The Sign of the Spider

by Bertram Mitford

  CHAPTER XVII.

  DISSENSIONS.

  "Well, I'm uncommonly glad I was out of that affair yesterday,Stanninghame. But it isn't like you, letting those poor devils off, eh?"

  Thus Holmes, as the two were leisurely pursuing their way, somewhat onthe rear flank of the slave-party.

  "I don't know. You see they let me off, and I didn't want to be outdonein civility even by a lot of scurvy dogs who eat each other. There wasno feeling about the matter."

  Before the other could pursue the subject, the sound of faint groans,and pleading in an unknown tongue, was heard just ahead. With it, too,the sound of blows.

  "Some devilish work going forward again," muttered Holmes, with savagedisgust.

  "You can't make omelettes without breaking eggs," was the indifferentreply. And then they came upon a not entirely unfamiliar scene.

  On the ground crouched three human figures, wretched-looking andemaciated to the last degree. Disease and exhaustion had overpoweredthem, and they were begging to be left to die. Standing over them inthreatening attitude was Lutali, with some half-dozen of the slavers.

  "They are too far gone to feel the whip," Lutali was saying. "Clearlythey are of no further use. You, Murad, shorten me the shadow of yonderdog. We shall see."

  The man named, a savage-looking ruffian, stepped forward, grinning withdelight. Just as he was swinging up his scimitar, Holmes burst forth:

  "Hold on, Lutali! Give the poor devil another show."

  Half turning his head at this interruption, there was that look upon thehawk-like features of the Arab which at times so strangely resembledHazon. His keen eyes darted haughty reproof at Holmes, for he was a sortof supercargo of the slave department, and relished not thisinterference. Then, turning back, he once more gave the signal. Downflashed the great blade. There was a dull swooshing thud, and theheadless trunk was deluging the earth.

  The effect, however, upon the other two exhausted wretches was magical.With a despairing effort they raised themselves up and staggered on, tothe accompaniment of not a few blows by way of recognition of theirmalingering. Lutali, who had uttered no word, and whose impassivecountenance had not moved a feature, stalked gravely on.

  "Why could we not have prevented this?" burst forth Holmes, whom a sortof morbid fascination seemed to root to the spot.

  "Because it would have been the very acme of insanity to attempt such athing. Lutali, in common with the rest, is in far too ugly a mood, afteryesterday, to be fooled with needlessly. Besides, all that sentiment issimply thrown away. These people, remember, are atrocious brutes, whoeat their own fathers and mothers. It is positively a work of charity toenslave them. Once they are off the march they are fairly welltreated,--better, in fact, than they treat each other--and, of course,no more cannibalism."

  "That may be. But I wish to Heaven I could blot out these two years asthough they had never been. The recollection of the horrors one has beenthrough will haunt me for life. I feel like blowing my brains out insheer disgust. Why did I ever come?"

  It was not the first time Holmes had burst forth in this fashion, as wehave shown. Laurence looked keenly at him.

  "There is a worse thing to haunt one's life than recollection," he said,"and that is anticipation."

  "Of what?" asked Holmes shortly.

  The other touched the muzzle of his rifle, then his own forehead.

  "It's that--or this," he said, pointing to the ghastly trunk and thesevered head which lay before them. "You don't suppose I should haveadopted this sweet trade from choice, I suppose? No. Hard necessity, mydear chap. If anybody has to go under--and somebody always has to--Iprefer that it shall not be me."

  Holmes made no reply for a while, so they left the spot, walking insilence. Then Laurence went on:

  "Now we are on the subject, I don't know that you would have come outany the better had we left you behind at Johannesburg. For you weregoing the wrong way. You were a precious sight too fond of hangingaround bars, and that sort of thing grows. In fact, you were more thanonce a trifle--shall we say 'muddled.' Not to put too fine a point uponit, you were on your way to the deuce. I know it, for I've seen it sooften before, and you know it too."

  "I believe you're right there," assented Holmes.

  "Well, then, we owe our first duty to ourselves; wherefore, mysoft-hearted young friend, it is better to spend a year or two raking ina fortune and ameliorating the lot of humanity, than to die in a stateof soak, and a disused shaft, on or around the Rand, even as did Pulmanthe day before we left."

  "I don't believe that same fortune will do us any good," urged Holmesgloomily. "There is the curse of blood upon it."

  "The curse of my grandmother," laughed the other.

  There was no affectation about Laurence Stanninghame's indifference. Itwas perfectly genuine. Strong-nerved constitutionally, callous,hard-hearted through stress of circumstances, such sights as that justwitnessed told not one atom upon him. In the sufferings of the miserablewretches he saw only a lurid alternative--his own. In them, toilingalong, wearily, dejectedly, beneath the chain or yoke, he saw himself,toiling, grinding, at some sordid and utterly repellent form of labour,for a miserable pittance; no ray of light, no redeeming rest orenjoyment to sweeten life until that life should end. In them, cowering,writhing, beneath the driver's brutal lash, he saw himself, ever lashedand stung by the torturing consciousness of what might have been, by therecollection of what had been. Or did they fall exhausted, fainting, todie, or to undergo decapitation to insure that such exhaustion shouldnot open even a feeble possibility of escape, there too, he saw himselfsinking, borne down by the sheer blank hopelessness of fate, takingrefuge in the Dark Unknown, his end the grave of the suicide. It washimself or them, and he preferred that it should be them. Preyer orpreyed upon--such was the iron immutable law of life, from man in hishighest development to the minutest of insects; and with this law he wasbut complying, not in wanton cruelty, but in cold, passive ruthlessness.

  Further, the sufferings of these people were only transitory. They wouldbe much better off when the journey was ended and they were disposedof--better off indeed than many a free person in civilized and Christianlands. Besides, such races as these, low down as they were in the scaleof humanity, suffered but little. It needs imagination, refinement, toaccentuate suffering. To anything approaching such attributes, thesewere utter strangers. They were mere animals. Men dealt in sheep andcattle, in order to live, in horses and other beasts of burden, why notin these, who were even lower than the higher animals?

  This theory of their sinister occupation Hazon thoroughly indorsed.

  "Depend upon it, Stanninghame," he said, "ours is the right view to takeof it--the only view. This is 'a world of plunder and prey,' as Tennysonputs it, and we have got to prey or be preyed upon. You, for instance,seem to have fulfilled the latter role, hitherto, and it seems onlyright you should have your turn now. To cite the latest instance, allthis rotten scrip and market-rigging finished you off, and what was thatbut rascality?"

  "Of course, I've been plundered, swindled, all along the line, eversince I can remember. I'm tired of that d----d respectability, Hazon. Itdoesn't pay. It never has paid. This, however, does."

  The other smiled significantly at the word.

  "Respectability--yes," he said. "Look at your type of success, yourself-made man, swelling out of his white waistcoat in snugself-complacency, your pattern British merchant, your millionairefinancier, what is he but a slave-dealer, a slave-driver, ablood-sucker. What has become of your little all, swamped in thoseprecious Rand companies, Stanninghame? Gone to bloat more unimpeachablewhite waistcoats; gone to add yet more pillars to the temple of patternrespectability."

  "That's so," assented Laurence, with something between a sneer and alaugh, knocking the ashes out of his pipe. "Yet that same crowd ofrespectable swindlers would yelp in horror at us and our enterprise.'Piratical,' they'd call it, eh? A hanging matter!"

  "Swindlers--no. Swindler is English for a convicted
person. Yet thepercentage of the props and pillars of financial success and mercantilerespectability who, in the self-candour and secrecy of their sleeplesshours, are honestly unable to recall to mind one or more occasions whenPortland, or Dartmoor, or Simonstown, or the Kowie loomed more thannear, cannot be a vast one; which, for present purposes, may be takento mean that if you have got to make money you must make it anyhow, ornot at all--'anyhow' covering such methods as are involved in theconventional term 'rascality.' If you have got it you can run asstraight as you like. We haven't got it--at least not enough of ityet--and so we are making it, and, like the rest of the world, making itanyhow. There's the whole case in a nutshell, Stanninghame."

  "Why, of course. But, if only we could bring Holmes round to thatpre-eminently sensible standpoint! I never could have believed thefellow would turn out such an ass. I am more than sorry, Hazon, that Ishould have influenced you to bring him along."

  "Oh, Holmes is young, and hardly knows the meaning of the term 'hardexperience,' as we know it. Still, in his way, he's useful enough, andfirst-rate in a fight; and when he comes to bank his share he'll forgetto feel over particular as to how he acquired it. That's mere ordinaryhuman nature, and Holmes is far from being an abnormal unit."

  "No, but he still affects a conscience. What if he goes back and takeson that blue-eyed girl he was smitten with, and, turning soft,incontinently gives us away?"

  "Are _you_ on the croak, Stanninghame? That's odd. Here, how's yourpulse? Let's time it." And Hazon reached out his hand.

  "Well, yes; it is unusual. But it's d----d hot, and the steaminess of itdepresses me at times," returned Laurence, with a queer, reckless laugh.

  "He won't give us away, never fear," said Hazon carelessly. "He won'ttake on that girl, because she'll have forgotten him long ago; that,too, being ordinary human nature. And--nobody ever did give me away yet.I don't somehow think anybody is ever likely to."

  Both sides of this remark struck a chord within Laurence's mind; thefirst, a jarring one, since it voiced a misgiving which had at timesassailed himself, specially at such periods of depression as this underwhich he was now suffering. For the second, the tone was characteristicof the speaker and the subject. It seemed to flash forth more than amenace, in its stern, unrelenting ruthlessness of purpose, while thewords seemed to recall the warning so darkly let fall by Rainsford andothers regarding his present confederate. "Other men have gone upcountry with Hazon, but--_not one of them has ever returned_." Tohimself the words contained no menace. He trusted Hazon, felt thoroughlyable to take care of himself, and, moreover, was as little likely toviolate the secrecy of their enterprise as Hazon himself. But what ofHolmes? With all his hard, callous unscrupulousness, Laurence had nodesire that harm should befall Holmes. In a measure, he felt responsiblefor him.

  "Don't you worry about Holmes," said Hazon, as though reading histhoughts. "We can put him to all the show part of the business,reserving the more serious line for our own immediate supervision. Andthe time may come when we can do very well with Holmes, in short, whenthree white men may be better than two. We are very near the Ba-gcatyacountry, and an _impi_ of them on the raid will give us as much troubleas we can do with; and I've seen signs of late which seem to point thatway."

  "Isn't it a crowded-on business this Ba-gcatya terror, eh?" saidLaurence, lazily puffing out rings of blue smoke, which hung upon thehot, still atmosphere as though they never meant to disperse. "I expecttheir strength is as exaggerated as their dash. Why, this part is notaltogether unexplored, yet there is no record of an exceptionally strongtribe hereabouts."

  Hazon smiled pityingly.

  "That great god, the African explorer, don't know everything," hesaid--"no, not quite everything, although he thinks he does. Anyway, hefrequently manages to get a pretty muddled-up idea of things and placeshereabout--a muddle which the natives of this land would rather thickenthan dispel. For instance, he will ask the name of a river or amountain, and when the other party to the talk repeats his question, asnatives invariably do to gain time for answering, he takes this for theanswer, and forthwith the thing is dubbed by a word that simply means'river' or 'mountain,' in one or other of the hundred and fifty tongueswhich prevail hereabout. No, the existence of the Ba-gcatya is notchronicled, simply because the explorer was fortunate enough not to fallin with them. Had he done so, he would probably never have returned tochronicle anything. But, get one or two of our Wangoni to talk, and hemay, or may not, tell you something about them; for the Ba-gcatya are,like the Wangoni themselves, a Zulu offshoot, only far more conservativein the old Zulu traditions, and of purer blood. They are a much finerrace, indeed I believe them to be as powerful and well disciplined asthe Zulus themselves were under Cetywayo. I was all through the war of'79, you know, and that pretty scar I carry about as an ornamentrepresents the expiring effort of an awful tough customer, who had losttoo much blood to be able to strike altogether home. I call it myIsandhlwana medal."

  "That where you captured it, eh?" said Laurence, with interest, for thestory was new to him. He remembered first noticing the great scar uponHazon's chest the day he visited him when ill in bed at Johannesburg,but he had never asked its history; indeed, it was characteristic of thestrange relations in which these two men stood to each other that,notwithstanding all this time of close comradeship, neither should everhave asked the other any question of a personal nature. Characteristic,too, was it of Hazon's method that this piece of information should havebeen vouchsafed as it was. Many an experience, strange and startling,had he narrated from time to time, but never for the sake of narratingit. If anything occurred to bring it forth, out it would come, carrying,perhaps, others in its train, but ever in due sequence. Even Holmes, theimpulsive, who, being young, was the 'natural man' of the trio, had longsince learned that to ask Hazon for a yarn was the direct way not to getone out of him.

  "Yes," went on Hazon, "that's where I captured it. Speaking with someexperience, Isandhlwana is the toughest thing that has ever travelled myway, and I don't hanker after any repetition of it with 'The people ofthe Spider----' Why, what does this mean?"

  The words, quick, hurried, broke off. On the faces of both men was alook of keen, anxious alertness. For a wild and fierce clamour hadsuddenly arisen and was drawing nearer and nearer, loud, swelling,threatening.