“But what was the object of it all?” I demanded. I had found it impossible to free even one hand.
“Arthur was my elder brother,” said Evan amiably. “Consequently, being English, he had all the money in the family. I do not like West Africa. If I disposed of Arthur, I could go back to England and live with some comfort. I thought of shooting him and calling it an accident, but people would talk, you know. When he came here with his tale of being followed by a gorilla, I saw the possibilities. When I heard you people were coming up, I saw I would have witnesses. My idea was to convince you of the presence of a gorilla, break Arthur’s neck precisely as I did this afternoon, and return to England. I rather thought I would be able to comfort Alicia, in time.”
Alicia shuddered. Evan grinned at her.
“I shall comfort you, Alicia, but presently. My people will return, Murray and your estimable chaperon will be disposed of, and you and I will escape precariously to Ticao, telling the tale of hairbreadth escapes during the uprising of my natives and during the trip.”
“Never!” said Alicia desperately.
“Oh, yes.” Evan was polite, but there was evil determination in his tone. “You never cared much for Arthur, and I more than suspect you’re in love with Murray. You’ll do as I say for his sake.”
There was mute interrogation in my expression.
“Not to save your life, of course, Murray,” Evan hastened to assure me. “I really can’t allow you to spread tales of what happened up here. She’ll be pleasant to make sure that you depart this life, er—comfortably.”
Alicia looked at me in despair.
Evan glanced out the window. “Not time for me to start off yet,” he remarked. “They’ll have to go down and worship me when I turn up in this little fixing.” He indicated the gorilla-head mask in his hand. “Is there anything that isn’t clear to you?”
“I don’t understand anything,” I said.
“I’ll begin at the beginning, in your own fashion. Let’s see. Biheta. You remember you were here the night she was installed in the casa? One of my servants had been insolent. I sent word to the village that Biheta was to be sent here to take the other’s place. She was frightened, and the juju ceremony you saw was for the purpose of heartening her for the time she would spend in proximity to my godlike person. When the other servants left, by my orders, she was too stupid to go with them. She was perpetually frightened, anyway. You see, she saw me dispose of the servant that had been insolent. Jujutsu is useful. I’ll show you how to break a neck.” He started to rise, then sank back in his chair. “Come to think of it, I need you to convince Alicia that she had better do as I tell her. You will depart this life tomorrow. As I was saying, Biheta stayed behind when she should have cleared out with the others. So, in the middle of the night, while on guard, I went into her room, wearing my mask. I made a noise, she woke, saw me—and that was the end of that. The photograph of the retina of her eye showed the face of this mask. Rather clever idea, don’t you think?”
“Very,” I admitted.
“Thanks.” Evan smiled sarcastically. “Well, Arthur just imagined he heard the beast following him through the trees. He shot at nothing, when you and he went down to explore the village. My own ‘encounter’ with the animal when I started off in the jungle alone was purely imaginary. I scratched my own face and jabbered like the gorilla myself. Like this—”
He emitted a succession of incredible sounds, so beastlike and ferocious in their tones that I could hardly believe it was not an animal uttering them. There was a peculiar echo from the bush outside.
“The dogs were excited in the storeroom,” Evan went on easily, “because they could smell the fur of the mask I kept in a small box in there. When I told that wild tale of a hairy arm reaching in at the window and dragging the dog out, to fling it with a broken neck into the courtyard, I need not say that I had done the killing. And my ‘seeing’ the gorilla on the roof was more fiction. Of course he wasn’t there at dawn. I was laughing in my sleeve at you people all night long, while we patrolled the courtyard. The silhouette of the gorilla’s head you two saw on the window curtain was the shadow of your humble servant. I had decided that the play had gone far enough. The presence of the gorilla had been proved. The three of you, my present audience, would corroborate my story of the gorilla’s having killed Arthur. I was on my way to break his neck. You nearly got me that time, and I had to kill the dog to get away. Then the natives got out of hand. I could have stopped them by a simple appearance, but you people would have missed me. I waited until they were near the house, then rushed out in my mask, snarling and raging at them, and they ran. After that I hid the mask quickly and pretended to you that I had been knocked down. It was really very simple. With the natives quieted for a few days, I simply carried out my plans to dispose of Arthur. I’m sorry I’ll have to put you two out of the way, but Arthur’s dead, I’m his heir, I’m going to marry Alicia and become a country gentleman in England, and I can’t let you two people talk.”
“You’ll never dare take me to England,” said Alicia, desperately white.
“You’ll marry me, Alicia,” said Evan coolly. “You won’t split. When you see the preparations my natives will make for the entertainment of Murray and Mrs. Braymore, you’ll swear to anything, and you’ll marry me when we get to Ticao. You’ll corroborate my tales of a slave uprising, too. You don’t know what can be done to Murray, and will be done before he dies, unless you do as I say.”
Alicia moistened her lips. I saw her half close her eyes.
Evan laughed. “It’s about time for me to call on my natives. This will be our wedding night, Alicia. One of the local witch doctors will marry us, and the ceremony will be repeated when we get to Ticao. Murray and Mrs. Braymore will be kept alive until tomorrow lest you refuse to go through with the ceremony. If you hesitate, I dare say I’ll be able to make up your mind for you. Too bad I’ll have to kill the other two, though.” He strolled over to the door. “I’ll call up my natives. You’ll hear the gorilla again.”
Derisively he opened his lips and from them issued a strange cry, that I had heard once before. It was the challenge of a bull ape to battle. And—good Heaven! It was answered!
There was a snarl behind him. He turned with a gasp. There on the veranda, leaping toward him, he saw, not a masquerading white man, posing as a jungle god, but a colossal gorilla in actuality, gnashing its teeth in rage, and with its huge, hairy arms outstretched.
I shall remember Evan’s shriek when the beast seized him, to the end of my days. Sometimes, even now, I start up at midnight with the echo of it in my ears. For one instant the two figures were outlined against the fading light of the sky. Then the ferocious fangs buried themselves in Evan’s throat and the beast leaped clumsily to the ground, bearing the still-struggling body in its immensely muscled arms.
We heard the sounds from the courtyard, sounds at whose meaning I do not wish to guess. And then our ears rang with the horrible, incredible, terrifying scream of a gorilla that has made a kill.
CHAPTER X
AT THE PADRE’S.
We passed through the night somehow. Alicia, half dead with terror, managed clumsily to release me, but weak as I was from loss of blood, we dared attempt nothing that night.
In the morning the great ape was gone. I might as well say now that I believe that it was the same animal that had trailed Arthur, and which Arthur had gravely wounded some two weeks before our arrival.
For three weeks it had hidden while the wound healed, and then came cautiously toward the casa again. It heard Evan’s first beastlike cries, and its response was probably the queer echo I had thought I heard from the bush. It crept forward, and when Evan derisively uttered the challenge cry of the monster anthropoids, it had leaped to the attack.
Limited as is the intelligence of the creatures, it would never distinguish between white men. A white man had ki
lled its mate. It had killed a white man. With the blood lust sated, by now the shaggy brute was doubtless swinging rapidly through the treetops toward its Kongo hunting grounds.
That is my explanation. I know I never saw any other sign of the huge gorilla either then or at any later time. I have told the tale on different occasions to many different people, and my surmise has always been accepted as correct.
Our predicament was not entirely done away with by the disappearance of the gorilla that had come to our deliverance so unexpectedly. We were still a hundred and fifty miles from another white man or woman, absolutely without carriers, and I was abominably weak from the wound Evan had inflicted. Our chances looked slight indeed until nearly noon of the next day.
A very much ashamed, and a very apologetic black figure emerged from the bush on the side farthest from the village. It was followed by about forty other similarly ashamed and apologetic figures. I recognized Mboka, my gun-bearer in the lead and had to struggle to restrain an impulse to jump up and shout aloud to Alicia that we were all right at last.
Instead, I sat impassively on the veranda until Mboka stopped humbly in the courtyard before me. I paid absolutely no attention, but smoked indifferently as if his presence or absence were a matter in which I had no concern. He waited and fidgeted, scraping his bare feet embarrassedly on the ground, until at last I looked down and inspected him impersonally. I looked away again. Presently, looking off through the bush as if he were the most insignificant atom in the universe, I remarked:
“Pig!”
Mboka beamed. It is the custom in West Africa for the lower in rank, the inferior, to speak first, but Mboka was too ashamed to presume. He stood there uneasily and tried to look apologetic while I informed him that he had put me to some inconvenience, that he was to go and never dare appear before me again. I added that I would see to it that no other trader ever dreamed of employing him for any purpose whatever.
It does not do for a white man to admit himself in any degree dependent on a black. I told him that he need never come to me again and resumed my stare into the bush. He may have had some idea of trying to bargain with me, but my attitude put him back. He hesitatingly and humbly told me what I already knew quite well, that he and the others had been forced to accompany Evan’s natives off into the bush.
One or two of the carriers had been swept away by the fervor of the juju council and had joined Evan’s folk in their attack on us, but the others had now fled to put themselves under my protection. They begged that I would receive them again and assured me of their undivided loyalty, if I would take them again into my service.
I kept them waiting for an hour while I went indoors and ate a leisurely breakfast. When I came outside again, I seemed to have forgotten them. My indifference completed their subjugation. They were abject in their pleadings for me to take them back. When I finally consented, it was with the scornful statement that I was going to take them to Ticao and discharge them from my service forever.
They burdened themselves joyfully with the loads they had brought up from Ticao and waited anxiously for me to announce my readiness to start. Alicia and Mrs. Braymore would have to walk, as their ox-cart was useless. I began the journey on foot, but could not keep up. I was too weak.
The second day I had to be carried in an improvised hammock, and the third or fourth day I found myself in a raging fever. Alicia worked over me bravely, but I lapsed into semidelirious feverishness in which I was of no use whatever.
I must credit Mboka with a great deal more faithfulness than I had expected of him. He kept the carriers under an iron rule, and Alicia told me later that the length of the journeys was stretched to the greatest possible distance every day. With nothing but the scantiest of medicines—as my own drug chest had been accidentally left behind at Evan’s deserted casa—she fought off the fever, but when we arrived at the Padre Silvestre’s mission, I was in very bad shape. The padre doctored me, however, and in two weeks I had not only ceased my delirium, but could move about a little. I remember the first evening I was allowed to sit up.
The padre, Alicia, and Mrs. Braymore had celebrated my recovery at dinner that night, the padre making one of his graceful little speeches on the subject. I am not of the padre’s faith, but we are great friends, and after dinner he announced that I might sit up. With great ceremony they got me into a chair and made a great to-do over me. Then they helped me to a chair on the little screened-in veranda of the padre’s house, where I could look out at the perfect African night and see the small mission church, and farther off the village in which the padre’s converts live.
Mrs. Braymore went back indoors to discuss with him some aid she proposed to give the mission. She was an Episcopalian, but she had seen the work the padre had done, and a difference of creed had long since seemed unimportant. The main thing was that the natives needed aid. Alicia and I on the veranda talked for a long time, disjointedly.
“What will happen to Evan’s plantation?” she asked presently, naming the place with reluctance.
“The natives will move away,” I answered thoughtfully, “and a tradition will grow up, making the casa the abode of a devil-god who will destroy all comers. Slave caravans passing down the great slave trail will make offerings to appease the evil spirits in the house, and a juju house will appear, where the witch doctor will grow rich and fat on the contributions he will exact. The casa itself will stand untenanted and deserted, while tall grasses grow in the courtyard, and at last the house will fall in shapeless ruins.”
“It was terrible there,” said Alicia with a shudder. “And Evan—it is almost unbelievable that he should have done what he did. He was always a black sheep, but that—”
I was silent for a moment. “He was planning to force you to marry him,” I said presently. “Not thinking of how you might feel for Arthur.”
“Arthur was like a brother,” Alicia said sadly. “I was very, very fond of him. We were engaged, but we had nearly agreed that we did not care for each other enough to marry. I was very fond of him, though. I could not have cared for him more if he had really been my brother.”
The great white African moon was silvering the whole earth with its pale rays. From the village came negro voices, singing the native words to an old, old devotional melody. From within the house came the rustle of papers. The padre and Mrs. Braymore were going over the details of the small hospital she proposed to erect for the mission. The padre is an old man, and more than forty years of his life have been spent at his little mission station, trying to help the natives despite the Portuguese and the servaçal. Now, at last, he was to have adequate equipment through Mrs. Braymore’s generosity.
She was going back to her beloved England, where she would go to her five-o’clock teas and discuss the neighborhood gossip and hear the curate talk about the possibility of repairing the parish house. I knew she was glad that she could again sink into the pleasant rut of well-to-do English country life. Alicia would go too, and I would see her no more. It suddenly seemed unbearable that she should leave me.
“I shall be leaving Ticao soon,” I said abruptly.
Alicia turned. Her face was grave and sweet in the half light.
“Why? I thought—”
“This is an evil country. White men denigrate and black men are like beasts. I am sick of the place. I shall go back somewhere in the States and see what I can find to do there.”
“I’m glad you’re leaving Ticao,” she said slowly. “I should not like to think I would never see you again. We have grown to be very good friends.”
I waited a moment or so and then said quietly:
“When Evan was explaining to us after he had shot me, he said that he would force you to do as he said by threats of my death by torture. You remember?”
Alicia nodded silently.
“He said that he believed you cared a little for me. I have been hoping very much t
hat he was right. I’m more or less of a ne’er-do-well, but if there’s any hope for me, I’ll try hard to change.”
I waited breathlessly for her to answer. She looked out at the moonlight for what seemed an age-long time. At last she turned again to me. I had a moment of panic, and then I saw that she was smiling.
“Why, Murray,” she said in a flash of mischief. “I may call on you to change after a while, but for the present, say for the next ten or twenty years, I think you’re perfectly all right as you are.”
I had not thought myself so strong, but when I saw her smiling at me with her face close to my own, my fever weakness left me and I reached out my arms. Alicia was quite considerate of me. She struggled only a very little.
CARAVAN
Originally published in Collier’s, Sept. 19. 1936, as by “Will F. Jenkins.”
Being sixteen, the kid could only really think of one thing at a time. He thought of it now, while the drive-away fleet trundled sedately on ahead. There were thirty new city-delivery trucks in a single, glittering line. There was a background of green foliage and brown tree trunks, with rocks here and there. Hilly country. The cars ahead were new ones, identical to the last drop of paint. They glittered in precisely the same fashion in the same spots when the sunlight struck them. The spokes in their wheels twinkled the same way. They even made puffs of thicker smoke from their exhausts at the same point on each curve. But the kid only half noticed.
He loafed at the wheel of the last car, absorbed in his own thoughts. He was sixteen, but anybody’d take him for eighteen, easy, and he had a driver’s license. He drove with the abstracted ease of a master, having handled a car—illegally—since he was ten. He wore a sweater which had once been a lurid shade of blue but which was now subdued by many wettings. Canvas pants. Sneakers. He lolled back at the conservative thirty-mile limit all drive-away fleets are supposed to observe, and which some actually keep to.
The Third Murray Leinster Page 36
