Authors: George England
He arose and, again making sure his automatic was in complete
readiness, stood for a second in thought. Whatever he was now to do
must be done quickly.
In a few hours, at the outside, he knew the vanguard of the pursuing
Horde would enter the last valley on the other side of the canyon. By
afternoon another battle might be on.
"Whatever happens, I must get my grip on the colony again at once!" he
realized. "Such of the Folk as are still sound must be rallied.
Otherwise nothing but annihilation awaits us all!"
But, even as he faced the exit of Cliff Villa, all at once the door
was hurled violently open and a harsh, discordant cry of hatred and
defiance burst into the cave.
Stern saw the detested figure of H'yemba standing there, loose-hung,
powerful, barbaric, his eyes blinking evilly behind the mica screens
that Allan himself had made for him.
With a cry Allan started forward.
"My son!" he gasped.
There, clutched in the smith's left arm, lay the boy!
Allan heard his child crying as in pain, and rage swept every caution
to the winds.
He sprang toward H'yemba, cursing; but the smith, with a beast-laugh,
raised his right hand.
"Master!" he mocked. "No nearer or ye die!"
Allan, aghast, saw the flicker of sunlight on a pistol-barrel. With
only too true an aim, H'yemba had him covered.
Came a little pause, tense as steel wire. Somewhere down the terrace
sounded a murmur of voices. Allan seemed to sense that the rebel had
now gathered his forces and that a general attack was imminent.
Time! At all hazards he must gain a moment's time!
"H'yemba!" cried he. "What is your speech with me, your master?"
"Master?" sneered the smith again. "My slave! Power has passed from
you to me. From you, who speak the false, who entrap us here to suffer
and die, who slay and ruin us, to me, who will yet lead the people
back to their far home, to safety and to life!"
"You lie, hound!"
The smith laughed bitterly.
"That shall be seen—who lies!" he gibed. "But now power is mine. I
have your son in my hand. Move only and I fling him from the cliff!"
Allan felt his brain whirl; all things seemed to turn about him. But
he fought off his faintness, and in a shaken voice once more demanded:
"What terms, H'yemba?"
"Slavery for you and yours! Your son shall be my serf; your woman my
chattel! Ha, that woman! She has already fought me, like one of these
strange woods-beasts you have made us kill! See! My hair is burned and
my flesh blistered with her fire-beating! But when I hold her in these
hands then she shall pay for all, the vuedma!"
Stern's hand twitched, with the automatic gripped in the fingers, but
the blacksmith cried a warning.
"Raise not that hand, slave!" he ordered. "You cannot shoot without
the danger of killing this vile spawn of yours! And remember, too, the
river lies far below, and very sharp are the waiting rocks!
"Fool that you are, that think yourself so wise! To leave this place
with me! With me, skilled in all labors of metal and stone, strong to
cut passage-ways—"
"You devil! You hewed a way into my house?"
H'yemba laughed brutally.
"Silently, steadily, I labored!" he boasted. "And behold the reward!
Power for me; eternal slavery for you and all your blood—if any
live!"
Insane with rage and hate, Allan nevertheless realized that now all
depended on keeping his thought and nerve.
One single premature move and his son would inevitably be hurled over
the parapet, down two hundred and fifty feet to the river-bed below.
At all hazards, he must keep cool!
The smith, after all only a barbarian and of limited intelligence, had
not even thought of the obvious command to make Stern drop his pistol
on the floor.
Upon this oversight now hung all Allan's hopes.
Even though the man's retainers might rush the cave and slaughter all,
yet in Allan's heart burned a clear and steady flame of hot desire to
compass H'yemba's death.
And as the smith now loudly boasted, insulted, vilified, in the true
manner of the savage, imperceptibly, inch by inch, Allan was turning
his pistol-barrel upward.
Higher, higher, bit by bit it crept toward the horizontal.
Unaccustomed to shoot from the hip, Allan realized that right before
him lay a supreme test of nerve and marksmanship and skill.
To shoot and kill his boy—the thought was too hideous even to be
considered. His father-heart yearned toward the frightened, crying
child there in the traitor's grip.
The unconscious form of Beatrice fever-burned and panting on the bed,
seemed calling aloud to him: "Aim true, Allan!
Aim true!
"
For one false shot inevitably sealed the child's death. To wound
H'yemba and not kill him meant the catastrophe. If the bullet failed
to enter brain or heart, H'yemba—though mortally hurt—would of a
surety, with his last quiver of strength, sling the boy outward over
the dizzying parapet.
Allan prayed; yet his prayer was wordless, formless and unconscious.
He dared not glance down at the automatic. His eyes must hold the
smith's. And he must speak, must parley, at all hazards must still
gain another moment's respite.
What Allan said in those last terrible, eternal seconds he could never
afterward recall.
He only knew he was treating with the enemy, making terms, listening,
answering—all with mechanical sub-consciousness.
His real personality, his true ego, was absolutely absorbed in the one
vital, all-deciding problem of that stiffening pistol-hand.
Suddenly something seemed to cry in his ear:
"You have it now! Fire!"
His hand leaped back with the crashing discharge, loud-echoing in the
cave.
H'yemba did not even yell. But at the second when he seemed to crumple
all together, falling as an empty sack falls, some involuntary jerk of
his finger sent a bullet zooming into the cave.
It shattered beyond Allan in a little shower of steel and lead
fragments, mingled with rock-dust.
Before these had even fallen Allan was upon him.
Neglecting for an instant the bruised and screaming child, who lay
there struggling on the terrace-path, Allan seized the still-twitching
body of the monstrous traitor.
With passionate strength he dragged it to the parapet.
Below, down the path, he caught a swift glimpse of grouped Folk,
wondering, staring, aghast.
To them he gave no heed.
He lifted the body, dripping bright blood.
Silent, indomitable, disheveled, he raised it on high.
Then, with a cry: "See, ye people, how I answer traitors!" he
whirled it outward into the void.
Over and over it gyrated through vacant space. Then, with an echoing
splash, the river took it, and the swift current, white-foaming,
boisterous, wild, rolled it and tumbled it away, away forever, into
the unknown.
With harsh cries and a wild spatter of bullets aimed high above them,
Allan drove the cowed and beaten partizans of H'yemba jostling,
fleeing, howling for mercy, down the terrace-path between the cliff
and parapet.
Only then, when he knew victory was secure and his own dominance once
more sealed on them, did he run swiftly back to his boy.
Snatching up the child, he retreated into the home cave again; and now
for the first time he realized his wan and sunken cheeks were wet with
tears.
Now that, for an hour or two at least, he felt himself free and
master of the situation, Allan devoted himself with energy to the
immediate situation in Cliff Villa.
Though still weak and dazed, old Gesafam had now recovered strength
and wit enough to soothe and care for the child.
Allan heard from her, in a few disjointed words, all she knew of the
kidnapping. H'yemba, she said, had suddenly appeared to her, from the
remote end of the cave, and had tried to snatch the child.
She had fought, but one blow of his ax had stunned her. Beyond this,
she remembered nothing.
Allan sought and quickly found the aperture made by the smith through
the limestone.
"Evidently he'd been planning this coup for a long time," thought he.
"The great catastrophe of the land-slide broke the last bonds of order
and restraint, and gave him his opportunity. Well, it's his last
villainy! I'll have this passageway cemented up. That's all the
monument he'll ever get. It's more than he deserves!"
He returned to Beatrice. The girl still lay there, moaning a little in
her fevered sleep. Allan watched her in anguish.
"Oh, if she should die—if she should die!" thought he, and felt the
sweat start on his forehead. "She must not! She can't! I won't let
her!"
A touch on his arm aroused him from his vigil. Turning, he saw
Gesafam.
"The child, O Kromno, hungers. It is crying for food!" Allan thought.
He saw at once the impossibility of letting the boy come near its
mother. Some other arrangement must be made.
"Ah!" thought he. "I have it!"
He gestured toward the door.
"Go," he commanded. "Go up the path, to the palisaded place. Take this
rope. Bring back, with you a she-goat. Thus shall the child be fed!"
The old woman obeyed. In a quarter-hour she had returned, dragging a
wild goat that bleated in terror.
Then, while she watched with amazement, Allan succeeded in milking the
creature; though he had to lash securely all four feet and throw it to
the cave-floor before it would submit.
He modified the milk with water and bade the old woman administer it
by means of a bit of soft cloth. Allan, Junior, protested with yells,
but had to make the best of hard necessity; and, after a long and
painful process, was surfeited and dozed off. Gesafam put him to bed
on the divan by the fire.
"A poor substitute," thought Allan, "but it will sustain life. He's
healthy; he can stand it—he's
got
to. Thank God for that goat!
Without it he might easily have starved."
He tied the animal at the rear of the cave, and had Gesafam fetch a
good supply of grass. Thus for the present one problem at least was
solved.
Beatrice's condition remained unchanged. Now and then she called for
water, which he gave her plentifully. Once he thought she recognized
him, but he could not be certain.
And day wore on; and now the hour of noon was at hand. Allan knew that
other duties called him. He must go down among the Folk and save them,
too, if possible.
Eating a little at random and making sure as always that his pistols
were well loaded, he consigned Beatrice and the child into the old
woman's keeping and left the cave.
On the terrace he stopped a moment, gazing triumphantly at the
bloodmarks now thickly coagulated down the rocks.
Then, out over the canyon and the forest to northward he peered. His
eyes caught the signal-fires he knew must be there now, not ten miles
away; and with a nod he smiled.
"They've certainly trailed me close, the devils!" sneered he. "Since
the minute they first attacked my two men and me, trying to repair the
disabled Pauillac in that infernal valley so far to northward, they
haven't given me an hour's respite! Before night there'll be war!
Well, let them come. The quicker now the better!"
Then he turned, and with a determined step, still clad in his
grotesque rags, descended toward the caves of the Folk, such as still
were left.
Where all had been resistance and defiant surliness before, now all
had become obedience and worship. He understood enough of the
barbarian psychology to know that power, strength and dominance—and
these alone—commanded respect with the Folk.
And among them all, those who had not seen as well as those that had,
the sudden, dramatic, annihilating downfall of H'yemba had again
cemented the bonds of solidarity more closely than ever.
The sight of that arch-rebel's body hurled from the parapet had
effectually tamed them, every one. No longer was there any murmur in
their caves, no thought save of obedience and worship.
"It's not what I want," reflected Allan. "I want intelligent
cooperation, not adulation. I want democracy! But, damn it! if they
can't understand, then I must rule a while. And rule I will—and they
shall obey or die!"
Quickly he got in touch with the situation. From cave to cave he went,
estimating the damage. At the great gap in the terrace he stood and
carefully observed the wreckage in the river-bed below.
He visited the hospital-cave, administered medicines, changed
dressings and labored for his Folk as though no shadow of rebellion
ever had come 'twixt them and him. The news of Bremilu's death moved
him profoundly. Bremilu had been one of his two most competent and
trusted followers, and Allan, too, felt a strong personal affection
for the man who had saved his life that first night at the cliffs.
Beside the body he stood, in the morgue-cave whither it had been
borne. With bowed head the master looked upon the man; and from his
eyes fell tears; and in his heart he felt a vacant place not soon to
be made whole.
With profound emotion he took Bremilu's cold hand in his—the hand
that had so deftly and so powerfully stricken down the gorilla—and
for a while held it, gazing on the dead man's face.
"Good-by," said he at length. "You were a brave heart and a true.
Never shall you be forgotten. Good-by!"
He summoned a huge fellow named Frumuos, now the most intelligent of
the Folk remaining, and together they directed the work of carrying
the bodies up to the cliff-top and there burying them.
By the middle of the afternoon some semblance of order and control had
become organized in the colony. He returned to Cliff Villa, leaving
strict orders for Frumuos to call him in case of need.