The men had been staunch enough in their devotion and loyalty as long as they were in no danger of being overtaken by the Russian and his party. They had heard, however, so much of the atrocious disposition of Rokoff that they had grown to hold him in mortal terror, and now that they knew he was close upon them their timid hearts would fortify them no longer, and as quickly as possible they deserted the three whites.
Yet on and on went Anderssen and the girl. The Swede went ahead, to hew a way through the brush where the path was entirely overgrown, so that on this march it was necessary that the young woman carry the child.
All day they marched. Late in the afternoon they realized that they had failed. Close behind them they heard the noise of a large safari advancing along the trail which they had cleared for their pursuers.
When it became quite evident that they must be overtaken in a short time Anderssen hid Jane behind a large tree, covering her and the child with brush.
“There is a village about a mile farther on,” he said to her. “The Mosula told me its location before they deserted us. Ay try to lead the Russian off your trail, then you go on to the village. Ay tank the chief ban friendly to white men — the Mosula tal me he ban. Anyhow, that was all we can do.
“After while you get chief to tak you down by the Mosula village at the sea again, an’ after a while a ship is sure to put into the mouth of the Ugambi. Then you be all right. Gude-by an’ gude luck to you, lady!”
“But where are you going, Sven?” asked Jane. “Why can’t you hide here and go back to the sea with me?”
“Ay gotta tal the Russian you ban dead, so that he don’t luke for you no more,” and Anderssen grinned.
“Why can’t you join me then after you have told him that?” insisted the girl.
Anderssen shook his head.
“Ay don’t tank Ay join anybody any more after Ay tal the Russian you ban dead,” he said.
“You don’t mean that you think he will kill you?” asked Jane, and yet in her heart she knew that that was exactly what the great scoundrel would do in revenge for his having been thwarted by the Swede. Anderssen did not reply, other than to warn her to silence and point toward the path along which they had just come.
“I don’t care,” whispered Jane Clayton. “I shall not let you die to save me if I can prevent it in any way. Give me your revolver. I can use that, and together we may be able to hold them off until we can find some means of escape.”
“It won’t work, lady,” replied Anderssen. “They would only get us both, and then Ay couldn’t do you no good at all. Think of the kid, lady, and what it would be for you both to fall into Rokoff’s hands again. For his sake you must do what Ay say. Here, take my rifle and ammunition; you may need them.”
He shoved the gun and bandoleer into the shelter beside Jane. Then he was gone.
She watched him as he returned along the path to meet the oncoming safari of the Russian. Soon a turn in the trail hid him from view.
Her first impulse was to follow. With the rifle she might be of assistance to him, and, further, she could not bear the terrible thought of being left alone at the mercy of the fearful jungle without a single friend to aid her.
She started to crawl from her shelter with the intention of running after Anderssen as fast as she could. As she drew the baby close to her she glanced down into its little face.
How red it was! How unnatural the little thing looked. She raised the cheek to hers. It was fiery hot with fever!
With a little gasp of terror Jane Clayton rose to her feet in the jungle path. The rifle and bandoleer lay forgotten in the shelter beside her. Anderssen was forgotten, and Rokoff, and her great peril.
All that rioted through her fear-mad brain was the fearful fact that this little, helpless child was stricken with the terrible jungle-fever, and that she was helpless to do aught to allay its sufferings — sufferings that were sure to come during ensuing intervals of partial consciousness.
Her one thought was to find some one who could help her — some woman who had had children of her own — and with the thought came recollection of the friendly village of which Anderssen had spoken. If she could but reach it — in time!
There was no time to be lost. Like a startled antelope she turned and fled up the trail in the direction Anderssen had indicated.
From far behind came the sudden shouting of men, the sound of shots, and then silence. She knew that Anderssen had met the Russian.
A half-hour later she stumbled, exhausted, into a little thatched village. Instantly she was surrounded by men, women, and children. Eager, curious, excited natives plied her with a hundred questions, no one of which she could understand or answer.
All that she could do was to point tearfully at the baby, now wailing piteously in her arms, and repeat over and over, “Fever — fever — fever.”
The blacks did not understand her words, but they saw the cause of her trouble, and soon a young woman had pulled her into a hut and with several others was doing her poor best to quiet the child and allay its agony.
The witch doctor came and built a little fire before the infant, upon which he boiled some strange concoction in a small earthen pot, making weird passes above it and mumbling strange, monotonous chants. Presently he dipped a zebra’s tail into the brew, and with further mutterings and incantations sprinkled a few drops of the liquid over the baby’s face.
After he had gone the women sat about and moaned and wailed until Jane thought that she should go mad; but, knowing that they were doing it all out of the kindness of their hearts, she endured the frightful waking nightmare of those awful hours in dumb and patient suffering.
It must have been well toward midnight that she became conscious of a sudden commotion in the village. She heard the voices of the natives raised in controversy, but she could not understand the words.
Presently she heard footsteps approaching the hut in which she squatted before a bright fire with the baby on her lap. The little thing lay very still now, its lids, half-raised, showed the pupils horribly upturned.
Jane Clayton looked into the little face with fear-haunted eyes. It was not her baby — not her flesh and blood — but how close, how dear the tiny, helpless thing had become to her. Her heart, bereft of its own, had gone out to this poor, little, nameless waif, and lavished upon it all the love that had been denied her during the long, bitter weeks of her captivity aboard the Kincaid.
She saw that the end was near, and though she was terrified at contemplation of her loss, still she hoped that it would come quickly now and end the sufferings of the little victim.
The footsteps she had heard without the hut now halted before the door. There was a whispered colloquy, and a moment later M’ganwazam, chief of the tribe, entered. She had seen but little of him, as the women had taken her in hand almost as soon as she had entered the village.
M’ganwazam, she now saw, was an evil-appearing savage with every mark of brutal degeneracy writ large upon his bestial countenance. To Jane Clayton he looked more gorilla than human. He tried to converse with her, but without success, and finally he called to some one without.
In answer to his summons another Negro entered — a man of very different appearance from M’ganwazam — so different, in fact, that Jane Clayton immediately decided that he was of another tribe. This man acted as interpreter, and almost from the first question that M’ganwazam put to her, Jane felt an intuitive conviction that the savage was attempting to draw information from her for some ulterior motive.
She thought it strange that the fellow should so suddenly have become interested in her plans, and especially in her intended destination when her journey had been interrupted at his village.
Seeing no reason for withholding the information, she told him the truth; but when he asked if she expected to meet her husband at the end of the trip, she shook her head negatively.
Then he told her the purpose of his visit, talking through the interpreter.
“I
have just learned,” he said, “from some men who live by the side of the great water, that your husband followed you up the Ugambi for several marches, when he was at last set upon by natives and killed. Therefore I have told you this that you might not waste your time in a long journey if you expected to meet your husband at the end of it; but instead could turn and retrace your steps to the coast.”
Jane thanked M’ganwazam for his kindness, though her heart was numb with suffering at this new blow. She who had suffered so much was at last beyond reach of the keenest of misery’s pangs, for her senses were numbed and calloused.
With bowed head she sat staring with unseeing eyes upon the face of the baby in her lap. M’ganwazam had left the hut. Sometime later she heard a noise at the entrance — another had entered. One of the women sitting opposite her threw a faggot upon the dying embers of the fire between them.
With a sudden flare it burst into renewed flame, lighting up the hut’s interior as though by magic.
The flame disclosed to Jane Clayton’s horrified gaze that the baby was quite dead. How long it had been so she could not guess.
A choking lump rose to her throat, her head drooped in silent misery upon the little bundle that she had caught suddenly to her breast.
For a moment the silence of the hut was unbroken. Then the native woman broke into a hideous wail.
A man coughed close before Jane Clayton and spoke her name.
With a start she raised her eyes to look into the sardonic countenance of Nikolas Rokoff.
Chapter 13
Escape
For a moment Rokoff stood sneering down upon Jane Clayton, then his eyes fell to the little bundle in her lap. Jane had drawn one corner of the blanket over the child’s face, so that to one who did not know the truth it seemed but to be sleeping.
“You have gone to a great deal of unnecessary trouble,” said Rokoff, “to bring the child to this village. If you had attended to your own affairs I should have brought it here myself.
“You would have been spared the dangers and fatigue of the journey. But I suppose I must thank you for relieving me of the inconvenience of having to care for a young infant on the march.
“This is the village to which the child was destined from the first. M’ganwazam will rear him carefully, making a good cannibal of him, and if you ever chance to return to civilization it will doubtless afford you much food for thought as you compare the luxuries and comforts of your life with the details of the life your son is living in the village of the Waganwazam.
“Again I thank you for bringing him here for me, and now I must ask you to surrender him to me, that I may turn him over to his foster parents.” As he concluded Rokoff held out his hands for the child, a nasty grin of vindictiveness upon his lips.
To his surprise Jane Clayton rose and, without a word of protest, laid the little bundle in his arms.
“Here is the child,” she said. “Thank God he is beyond your power to harm.”
Grasping the import of her words, Rokoff snatched the blanket from the child’s face to seek confirmation of his fears. Jane Clayton watched his expression closely.
She had been puzzled for days for an answer to the question of Rokoff’s knowledge of the child’s identity. If she had been in doubt before the last shred of that doubt was wiped away as she witnessed the terrible anger of the Russian as he looked upon the dead face of the baby and realized that at the last moment his dearest wish for vengeance had been thwarted by a higher power.
Almost throwing the body of the child back into Jane Clayton’s arms, Rokoff stamped up and down the hut, pounding the air with his clenched fists and cursing terribly. At last he halted in front of the young woman, bringing his face down close to hers.
“You are laughing at me,” he shrieked. “You think that you have beaten me — eh? I’ll show you, as I have shown the miserable ape you call ‘husband,’ what it means to interfere with the plans of Nikolas Rokoff.
“You have robbed me of the child. I cannot make him the son of a cannibal chief, but” — and he paused as though to let the full meaning of his threat sink deep— “I can make the mother the wife of a cannibal, and that I shall do — after I have finished with her myself.”
If he had thought to wring from Jane Clayton any sign of terror he failed miserably. She was beyond that. Her brain and nerves were numb to suffering and shock.
To his surprise a faint, almost happy smile touched her lips. She was thinking with thankful heart that this poor little corpse was not that of her own wee Jack, and that — best of all — Rokoff evidently did not know the truth.
She would have liked to have flaunted the fact in his face, but she dared not. If he continued to believe that the child had been hers, so much safer would be the real Jack wherever he might be. She had, of course, no knowledge of the whereabouts of her little son — she did not know, even, that he still lived, and yet there was the chance that he might.
It was more than possible that without Rokoff’s knowledge this child had been substituted for hers by one of the Russian’s confederates, and that even now her son might be safe with friends in London, where there were many, both able and willing, to have paid any ransom which the traitorous conspirator might have asked for the safe release of Lord Greystoke’s son.
She had thought it all out a hundred times since she had discovered that the baby which Anderssen had placed in her arms that night upon the Kincaid was not her own, and it had been a constant and gnawing source of happiness to her to dream the whole fantasy through in its every detail.
No, the Russian must never know that this was not her baby. She realized that her position was hopeless — with Anderssen and her husband dead there was no one in all the world with a desire to succour her who knew where she might be found.
Rokoff’s threat, she realized, was no idle one. That he would do, or attempt to do, all that he had promised, she was perfectly sure; but at the worst it meant but a little earlier release from the hideous anguish that she had been enduring. She must find some way to take her own life before the Russian could harm her further.
Just now she wanted time — time to think and prepare herself for the end. She felt that she could not take the last, awful step until she had exhausted every possibility of escape. She did not care to live unless she might find her way back to her own child, but slight as such a hope appeared she would not admit its impossibility until the last moment had come, and she faced the fearful reality of choosing between the final alternatives — Nikolas Rokoff on one hand and self-destruction upon the other.
“Go away!” she said to the Russian. “Go away and leave me in peace with my dead. Have you not brought sufficient misery and anguish upon me without attempting to harm me further? What wrong have I ever done you that you should persist in persecuting me?”
“You are suffering for the sins of the monkey you chose when you might have had the love of a gentleman — of Nikolas Rokoff,” he replied. “But where is the use in discussing the matter? We shall bury the child here, and you will return with me at once to my own camp. Tomorrow I shall bring you back and turn you over to your new husband — the lovely M’ganwazam. Come!”
He reached out for the child. Jane, who was on her feet now, turned away from him.
“I shall bury the body,” she said. “Send some men to dig a grave outside the village.”
Rokoff was anxious to have the thing over and get back to his camp with his victim. He thought he saw in her apathy a resignation to her fate. Stepping outside the hut, he motioned her to follow him, and a moment later, with his men, he escorted Jane beyond the village, where beneath a great tree the blacks scooped a shallow grave.
Wrapping the tiny body in a blanket, Jane laid it tenderly in the black hole, and, turning her head that she might not see the mouldy earth falling upon the pitiful little bundle, she breathed a prayer beside the grave of the nameless waif that had won its way to the innermost recesses of her heart.
Then, dr
y-eyed but suffering, she rose and followed the Russian through the Stygian blackness of the jungle, along the winding, leafy corridor that led from the village of M’ganwazam, the black cannibal, to the camp of Nikolas Rokoff, the white fiend.
Beside them, in the impenetrable thickets that fringed the path, rising to arch above it and shut out the moon, the girl could hear the stealthy, muffled footfalls of great beasts, and ever round about them rose the deafening roars of hunting lions, until the earth trembled to the mighty sound.
The porters lighted torches now and waved them upon either hand to frighten off the beasts of prey. Rokoff urged them to greater speed, and from the quavering note in his voice Jane Clayton knew that he was weak from terror.
The sounds of the jungle night recalled most vividly the days and nights that she had spent in a similar jungle with her forest god — with the fearless and unconquerable Tarzan of the Apes. Then there had been no thoughts of terror, though the jungle noises were new to her, and the roar of a lion had seemed the most awe-inspiring sound upon the great earth.
How different would it be now if she knew that he was somewhere there in the wilderness, seeking her! Then, indeed, would there be that for which to live, and every reason to believe that succour was close at hand — but he was dead! It was incredible that it should be so.
There seemed no place in death for that great body and those mighty thews. Had Rokoff been the one to tell her of her lord’s passing she would have known that he lied. There could be no reason, she thought, why M’ganwazam should have deceived her. She did not know that the Russian had talked with the savage a few minutes before the chief had come to her with his tale.
At last they reached the rude boma that Rokoff’s porters had thrown up round the Russian’s camp. Here they found all in turmoil. She did not know what it was all about, but she saw that Rokoff was very angry, and from bits of conversation which she could translate she gleaned that there had been further desertions while he had been absent, and that the deserters had taken the bulk of his food and ammunition.
Delphi Collected Works of Edgar Rice Burroughs (Illustrated) (Series Four Book 26) Page 65
