all because Bull built his house on a king's grave and a blithering idiot killed a devil. 'Tis true, Joe. If we could work down toward them, come three o'clock in the morning, it might happen even as you say."

There were no torches, now, to be seen; no voices were to be heard. There were only the fixed lights shining like stars and the steadily throbbing drums. Whether or not, back on our trail, the blacks were still hunting for us, we did not know; but by all signs that we could see, they were settling quietly down for the remainder of the night.

"And if it don't happen like you say," O'Hara added as an afterthought, "we'll be nearer the river surely, and there may be hope for us yet."

At that he looked at Gleazen and smiled, and Gleazen softly laughed and nudged Matterson, at which Matterson swore, because Gleazen's elbow had touched a wound. Then they all three looked at one another and laughed; and remembering the board in the centre of the hut and the law that neither side should trespass on the part allotted to the other, I heartily wished that we had another such board and another such law. We had agreed upon our truce under the stress of great danger. Take away that danger, I thought, and there would be nothing to keep the old coals of hate from springing into flame anew.

Down from the hilltop we went, slowly picking our way among the boulders, to still another brawling stream at the foot. There we drank and waited and reconnoitred, and finally, convinced that we were in no immediate danger, pushed on after our guide, O'Hara.

He first led us down the ravine and through a wild and wooded country; but within two miles the sound of drums, which had become louder and nearer, warned us of a village ahead, and, leaving the stream, we climbed a hill, passed through scattered patches of plantains and yams, from which we took such food as would dull the edge of our hunger, came down again into dense timber, worked our way through it, and emerged at last into an open space above a broad plain.

And all this long way faithful Abe Guptil had half carried, half dragged the great body of Matterson, who fought hard to keep up with the rest of us and strove to regain the strength that his wound had taken from him, but who despite his bravest efforts, still was sadly weak.

As well as we could judge by the interminable drumming, there were villages on our right and on our left and behind us. By the stars we estimated that it was still an hour before dawn, and by lights on the plain we guessed at the location of the camp of which we had come in search.

We had already wandered so far from the road by which we had come to the mountain, that it seemed as if only a miracle could bring us back to the place on the river where we had left our boat; but in that respect O'Hara was no mean worker of miracles, for his years in Africa had given him an uncanny judgment of direction and distance.

"Yonder will be the river," he said, pointing slightly to the left; "and yonder will surely be the camp where we heard guns firing. Below there'll be a road and the camp will be on the road. I know this place; I've been here before."

With that he once more plunged down the steep declivity and through a growth of scrubby trees to a great prairie, where, even as he had said, a road ran in the direction that our journey led us. Fire not long since had burned over the meadow, and spears of grass from fifteen to twenty feet high had fallen across the road and tangled and twisted so that most of the time we had to bend almost double as we walked. But in that early morning hour there were no travelers on the road except occasional deer, which went dashing off through the grass; and it crossed many streams into which we plunged our hot faces. With water for our thirst and plantains for our hunger, we fared on, until, just as dawn was breaking, we came in sight of the red coals of a fire.

O'Hara raised his hand and we stopped. "The niggers are ahead of us," he whispered. "Beyond the niggers will be the caravan surely, and beyond the caravan there'll be more niggers."

"The question, then, my friends," said Arnold, slowly, "is whether to go round them and on alone, or to go through the blacks and take our chances on a friendly reception from whoever is camping just ahead."

"That," said O'Hara, "is the question."

"There's no doubt but they're traders," Gleazen muttered. "We'll have to fight before we reach the river. The more on our side, the merrier, I say, when it comes to fighting."

By our silence we assented.

Arnold raised his hand. "It is by surprise, gentlemen, or not at all. Are you ready?"

Breathing hard, we pressed closer together.

"Quickly, then! Together, and with speed!"

Arnold's voice snapped out the orders as if we were a company of military. There was something so commanding, so martial, in his manner and carriage, yet something that fitted him so well and seemed so much a part of his old, calm, taciturn, wise way, that I felt a sudden new wonder at him, a feeling that, well though I thought I had known him, I never had known him.

Then, brought all at once into action by the energy and force of his command, as was every one of the others, I started at the word as did they. Together we ran straight through the camp of sleeping blacks,—so strong was Matterson's spirit, so great his eagerness, that he now kept pace with us almost without help,—straight past the coals of their campfire, over the remnants of their evening meal, over their weapons and shields strewn in the road, and on toward their picket-line. As they woke behind us, bewildered, and groped to learn the cause of the sudden disorder, and realized what was happening, and started up with angry cries, we leaped, one after another, actually leaped, over a black sentry nodding at his post, over a frail barrier that they had thrown up to conceal their movements, and charged down upon a threatening stockade behind which lay the caravan.

That the caravan kept better watch than their besiegers, we learned first of all; for even as we leaped the barricade and came racing down the road, a gun went off in our faces and a cry of warning called the defenders from their sleep.

"Don't shoot!" O'Hara yelled. "We're white men! Don't shoot!"

All now depended on the men of that caravan. Were they friends or foes, honest men or thieves, we had cast the dice, and on that throw our fate waited.

I heard Gleazen bellowing in Spanish and Arnold Lamont calling in French; then up I came with Matterson and Abe to the crude, hasty rampart of mud and grass, and over I tumbled upon a man who cried out in amazement and raised his gun to strike me down, only to desist at the sight of my white face, which was no whiter than his own. Arnold was ahead of me; Gleazen and Matterson came in, almost at the same moment; then came Abe; and last of all, dumb with terror, O'Hara, who had tripped and fallen midway between the two barricades and had narrowly escaped perishing at the hands of the negro guards.

In we came and about we turned, side by side with the strange whites, and when the hostile spearmen showed signs of rushing upon us, we gave them balls from musket and pistol to remember us by, and they faltered and drew back. But that the end was not yet in sight the thudding of their drums and the growing chorus of their angry yells unmistakably told us.

"Ha! Dey t'ink dey git us yet," one of the strangers cried, hearing me speak to Arnold in English. "Dis one beeg war. Where he start, who know? Dey fight, how dey fight! Dey come down upon us—whee! Gun, spear—when we start we have feefty slave. Ten we loos' before war hit us so we know and hit back. Ha! Dis one beeg war!"

"How far, tell me," gasped O'Hara, "has the fighting gone?"

"Leesten!" The stranger lifted his hand. "Hear dem drum? One here—one dar—one five mile 'way—one ten mile 'way! Oh, ev'ywhere dem drum! Hear dem yell! How far dis war gone—dis war gone clean to Cuba! Dis one beeg war, by damn!"

"Has the war," I cried, "reached the mission on the river?"

"Ha! You t'ink you see dat meession, hey? Dat meession, he fall down long since time, I'll bet. One good t'ing dat war he do."

If only I had never seen the girl by the river, I thought. If only I could have forgotten her! I turned away. Yet even then I would not have spared one iota of my brief memories of that girl with the strong, kind face and quiet voice. If I never saw her again, I still had something to hold fast. How many times, since Seth Upham went down to die by the spring, had I thought of that girl as one of the few people whom I should be glad to see again, and how many times had I wished that she did not think so ill of me!

"Tell me, you man, where from you come?" the stranger now asked. "You come pop! So! Whee!"

At that Gleazen spoke in Spanish, and the man turned like a cat taken unawares and looked at him with shrewd, keen eyes. Then Matterson came up to them and likewise began to talk in Spanish, and others crowded round them.

Arnold, after listening for a moment, drew me to one side. "See," he murmured.

Following his gesture, I looked around the camp and saw, in the middle of the clearing, thirty or forty cowering negroes bound fast by bamboo withes. Behind them and mingling with them were bullocks and sheep and goats. Moving restlessly about in the light of earliest morning were numbers of male and female slaves; and on every side were baled hides and bundles of merchandise: ivory, rice, beeswax, and even, it was whispered, gold.

"I fear, my friend," Arnold said in an undertone, "that our hosts are more to the taste of Gleazen than of ourselves."

"You have heard them talking," I whispered. "Tell me what they said."

"Only," replied Arnold, "that we have a ship and they have a cargo; that it will be to our mutual advantage to join forces."

I looked again at the captive negroes, and again thought of the girl at the mission and of the evil that she had attributed to me.

"To join forces," I said,—and in my excitement I spoke aloud,—"in trading human beings? Not that!"

The others turned.

"What are you two talking about?" Matterson asked quickly in his light voice.

"Of one thing and another," I replied, flushing.

"Come," said Gleazen, boldly, "let us all talk together."

"Dis one beeg war!" the trader cried. "To fight—eet is all we can do. Fighting we go, da's what me, I say. See! Sun, he come up!"

"To that," said Arnold, "we all agree. We, sir, will go with you and fight by your side."

"Good! Me, I's happy. You brave men. Dis one beeg war, but we make plenty war back again."

Then he cried out orders in Spanish, and the camp woke to the activities of the new day; and while some of us held off the blacks, the rest of us ate our morning meal in the first golden sunlight of the dawn, with a hum and bustle of packing and harnessing and herding going on around us.

But all the time the drums beat, and far away we would hear now and then calls and shouts that made the strange trader and Gleazen and O'Hara exchange significant glances.

As with loaded muskets we fell in to guard the caravan, and the porters lifted their bundles, and the herders goaded their beasts, and the captive negroes started hopelessly on the road to the river, and the sudden hush of voices made the trample of feet seem three times louder than before, we heard guns behind us.

"Ha! Dose trade gun, hey?" the trader cried, and fell into Spanish.

Wheeling his horse, he anxiously looked back along the road.

One thing for which we had crossed the sea was lost in a hut overrun by an army of vengeful savages. There was no fortune left for us, I knew, unless it were a fortune gained by bartering human souls; and at that, which lay at the real bottom of all Neil Gleazen's schemes, my heart revolted. What chance should we have had of saving for Seth Upham his ship and what money was left, even if he had lived? Small chance, I admitted.

All day we drove on in a forced march, leaving the war to all appearances far behind us and stopping only at noon, by a clear cold stream in the forest, to eat a hasty meal; and at nightfall, crossing another stretch of prairie, we came to still another forest.

"Here," the trader cried, "here ees one fine leetle river! Here we camp one leetle while! Den we go—like fire—when midnight come, mebbe we see one beeg river!"

That we, who had come the night before from the house on the king's grave, were ready to rest, I can assure you. Never in all my life have I been so heavy with weariness, nay, with downright exhaustion, as on that evening at the edge of that African forest.

The very beasts were weary after the long day's march. The trader's horse hung its head. The bullocks and goats and sheep plodded on before their noisy herders and scarcely quickened their pace at thrust of goad or snap of whip. The captive negroes, wretched creatures doomed to the horrors of the infamous middle passage in the hold of some Cuban or Brazilian slave-ship, wearily dragged along, their chins out-thrust, their hands lashed behind them. The traders' own slaves, bending under the weight of hides and rice and ivory, stumbled as they walked, and even the white men themselves, who had done nothing more than ride or walk over the road, breathed hard and showed drawn faces as they eagerly pushed on or apprehensively looked back.

Into the woods we pressed, thanking in our hearts the Divine Providence that here at least there was no throb of drum, no howling of black heathen, no war at all. The aisles between the great trees were cool and green and inviting. The river rippled over rocks and suggested by its music the luxury of bathing; fruits were to be had for the picking, and there was no doubt in my mind that our hosts would butcher a sheep for the evening meal.

Water, food, and sleep at that moment seemed more desirable than all the dominions of Africa; and water, food, and sleep, I was confident, were but now at hand. Into the forest we marched, for once relaxing the watchfulness that we had maintained since sunrise, and down the trail to the creek that we could hear murmuring on its way over the rocks and through the underbrush. And there, at the end of our long day's journey, the bushes suddenly blossomed in flame.

Guns boomed in our very faces. Up and down the creek fire flashed in long spurts. The wind brought to our nostrils the stinging smell of powder-smoke. Men and beasts were thrown into wild confusion. In the dim light of the forest I saw coming at us from all sides, naked men armed with trade guns and bows and spears and lances. Louder than the shouts and curses behind us, rang the exultant yells before us.

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CHAPTER XXVIII
DOWN THE CURRENT

When I was a boy in school, I one day ran across a translation of Homer's Iliad and carried it home and read it afternoons for a week. During those days I lived in the great pictures of the battles on the plains of Troy, and though afterwards I had seldom thought of them, they had never quite faded from my memory.

It was far indeed from Homer's Iliad to an ambush in an African forest; but the fight that ensued when we walked into that hornets' nest of black warriors nevertheless brought Homer's story vividly to my mind. The spears, I think, suggested the resemblance; or perhaps the wild swiftness of the fight. First an arrow came whistling through the air and struck one of the men on the throat and went through his neck half the length of the shaft. He spun round, spattering me with dark blood that ran from a severed vein, and went down under the feet of the bullocks without a word. Then the bullocks turned, stampeded by the sight and smell of blood, and crowded back upon the sheep and goats, and the porters dropped their burdens and tried to run. O'Hara threw up his musket and shattered the skull of a huge black who came at him with a knife like the blade of a scythe, and, himself stooping to pick up the knife, grappled with another and died, shrieking, from a spear-thrust up under the ribs. Then one of the porters hurled a bundle at a man who was about to cut him down, and the bundle broke and a shower of yellow gold scattered in front of us, whereupon there was a short, fierce rush for plunder.

Side by side with Arnold Lamont and Gleazen, emptying my pistol into the crowd, I saw out of the corner of my eye that the blacks were cutting their way into the heart of the caravan for slaves and booty.

Imagine, if you can, that motley horde which had rushed upon us out of the wood. Some, naked except for loin cloths, brandished spears and howled like enraged maniacs; some, in queer quilted armor and helmets with ostrich plumes, clumsily wielded trade muskets; some advanced boldly under the cover of shields and others, ranging through the underbrush, kept up a desultory flight of arrows. It was primitive, unorganized, ferocious war.

"Mon dieu, what a spectacle!" Arnold exclaimed; then, "Now, my friends, quick! To the left! While the thieves steal, we yet may escape!"

Up from the mÊlÉe, streaked with blood and dust, now came the trader. "All, all ees gone!" he wailed, and waved his arms and shrieked and stamped and cursed and jabbered on in Spanish.

Had our enemies been content to delay their plundering until they had killed us all, not one of us would have escaped to tell the true story of that bloody day. But at the sight of a rich caravan and loose gold, the blacks, in the twinkling of an eye, were fighting among themselves.

"Quick!" again cried Arnold's voice, strangely familiar in the midst of that grotesquely unreal uproar, and as amazingly precise as ever. "Quick, gentlemen! It is our only chance."

And with that, he, Gleazen, Matterson, the trader, Abe, and I took to our heels into the bushes. The woods behind the line of the ambush appeared to be deserted. At the foot of a ravine ran the creek. We crossed it by a rude bridge of branches, hastily and silently climbed the opposite bank, and stole off quite unobserved.

A hundred yards farther on, at the sound of a great thrash and clatter, we dove into the undergrowth and lay hidden while a band of blacks tore past us to the scene of battle. But getting hastily up as soon as they were out of sight, we resumed our headlong retreat.

Every bush and tree darkly threatened us. Great rocks, deeply clothed in moss and tumbled so together as to form damp holes and caves, at once tempted us by their scores of hiding-places and filled us with apprehension lest natives might have hidden there before us. But as if we were playing the old game of follow-my-leader, we scrambled up and down, and in and out, and always hard ahead, until we again heard before us a rumble of voices and pounding feet, and a second time, desperately, flung ourselves into the undergrowth and lay all atremble while half a hundred naked negroes, armed with bows and clubs and spears, came trotting, single file, like wolves, and passed us not fifty feet away.

As they disappeared, and while we still dared not move, I saw something stir not five English cubits from my face. I caught my breath and stared at the thing. Ten feet ahead of it; the leaves and ferns rustled, and twenty feet ahead of it then, twitching, it disappeared. I broke out from head to foot in sweat. Unwittingly, we had thrown ourselves down within hand's reach of a great serpent. Whether or not newly gorged, and so too sleepy to resent our nearness, it moved slowly away through the quivering undergrowth.

When we had put a mile between ourselves and the plundered caravan, Matterson turned with an oath. "Poor Bud!" he said in his hard, light voice. "At least, we'll hear no more of jujus and devils and king's graves."

Gleazen shrugged and turned to the trader. "How far is the river?" he asked.

"Mebbe one mile—mebbe two."

"Do you, sir, know the road?" Arnold asked.

The trader nodded and spread his hands as if in despair. "Know heem? I know heem, yes! T'ree, ten, fifty time I come with slave and ivory and hide—now all gone! Forty prime slave all gone! Ev'ytheeng gone!"

Gleazen grunted.

"Let us go to the river," said Arnold.

"Heem reever go by town," wailed the trader. "Heem beeg town! Walls so high and strong!"

"Ah, that is another matter," said Arnold. "But let us go forward at all events. We may, for all that we can tell, strike the river below the town."

So forward we went in the darkness, and a slow, tedious journey it was, particularly for Abe and me, who helped Matterson along as best we could; but we avoided the town by the sound of drumming that issued from behind its walls, and having helped ourselves to fruit from the patches of cultivated land that we passed, we at last emerged from the darkness of the woods into the half light of a great clearing, and saw a vast, black, living surface on which strange lights played unsteadily. It seemed unbelievable that it really could be the same river that we had left so long ago,—in the sense of all that had happened, so very long ago,—and yet I knew, as I watched Gleazen and Matterson, that it must be the same. The black, swift current recalled to my mind the toil that we had expended in coming so far to so little purpose. In which direction the creek lay that we had entered on our way to the ill-fated hut, I had not the remotest idea; but I looked a long time downstream toward the mission.

Bearing around in a rough half-circle, we worked slowly down the bank, until the walls of the town itself were before us, at a safe distance.

"Our boat," said Matterson, grimly, "is fifty miles away."

"Wait here," said I. "There'll be canoes under the town. I'll get one."

Gleazen made a motion as if to go himself, but Arnold shook his head. "No; let Joe go first. He will learn where the canoes are, and do it more quietly than we."

They all sat down by the edge of the water, and, leaving them, I went on alone. It took all the courage I could muster; but having rashly offered, I would not hesitate.

For one thing, it gave me time to think, and in a sense I desired to think, although in another sense it came to me that I was more afraid of my own thoughts than of all the walled towns in Africa. The living nightmare through which we had passed had left me worn in body and mind. That Uncle Seth, upon whom once I had placed every confidence, should have died so tragic a death, now brought me a fresh burst of sorrow, as if I realized it for the first time. It seemed to me that I could hear his sharp yet kindly voice speaking to me of little things in our life at Topham. I thought of one episode after another in those earlier days, some of them, things that had happened while my mother was alive; others, things that had happened after her death; all, things that I had almost forgotten long before. My poor uncle, I thought for the hundredth time—my poor, poor uncle!

Then suddenly another thought came to me and I straightened up and stood well-nigh aghast. By the terms of my uncle's will, of which more than once he had told me, all that had been his was mine!

The river silently swept down between its high banks, past me who stood where the waves licked at my feet, past the black walls of the town, which stood like a sentinel guarding the unknown fastnesses of the continent of Africa, past high hill and low gravel shoal and bottomless morass, past pawpaw and pine palm and mangrove, to the mission and the sea.

There I stood, as still as a statue, until after a long time I remembered my errand and, like one just awakened, continued on my way.

I found a score of canoes drawn up on the beach under the town, and very carefully placing paddles by one that was large enough for our entire party, I cautiously returned to the others and reported what I had done. Together we all slipped silently along the shore to the canoes, launched the one that I had chosen, and with a last glance up at the pointed roofs of the houses and the sharpened pickets of the stockade, silently paddled, all unobserved, out on the strong current and went flying down into the darkness.

It had been one thing to row up stream against that current. It was quite another, and vastly easier, even though three of us were entirely ignorant of handling such a canoe, to paddle down the swift waters of midstream. Exerting always the greatest care to balance the ticklish wooden craft, which the blacks with their crude adzes had hewn out of a solid log, we sent it, even by our clumsy efforts, fairly flying past the trees ashore; and as it seemed that we had struck the river many miles below the creek where we had left our boat, we had hopes that the one night would bring us within striking distance of the open sea. Indeed, I found myself watching every point and bend, in hope that the mission lay just beyond it.

Estimating that daylight was still two hours away, we drew in shore at Gleazen's suggestion, to raid a patch of yams or plantains.

"A man," he said arrogantly, but with truth, "can't go forever on an empty stomach."

Luckless venture that it was—no sooner did the canoe grate on the beach than a wakeful woman in a hut on the bank set up a squealing and squalling. As we put out again incontinently into the river, we heard, first behind us, then also ahead of us, the roll of those accursed native drums.

To this very day I abhor the sound of drumming. It has a devilishly haunting note that I cannot escape; and small wonder.

We swept on down the current, but now, here and there, the river-banks were alive with blacks, and always the booming of drums ran before us, to warn the country that we were coming. Once, as we passed a wooded point, a spear flew over our heads and went hissing into the water, and I was all for putting over to the other bank. But Arnold, who could use his eyes and ears as well as his head, cried, "No! Watch!"

All at once, under the dark bank of the river, there was screaming and splashing and floundering. The torches that immediately flared up revealed what Arnold, and now the rest of us, expected to see, but they also revealed indistinctly another and more dreadful sight: on the shore, running back and forth in great excitement, were many men; but in the troubled water a negro was struggling in vain to escape from the toils of a huge serpent, which was wrapping itself round him and dragging him down into the river where it had been lying in wait.

To me, even though I knew that that very negro had been watching for a chance to waylay us, the sight of the poor fellow's horrible death almost overcame me.

Not so with Matterson and Gleazen.

With a curse, Matterson cried, "There's one less of them now." His light voice filled me with loathing.

And Gleazen softly laughed.

On down the river we went, with flying paddles, and round a bend. But as we passed the bend, I looked back, and saw coming after us, first one canoe, then two, then six, then so many that I lost all count.

How far we had come in that one night, I had little or no idea; but it was easy to see by the attitude of those who knew the river better than I, that the end of our journey was close at hand. Glancing round at our pursuers, Gleazen spoke in an undertone to Matterson, and both they and the trader studied the shore ahead of us.

"A scant ten miles," Gleazen muttered; "only ten miles more."

I felt the heavy dugout leap forward under the fierce pull of our paddles. The water turned away from the bow in foam, and we fairly outrode the current. But fast though we were, the war fleets behind us were faster. By the next bend they had gained a hundred yards, by the next, another hundred. We now led them by a scant quarter of a mile, and if Gleazen had estimated our distance rightly, they would have had us long before we could reach port. But suddenly, all unexpectedly, round the next bend, not half a mile away, the mission sprang into sight.

There it stood, in the early morning sun, as clean and cool and still as if it were a thousand miles away from Africa and all its wars.

"Give me your pistols," Arnold cried; and when we tossed them to him and in frantic haste resumed our paddling, he coolly renewed the priming and one by one fired them at our pursuers.

That the negroes had a gun we then learned, for they retorted by a single shot; but the shot went wild and the arrows that followed it fell short, and our pistols cooled their eagerness. So we swept in to the landing by the mission, and beached the canoe, and ran up the long straight path to the mission house as fast as we could go, while the black canoemen paused in midstream and let their craft swing with the current.

The place, as we came rushing up to it, was so quiet, so peaceful, so free from any faintest sign of the terrible days through which we had passed, that it seemed as if, after all, we had never left it; as if we were waking from a troubled sleep; as if we had spent a thousand years in the still, hazy heat of that very clearing. The face in the window, the opening door, only intensified that uncanny sense of familiarity.

The door opened, and the man we had seen before met us. His eyes were stern and inhospitable.

"What?" said he. "Must you bring your vile quarrels and vile wars to the very threshold of one whose whole duty here is to preach the word of God?"

"Those," cried Arnold, angry in turn, but as always, precise in phrase and enunciation, "are hard words to cast at strangers who come to your gate in trouble."

"Trouble, sir, of your own brewing," the missionary retorted. "What you have been up to, I do not know. Nor have I any wish to save your rascally necks from a fate you no doubt richly merit."

"Your words are inclusive," I cried.

"They certainly include you, young man. If you would not be judged by this company that you are keeping, you should think twice or three times before embarking with it."

"Father!" said a low voice.

My heart leaped, but I did not turn my head. Down the river, manned by warriors armed to the teeth, came more canoes of the war. Behind them were more,—and more,—and still more.

"Come, come, you sniveling parson," Gleazen bellowed, "where are your guns? Where's your powder? Come, arm yourself!"

The man turned on him with a look of scorn that no words of mine can properly describe.

"You have brought your dirty quarrel to my door," he said in a grim, hard voice. "Now do you wish me to fight your battles for you?"

Steadily, silently, the canoes were swinging inshore. I saw negroes running into the clearing. On my left I heard a cry so shrill and full of woe that it stood out, even amid the ungodly clamor of the blacks, and commanded my attention.

The man stepped down from the porch.

"This," he said, turning, "is a house of peace. I order you to leave it. I will go down and talk with these men myself."

"You'll never come back alive!" Matterson cried, and hoarsely laughed.

At that the missionary, John Parmenter, merely smiled, and, afraid of neither man nor devil, walked down toward the river and fell dead with a chance arrow through his heart.

There was something truly magnificent in his cold courage, and Gleazen paid him almost involuntary tribute by crying, "There, by heaven, went a brave man!"

But from the door of the house the girl suddenly ran out. Her face was deathly white and her voice shook, but as yet there were no tears in her eyes.

"Father!" she cried, and ran down the path, where occasional arrows still fell, and bent over the dead man.

"Come up, you little fool," Gleazen shouted. "Come back!" Then he jumped and swore, as an arrow with a longer flight than its fellows passed above his head.

The canoes were drawing in upon the shore, very cautiously, deliberately, grimly, in a great half-moon, and more of them were arriving at every moment.

I leaped from the porch and sped down beside the girl.

"Come," I cried, "you—we—can do nothing for him."

"Is it you?" she said. "You—I—go back!"

"Come," I cried hoarsely.

"Don't leave him here."

I bent over and lifted the body, and staggering under its weight, carried it up into the house and laid it on the couch in the big front room.

All this time the noise within and without the mission was deafening. The blacks on the river were howling with fury, and those ashore, who had not already fled to the woods, were wailing in grief and terror. Gleazen and Arnold Lamont had joined forces to organize a defense, the one raving at the arrant cowards who were fleeing from first sight of an enemy, while the other turned the place upside down in search of arms. And still the blacks on the river held off, probably for fear of firearms, though there were indications that as their numbers grew, they were screwing up their courage to decisive action.

The girl, suddenly realizing the object of Arnold's search, said quietly, "There are no weapons."

Arnold threw his hands out in a gesture of despair.

"If you wish to leave," she coldly said, "there is a boat half a mile downstream. You can reach it by the path that leads from the chapel. No one will notice you if you hurry."

"Then," I cried, "we'll go and you shall come with us."

Gleazen spoke to the trader in Spanish.

Abe Guptil was beside me now and Arnold behind me. We three, come what would, were united.

A louder yell than any before attracted our attention, and Matterson, who stood where he could see out of the window, called, "They're coming! Run, Neil, run!"

At that he turned and fled, with the others after him.

I stopped and looked into the girl's gray eyes.

"Come!" I cried, "in heaven's name, make haste!"

I had clean forgotten that the dead man by whom the girl was standing was her father; but her next words, which were spoken from deepest despair, reminded me of it grimly.

"I will not leave him," she said.

"You must!"

"I cannot."

"What," said I, "would he himself have had you do?"

Her determination faltered.

"Come! You cannot do anything more for him! Come."

She shook her head.

"Then I shall stay," I said.

"No," said she, and I saw that there was a change in her manner toward me. "You will go and I—I—"

Then she whistled and cried, "Paul! Paul!"

The great black Fantee servant whom I had seen with her in the canoe on that day when first we met, appeared suddenly.

"Come," she said.

I now saw that Arnold Lamont was running back to the door of the room.

"Quick!" he called. "Mon dieu, be quick!"

He stepped aside and let her go through the door first.

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CHAPTER XXIX
THE FIGHT AT THE LANDING

As we ran down the footpath, we heard them after us like hounds on the trail, and I tell you, it galled me to run from that cowardly pack. Oh, for one good fight, I thought! For a chance to avenge Seth Upham, who lay miles away beside the spring at the king's grave, to avenge the stern man who had fallen so bravely in front of the mission! For a chance to show the black curs that we would and could meet them, though the odds against us were a hundred to one! A chance to hold our own with them in defiance of their arms and numbers!

The hot pride of youth burned in my cheeks, and I was actually tempted to turn on them there and then; but now I thought of something besides myself, of something besides Seth Upham's rights and my own: I thought of the girl who ran ahead of me so lithely and easily. Be the hazards what they might, be the shame of our retreat ever so great, she must not, while one of us lived, be left to that herd at our heels.

So, running thus in headlong flight, out we came on the river bank.

There was a boat on the river, made fast to a peg on the bank, and there was a long canoe drawn up in the bushes. But at a great distance, where a narrow channel led through the mangroves, we saw titanic waves rolling on the bar in shining cascades from which the sun was brightly reflected, and which, one after another, hurled ton upon ton of water into a welter of foaming whirlpools. And over the lifting crests of the surf we saw, standing offshore, the topsails of a brig. The prospect of riding that surf in any boat ever built gave me, I confess without shame, a miserably sick feeling; and as if that were not enough, in through the mangroves to the shore in front of us shot three canoes of the war, and cut us off from the river.

Our time now had come to fight. With blacks behind us and blacks before us, we could no longer double and turn. The river, we knew, was alive with the canoes of the war. Already the black hornets were swarming through the woods and swamps around us. Three times now we had eluded them; this time we must fight. Our guns were lost and only pistols were left. No longer, as in that fatal hut on the king's grave,—in my heart I cursed the bull-headed stupidity of the man who built it and who had paid but a fraction of the price with his own life!—could we hold them at a distance by fear of firearms. Their frenzy by now brooked no such fear. To the brig, whose topsails we could descry miles off shore, we must win our way; there lay our only hope.

I thought of the voice of the wizard—"White man him go Dead Land." Verily to the door of his Dead Land we had come; and it seemed now that we must surely follow Bull and Seth Upham and Bud O'Hara and many another over the threshold.

"Men," said Arnold Lamont,—and his voice, calm, precise, cutting, brought us together,—"stones and clubs are not weapons to be despised in an encounter hand to hand."

"Have into 'em, then!" Gleazen gasped. "All hands together!"

"Mademoiselle," said Arnold, "keep close at our heels."

The girl was beside me now. Her eyes were wide, but her lips were set with a courage that rose above fear. "Come," she cried, and set my heart beating faster than ever, if it were possible, "they're upon us from the rear!" Then she spoke to her great negro in a language that I had never heard, and came close behind us when we charged down on the blacks ahead.

I fired my pistol and saw that the ball accounted for one of our enemies. I reeled from a glancing blow on the head, which knocked me to my knees; but, rising, I lifted a great rock on the end of a rope, which evidently the girl or her father had used for an anchor,—never negro tied that knot!—and swinging the huge weapon round my head, brought down one assailant with his shoulder and half his ribs broken. Now Arnold fired his pistol; now Matterson pitched, groaning, into the boat. Now, with my bare hand, I parried a spear-thrust and, again swinging my rock, killed a negro in his tracks.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw that the girl had shoved the canoe into the water. She was calling to us eagerly, but neither I nor the others could distinguish her words.

As Gleazen, with an oath, cut the painter of the boat and leaped into her, the impulse of his jump carried her ten feet out from shore; and instantly thrusting out the oars, he started to row away with Matterson and desert us.

"Come back, you yellow cur!" Arnold cried.

The trader, who had fought industriously but to no great purpose, now ran down the bank and, flinging himself full length into the river, caught the stern of the boat, with outstretched fingers, and dragged himself into her, and at the same moment Abe Guptil, obviously with the intention of holding the boat until the rest of us should have a chance to embark, too, not of saving himself, fought his own way aboard and, in spite of violent efforts to lay hands on the oars, was carried, protesting, away.

It is not to be thought that Gleazen had the remotest notion of saving our lives. Having got rid of Arnold and me, he could, as he very well knew, do what he pleased with the brig when once he had silenced Gideon North. But although he had every desire not to help us, he in truth did help us in very spite of himself: no sooner did he appear to be getting safely out into the river, than the blacks, who had us all but at their mercy, suddenly bent every effort to keep him, too, from escaping.

"Let them go! Let them go! Oh, will you not come this way?"

It was the girl again. There was not a drop of cowardly blood in her veins. She, in the bow of the canoe and her big black servant in the stern, held the craft against the bank.

Taking advantage of the momentary respite that we got while the enemy was putting after Gleazen, Arnold and I fairly trembling in our haste—Arnold missed his footing and plunged waist-deep into the river—climbed in after them.

All this, which has taken a long time to tell, happened like so many cracks of the whip. Each event leaped sharply and suddenly at the heels of another, so that it was really but a few seconds—at all events less than a minute—after our arrival at the shore when we found ourselves gliding swiftly and noiselessly through a tiny channel among the mangroves, of which Gleazen had never dreamed. A turn of the paddle carried us out of sight of the struggle behind us, and it now appeared that, once out of sight, we were likewise out of mind.

"Mademoiselle," said Arnold, with a manner at once so deferential and in itself so proud, that it puzzled me more than a little, "shall we not paddle? Permit me to take your place."

"Thank you, no," she said.

"It is not fitting—" he began.

"I know the canoe, the river and the surf," she said. "It is safer that I keep the paddle."

And to my surprise, as well as Arnold's, she did keep it and handled it in a way that would have shamed our efforts had we been permitted to try. It was a strange thing in those days, when most women laced tightly, and fainted gracefully if ever occasion required, and played at croquet and battledore and shuttlecock, to see a slender girl swing a paddle with far more than a man's deftness and skill to make up for what she lacked of a man's strength. But though she appeared so slender, so frail, there was that in her bearing which told us that her life in that wild place had given her muscles of steel. The big Fantee, too, drove the long craft ahead with sure, powerful strokes; so we shot out of the mangroves, out of the mouth of the river, into the full glare of the sun.

For a time the sails of the brig had grown small in the distance, but already we saw that she had come about and was standing in again. Why, I wondered, did Gideon North not anchor? Why should he indefinitely stand off and on? How long had he been beating back and forth, and how long would he continue to wait for us if we were not to come? We were long overdue at the meeting-place.

"To think," I said, "that now we can go home to Topham!"

"To Topham?" said Arnold. There was a question in his voice. "I should be surer of going home to Topham if we were rid of Gleazen. Also, my friend, we must ride that surf to the open sea."

The negro in the stern of the canoe now spoke up in gutturals.

"See!" Arnold cried.

Looking back up the river, we saw Gleazen and Abe Guptil, whom we had outdistanced by our short cut, now rowing madly downstream. Big and heavy though the boat was, they rowed with the strength that precedes despair, and sent her ploughing through the river with a wake such as a cutter might have left. In the stern beside the trader lay Matterson; and though his face, we could see, was streaked with blood, he menaced the negroes upstream with a loaded pistol. Arrows flew, and then a long spear hurtled through the air and struck the bow of the boat. But for all that, they bade fair to get clean away, and none of them appeared aware that we had slipped ahead of them in the race for life.

Now we in the canoe had come to the very edge of the surf, where the surge of the breakers swept past us in waves of foam. Beyond that surf was the open sea, the brig and safety. Behind it were more terrors than we had yet endured. For a moment the canoe hung motionless in the boiling surge; then, taking advantage of the outward flow and guided and driven by the hands of the great negro and the white, slender girl, she shot forward like a living creature, rose on the moving wall of an incoming wave, yielded and for a brief space drew back, then shot ahead once more and passed over the crest just before the wave curled and broke.

I heard a cry from behind us and knew that the others had discovered us ahead of them.

Turning, as we pitched on the heavy seas at a safe distance from the breakers, I watched them, too, row into the surf. I faintly heard Matterson's pistol spit, then I saw Gleazen drive the boat forward, saw her hesitate and swing round, lose way and go over as the next wave broke.

Then we saw them swimming and heard their cries.

As a mere matter of cold justice we should, I am convinced, have left that villainous pair, Matterson and Gleazen, to their fate. They had been ready enough to leave us to ours. Their whole career was sown with fraud, cruelty, brazen effrontery, and downright dishonesty. But even Arnold and I could scarcely have borne to do that, for the trader was guiltless enough according to his lights, and Abe Guptil was struggling with them in the water.

The girl, turning and looking back when she heard their shouts, spoke to the great negro in his own language. The canoe came about. Again we paused, waiting for a lull. Then we shot back on the crest of a wave, back down upon the overturned boat, and within gunshot of the flotilla of canoes that were spreading to receive us.

As we passed the wallowing boat I leaned out and caught Gleazen's hands and drew him up to the canoe. The negro cried a hoarse warning, and the canoe herself almost went over; but by as clever use of paddles as ever man achieved, the girl and the negro brought us up on an even keel, and Arnold and I lifted Gleazen aboard, half drowned, and gave a hand to Abe Guptil, who had made out to swim to the canoe. Of Matterson and the trader we saw no sign.

Then Abe, himself but newly rescued, gave a lurch to starboard, and with a clutch at something just under water, was whipped, fiercely struggling to prevent it, clean overboard.

We could neither stop nor turn; either would have been suicide. Would we or would we not, we went past him and left him, and drove on in the wash of the breaking waves down upon the grim line of canoes.

To them we must have seemed a visitation. When I sit alone in the dark I can see again in memory, very clearly, that white girl, her eyes flashing, that great, black Fantee, his bared teeth thrust out between his thick lips. The long breakers were roaring as they swept across the bar and crashed at slow intervals behind us. In those seething waters the fiercest attack would have been futile; the very tigers of the sea must have lain just beyond the wash of the surf, as did the war. To one who has never seen a Fantee on his native coast, the story that I tell of that wild canoe-ride may seem incredible. It was an appalling, horrifying thing to those of us who were forced passively to endure it, who a dozen times were flung to the very brink of death. And yet every word is true. Though I could scarce draw breath, so swiftly did we escape one danger only to meet another, the big black, trained from childhood to face every peril of the coast, with the white girl paddling in the bow, brought the canoe through the surf and shipped no more than a bucket of water. And then that negro and that slim girl turned in the surge, as coolly as if there were no enemy within a thousand miles, and started back, out again through the surf, to the Adventure.

Were we thus, I thought, to lose Abe Guptil, whom but now we had rescued—good old Abe Guptil, into whose home I had gone long since with the sad news that had forced him to embark with us on Gleazen's mad quest? The thunder of the seas was so loud that I could only wait—no words that I might utter could be heard a hand's-breadth away.

For a moment the canoe hung motionless on the racing waters as a hummingbird hangs in the air, then she shot ahead; and up from the sea, directly in her path, came a tangle of bodies. Leaning out, Arnold and I laid hands on Abe and Matterson; and while the negro held the canoe in place, the girl herself reached back and caught that rascal of a trader by the hair. Now tons of water broke around us and the canoe half filled. Now the big negro, by the might of his single paddle, drove us forward. The wash of water caught us up and carried us on half a cable's length; the negro again fairly lifted us by his great strength; we went in safety over the crest of the next wave, then as we drew the last of the three into the canoe, we began to pitch in the heavy swell of the open sea.

With our backs turned forever on the war, we paddled out to meet the brig. Our great quest had failed. We had left a trail of dead men, plundered goods, and a broken mission. But though all our hopes had gone wrong, though Gleazen had lost all that he sought, there was that in his face as he lay sick and miserable in the canoe which told me that he had other strings for his bow; and when I looked up at the brig, I vowed to myself that I would defend my own property with as much zeal as I would have defended my uncle's.

"See!" Arnold whispered. "Yonder is a strange ship!"

I saw the sail, but I thought little of it at the time. I had grown surprisingly in many ways, but to this very day I have not acquired Arnold Lamont's wonderful power to appraise seemingly insignificant events at their true value.

I only thought of how glad I was to come at last to the shelter of the brig Adventure, how strangely glad I was to have brought off the girl from the mission.

And when we came up under the side of the brig and saw honest Gideon North and all the others on deck looking down at us, the girl let her paddle slide into the water and bent her head on her hands and cried.

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