“It is best we seek shelter in the bush, my friend,” de Grandin announced matter-of-factly. “The farther out of sight we get the better will be our health.”
“What in heaven’s name does it all mean?” I demanded as I turned to follow him.
“Mean?” he echoed impatiently. “It means we have stumbled on as fine a nest of pirates as ever cheated the yardarm. When we reached this island, Friend Trowbridge, I fear we did but step from the soup kettle into the flame. Mille tonneres, what a fool you are, Jules de Grandin! You should have demanded fifty pounds sterling a day from those Messieurs Lloyd! Come, Friend Trowbridge, let us seek shelter. Right away, at once, immediately.”
2
THE SLOPING BEACH GAVE way to a line of boulders a hundred yards inland, and these in turn marked the beginning of a steady rise in the land, its lower portion overgrown with bushes, loftier growth supplanting the underbrush as we stumbled upward over the rocks.
When we had traversed several hundred rods and knocked nearly all the skin from our legs against unexpectedly projecting stones, de Grandin called a halt in the midst of a copse of wide-leafed trees. “We may as well rest here as elsewhere,” he suggested philosophically. “The pack will scarcely hunt again tonight.”
I was too sleepy and exhausted to ask what he meant. The last hour’s events had been as full of surprises to me as a traveling carnival is for a farmhand.
It might have been half an hour later, or only five minutes, judging by my feelings, that I was roused by the roar of a muffled explosion, followed at short intervals by two more detonations. “Mordieu!” I heard de Grandin exclaim. “Up, Friend Trowbridge. Rise and see!” He shook me roughly by the shoulder, and half dragged me to an opening in the trees. Out across the lagoon I saw the hulk of the Mevrouw falling apart and sliding into the water like a mud bank attacked by a summer flood, and round her the green waters boiled and seethed as though the entire reef had suddenly gone white hot. Across the lagoon, wave after swelling wave raced and tumbled, beating on the glittering sands of the beach in a furious surf.
“Why—” I began, but he answered my question before I could form it.
“Dynamite!” he exclaimed. “Last night, or early this morning, they looted her, now they dismantle the remains with high explosives; it would not do to let her stand there as a sign-post of warning for other craft. Pardieu! They have system, these ones. Captain Kidd and Blackbeard, they were but freshmen in crime’s college, Friend Trowbridge. We deal with postgraduates here. Ah”—his small, womanishly slender hand caught me by the arm—“observe, if you please; what is that on the sands below?”
Following his pointing finger with my eyes, I made out, beyond a jutting ledge of rocks, the rising spiral of a column of wood smoke. “Why,” I exclaimed delightedly “some of the people from the ship escaped, after all! They got to shore and built a fire. Come on, let’s join them. Hello, down here; hello, hello! You …”
“Fool!” he cried in a suppressed shout, clapping his hand over my mouth. “Would you ruin us altogether, completely, entirely? Le bon Dieu grant your ass’s bray was not heard, or, if heard, was disregarded!”
“But,” I protested, “those people probably have food, de Grandin, and we haven’t a single thing to eat. We ought to join them and plan our escape.”
He looked at me as a school teacher might regard an unusually backward pupil. “They have food, no doubt,” he admitted, “but what sort of food, can you answer me that? Suppose—nom d’un moinçau, regardez-vous!”
AS IF IN ANSWER to my hail, a pair of the most villainous-looking Papuans I had ever beheld came walking around the rocky screen beyond which the smoke rose, looked undecidedly toward the heights where we hid, then turned back whence they had come. A moment later they reappeared, each carrying a broad-bladed spear, and began climbing over the rocks in our direction.
“Shall we go to meet them?” I asked dubiously. Those spears looked none too reassuring to me.
“Mais non!” de Grandin answered decidedly. “They may be friendly; but I distrust everything on this accurst island. We would better seek shelter and observe.”
“But they might give us something to eat,” I urged. “The whole world is pretty well civilized now, it isn’t as if we were back in Captain Cook’s day.”
“Nevertheless,” he returned as he wriggled under a clump of bushes, “we shall watch first and ask questions later.”
I crawled beside him and squatted, awaiting the savages’ approach.
But I had forgotten that men who live in primitive surroundings have talents unknown to their civilized brethren. While they were still far enough away to make it impossible for us to hear the words they exchanged as they walked, the two Papuans halted, looked speculatively at the copse where we hid, and raised their spears menacingly.
“Ciel!” de Grandin muttered. “We are discovered.” He seized the stalk of one of the sheltering plants and shook it gently.
The response was instant. A spear whizzed past my ear, missing my head by an uncomfortably small fraction of an inch, and the savages began clambering rapidly toward us, one with his spear poised for a throw, the other drawing a murderous knife from the girdle which constituted his sole article of clothing.
“Parbleu!” de Grandin whispered fiercely. “Play dead, my friend. Fall out from the bush and lie as though his spear had killed you.” He gave me a sudden push which sent me reeling into the open.
I fell flat to the ground, acting the part of a dead man as realistically as possible and hoping desperately that the savages would not decide to throw a second spear to make sure of their kill.
Though my eyes were closed, I could feel them standing over me, and a queer, cold feeling tingled between my shoulder blades, where I momentarily expected a knife thrust.
Half opening one eye, I saw the brown, naked shins of one of the Papuans beside my head, and was wondering whether I could seize him by the ankles and drag him down before he could stab me, when the legs beside my face suddenly swayed drunkenly, like tree trunks in a storm, and a heavy weight fell crashing on my back.
STARTLED OUT OF MY sham death by the blow, I raised myself in time to see de Grandin in a death grapple with one of the savages. The other one lay across me, the spear he had flung at us a few minutes before protruding from his back directly beneath his left shoulder blade.
“A moi, Friend Trowbridge!” the little Frenchmen called. “Quick, or we are lost.”
I tumbled the dead Papuan unceremoniously to the ground and grappled with de Grandin’s antagonist just as he was about to strike his dirk into my companion’s side.
“Bien, très bien!” the Frenchman panted as he thrust his knife forward, sinking the blade hilt-deep into the savage’s left armpit. “Very good, indeed, Friend Trowbridge. I have not hurled the javelin since I was a boy at school, and I strongly misdoubted my ability to kill the one with a single throw from my ambush, but, happily, my hand has not lost its cunning. Voilà, we have a perfect score to our credit! Come, let us bury them.”
“But was it necessary to kill the poor fellows?” I asked as I helped him scrape a grave with one of his victim’s knives. “Mightn’t we have made them understand we meant them no harm?”
“Friend Trowbridge,” he answered between puffs of exertion as he dragged one of the naked bodies into the shallow trench we had dug, “never, I fear me, will you learn the sense of the goose. With fellows such as these, even as with the shark last night, we take necessary steps for our own protection first.
“This interment which we make now, think you it is for tenderness of these canaille? Ah, non. We bury them that their friends find them not if they come searching, and that the buzzards come not flapping this way to warn the others of what we have done. Good, they are buried. Take up that one’s spear and come with me. I would investigate that fire which they have made.”
We approached the heights overlooking the fire cautiously, taking care to remain unseen by any possible scout s
ent out by the main party of natives. It was more than an hour before we maneuvered to a safe observation post. As we crawled over the last ridge of rock obstructing our view I went deathly sick at my stomach and would have fallen down the steep hill, had not de Grandin thrown his arm about me.
Squatting around a blazing bonfire in a circle, like wolves about the stag they have run to earth, were perhaps two dozen naked savages, and, bound upright to a stake fixed in the sand, was a white man, lolling forward against the restraining cords with a horrible limpness. Before him stood two burly Papuans, the war clubs in their hands, red as blood at the tips, telling the devil’s work they had just completed. It was blood on the clubs. The brown fiends had beaten their helpless captive’s head in, and even now one of them was cutting the cords that held his body to the stake.
But beyond the dead man was a second stake, and, as I looked at this, every drop of blood in my body seemed turned to liquid fire, for, lashed to it, mercifully unconscious, but still alive, was a white woman whom I recognized as the wife of a Dutch planter going out from Holland to join her husband in Sumatra.
“Good God, man!” I cried. “That’s a woman; a white woman. We can’t let those devils kill her!”
“Softly, my friend,” de Grandin cautioned, pressing me back, for I would have risen and charged pell-mell down the hill. “We are two, they are more than a score; what would it avail us, or that poor woman, were we to rush down and be killed?”
I TURNED ON HIM IN amazed fury. “You call yourself a Frenchman,” I taunted, “yet you haven’t chivalry enough to attempt a rescue? A fine Frenchman you are!”
“Chivalry is well—in its place,” he admitted, “but no Frenchman is so foolish as to spend his life where there is nothing to be bought with it. Would it help her if we, too, were destroyed, or, which is worse, captured and eaten also? Do we, as physicians, seek to throw away our lives when we find a patient hopelessly sick with phthisis? But no, we live that we may fight the disease in others—that we may destroy the germs of the malady. So let it be in this case. Save that poor one we can not; but take vengeance on her slayers we can and will. I, Jules de Grandin, swear it. Ha, she has it!”
Even as he spoke one of the cannibal butchers struck the unconscious woman over the head with his club. A stain of red appeared against the pale yellow of her hair, and the poor creature shuddered convulsively, then hung passive and flaccid against her bonds once more.
“Par le sang du diable,” de Grandin gritted between his teeth, “if it so be that the good God lets me live, I swear to make those sales bouchers die one hundred deaths apiece for every hair in that so pitiful woman’s head!”
He turned away from the horrid sight below us and began to ascend the hill. “Come away, Friend Trowbridge,” he urged. “It is not good that we should look upon a woman’s body served as meat. Pardieu, almost I wish I had followed your so crazy advice and attempted a rescue; we should have killed some of them so! No matter, as it is, we shall kill all of them, or may those Messieurs Lloyd pay me not one penny.”
3
FEELING SECURE AGAINST DISCOVERY by the savages, as they were too engrossed in their orgy to look for other victims, we made our way to the peak which towered like a truncated cone at the center of the island.
From our station at the summit we could see the ocean in all directions and get an accurate idea of our surroundings. Apparently, the islet was the merest point of land on the face of the sea—probably only the apex of a submarine volcano. It was roughly oval in shape, extending for a possible five miles in length by two-and-a-quarter miles at its greatest width, and rising out of the ocean with a mountainous steepness, the widest part of the beach at the water-line being not more than three or four hundred feet. On every side, and often in series of three or four, extended reefs and points of rock (no doubt the lesser peaks of the mountain whose un-submerged top constituted the island) so that no craft larger than a whaleboat could hope to come within half a mile of the land without having its bottom torn out by the hidden semi-submerged crags.
“Nom d’un petit bonhomme!” de Grandin commented. “This is an ideal place for its purpose, c’est certain. Ah, see!”—he drew me to a ridge of rock which ran like a rampart across the well-defined path by which we had ascended. Fastened to the stone by bolts were three sheet-iron troughs, each pointing skyward at an angle of some fifty degrees, and each much blackened by smoke stains. “Do you see?” he asked. “These are for firing rockets—observe the powder burns on them. And here”—his voice rose to an excited pitch and he fairly danced in eagerness—“see what is before us!”
UP THE PATH, ALMOST at the summit of the peak, and about twenty-five feet apart, stood two poles, each some twelve feet in height and fitted with a pulley and lanyard. As we neared them we saw that a lantern with a green globe rested at the base of the right-hand stake, while a red-globed lamp was secured to the rope of the left post “Ah, clever, clever,” de Grandin muttered, staring from one pole to the other. “Observe, my friend. At night the lamps can be lit and hoisted to the tops of these masts then gently raised and lowered. Viewed at a distance against the black background of this mountain they will simulate a ship’s lights to the life. The unfortunate mariner making for them will find his ship fast on these rocks while the lights are still a mile or more away, and—too well we know what happens then. Let us see what more there is, eh?”
Rounding the peak we found ourselves looking down upon the thatched beehive-roofs of a native village, before which a dozen long Papuan canoes were beached on the narrow strip of sand. “Ah,” de Grandin inspected the cluster of huts, “it is there the butchers dwell, eh? That will be a good spot for us to avoid, my friend. Now to find the residence of what you Americans call the master mind. Do you see aught resembling a European dwelling, Friend Trowbridge?”
I searched the greenery below us, but nowhere could I descry a roof. “No,” I answered after a second inspection, “there’s nothing like a white man’s house down there; but how do you know there’s a white man here, anyway?”
“Ho, ho,” he laughed, “how does the rat know the house contains a cat when he hears it mew? Think you those sacré eaters of men would know enough to set up such devil’s machinery as this, or that they would take care to dynamite the wreck of a ship after looting it? No, no, my friend, this is white man’s work, and very bad work it is, too. Let us explore.”
Treading warily, we descended the smooth path leading to the rocket-troughs, looking sharply from left to right in search of anything resembling a white man’s house. Several hundred feet down the mountain the path forked abruptly, one branch leading toward the Papuan village, the other running to a narrow strip of beach bordering an inlet between two precipitous rock walls. I stared and stared again, hardly able to believe my eyes, for, drawn up on the sand and made fast by a rope to a ringbolt in the rock was a trim little motor-boat, flat-bottomed for navigating the rock-strewn waters in safety, broad-beamed for mastering the heavy ocean swells, and fitted with a comfortable, roofed-over cabin. Forward, on the little deck above her sharp clipper bow, was an efficient looking Lewis gun mounted on a swivel, and a similar piece of ordnance poked its aggressive nose out of the engine cockpit at the stern.
“Par la barbe d’un bouc vert,” de Grandin swore delightedly, “but this is marvelous, this is magnificent, this is superb! Come, Friend Trowbridge, let us take advantage of this miracle; let us leave this hell-hole of an island right away, immediately, at once. Par—” The exclamation died, half uttered, and he stared past me with the expression of a superstitious man suddenly face-to-face with a sheeted specter.
4
“SURELY, GENTLEMEN,” SAID A suave voice behind me, “you are not going to leave without permitting me to offer you some slight hospitality? That would be ungenerous.”
I turned as though stung by a wasp and looked into the smiling eyes of a dark-skinned young man, perhaps thirty years of age. From the top of his spotless topi to the tips of h
is highly polished tan riding boots he was a perfect model of the well-dressed European in the tropics. Not a stain of dust or travel showed on his spruce white drill jacket or modishly cut riding breeches, and as he waved his silver-mounted riding crop in greeting, I saw his slender hands were carefully manicured, the nails cut rather long and stained a vivid pink before being polished to the brightness of mother-of-pearl.
De Grandin laid his hand upon the knife at his belt, before he could draw it, a couple of beetle-browed Malays in khaki jackets and sarongs stepped from the bushes bordering the path and leveled a pair of business-like Mauser rifles at us. “I wouldn’t,” the young man warned in a blasé drawl, “I really wouldn’t, if I were you. These fellows are both dead shots and could put enough lead in you to sink you forty fathoms down before you could get the knife out of its sheath, much less into me. Do you mind, really?” He held out his hand for the weapon. “Thank you, that is much better”—he tossed the blade into the water of the inlet with a careless gesture—“really, you know, the most frightfully messy accidents are apt to happen with those things.”
De Grandin and I eyed him in speechless amazement, but he continued as though our meeting were the most conventional thing imaginable.
“Mr. Trowbridge—pardon my assumption, but I heard your name called a moment ago—will you be good enough to favor me with an introduction to your friend?”
“I am Dr. Samuel Trowbridge, of Harrisonville, New Jersey,” I replied, wondering, meanwhile, if I were in the midst of some crazy dream, “and this is Dr. Jules de Grandin, of Paris.”
“So good of you,” the other acknowledged with a smile. “I fear I must be less frank than you for the nonce and remain veiled in anonymity. However, one really must have some sort of designation, mustn’t one? So suppose you know me for the present as Goonong Besar. Savage, unchristian-sounding sort of name, I’ll admit, but more convenient than calling, ‘hey, you!’ or simply whistling when you wish to attract my attention. Eh, what? And now”—he made a slight bow—“if you will be so kind as to step into my humble burrow in the earth … Yes, that is it, the doorway right before you.”
The Horror on the Links Page 9
