Stern shifted his course to southwest by west, and for some minutes held it true, so that the needle hardly trembled on the compass dial.
Then all at once he, too, saw the welcome signal, a tiniest pin-prick of light far on the edge of the world, no different from the sixth-magnitude stars that hung just above it on the horizon, save for its redness.
A gush of gratitude and love welled in the fountains of his heart.
“Home!” he whispered. “Home—for where you are that’s home to me! Oh, Beatrice, I’m coming—coming home to you!”
Slowly at first, then with greater and ever greater swiftness, the signal star crept nearer; and now even the flames were visible, and now behind them he caught dim sight of the rock-wall.
On and on, a very vulture of the upper air, planed the Pauillac. Stern shouted with all his strength. The girl might possibly hear him and might come out of their cave. She might even signal—and the nearness of her presence mounted upon him like a heady wine.
He swung the searchlight on the cañon, as they swept above it. He flung the pencil of radiance in a wide sweep up the cliff and down along the terrace.
It gave no sight, no sign of Beatrice.
“Sleeping, of course,” he reflected.
And now, Hope River past, and the cañon swallowed by the dense forest, he flung his light once more ahead. With it he felt out the rocky barrens for a landing-place.
Not more than twenty minutes later, followed by Bremilu and Zangamon, Stern was making way through the thick-laced wood and jungle.
Awed, terrified by their first sight of trees and by the upper world which to them was naught but marvel and danger, the two Merucaans followed close behind their guide. Even so would you or I cling to the Martian who should land us on that ruddy planet and pilot us through some huge, inchoate and grotesque growth of things to us perfectly unimaginable.
“Oh, master, we shall see the patriarch soon?” asked Bremilu, in a strange voice—a voice to him astonishingly loud, in the clear air of night upon the surface of the world. “Soon shall we speak with him and—”
“Hark! What’s that?” interrupted Stern, pausing, the while he gripped his pistol tighter.
From afar, though in which direction he could not say, a vague, dull roar made itself heard through the forest.
Sonorous, vibrant, menacing, it echoed and died; and then again, as once before, Stern heard that strange, hollow booming, as of some mighty drum struck by a muffled fist.
A cry? Was that a cry, so distant and so faint? Beast-cry, or call of night-bird, shrill and far?
Stern shuddered, and with redoubled haste once more pushed through the vague path he and Beatrice had made from the barrens to Settlement Miffs.
Presently, followed by the two colonists who dared not let him for a moment out of their sight, he reached the brow of the cañon. His hand flash-lamp showed him the rough path to the terrace.
With fast-beating heart he ran down it, unmindful of the unprotected edge or the sheer drop to the rocks of New Hope River, far below.
Bremilu and Zangamon, seeing perfectly in the gloom, hurried close behind, with words of awe, wonder and admiration in their own tongue.
“Beta! Oh, Beatrice! Home again!” Stern shouted triumphantly. “Where are you, Beta? Come! I’m home again!”
Quickly he scrambled along the broken terrace, stumbling in his haste over loose rocks and débris. Now he had reached the turn. The fire was in sight.
“Beta!” again he hailed. “O-hé! Beatrice!”
Still no answer, nor any sign from her. As he came to the fire he noted, despite his strong emotions, that it had for the most part burned down to glowing embers.
Only one or two resinous knots still flamed. It could not have been replenished for some time, perhaps two hours or more.
Again, his quick eye caught the fact that cinders, ashes and half-burned sticks lay scattered about in strange disorder.
“Why, Beatrice never makes a fire like that!” the thought pierced through his mind.
And—though as yet on no very definite grounds—a quick prescience of catastrophe battered at his heart.
“What’s this?”
Something lying on the rock-ledge, near the fire, caught his eye. He snatched it up.
“What—what can this mean?”
The colonists stood, frightened and confused, peering at him in the dark. His face, in the ruddy fire-glow, as he studied the thing he now held in his hand, must have been very terrible.
“Cloth! Torn! But—but then—”
He flung from him the bit of the girl’s cloak which, ripped and shredded as though by a powerful hand, cried disaster.
“Beatrice!” he shouted. “Where are you? Beatrice!”
To the doorway in the cliff he ran, shaken and trembling.
The stone had been pushed away; it lay inside the cave. Ominously the black entrance seemed staring at him in the dull gleam of the firelight.
On hands and knees he fell, and hastily crawled through. As he went, he flashed his lamp here, there, everywhere.
“Beatrice! Beatrice!”
No answer.
In the far corner still flickered some remainder of the cooking-fire. But there, too, ashes and half-burned sticks lay scattered all about.
To the bed he ran. It was empty and cold.
“Beatrice! Oh, my God!”
A glint of something metallic on the floor drew his bewildered, terror-smitten gaze.
He sprang, seized the object, and for a moment stood staring, while all about him the very universe seemed thundering and crashing down.
The object in his hand was the girl’s gun. One cartridge, and only one, had been exploded.
The barrel had been twisted almost off, as though by the wrenching clutch of a hand inhuman in its ghastly power.
On the stock, distinctly nicked into the hard rubber as Stern held the flash-lamp to it, were the unmistakable imprints of teeth.
With a groan, Allan started backward. The revolver fell with a clatter to the cave floor.
His foot slid in something wet, something sticky.
“Blood!” he gasped.
Half-crazed, he reeled toward the door.
The flash-lamp in his hand flung its white brush of radiance along the wall.
With a chattering cry he recoiled.
There, roughly yet unmistakably imprinted on the white limestone surface, he saw the print, in crimson, of a huge, a horrible, a brutally distorted hand.
CHAPTER XIV
ON THE TRAIL OF THE MONSTER
Stern’s cry of horror as he scrambled from the ravaged, desecrated cave, and the ghastly horror of his face, seen by the firelight, brought Zangamon and Bremilu to him, in terror.
“Master! Master! What—”
“My God! The girl—she’s gone!” he stammered, leaning against the cliff in mortal anguish.
“Gone, master? Where?”
“Gone! Dead, perhaps! Find her for me! Find her! You can see—in the dark! I—I am as though blind! Quick, on the trail!”
“But tell us—”
“Something has taken her! Some savage thing! Some wild man! Even now he may be killing her! Quick—after them!”
Bremilu stood staring for a moment, unable to grasp this catastrophe on the very moment of arrival. But Zangamon, of swifter wit, had already fallen on his knees, there by the mouth of the cave, and now—seeing clearly by the dim light which more than sufficed for him—was studying the traces of the struggle.
Stern, meanwhile, clutching his head between both hands, dumb-mad with agony, was choking with dry sobs.
“Master! See!”
Zangamon held up a piece of splintered wood, with the bark deeply scarred by teeth.
Stern snatched it.
“Part of the pole I gave her to brace the rock with,” he realized. “Even that was of no avail.”
“Master—this way they went!”
Zangamon pointed up along the rock-terr
ace. Stern’s eyes could distinguish no slightest trace on the stone, but the Merucaan spoke with certainty. He added:
“There was fighting, all the way along here, master. And then, here, the girl was dragged.”
Stern stumbled blindly after him as he led the way.
“There was fighting here? She struggled?”
“Yes, master.”
“Thank God! She was alive here, anyhow! She wasn’t killed in the cave. Maybe, in the open, she might—”
“Now there is no more fighting, master. The wild thing carried her here.”
He pointed at the rock. Stern, trembling and very sick, flashed his electric-lamp upon it. With eyes of dread and horror he looked for blood-stains.
What? A drop! With a dull, shuddering groan, he pressed forward again.
Out he jerked his pistol and fired, straight up, their prearranged signal: One shot, then a pause, then two. Some bare possibility existed and that she still might live and hear and know that rescue came—if it could come before it were eternally too late!
“On, on!” cried Allan. “Go on, Zangamon! Quick! Lead me on the trail!”
The Merucaan, now aided by Bremilu, who had recovered his wits, scouted ahead like a blood-hound on the spoor of a fugitive. One gripped his stone ax, the other a javelin.
Bent half double, scrutinizing in the dark the stony path which Allan followed behind them only by the aid of his flash, they proceeded cautiously up toward the brow of the cliff again.
But ere they reached the top they branched off onto another lateral path, still rougher and more tortuous, that led along the breast of the cañon.
“This way, master. It was here, most surely, the thing carried her.”
“What kind of marks? Do you see signs of claws?”
“Claws? What are claws?”
“Sharp, long nails, like our nails, only much larger and longer. Do you see any such marks?”
Zangamon paused a second to peer.
“I seem to see marks as of hands, master, but—”
“No matter! On! We must find her! Quick—lead the way!”
Five minutes of agonizing suspense for Allan brought him, still following the guides, without whom all would have been utterly lost, to a kind of thickly wooded dell that descended sharply to the edge of the cañon. Into this the trail led.
Even he himself could now here and there make out, by the aid of his light, a broken twig, trampled ferns and down-crushed grass. Once he distinguished a blood-stain on a limb—fresh blood, not coagulated. A groan burst from between his chattering teeth.
He turned his light on the grass beneath. All at once a blade moved.
“Oh, thank God!” he wheezed. “They passed here only a few minutes ago. They can’t be far now!”
Something drew his attention. He snatched at a sapling.
“Hair!”
Caught in a roughness of the bark a few short, stiff, wiry hairs, reddish-brown, were twisted.
“One of the Horde?” he stammered.
A lightning-flash of memory carried him back to Madison Forest, more than a year ago. He seemed to see again the obeah, as that monster advanced upon the girl, clutching, supremely hideous.
“The hair! The same kind of hair! In the power of the Horde!” he gasped.
A mental picture of extermination flashed before his mind’s eye. Whether the girl lived or died, he knew now that his life work was to include a total slaughter of the Anthropoids. The destruction he had already wrought among them was but child’s play to what would be.
And in his soul flamed the foreknowledge of a hunt à l’outrance, to the bitter end. So long as one, a single one of that foul breed should live, he would not rest from killing.
“Master! This way! Here, master!”
The voice of Zangamon sent him once more crashing through the jungle, after his questing guides. Again he fired the signal-shot, and now with the full power of his lungs he yelled.
His voice rang, echoing, through the black and tangled growths, startling the night-life of the depths. Something chippered overhead. Near-by a serpent slid away, hissing venomously. Death lurked on every hand.
Stern took no thought of it, but pressed forward, shouting the girl’s name, hallooing, beating down the undergrowth with mad fury. And here, there, all about he flung the light-beam.
Perhaps she might yet hear his hails; perhaps she might even catch some distant glimmer of his light, and know that help was coming, that rescuers were fighting onward to her.
Silent, lithe, confident even among these new and terribly strange conditions, the two men of the Folk slid through the jungle.
No hounds ever trailed fugitive more surely and with greater skill than these strange, white barbarians from the underworld. Through all his fear and agony, Stern blessed their courage and their skill.
“Men, by God! They’re men!” he muttered, as he thrashed his painful way behind them in the night.
Of a sudden, there somewhere ahead, far ahead in the wilderness—a cry?
Allan stopped short, his heart leaping.
Again he fired, and his voice set all the echoes ringing.
A cry! He knew it now. There could be no mistake—a cry!
“Beatrice!” he shouted in a terrible voice, leaping forward. The guides broke into a crouching run. All three crashed through the thickets, split the fern-masses, struggled through the tall saber-grass that here and there rose higher than their heads.
Allan cursed himself for a fool. That other cry he had heard while on his way from the Pauillac to Settlement Cliffs—that had been her cry for help—and he had neither known nor heeded.
“Fool that I was! Oh, damnable idiot that I was!” he panted as he ran.
From moment to moment he fired. He paused a few seconds to jack a fresh cartridge-clip into the automatic.
“Thank God I’ve got a belt full of ammunition!” thought he, and again smashed along with the two Merucaans.
All at once a formidable roar gave them pause.
Hollow, booming, deep, yet rising to a wild shriek of rage and horrid brutality, the beast-cry flung itself through the jungle.
And, following it, they heard again that muffled drumming, as though gigantic fists were flailing a tremendous tambour in the darkness.
“Master!” whispered Zangamon, recoiling a step. “Oh, Kromno, what is that?”
“Never have we heard such in our place!” added Bremilu, gripping his ax the tighter. “Is that a man-cry, or the cry of a beast—one of the beasts you told us of, that we have never seen?”
“Both! A man-beast! Kill! Kill!”
Now, Allan, sure of his direction, took the lead. No longer he flashed the light, and only once more he called:
“Beatrice! O Beatrice! We’re coming!”
Again he heard her cry, but suddenly it died as though swiftly choked in her very throat. Allan spat a blasphemy and surged on.
The two white barbarians followed, peering with those strange, pinkish eyes of theirs, courageous still, yet utterly at a loss to know what manner of thing they were now drawing near.
They burst through a thicket, waded a marshy swale and went splashing, staggering and slipping among tufts of coarse and knife-edged grasses, the haunt of unknown venomous reptiles.
Up a slope they won; and now, all at once the roar burst forth again close at hand, a rending tumult, wild, earthshaking, inexpressibly terrible.
All three stopped.
“Beatrice! Are you there? Answer!” shouted Stern.
Silence, save for a peculiar mumbling snuffle off ahead, among the deeper shadows of a fern-tree thicket.
“Beatrice!”
No answer. With a groan Allan shot his light toward the thicket. He seemed to distinguish something moving. To his ears now came a sound of twigs and brushwood snapping.
Absolutely void of fear he pressed forward, and the two colonists with him, their weapons ready. Stern held his revolver poised for instant action. His heart was h
ammering, and his breath surged pantingly; but within him his consciousness and soul lay calm.
For he knew one of two things were now to happen. Either that beast ahead there in the gloom, or he, must die.
CHAPTER XV
IN THE GRIP OF TERROR
As the three pursuers steadily advanced, the thing roared once more, and again they heard the hammering, drumming boom. Zangamon whispered some unintelligible phrase.
Allan projected the light forward again, and at sight of a moving mass, vague and intangible, among the gigantic fronds, leveled his automatic.
But on the instant Bremilu seized his arm.
“O master! Do not throw the fire of death!” he warned. “You cannot see, but we can! Do not throw the fire!”
“Why not? What is that thing?”
“It seems a man, yet it is different, master. It is all hair, and very thick and strong, and hideous! Do not shoot, O Kromno!”
“Why not?”
“Behold! That strange man-thing holds the woman, Beatrice, in his left arm. Of a truth, you may kill her, and not the enemy.”
Allan steadied himself against a palm. His brain seemed whirling, and for a moment all grew vague and like a dream.
She was there—Beatrice was there, and they could see her. There, in the clutches of some monster, horrible and foul! Living yet? Dead?
“Tell me! Does she live?”
“We cannot say, O Kromno. But do not shoot. We will creep close—we, ourselves, will slay, and never touch the woman.”
“No, no! If you do he’ll strangle her—provided she still lives! Don’t go! Wait! Let me think a second.”
With a tremendous effort Allan mastered himself. The situation far surpassed, in horror, any he had ever known.
There not a hundred yards distant in the dense blackness was Beatrice, in the grip of some unknown and hideous creature. Advance, Allan dared not, lest the creature rend her to tatters. Shoot, he dared not.
Yet something must be done, and quickly, for every second, every fraction of a second, was golden. The merest accident might now mean death or life—life, if the girl still lived!
“Zangamon!”
“Yea, master?”
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