CHAPTER XIV
BACK TO THE CAMP
The path, with its coating of coral lime, stretched before me, and I fled along it. The moon had disappeared behind the hills, but the limed track was quite distinct. My watch had stopped, but I judged that there was still a good two hours before the dawn, and I ran as I had never run in my life. I recognized what sort of feeling I possessed for Edith Herndon as I raced through the lonely night, and I reproached myself bitterly for leaving the camp. I became convinced that Leith had set out for the resting place of the Professor and his two daughters after placing guards at the inner opening of the corridor to see that Holman and I did not escape from the cavern, and I realized the terror which the two girls would experience when the big brute reached the camp.
"The devil!" I muttered. "The fiendish brute!"
A chuckle came from a boulder beside the track, and Holman's cheery voice set my pulses beating.
"You frightened the dickens out of me, Verslun," he cried. "I thought you were one of the evil legion. Gee! I'm glad to see you."
"How did you get out?" I gasped as we rushed on together. "I thought I left you in the cavern."
"It was a good job you didn't," he retorted. "There was a husky nigger at the outside entrance of the passage, and he gave me the fight of my life. Get off this track; they might be after us at any moment."
"Do you think that Leith has made for the camp?" I asked.
"I suppose he has. We must move as fast as we can, Verslun. If he reaches there before us we'll deserve any fate that will come to us. We shouldn't have left them."
The utterance of the conviction that had come to both of us brought a silence, and we rushed across the boulder-strewn ground that we had crossed earlier in the night. We felt certain that Leith knew of a surer and safer path back to the camp, but it was useless for us to hunt for a new trail at that moment. We would have to find our way down the nearly perpendicular wall up which we had climbed after leaving the crevice through which we had viewed the death dance, and, to me at least, the recollections of that path brought feelings that were by no means pleasant. But Leith was making toward the camp, and the horrible thoughts aroused by the spectacle which we had witnessed in the early night muzzled the thrills which the dangers of the climb sent through our bodies. The dance had terrified the Fijian by arousing thoughts of the deeds that would happen in its wake, and Kaipi's terror became a gauge for us to measure its dread significance.
We reached the cliffs and ran up and down the ledge in a vain search for the spot where we had clawed our way to the top. Not that we thought the finding of the place would solve the problem of the descent. It was hard to conceive of a more difficult way than the one by which we had come, and as if he had suddenly come to the conclusion that any other path would be preferable, Holman dropped upon his knees and lowered himself upon a ledge that was immediately below.
"Come on, Verslun!" he cried, in a choked voice that was altogether different from his cheery tones. "If there is no path we must roll down. There's the first flush of the dawn!"
I looked toward the east and groaned. The faint grayish tint unnerved me. Although it was possible that Leith had already reached the camp, still we had promised the two girls that we would return by daylight, and although we had a hazy notion as to what we would do when we did reach their side, the longing to get there made us oblivious of danger. I swung down on to the crumbling foothold that supported Holman, and breathlessly we began to scramble toward the valley.
It was a mad climb. Holman exhibited a temerity that bordered on insanity. With reckless daring he scrambled down upon dangerous niches that jutted out upon the face of the cliff, and my repeated warnings fell upon deaf ears. A task that would have appeared impossible when viewed in daylight, lost half of its terrors because we only vaguely apprehended the dangers that threatened us when a layer of shale crumbled beneath our feet. Our descent became a wild toboggan. Slipping and sliding, clutching wildly at every little projection that would decrease the speed at which we were travelling, we rolled with bruised and bleeding bodies on to a small platform, and lay half stunned for a moment, as a thousand pieces of rock, dislodged by our bodies, bounced past us into the valley.
Holman picked himself up and looked around. The pink flush had deepened in the east, and nearby objects were discernible.
"By all the gods! we are back on the ledge near the crevice!" he cried. "Come along and we'll hunt for Kaipi."
It was wonderful how we had pulled up in our slide near the place where we had witnessed the performance that prompted us to make the ascent. But there was no mistake about the spot. As we crawled along the platform we found that we had landed not more than twenty feet from the crevice through which we had witnessed the blood-curdling "tivo," and we hurried toward the spot where we had left the Fijian, whose nerves had been upset by the glimpse he had had of the strange antics of the dancers.
But Kaipi was not at the spot where we had left him. Whether his fears had increased to such an extent that they had forced him to leave the place, or whether he had come to the conclusion that we had returned to the camp by some other route, we could not determine; so wasting no time on useless conjecture we hurried toward the big maupei tree up which we had climbed to reach the ledge.
But Holman's hurry proved disastrous. He had escaped the dangers of the cliff descent to meet an accident when he had sufficient light to see what he was about. In reaching for the limb of the tree that threshed against the cliff, he lost his footing, and before I could grip him he went crashing through the foliage to the ground, some fifty feet below!
I thought that I was an hour descending that tree, but I could not have been more than three minutes if my skinned legs could be relied upon as evidence of speed. I found Holman in a thorny tangle, and as I dragged him into the open he groaned loudly and endeavoured to get upon his feet.
"Are you hurt?" I questioned.
"No, no!" he cried. "I'm not hurt, Verslun. Get me on my feet, man. Quick! For the love of God, quick!"
I gripped his shoulders and he managed to stand upright. The dawn came with tropic suddenness at that moment, and I saw that he was bleeding from a nasty wound above the right temple, while he limped painfully as I helped him across a small cleared patch near the tree.
"I've hurt my leg," he cried, "but I'm going to get to the camp. If I fall, Verslun, I want you to lend me a hand. Promise to help me, will you? She—Miss Barbara, you know, old man. She is everything to me. Give me a hand if I tumble down."
"I promise," I answered, and he wrung my hand as we started off through the clawing, scratching vines that tripped us up as we tried to fight our way forward.
If we had thought on the night before that the quarter mile of country that lay between the camp and the rocky wall was a difficult stretch to negotiate, we were more than doubly certain of its impenetrable character now that daylight had come. How we had ever managed to get through it in the darkness was a mystery that we tried to solve as we attempted to make our way back. The place was a mad riot of thorny undergrowth, laced and bound with vines that were as strong as wire hawsers. The lianas appeared human to us; they lassoed our legs and flung us sprawling upon our faces whenever we tried to quicken our speed. Thorns of a strange fishhook variety drove their barbed points into us, and each yard of the tortuous path that we cut through the devilish vines was marked by a scrap of our clothing, which the tormenting thorns seemed to wave aloft as an emblem of victory.
"He'll beat us!" gasped Holman. "I'm all in, Verslun; that fall has finished me."
"Keep at it!" I said. "We must be near the camp by now."
"We've walked three miles," muttered Holman. "We've lost our way."
"No, we haven't!" I cried. "We've struck a bad patch, but we'll get there soon."
The youngster clenched his teeth and endeavoured to forget the agony of his leg, but the effort taxed his courage.
"We'll do it," I said. "Don't let the brute beat us."
"I—I won't!" he stammered. "If it was anything but my leg! Verslun!"
He fell on his face, and I helped him up, but once again he collapsed. The injured limb made it impossible for him to stand or even crawl.
"You get ahead," he cried hoarsely. "Leave me, Verslun! Leave me here!"
"But I'd never find you again," I protested.
"Yes, you would! I'll crawl out after a few hours' rest. Run to the camp, and shoot—shoot the devil the moment you put your eyes on him!"
I took a quick glance at the matted walls of the green creepers that hedged us in on all sides. Holman was in the last stages of exhaustion, and I reasoned quickly. If I left him in the middle of the thorny tangle that encompassed us, it would be utterly impossible for me to find him again, and he would probably perish from thirst. If I rushed away I would be leaving him to certain death, and although our prospects of leaving the island alive did not look too bright at that moment, I considered that I would be making his demise a certainty by leaving him in the maze.
I stopped, gripped him round the waist, and with a great effort managed to lift him upon my shoulder. Holman's actions did not help me as I struggled beneath him. He kicked like a madman when he understood what I intended to do, but I held him in spite of his protests.
"Leave me here!" he screamed. "Go ahead by yourself, Verslun! What's the use of taking me?"
"You're coming, so you can stop kicking," I muttered. "Take your fingers out of my eyes."
But Holman's struggles ceased then, and his head fell backward. The pain of his leg had made the plucky youngster swoon away, and with a prayer upon my lips I sprang again at the bulwark of vicious creepers.
I have a very vague recollection of the remainder of that trip. In my subconscious mind I have memories of an insane struggle with a jungle that was alive, of a fight with thorny creepers that pursued us. I became convinced that those vines were alive, because the same thorns that we had passed hours before rose up again in our path and waved the scraps of bloody clothing that they had torn from Holman and myself.
At last, half insane with anxiety for the safety of the girls and our own struggles, we staggered blindly into the patch of cleared land upon which the camp had been pitched on the previous evening. It was impossible to mistake the site. The embers of the big fire were still smoking and we stared with sweat-blinded eyes at the place where the girls' tent had been standing when we rushed off with Kaipi to investigate the light in the hills. But there was no trace of the girls or the Professor. Leith had got ahead of us, and the big brute had rushed the crazy scientist and his two daughters toward the hills that stood up black and defiant above the sea of green vegetation.
