The Afterglow

CHAPTER XIII. THE RAVISHED NEST

“It cannot be? Who says it cannot be? Who dares stand out and challenge me?”

“I, H'yemba, the man of iron and of flame!”

Stern faced him, every nerve and fiber quivering with sudden passion. At realization that in the exact psychological moment when success lay almost in his hand, this surly brute might baffle him, he felt a wave of murderous hate.

He realized that the dreaded catastrophe had indeed come to pass. Now his sole claim to chieftainship lay in his power to defend the title. Failure meant--death.

“You?” he shouted, advancing on the smith.

His opponent only leered and grimaced offensively. Then without even having vouchsafed an answer, he swung toward the elders.

“I challenge!” he exclaimed. “I have the right of words!”

Vreenya nodded, fingering his long white beard.

“Speak on!” he answered. “Such is our ancient custom.”

“Oh, people,” cried the smith, suddenly facing the throng, “will ye follow one who breaks the tribal manners of our folk? One who disdains our law? Who has neglected to obey it? Will ye trust yourselves into hands stained with law-breaking of our blood?”

A murmur, doubtful, wondering, obscure, spread through the people. By the greenish flare-light Stern could see looks of wonder and dismay. Some frowned, others stared at him or at the smith, and many muttered.

“What the devil and all have I broken now?” wondered Allan. “Plague take these barbarous customs! Jove, they're worse than the taboos of the old Maoris, in the ancient days! What's up?”

He had not long to wonder, for of a sudden H'yemba wheeled on him, pointed him out with vibrant hands, and in a voice of terrible anger cried:

“The law, the law of old! No man shall be chief who does not take a wife from out our people! None who weds one of the Lanskaarn, the island folk, or the yellow-haired Skeri beyond the Vortex, none such shall ever rule us. Yet this man, this stranger who speaks such great things very hard to be believed, scorns our custom. No woman from among us he has taken, but instead, that vuedma of his own kind! What? Will ye--”

He spoke no further, for Allan was upon him with one leap. At sound of that word, the most injurious in their tongue, the fires of Hell burst loose in Stern.

Reckoning no consequences, staying for no parley or diplomacy, he sprang; and as he sprang, he struck.

The blow went home on the smith's jaw with a smash like a pile-driver. H'yemba, reeling, swung at him--no skill, no science, just a wild, barbaric, sledge-hammer sweep.

It would have killed had it landed, but Allan was not there. In point of tactics, the twentieth century met the tenth.

And as the smith whirled to recover, a terrible left-hander met him just below the short ribs.

With a grunt the man doubled, sprawled and fell. By some strange atavism, which he never afterward could understand, Allan counted, in the Folk's tongue: “Hathi, ko, zem, baku” and so up to “lamnu”--ten.

Still the smith did not rise, but only lay and groaned and sought to catch the breath that would not come.

“I have won!” cried Allan in a loud voice. “Here, you people, take this greun, this child, away! And let there be no further idle talk of a dead law--for surely, in your custom, a law dies when its champion is beaten! Come, quick, away with him!”

Two stout men came forward, bowed to Allan with hands clasped upon their breasts in signal of fresh allegiance, and without ceremony took the insensible smith, neck-and-heels, and lugged him off as though he had only been a net heavily laden with fish.

The crowd opened in awed silence to let them pass. By the glare Allan noticed that the man's jaw hung oddly awry, even as the obeah's had hung, in Madison Forest.

“Jove, what a wallop that must have been!” thought he, now perceiving for the first time that his knuckles were cut and bleeding. “Old Monahan himself taught me that in the Harvard gym a thousand odd years ago--and it still works. One question settled, mighty quick; and H'yemba won't have much to say for a few weeks at least. Not till his jawbone knits again, anyhow!”

Upon his arm he felt a hand. Turning, he saw Vreenya, the aged counselor.

“Surely, O master, he shall not live, now you have conquered him? The boiling pit awaits. It is our custom--if you will!”

Allan only shook his head.

“All customs change, these times,” he answered. “I am your law! This man's life is needed, for he has good skill with metals. He shall live, but never shall he speak before the Folk again. I have said it!”

To the waiting throng he turned again.

“Ye have witnessed!” he cried, in a loud voice. “Now, have fear of me, your master! Once in the Battle of the Walls ye beheld death raining from my fire-bow. Once ye watched me vanquish your ruler, even the great Kamrou himself, and fling him far into the pit that boils. And now, for the third time, ye have seen. Remember well!”

A stir ran through the multitude. He felt its potent meaning, and he understood.

“I am the law!” he flung at them once more. “Declare it, all! Repeat!”

The thousand-throated chorus: “Thou art the law!” boomed upward through the fog, rolled mightily against the towering cliff, and echoed thunderlike across the hot, black sea.

“It is well!” he cried. “One more sleep, and then--then I choose from among ye two for the journey, two of your boldest and best. And that shall be the first journey of many, up to the better places that await ye, far beyond the pit!”

Straining his eyes in the night, pierced only by the electric beam that ran and quavered rapidly over the broken forest-tops far below, Allan peered down and far ahead. The fire, the signal-fire he had told Beatrice to build upon the ledge--would he never sight it?

Eagerly he scanned the dark horizon only just visible in the star-shine. Warmly the rushing night wind fanned his cheek; the roar of the motor and propellers, pulsating mightily, made music to his ears. For it sang: “Home again! Beatrice, and love once more!”

Many long hours had passed since, his fuel-tanks replenished from the apparatus for distilling the crude naphtha, which he had installed during his first stay in the Abyss, he had risen a second time into that heavy, humid, purple-vapored air.

With him he now bore Bremilu, the strong, and Zangamon, most expert of all the fishermen. Slung in the baggage-crate aft lay a large seine, certain supplies of fish, weed and eggs, and--from time to time noisily squawking--some half-dozen of the strange sea-birds, in a metal basket.

The pioneers had insisted on taking these impedimenta with them, to bridge the gap of changed conditions, a precaution Stern had recognized as eminently sensible.

“Gad!” thought he, as the Pauillac swept its long, flat-arc'd trajectory through the night, “under any circumstances this must be a terrific wrench for them. Talk about nerve! If they haven't got it, who has? This trip of these subterranean barbarians, thus flung suddenly into midair, out into a world of which they know absolutely nothing, must be exactly what a journey to Mars would mean to me. More, far more, to their simple minds. I wonder myself at their courage in taking such a tremendous step.”

And in his heart a new and keener admiration for the basic stamina of the Merucaans took root.

“They'll do!” he murmured, as he scanned his lighted chart once more, and cast up reckonings from the dials of his delicately adjusted instruments.

Half an hour more of rapid flight and he deemed New Hope River could not now be far.

“No use to try and hear it, though, with this racket of the propellers in my ears,” thought he. “The searchlight might possibly pick up a gleam of water, if we fly over it. But even that's a small index to go by. The signal-fire must be my only real guide--and where is it, now, that fire?”

A vague uneasiness began to oppress him. The fire, he reckoned, should have shown ere now in the far distance. Without it, how find his way? And what of Beatrice?

His uneasy reflections were suddenly interrupted by a word from Zangamon, at his right.

“O Kromno, master, see?”

“What is it, now?”

“A fire, very distant, master!”

“Where?” queried Stern eagerly, his heart leaping with joy. “I see no fire. Your eyes, used to the dark places and the fogs, now far surpass mine, even as mine will yours when the time of light shall come. Where is the fire, Zangamon?”

The fisher pointed, a dim huge figure in the star-lit gloom. “There, master. On thy left hand, thus.”

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.