* * * *
At eight next morning, I was back in the Rue El Kehaoui. I knocked, and Madame Macklin opened the door. She was in a state of great excitement. The big eyes were filled with fear; her cheeks showed marks of tears; her husky voice was broken with sobs.
Hurriedly she told of her trouble. From the hide, on the day previous, she had received one of her unexplainable “tips.” She had telegraphed Macklin immediately, urging him to visit Kasserine, a small village thirty kilometers south of Sbeïtla. Near this village are the ruins of old Cillium, a flourishing spot in the days of Constantine.
“Well?” I said, not understanding the cause of her emotion.
“But now the skin of the ox warns me!” she sobbed. “John is in danger! I must go to him!”
I played a Judas to that woman. I sympathized with her. Near-thief that I was, I offered to guard her apartment while she was away. I would watch over the hide.
“No, no!” she cried. “The skin goes with me!”
Two hundred kilometers southward was Kasserine, on the road by which I had come up to Sousse. But I did not falter. “I will accompany you!” I cried. “If there is anything wrong with Macklin, I might be useful.”
She didn’t make any objections. She was whispering what I thought were prayers as she rushed her preparations. The fear had her in its clutch.
I helped her to take the hide from the wall. Dear Lord, how I thrilled! I put it on the floor and rolled it carefully, the rapparee ancestor whispering to me as I did so. “Stick it under your arm and run,” said he, and the brogue in his voice was thick and harsh. “She’s upset, an’ she’ll never chase you! Devil a chase!”
I combated him. “These are modern days,” I said aloud. “That cannot be done.”
The woman thought I was speaking to her. “It can! It can!” she cried. “The train is at nine-fifteen. Get a carriage!”
At a wild gallop we drove to the station. I bought two billets, troisième classe, to Kasserine. That, in the state of my finances, showed courage. We clambered aboard, and between us on the cushionless seat rode the bull’s hide. The Bull’s Hide of Bagdad!
Madame Macklin was silent. Vaguely she answered questions that I put to her. What was the actual danger the hide had hinted at? She couldn’t say. But it was a great danger. Even then, as we rode through the dreary country with its great stretches of alfalfa, its dry riverbeds and its stony deserts, the hide, so she asserted, was whispering to her.
Once again I saw the ruins of old Sufetula as we slipped by Sbeïtla. I pondered over my meeting with John Macklin. I was a little afraid of the results of that meeting; yet when I touched the hide with eager groping fingers, the fear left me.
* * * *
In the early afternoon we reached Kasserine. Madame Macklin addressed the small stationmaster, a Corsican, like most of the railway officials in Tunisia. Had he noticed an American descending from the train the day previous?
I thought that a queer look of horror came into the eyes of the chef de gare when he heard the question. He swallowed like a pelican. He looked this way and that; then he clutched the lapel of my coat and dragged me into his little den, leaving Madame Macklin standing on the platform.
His words came spattering like machine-gun fire. I had difficulty in getting their meaning. They tore through the receiving-net of my brain in the manner of sharks ripping through the flimsy mesh of a herring fisherman.
There had been a disaster. “Un épouvantable désastre, monsieur! Dix personnes mortes! Beaucoup blessés! Les soldats sont sur la place!”
Stupidly I grasped the meaning of his words. Five kilometers from the gare, on the site of ancient ruins, a huge underground cistern of Roman workmanship had collapsed when a number of treasure-seekers were in the reservoir. Five thousand tons of stone had fallen in on them!
“L’Americain?” I cried. “Monsieur Macklin?”
“Mort!” cried the station-master.
I was stunned by the news. Glancing through the window of the little office, I could see Madame Macklin standing on the platform. How the devil could I break the news to her? As I debated, a captain of infantry, back from the place of the accident, cried out the latest news. “Pas d’éspoir!” he cried. “Vingt morts! Dix-neuf indigènes et l’Américain!”
Madame Macklin heard. She screamed and stumbled toward a bench. The station-master, the captain and I rushed toward her. Of course she knew that the only American in the neighborhood of Kasserine was John Macklin, chercheur d’or from California.…
When Madame Macklin came out of the faint, she insisted on visiting the spot where Macklin had met his death. The polite officer drew me aside and hurriedly put forward objections. The recovery of the bodies was out of the question. A fleet-footed native, who had escaped death by a miracle, had described the situation immediately before the collapse of the cistern. A sacrifice had been made—the officer thought it might have been a human sacrifice; then the tremendous clamor of the gold searchers within the huge underground reservoir had acted like an explosive on the masonry that had held itself upright for fifteen hundred years!
The escapee had seen the huge walls quiver. Slowly they folded inward upon the treasure-seekers blinded by their greed. Then with a frightful crash the immense mass had buried the clawing, screaming mob. Buried them under the thousand blocks of stone chiseled by masons in the days of Constantine!
“It would take an army of workmen a year to reach the bodies,” whispered the officer.
I imparted a little of this information to Madame Macklin, but she was obdurate. She wished to see the spot, and so the captain offered to take us in his automobile.
We drove through a dreary countryside with the African night creeping down upon it. For a part of the way we followed the piste to Tebessa; then we swung westward over a flat plain till we came to the fatal spot.
There were a hundred bonfires around the enormous depression that marked the spot where the cistern had collapsed. The walls, as the officer explained, had folded in from all sides; and now, in the center of this depression, there was a four-sided pyramid of piled blocks beneath which rested the dead: Nineteen colored and one white.
A company of native soldiers kept order. They beat back the hundreds of indigènes who had come from far-off places to the scene.
I thought that there was a defiant look about the great stones as they sprawled one upon the other. A menacing look. I think the soldiers and the screaming natives saw it. The blocks put out a threat to those who would meddle with them. Perhaps there was treasure there. Great treasure, which they were guarding.
Gently the officer and I led Madame Macklin back to the automobile. We returned to Kasserine. A few minutes before midnight, a train came through from Tozeur and we boarded it. We reached Sousse seven hours later. I took Madame Macklin to her apartment. I carried the hide from the carriage to her sitting-room. I placed it on the divan and left her. It was not the moment to talk of what was uppermost in my mind.
* * * *
For six successive days I visited that apartment in the Rue El Kehaoui. A super-Judas was I in those days. I played the hypocrite, whispering sympathetic words with my tongue while my eyes were upon the rolled hide.
That woman would not permit me to unroll it after our return from Kasserine. There it lay where I had placed it on the divan, and my eyes lusted for a glimpse of it. At times my groping fingers touched it furtively.
I pawned a few bits of jewelry to pay my board. The future was a little frightening. Again the rapparee ancestor whispered of theft. He thought me a fool because I hesitated.
Nervously I questioned the woman as to what she intended to do. She spoke of her mother’s relatives in Greece. They lived at Phaleron, a few miles out of Athens. She thought she would go to them. She showed me letters that were very affectionate.
I touched the hide with my hand, hungrily; then I looked at her. The big eyes were upon my face. They were looking into my brain. They were reading my thoug
hts.
Those enormous eyes were startled with what they discovered. They knew me as a hypocrite because of my ride with her to Kasserine. A wordy deceiver because of my feigned sympathy for Macklin. They knew me a possible thief, a near-thief. Ay, the spirit of theft showed in my eyes! She pushed me gently to the door.
The following morning I went back to the apartment, and the spirit of that rapparee ancestor walked with me. Boldly he walked. Now and then he whispered in Gaelic, words that I did not understand; but they were fine, strong words. Strong and urgent. When we speak of the devil as a tempter, we mean, of course, our unmoral ancestors who knew nothing of our silly modern codes.
I knocked at the door. There was no answer. I knocked louder. I beat it with my fist. I thought the spirit of my ancestor kicked it, but that couldn’t be. It must have been my shoe that crashed against it.
An Arab woman thrust a nervous face out of a door and spoke to me in French. “Madame est parti,” she said.
“Où?” I shrieked.
“Pour Tunis,” she replied. “Elle rentre dans le pays de sa mère.”
She had fled me! She had taken the early train for Tunis, where she would take a boat for the Piraeus!
“La peau?” I gasped. “La peau du taureau?”
She made a gesture with her hand northward. She laughed gayly. I could have killed her. At least my spectral ancestor could.…
There are but three trains a day from Sousse to Tunis. I had a wait of seven hours. It was not till after midnight that I reached Tunis. Too late to make inquiries.
I was at the doors of the Società di Navigazione before the place was open. A sleepy clerk looked over the list of passengers that had departed on the Chalkotheka, a small boat which had sailed the previous evening.
“Oui, oui,” he muttered. “Madame Macklin est parti.”
I staggered out onto the Avenue Jules-Ferry. I was a little deranged. I bumped into pedestrians on the sidewalk and did not apologize when they damned my clumsiness.
* * * *
That evening, news of the Chalko-theka was posted in the bureau of the local news-sheet. The steamer had struck what was supposed to be a derelict some hundred and fifty miles off the coast. The passengers and crew had barely time to leap into the boats before the vessel sank. Every scrap of luggage that they possessed went down with the vessel. The passengers were picked up by an Italian steamer bound for Sicily.
I wrote Madame Macklin in care of her parents at Phaleron. I wished to be certain as to the fate of the hide. Her tardy and ungrammatical reply was, I thought, fearfully ungracious. It ran:
You might makes false words with one mermaidens and get it from her. Or you mights steal it from Mister Neptune. There are your chances. I think you bad mans.
As I said before, if it pleases you who peruse this story to think I am mad, your thoughts are excused by the fact, that you did not see that hide. And you never will. But to me it is visible in my dreams. In my glorious dreams.
MAORI JUSTICE, by Bob Du Soe
Kamaka had been the first to sight the strange schooner as it headed in toward the opening in the reef, and he had hastened at once to the bungalow to break the news to old man Stovall. He stood there now on the porch, head and shoulders above the old trader, his dark, oily skin glistening in the morning sunlight.
“See, Mr. Stovall, he lose mainmast. He come long way, eh? No storm now for two, maybe three weeks. What you think?”
“It looks to me like the Wasp—Captain Bowker’s outfit,” the trader answered. “What do you say, Ugly, ever seen her before?”
Ugly Smith, mate, steward, and sometimes even cook on Stovall’s own schooner, the Lalanai, screwed his homely face into a puzzled frown and shook his head. “No, sir, can’t say as I have. They had better have a care, though, or they’ll be loosin’ more than their stick.”
“Not if it’s Bull Bowker. See, he’s got her in the channel already.”
The disabled schooner rose on an oncoming swell, as Stovall spoke, and slid through the narrow channel like an outrigger in the hands of a native. The plunge of her anchor sent a ripple over the lagoon and then a long-boat that had been towing astern was hauled up amidships and a white man with two blacks climbed down into it.
Bowker had reason enough to be in a nasty mood on that particular morning, for his disreputable old schooner had come to anchor with her hull half-full of water and the main mast but a splintered stump. However, he selected a very poor time to indulge his humor.
Ugly, Kamaka, and two of the natives went down to the beach to meet him, as his long boat crossed the lagoon, and as it grounded in the shallow water they waded out to help drag it in. Why Bowker should have been standing carelessly in the bow the way he was no one knew, but there he stood and as the boat suddenly stopped he went sprawling head first into the water. He was on his feet again in an instant, cursing vilely, and then he caught sight of Kamaka who was roaring with laughter.
Without a word his fist shot out and he caught the big Maori square on the mouth. And then, before the astonished native could strike back, if such a thing had occurred to him, Bowker had him covered with his gun.
“Laugh at me, will you?” he swore. “I’ll teach you to respect a white man!”
Ugly had been laughing, too, but in an instant his scrawny frame was tense. “Put up that gun, you white-livered bully!” he growled. “You deserve to be laughed at.”
Shooting a black and shooting a white man were two different things or Bowker, in his rage, might have killed them both. He waded out of the water, swearing as he went, the gun still held in his hairy fist.
“Put up that gun!” Ugly repeated, “or by cripes we’ll make you eat it!”
Bowker pocketed the gun but he took his time about it and there was a look of contempt on his dark, heavy features. That is, Ugly took it for contempt; Kamaka in his native shrewdness read something deeper.
Kamaka was a full-blooded Maori from back of the reefs. The son of a chief, he had said, and there was no reason to doubt him. What had brought him out to old man Stovall’s plantation and trading post, no one knew, but there he was and they were glad to have him. For all his breadth of chest and mighty arms he was the culmination of bland good humor and more than that he was strong as an ox and an excellent seaman.
Compared to the big-eared, pug-nosed Ugly Smith, Kamaka was a giant, and yet he never questioned the smaller man’s orders. Had Ugly commanded him to seize the enraged Bowker and relieve him of his gun the Maori would have done so without hesitation, though it cost him his life. They were as different as God could make them, and yet they were the best of friends.
“Why he hit me?” Kamaka demanded, when Bowker had moved on up the beach toward the bungalow. “Damn fool, why he hit me?”
“Because he didn’t like your sense of humor,” Ugly replied. “Guess he thought we should have cried over him.”
“I fix him for that. Him fool—damn fool!”
Ugly was a bit surprised at the Maori’s anger, though he certainly did not blame him. “No you won’t,” he said. “You’ll forget it unless he starts something else. If he does you can wring his neck. But you’d better keep an eye on that gun if you ever try it.”
“I watch him,” Kamaka muttered, and his dark, burning eyes followed the swaggering form of the man who had hit him until he disappeared through the door of the bungalow. It was really not vengeance that had stirred the big native. It was simply that his pride, his feelings had been injured, and now he sensed some impending evil.
* * * *
The incident had cooled in Ugly’s mind when he was summoned to the house later in the day. Finding Bowker and his employer seated on the porch, a bottle and two glasses between them, he knew they had been talking business.
“Mr. Bowker wants to beach his schooner here and make some repairs,” Stovall explained, “and he wants help. I told him I thought you and Kamaka would be willing to give him a hand. There’s no one else here who’d be of much he
lp to him.”
Ugly nodded. “You’re the boss. What’s got to be done to her?”
“She’s got an open seam,” Bowker spoke up, “and I’ve got to step a new mast. Stovall tells me he’s got a stick that will do until I get to Cooktown.”
“What have you got for cargo?”
“Shell, but it don’t make any difference about that. I won’t have to unload her to do the work.”
“You’ll never get her beached high enough out of water to get at her hull unless you do. Most of it will have to be moved before you can step the mast, anyway.”
“I’ll take care of that,” Bowker snapped. “You tend to the hull. If I wait to unload her she’ll be at the bottom.”
Ugly shrugged his shoulders. From what he had seen of the schooner, drifting sluggishly in the lagoon, he guessed the owner was about right. He still failed to see, though, how anything could be done with her as she was.
“Well, it’s your wreck,” he said. “Put your men in the long boat and tow her in.”
“My men couldn’t pull the long boat, leave alone that waterlogged hulk. They damn near gave out before we got here. Use some of these lazy blacks you’re coddling here.”
Ugly frowned. He resented the inference, but he knew there would be money in the job for Stovall so he left them to finish the bottle while he rounded up a few of the natives.
“Which way he come this place?” Kamaka inquired, as they headed out for the schooner.
“From the south,” Ugly replied. “Says he’s headed for Cooktown.”
“Funny he come from south,” Kamaka grunted.
“Why, what’s funny about that?”
“Where he come from—south?”
“How do I know? I didn’t ask him.”
“I no think he come from south—come maybe east,” the Maori muttered, and would say no more.
Bowker came down from the bungalow, as the sweating natives towed the vessel broadside to the beach, and made known his presence by a string of unnecessary oaths and orders. Ugly paid no attention to him until that much of the job was finished and lines had been made fast to the nearby fringe of palms. The next thing was to bury an anchor opposite the two masts and heel the craft over with blocks and tackle. There was only one mast, however, and with the hull weighed down, Ugly knew the task would be impossible.
The Adventure Megapack Page 28
