Beyond the Great Oblivion

CHAPTER VII. A NIGHT OF TOIL

An hour later, from the gnarled branches of the willow--up into which Stern had fairly flung her, and where he had himself clambered with the beasts ravening at his legs--the two sole survivors of the human race watched the glowering eyes that dotted the velvet gloom.

“I estimate a couple of hundred, all told,” judged Allan. “Odd we never ran across any of them before to-night. Must be some kind of a migration under way--maybe some big shift of game, of deer, or buffalo, or what-not. But then, in that case, they wouldn't be so starved, so dead-set on white meat as they seem to be.”

Beta shifted her place on a horizontal limb.

“It's awfully hard for a soft wood,” she remarked. “Do you think we'll have to stay here long, dear?”

“That depends. I don't see that the fifteen we've killed since roosting here have served as any terrible examples to the others. And we're about twenty cartridges to the bad. They're not worth it, these devils. We've got to save our ammunition for something edible till I can get my shop to running and begin making my own powder. No; must be there's some other and better way.”

“But what?” asked the girl. “We're safe enough here, but we're not getting any nearer home--and I'm so hungry!”

“Same here,” Stern coincided. “And the lunch was all in the boat; worse luck! Who the deuce could have cut her loose? I thought we'd pretty effectually cleared out those Hinkmatinks, or whatever the Horde consisted of. But evidently something, or somebody, is still left alive with a terrific grudge against us, or an awful longing for navigation.”

“Was the cord broken or cut?”

“I'll see.”

Stern clambered to a lower branch. With the trigger-guard of his rifle he was able to catch the cord. All about the trunk, meanwhile, the wolves leaped snarling. The fetid animal smell of them was strong upon the air--that, and the scent of blood and raw meat, where they had feasted on the slain.

With the severed cord, Allan climbed back to where Beatrice sat.

“Hold the rifle, will you?” asked he. A moment, and by the quick showers of sparks that issued from his flint and steel, he was examining the leather thong.

“Cut!”

“Cut? But then, then--”

“No tide or wind to blame. Some intelligence, even though rudimentary, has been at work here--is at work--opposed to us.”

“But what?”

“No telling. There may be more things in this world yet than either of us dream. Perhaps we committed a very grave error to leave the apparently peaceful little nook we've got, up there on the Hudson, and tackle this place again. But who could ever have thought of anything like this after that terrible slaughter?”

They kept silence a few minutes. The wolves now had sunk to a plane of comparative insignificance. At the very worst Stern could annihilate them, one by one, with a lavish expenditure of his ammunition. Unnoticed now, they yelped, and scratched and howled about the tree, sat on their haunches, waiting in the gloom, or sneaked--vague shadows--among the deeper dusks of the forest.

And once again the east began to glow, even as when he and she had watched the moon rise over the hills beyond the Hudson; and their hearts beat with joy for even that relief from the dark mystery of solitude and night.

After a while the man spoke.

“It's this way,” said he. “Whoever cut that cord and either let the banca float away or else stole it, evidently doesn't want to come to close quarters for the present, so long as these wolves are making themselves friendly.

“Perhaps, in a way, the wolves are a factor in our favor; perhaps, without them, we might have had a poisoned arrow sticking into us, or a spear or two, before now. My guess is that we'll get a wide berth so long as the wolves stay in the neighborhood. I think the anthropoids, or whoever they were, must have been calculating on ambushing us as we came back, and expected to ‘get’ us while we were hunting for the boat.

“They didn't reckon on this little diversion. When they heard it they probably departed for other regions. They won't be coming around just yet, that's a safe wager. Mighty lucky, eh? Think what Ar targets we'd make, up here in this willow, by moonlight!”

“You're right, Allan. But when it comes daylight we'll make better ones. And I don't know that I enjoy sitting up here and starving to death, with a body-guard of wolves to keep away the Horde, very much more than I would taking a chance with the arrows. It's two sixes, either way, and not a bit nice, is it?”

“Hang the whole business! There must be some other way--some way out of this infernal pickle! Hold on--wait--I--I almost see it now!”

“What's your plan, dear?”

“Wait! Let me think, a minute!”

She kept silence. Together they sat among the spreading branches in the growing moonlight. A bat reeled overhead, chippering weakly. Far away a whippoorwill began its fluty, insistent strain. A distant cry of some hunting beast echoed, unspeakably weird, among the dead, deserted streets buried in oblivion. The brush crackled and snapped with the movements of the wolf-pack; the continued snarling, whining, yapping, stilled the chorus of the frogs along the sedgy banks.

“If I could only snare a good, lively one!” suddenly broke out Stern.

“What for?”

“Why, don't you see?” And with sudden inspiration he expounded. Together, eager as children, they planned. Beatrice clapped her hands with sheer delight.

“But,” she added pensively, “it'll be a little hard on the wolf, won't it?”

Stern had to laugh.

“Yes,” he assented; “but think how much he'll learn about the new kind of game he tried to hunt!”

Half an hour later a grim old warrior of the pack, deftly and securely caught by one hind leg with the slip-noosed leather cord, dangled inverted from a limb, high out of reach of the others.

Slowly he swung, jerking, writhing, frothing as he fought in vain to snap his jaws upon the cord he could not touch. And night grew horrible with the stridor of his yells.

“Now then,” remarked Stern calmly, “to work. The moonlight's good enough to shoot by. No reason I should miss a single target.”

Followed a time of frightful tumult as the living ate the dying and the dead, worrying the flesh from bones that had as yet scarcely ceased to move. Beatrice, pale and silent, yet very calm, watched the slaughter. Stern, as quietly methodical as though working out a reaction, sighted, fired, sighted, fired. And the work went on apace. The bag of cartridges grew steadily lighter. The work was done long before all the wolves had died. For the survivors, gorged to repletion, some wounded, others whole, slunk gradually away and disappeared in the dim glades, there to sleep off their cannibal debauch.

At last Stern judged the time was come to descend.

“Bark away, old boy!” he exclaimed. “The louder the better. You're our danger-signal now. As long as those poor, dull anthropoid brains keep sensing you I guess we're safe!”

To Beatrice he added:

“Come now, dear. I'll help you down. The quicker we tackle that raft and away, the sooner we'll be home!”

“Home!” she repeated. “Oh, how glad I'll be to see our bungalow again! How I hate the ruins of the city now! Look out, Allan--you'll have to let me take a minute or two to straighten out in. You don't know how awfully cramped I am!”

“Just slide into my arms--there, that's right!” he answered, and swung her down as easily as though she had been a child. Her arms went round his neck; their lips met and thrilled in a long kiss.

But not even the night-breeze and the moon could now beguile them to another. For there was hard, desperate work to do, and time was short.

A moment they stood there together, under the old tree wherein the wolf was dangling in loud-mouthed rage.

“Well, here's where I go at it!” exclaimed the man.

He opened the big sack. Fumbling among the tools, he quickly found the ax.

“You, Beta,” he directed, “get together all the plaited rope you can take off the bag, and cut me some strips of hide. Cut a lot of them. I'll need all you can make. We've got to work fast--got to clear out of here before sunrise or there may be the devil to pay!”

It was a labor of extraordinary difficulty, there in those dense and dim-lit thickets, felling a tall spruce, limbing it out and cutting it into three sections. But Stern attacked it like a demon. Now and again he stopped to listen or to jab tile suspended wolf with the ax-handle.

“Go on there, you alarm-signal!” he commanded. “Let's have plenty of music, good and loud, too. Maybe if you deliver the goods and hold out--well, you'll get away with your life. Otherwise, not!”

Robinson Crusoe's raft had been a mere nothing to build compared with this one that the engineer had to construct there at the water's edge, among the sedges and the reeds For Crusoe had planks and beams and nails to help him; while Stern had naught but his ax, the forest, and some rough cordage.

He had to labor in the gloom, as well, listening betimes for sounds of peril or stopping to stimulate the wolf. The dull and rusty ax retarded him; blisters rose upon his palms, and broke, and formed again. But still he toiled.

The three longitudinal spruce timbers he lashed together with poles and with the cords that Beatrice prepared for him. On these, again, he laid and lashed still other poles, rough-hewn.

In half an hour's hard work, while the moon began to sink to the westward, he had stepped a crude mast and hewed a couple of punt-poles.

“No use our trying to row this monstrosity,” he said to Beatrice, stopping a moment to dash the sweat off his forehead with a shaking hand. “We either rig the skin sack in some way as a sail, or we drift up with the tide, tie at the ebb, and so on--and if we make the bungalow in three days we're lucky!

“Come on now, Beatrice. Lend a hand here and we'll launch her! Good thing the tide's coming up--she almost floats already. Now, one, two, three!”

The absurd raft yielded, moved, slid out upon the marshy water and was afloat!

“Get aboard!” commanded Allan. “Go forward to the salon de luxe. I'll stow the bag aft, so.”

He lifted her in his arms and set her on the raft. The bag he carefully deposited at what passed for the stern. The raft sank a bit and wallowed, but bore up.

“Now then, all aboard!” cried Stern.

“The wolf, Allan, the wolf! How about him?”

“That's right, I almost plumb forgot! I guess he's earned his life, all right enough.”

Quickly he slashed the cord. The wolf dropped limp, tried to crawl, but could not, and lay panting on its side, tongue lolling, eyes glazed and dim.

“He'll be a horrible example all his life of what it means to monkey with the new kind of meat,” remarked Allan, clambering aboard. “If wolves or anthropoids can learn, they ought to learn from him!”

Strongly, steadily, they poled the raft out through the marshy slip, on, on, past the crumbling wreckage of the pier-head.

“Now the tide's got us,” exclaimed Allan with satisfaction, as the moonlit current, all silver and rippling with calm beauty, swung them up-stream.

Beatrice, still strong, and full of vigorous, pulsing life, in spite of the long vigil in the tree and the hard night of work, curled up at the foot of the rough mast, on the mass of fir-tips Stern had piled there.

“You steer, boy,” said she, “and I'll go to work on making some kind of sail out of the big skin. By morning we ought to have our little craft under full control.”

“It's one beautiful boat, isn't it?” mocked Stern, poling off from a gaunt hulk that barred the way.

“It mayn't be very beautiful,” she answered softly, “but it carries the greatest, purest, noblest love that ever was since the world began--it carries the hope of the whole world, of all the ages--and it's taking us home!”