“O Lord,” she moaned weakly between swollen lips which had been gashed and bitten till the blood showed on them in ruddy froth, “O dear Lord, take me—take me quickly—I can’t stand this; I can’t—oh, oh,—o-o-oh!” The prayerful exclamation ended in a half-whispered sob and her anguished head fell limply back and swung pendulously from side to side as consciousness left her.
“Ohé; la pauvre créature!” De Grandin leaped forward, unsheathing his knife as he sprang. Thrusting the flashlight into my hand, he slashed the cords from her hands and feet, cutting through each group of five strings with a single slash of his razor-sharp knife, and the thongs hummed and sang like broken banjo strings as they came apart beneath his steel.
As de Grandin worked I took note of the swooning girl. She was slight, almost to the point of emaciation, her ribs and the processes of her wrists and ankles showing whitely against the flesh. For costume she wore a wisp of printed cotton twisted bandeauwise about her bosom, a pair of soiled and torn white-cotton bloomers which terminated in tattered ruffles at her ankles and were held in place at the waist by a gayly dyed cotton scarf secured by a sort of four-in-hand knot in front. A close-wrapped bandanna kerchief swathed her head from brow to nape, covering hair and ears alike, and from the handkerchief’s rim almost to the pink of her upper lip a gilded metal mask obscured her features, leaving only mouth, nose-tip and chin visible.
As de Grandin lifted her from the bed-frame and rested her lolling head against his shoulder, he tugged at the mask, but so firmly was it bound that it resisted his effort.
Again he pulled, more sharply this time, and, as he did so, we noticed a movement at the side of her head beneath the handkerchief-turban. Snatching off the headgear, the Frenchman fumbled for the mask cords, then started back with a low cry of horror and dismay. The mask was not tied, but wired to her flesh, two punctures having been made in each ear, one in the lobe, the other in the pinna, and through the raw wounds fine golden wires had been thrust and twisted into loops, so that removal of the mask would necessitate clipping the wire or tearing the tender, doubly pierced ears.
“Oh, the villains, the assassins, the ninety-thousand-times-damned beasts!” de Grandin gritted through his teeth, desisting in his effort to take off the metallic mask. “If ever Satan walked the earth in human guise, I think he lodges within this accursed kennel of hellhounds, Friend Trowbridge, and, cordieu, though the monster have as many gullets as the fabled hydra, I shall slit them all for this night’s business!”
What more he would have said I do not know, for the fainting girl rolled her head and moaned feebly as she lay in his arms, and he was instantly all solicitude. “Drink this, ma pauvre,” he commanded, drawing a silver flask from his pocket and pressing it to her pale lips.
She swallowed a bit of the fiery brandy, choked and gasped a little, then lay back against his arm with a weak sigh.
Again he applied the restorative; then: “Who are you, ma petite?” he asked gently. “Speak bravely; we are friends.”
She shuddered convulsively and whimpered weakly again; then, so faint we could scarcely catch the syllables, “Ewell Eaton,” she whispered.
“Cordieu, I did know it!” de Grandin exclaimed delightedly. “Gloire à Dieu, we have found you, ma petite!
“The door, Friend Trowbridge—do you stand guard at the portal lest we be surprised. Here,”—he snatched a pistol from his pocket and thrust it into my hand—“hesitate not to use it, should occasion arise!”
I took station at the entrance of the torture chamber while de Grandin set about making the half-conscious girl as comfortable as possible. I could hear the murmur of their voices in soft conversation as he worked frantically at her swollen feet and hands, rubbing them with brandy from his flask and massaging her wrists and ankles in an effort to restore circulation, but what they said I could not understand.
I was on the point of leaving my post to join them, for the likelihood of our being interrupted seemed remote, when it happened. Without so much as a warning creak from without, the door smashed suddenly back on its hinges, flooring me as the kick of a mule might have done, and three men rushed pell-mell into the room. I saw de Grandin snatch frantically at his pistol, heard Ewell Eaton scream despairingly, and half-rose to my feet, weak and giddy with the devastating blow I had received, but determined to use my pistol to best advantage. One of the intruders turned savagely on me, brought the staff of a long, spearlike weapon he carried down upon my head, and caught me a smashing kick on the side of the head as I fell.
“TROWBRIDGE, MY FRIEND, ARE you living—do you survive?” Jules de Grandin’s anxious whisper cut through the darkness surrounding me.
I was lying on my back, wrists and ankles firmly bound, a bump like a goose-egg on my head where the spear-butt had hit me. Through the grimy window of our cellar prison a star or two winked mockingly; otherwise the place was dark as a cave. How long we had lain there I had no way of telling. For all I knew the troopers might have raided the place, arrested the inmates and gone, leaving us in our dungeon. A dozen questions blazed through my mind like lightning-flashes across a summer night as I strove to roll over and ease the pressure of the knots on my crossed wrists.
“Trowbridge, mon vieux, do you live, are you awake, can you hear?” the Frenchman’s murmured query came through the darkness again.
“De Grandin—where are you?” I asked, raising my head, the better to locate his voice.
“Parbleu, here I lie, trussed like a capon ready for the spit!” he returned. “They are prodigal with their rope, those assassins. Nevertheless, I think we shall make apes of them all. Roll toward me if you can, my friend, and lie with your hands toward me. Grâce à Dieu, neither age nor overeating has dulled my teeth. Come, make haste!”
Followed a slow, dragging sound, punctuated with muttered profanities in mingled French and English as he hitched himself laboriously across the rough cement floor in my direction.
In a few moments I felt the stiffly waxed hairs of his mustache against my wrists and the tightening of my bonds as his small, sharp teeth sank into the cords, severing strand after strand.
Sooner than I had hoped, my hands were free, and after a few seconds, during which I wrung my fingers to restore circulation, I unfastened the ropes binding my feet, then released de Grandin.
“Morbleu, at any rate we can move about, even if those sacré rogues deprived us of our weapons,” the Frenchman muttered as he strode up and down our prison. “At least one thing is accomplished—Mademoiselle Ewell is relieved of her torture. Before they beat me unconscious I heard her told tomorrow she would be strangled, but as the Spaniards so sagely remark, ‘tomorrow is another day,’ and I trust we shall have increased hell’s population by that time.
“Have you a match, by any kind of chance?” he added, turning to me.
Searching my pockets, I found a packet of paper matches and passed them over. Striking one, he held it torchwise above his head, surveying our prison. It was a small, cement-floored room, its single window heavily barred and its only article of furniture a large, sheet-iron-sheathed furnace, evidently the building’s auxiliary heating-plant. The door was of stout pine planks, nailed and doweled together so strongly as to defy anything less than a battering-ram; and secured with a modern burglar-proof lock. Plainly, there was no chance of escape that way.
“U’m?” murmured de Grandin, surveying the old hot-air furnace speculatively. “U’m-m-m? It may be we shall find use for this, if my boyhood’s agility has not failed me, Friend Trowbridge.”
“Use for that furnace?” I asked incredulously.
“Mais oui, why not?” he returned. “Let us see.”
He jerked the heater’s cast-iron door open, thrusting a match inside and looking carefully up the wide, galvanized flues leading to the upper floors. “It is a chance,” he announced, “but the good God knows we take an equal one waiting here. Au revoir, my friend, either I return to liberate us or we say good morning in heaven.”
Next instant he had turned his back to the furnace, grasped the iron door-frame at each side, thrust his head and shoulders through the opening and begun worming himself upward toward the flue-mouth.
A faint scraping sounded inside the heater’s interior, then silence broken only by the occasional soft thud of a bit of dislodged soot.
I paced the dungeon in a perfect fever of apprehension. Though de Grandin was slight as a girl, and almost as supple as an eel, I was certain I had seen the last of him, for he would surely be hopelessly caught in the great, dusty pipes, or, if not that, discovered by some of the villainous inmates of the place when he attempted to force himself through a register. His plan of escape was suicide, nothing less.
Click! The strong, jimmy-proof lock snapped back. I braced myself for the reappearance of our jailers, but the Frenchman’s delighted chuckle reassured me.
“Mordieu, it was not even so difficult as I had feared,” he announced. “The pipes were large enough to permit my passage without great trouble, and the registers—God be thanked!—were not screwed to the floor. I had but to lift the first I came to from its frame and emerge like a jack-in-the-box from his case. Yes. Come, let us ascend. There is rheumatism, and other unpleasant things, to be contracted in this cursed cellar.”
Stepping as softly as possible, we traversed a long, unlighted corridor, ascended two flights of winding stairs and came to an upper hallway letting into a large room furnished in a garish East Indian manner and decorated with a number of mediæval sets of mail and a stand of antique arms.
The Frenchman looked about, seeking cover, but there was nothing behind which an underfed cat could hide, much less a man. Finally: “I have it!” he declared, “Parbleu, c’est joli!”
Striding across the room he examined the nearest suit of armor and turned to me with a chuckle. “Into it, mon ami,” he commanded. “Quick!”
With de Grandin’s help I donned the beavered helmet and adjusted the gorget, cuirass, brassards, cuisses and jambs, finding them a rather snug fit. In five minutes I was completely garbed, and the Frenchman, laughing softly and cursing delightedly; was clambering into another set of mail. When we stood erect against the wall no one who had not seen us put on the armor could have told us from the empty suits of mail which stood at regular intervals about the wall.
From the stand of arms de Grandin selected a keen, long-bladed misericorde, and gazed upon it lovingly. Nor had he armed himself a moment too soon, for even as he straightened back against the wall and lowered the visor of his helmet there came the scuffle of feet from the corridor outside and a bearded, muscular man in Oriental garb dragged a half-fainting girl into the room. She was scantily clad in a Hindu version of a Parisian night club costume.
“By Vishnu, you shall!” the man snarled, grasping the girl’s slender throat between his blunt fingers and squeezing until she gasped for breath. “Dance you must and dance you shall—as the Master has ordered—or I choke the breath from your nostrils! Shame? What have you to do with shame, O creature? Daughter of a thousand iniquities, tomorrow there shall be two stretched upon the ‘bed of roses’ in the cellar!”
“Eh bien, my friend, you may be right,” de Grandin remarked, “but I damn think you shall not be present to see it.”
The fellow toppled over without so much as a groan as the Frenchman, with the precise skill of a practised surgeon, drove his dagger home where skull and spine met.
“Silence, little orange-pip!” the Frenchman ordered as the girl opened her lips to scream. “Go below to your appointed place and do as you are bidden. The time comes quickly when you shall be liberated and we shall drag such of these sow-suckled sons of pigs as remain alive to prison. Quick, none must suspect that help approaches!”
The girl ran quickly from the room, her soft, bare feet making no sound on the thick carpets of the hall, and de Grandin walked slowly to the door. In a moment he returned, lugging a suit of armor in his arms. Standing it in the place against the wall he had vacated, he repeated the trip, filling my space with a second empty suit, then motioning me to follow.
“Those sets of mail I did bring were from the balcony at the stairhead,” he explained softly. “In their places we shall stand and see what passes below. Perhaps it is that we shall have occasion to take parts in the play before all is done.”
STIFF AND STILL AS the lifeless ornaments we impersonated, we stood at attention at the stairway’s top. Below us lay the main drawing-room of the house, a sort of low stage or dais erected at its farther end, a crescent formation of folding-chairs, each occupied by a man in evening clothes, standing in the main body of the room.
“Ah, it seems all is ready for the play,” the Frenchman murmured softly through the visor-bars of his helmet. “Did you overhear the tale the little Mademoiselle Ewell told me in the torture chamber, my friend?”
“No.”
“Mordieu, it was a story to make a man’s hair erect itself! This is a house of evil, the abode of esclavage, no less, Friend Trowbridge. Here stolen girls are brought and broken for a life of degradation, even as wild animals from the jungle are trained for a career in the arena. The master of this odious cesspool is a Hindu, as are his ten retainers, and well they know their beastly trade, for he was a dealer in women in India before the British Raj put him in prison, and his underlings have all been corah-bundars—punishment-servants—in Indian harems before he hired them for this service. Parbleu, from what we saw of the poor one in the cellars, I should say their technique has improved since they left their native land!
“The headquarters of this organization is in Spain—I have heard of it before—but there are branches in almost every country. These evil ones work on commission, and when the girls they steal have been sufficiently broken in spirit they are delivered, like so many cattle, and their price paid by dive-keepers in South America, Africa or China—wherever women command high prices and no questions are asked.
“Hitherto the slavers have taken their victims where they found them—poor shop-girls, friendless waifs, or those already on the road to living death. This is a new scheme. Only well-favored girls of good breeding are stolen and brought here for breaking, and every luckless victim is cruelly beaten, stripped and reclothed in the degrading uniform of the place within half an hour of her arrival.
“Mordieu, but their tactics are clever! All faces obscured by masks which can not be removed, all hair covered by exactly similar turbans, all clothing exactly alike—twin sisters might be here together, yet never recognize each other, for the poor ones are forbidden to address so much as a word to each other—Mademoiselle Ewell was stretched on the bed of torture for no greater fault than breaking this rule.”
“But this is horrible!” I interrupted. “This is unbelievable—”
“Who says it?” he demanded fiercely. “Have we not seen with our own eyes? Have we not Mademoiselle Ewell’s story for testimony? Do I not know how her sister, poor Madame Mazie, came in the river? Assuredly! Attend me: The fiends who took her prisoner quickly discovered the poor child’s condition, and they thereupon deliberately beat out her brains and cast her murdered body into the water, thinking the river would wash away the evidence of their crime.
“Did not that execrable slave-master whom I slew command the other girl to dance—what did it mean?” He paused a moment, then continued in a sibilant whisper:
“This, pardieu! Even as we send the young conscripts to Algeria to toughen them for military service, so these poor ones are given their baptism into a life of infamy by being forced to dance before half-drunken brutes to the music of the whip’s crack. Nom d’une pipe, I damn think we shall see some dancing of the sort they little suspect before we are done—no more, the master comes!”
As de Grandin broke off, I noticed a sudden focusing of attention by the company below.
Stepping daintily as a tango dancer, a man emerged through the arch behind the dais at the drawing-room’s farther end. He was in full Indian cour
t dress: a purple satin tunic, high at the neck and reaching half-way to his knees, fastened at the front with a row of sapphire buttons and heavily fringed with silver at the bottom; trousers of white satin, baggy at the knee, skin-tight at the ankle, slippers of red Morocco on his feet. An enormous turban of peach-bloom silk, studded with brilliants and surmounted by a vivid green aigrette was on his head, while round his neck dangled a triple row of pearls, its lowest loop hanging almost to the bright yellow sash which bound his waist as tightly as a corset. One long, brown hand toyed negligently with the necklace, while the other stroked his black, sweeping mustache caressingly.
“Gentlemen,” be announced in a languid Oxonian drawl, “if you are ready, we shall proceed to make whoopee, as you so quaintly express it in your vernacular.” He turned and beckoned through the archway, and as the light struck his profile I recognized him as the leader of the party which had surprised us in the torture chamber.
De Grandin identified him at the same time, for I heard him muttering through the bars of his visor: “Ha, toad, viper, worm! Strut while you may; comes soon the time when Jules de Grandin shall show you the posture you will not change in a hurry!”
Through the archway stepped a tall, angular woman, her face masked by a black cloth domino, a small round samisen, or Japanese banjo, in her hand. Saluting the company with a profound obeisance, she dropped to her knees and picked a short, jerky note or two on her crude instrument.
The master of ceremonies clapped his hands sharply, and four girls came running out on the stage. They wore brilliant kimonos, red and blue and white, beautifully embroidered with birds and flowers, and on their feet were white-cotton tabi or foot-mittens with a separate “thumb” to accommodate the great toe, and zori, or light straw sandals. Golden masks covered the upper part of their faces, and their hair was hidden by voluminous glossy-black wigs arranged in elaborate Japanese coiffures and thickly studded with ornamental hairpins. On their brightly rouged lips were fixed, unnatural smiles.
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