CHAPTER XV
A DAY OF SKIRMISHING
We lay for a few moments upon the soft grass, then Holman crawled on hand and knees to the little spring of cold water and bathed the wound upon his temple and his injured leg. The water revived him, and after a brief rest he got to his feet and stared at the festooned trees that surrounded the spot.
"I'm ready, Verslun," he muttered. "Which way did they go?"
I pointed to the marks made in the soft ground by the shoes of the two girls, and Holman limped forward.
"But we can't follow this fashion," I protested.
"Why not?"
"We'll be shot down before we get within half a mile of them. Leith cannot know that we have escaped from the cavern or he would have left some one here to interview us."
"Well, we can't do any high-class tracking in this country," said the youngster grimly. "If we stray six feet from the trail we are lost. We had better trust to fortune and go ahead."
It was impossible to do anything else. The route by which the carriers had marched from the camping ground was perfectly clear while we followed their footsteps, but if we diverged ever so slightly the thick veils of verdure hid the path from our eyes. To follow the party we would have to hold to the trail and take the chances of an ambush which Leith would certainly prepare for us the moment he knew we had escaped from the Cavern of Skulls. It would be easy for him to set his one-eyed white partner to shoot us down as we staggered along the trail which Soma or one of the carriers had blazed with an axe.
"They cannot have more than three hours' start of us," cried Holman. "Give me your arm, Verslun. Now let us move as fast as we can."
"But this is puerile," I protested. "We'll be running our heads into the noose."
"I don't care if we do. I want to get near Leith."
"But we'll never get near by running after him in this fashion. If we could find some way to get in front of him and wait."
"But what will happen to the girls?"
"Will our death prevent it?" I snapped. "If we rush after him in the open we'll throw our chances away."
I am a sailor, absolutely ignorant of jungle knowledge, but I had sense enough to know that Leith would not leave his rear exposed for a moment after he had received word from the cave. I tried to recall stories of extraordinary trailing feats as we stumbled forward, but I became convinced that all the marvellous performances I had ever read of had been accomplished under conditions that were altogether different from those that confronted us upon the Isle of Tears. An open piece of country would have been a sight of joy to our eyes that were weary of the everlasting mesh of green which encompassed us like the tentacles of a malignant fate. The green, sweaty leaves, the fat, bloated pods, and the lengths of pythonesque runners produced a mental nausea. The vegetation appeared to us to be vicious. Its very luxuriance produced that fear of the wild which grips one in tropical countries but which is never felt in lands situated in the temperate zones.
We had not covered a hundred yards of the path when Holman pounced upon a strip of white bark that waved to us from the thorn of a lawyer-vine crossing the track. A few pencilled words covered the smooth side of the strip, and we absorbed them in a single glance.
"'We're prisoners now,' muttered Holman, reading the few words in a whisper. 'The brute has declared himself. Barbara.'"
The boy turned to me, his face all blood-smeared and haggard, and for a moment we stared at the strip of bark. There had been no doubt in our minds concerning Leith's intentions from the time that Kaipi brought us the message which Soma had dropped, but the knowledge that the brute had declared himself to the Professor and the two girls brought us a most horrible feeling. In my own case I had never experienced such a sensation. The strange rites connected with the "tivo" in the long cave had laid a foundation upon which my imagination piled skyscrapers of horror. If I could have fixed my mind upon a definite fate that would be theirs if they were not rescued from the big brute's clutches, I would have found relief, but my inability to do that left me a victim to thoughts that were enough to deprive one of his reason. We looked upon the island as the ceremonial place for rites that were stamped out in the groups where the missionary had pushed himself, and the message from Barbara Herndon became a mental piledriver to ram home a thousand doubts that had obtained a footing in our minds.
"Come on!" cried Holman. "If we don't catch up with him I'll go mad!"
He turned to hurry along the narrow path, but out of the silence behind us came a shout that caused us to dive promptly into the bushes. The whoop came from the direction of the camping ground, and we had hardly crouched in the undergrowth when a nude native crashed through the vines and raced past our hiding place. He was followed by two more, the three running at top speed, heads forward, and their chests heaving in a manner that suggested they had come some distance.
In the glimpse we caught of them as they dashed past we came to the conclusion that they were three of the "tivo" dancers, and as we watched their bare brown backs disappear in the creepers we observed something which our position on the previous evening had prevented us from seeing. The backs of the three were tattooed, not with the common line tattooing, but with short scars that ran down the spine, making a ridged representation of a centipede, and as they passed I remembered that the Professor, when taking a photograph of the stone table on the previous morning, had commented on the same peculiar pattern which he had discovered upon one of the huge supporting pillars.
"They've come to tell Leith that we have escaped," whispered Holman.
"And they'll be on our trail the moment they give him the news."
"All right, we'll be ready for them. How much ammunition have you?
"Three cartridges," I replied.
"And I have four. We must make those seven—look out! There's another beggar coming!"
We dropped quickly out of sight and peered through the leaves. Holman was right. Some one else was coming along the path, but the newcomer was exercising much more prudence than the three dancers. Judging by the little intervals of silence that followed the slight noises made by the breaking of twigs, he was investigating each yard of the way.
A woolly head at last appeared through the network, and our nerves relaxed at the big brown eyes that rolled fearfully. The timorous stranger was Kaipi!
The Fijian was shaking with fear when we dragged him into the bushes. In halting words he told the story of his experiences of the night, and Holman and I listened. Kaipi had waited upon the ledge till a few hours before the dawn, and then he had made for the camp. With much better luck than we had struck, he reached there before daylight, but fearful of the happenings which would follow in the wake of the devil dance, he had taken up a post of observation in a neighbouring tree and awaited events.
Leith, according to the Fijian, had arrived at dawn, accompanied by Soma and the one-eyed white man, and the big brute had immediately interviewed the Professor. Kaipi's actions, as he mimicked the elderly scientist, convinced us that the interview was not pleasant to the archæologist, and it was evident that it was at that moment Leith had declared himself as Barbara Herndon stated in her note.
"He kick up plentee big row," explained Kaipi. "He kick porter men an' make damn big noise outside missee tent. They come out speakee him, he slap big missee in face, drive 'em off."
Holman was crashing through the bushes before Kaipi had finished his recital, and I followed him, with the excited Fijian bringing up the rear. Leith was rushing the Professor and his daughters toward the black hills and we had to do something immediately.
For over an hour we stumbled along the track, making no effort to keep under cover in case Leith should have prepared an ambush. It was useless to argue with Holman, and my own feelings were such that I preferred to take the risks of the route which Soma's axe had cut, to the delays which the task of forcing our own passage through the labyrinth would bring upon us. Prudence was thrust into the background by the intense hate we entertained for the devil who had entrapped us.
It was near midday when our pursuit met with an interruption. A revolver cracked in a clump of wild ginger directly in front, and we took cover immediately. The bullet had whizzed close to Holman's head, and as we lay panting in the ribbon-grass we congratulated ourselves on the fact that we had been met with a single shot instead of a volley. We had taken a big chance and had come off lucky. It was impossible for Leith's party to be very far ahead, and as we watched the ginger clump we wondered how we could circumvent the sharpshooter.
After about five minutes of absolute quiet Kaipi turned his head and pointed to the rear, and Holman and I listened intently. The Fijian's sharper ears had detected slight sounds behind us, and as we strained the silence we came to the conclusion that the enemy had stealthily worked their way around us, and were now creeping like snakes through the maze with the hope that they would take us unawares.
We started to worm our way to the right, and our hatred of the infernal island, where we were reduced to the condition of burrowing moles, increased. Our eyes were practically useless. We had to depend upon hearing alone, and when a white man pits his ears against those of a native he finds that he has been suffering from partial deafness without being aware of the fact. A dozen times we shifted ground on a signal from Kaipi, whose head was continually to the earth, and that game of hide and seek drove us frantic. Leith was hurrying toward the hills while we were crawling backward and forward through the undergrowth to escape a few natives who pursued their tactics with a persistency that was maddening. The fact that the pursuers had the advantage put a raw edge upon our tempers, and after an hour spent upon hands and knees Holman resolutely refused to shift his ground in response to Kaipi's signals. I was just as tired of the wormlike attitude that we were compelled to adopt, and I waited beside Holman while the Fijian slipped away through the creepers after warning us by many eloquent signals that one of the search party was creeping toward us.
Holman had a "let-'em-all-come" expression upon his face that would have been amusing at any other time, and kneeling with our backs to each other we endeavoured to peer through the leafage to get a glimpse of the foe.
We remained like that for about ten minutes; then our attention was attracted to a point about eighteen inches to the right. The dry leaves were pushed quietly aside, but instead of a head appearing, as we expected, a bare brown leg was thrust through the creepers and remained stationary.
The leg fascinated us. Kaipi had moved in the opposite direction, and we were certain that the limb belonged to one of our enemies. The naked savage was worming his way upon his stomach, and the position immediately brought to our minds a picture of the scene in the long gallery. When it came to a game of this sort we would be hopelessly outclassed by a batch that, through assiduous training, slipped along with the ease of serpents.
Holman held his revolver in readiness and watched the leg. It was difficult to judge the position of the native's body, and the scarcity of ammunition made us hesitate before firing a shot. The leg was pushed farther out of the leafy tangle, and as it came toward him a change passed over Holman's face. He handed his revolver to me, crouched on his thighs and sprang!
There was something primitive about the action, something which caused my heart to throb as I watched him take the pantherlike spring. On the previous evening the youngster had expressed a desire to throttle Leith, and the same desire had gripped him when he watched the leg come through the vines. The devilishness of the batch made shooting a tame way of obtaining revenge, and I possessed the same itchiness of the fingers which had prompted Holman to take the wild leap. There was a joy in throttling such a brute, and I delighted in the grit of the boy.
The affair was dramatic in its swift and silent ending. The native, taken entirely unawares, had no chance against the angry antagonist who had landed upon his back. A faint gurgle proved to me that Holman's fingers had found the neck of the other, and in an incredible short time the struggle was over.
We parted the bushes and examined the body. It was one of the three nude natives that had rushed by us on the trail a few hours before, and he clasped in his right hand a long knife of New Zealand greenstone that had been inlaid with gold in an intricate design. We had never seen such a weapon. The crude knives that I had seen throughout the islands were not to be compared to the wonderfully polished blade that had been intended to free either Holman or myself from all earthly cares, while the metalwork showed a craftmanship that made one wonder how many centuries had elapsed since the Polynesian artist who had fashioned the weapon had been laid in the Cavern of Skulls. The sinnet work and the parquetry of split bamboo, which comprise the highest handicraft of the present-day islander, could hardly be classed with the exceedingly beautiful work upon the blade.
Holman turned up the end of the haft, pointed to a delicate design of a centipede, and then looked down at the back of the savage upon the ground. The similarity of the two designs was immediately apparent, but while the one on the greenstone had been executed by an artist, the figure upon the back of the dancer was a crude example of scar-tattooing that required some imagination to puzzle out what object it was supposed to represent. As we glanced at each other the significance of the serpentlike dance, the marks upon the bodies of the dancers and on the knife and stone table, was plainly evident. The island was sacred to the centipede, and in some way Leith had made himself a chief wizard amongst the few savages who still performed the rites which had once made the Isle of Tears a place of particular importance to the surrounding groups.
Holman took the long greenstone knife, and we crept quietly away in the direction taken by Kaipi. We had one enemy less upon the island. Not counting the carriers, we reckoned that the active opposition comprised Leith, Soma, the one-eyed white man, and either two or three of the "tivo" dancers, and these made a formidable batch. The dancers were huge natives, possessing all the characteristics of the Tongans, while Leith, Soma, and the one-eyed white man possessed more than ordinary strength.
"We must try to find the path," whispered Holman. "This delay will give Leith a chance to get to the hills."
But the finding of the path was no easy matter. So that we would be well out of the sphere of the companions of the man who carried the greenstone blade, we worked our way for about one hundred yards through the leafy maze before attempting to search for it, and that search proved a long and tiresome one. It is impossible to describe the network of wanton vegetation through which we struggled during the hot afternoon. Every kind of shrub and tree was woven into an ungodly tangle by the crawling, leaping vines that shut out the sky and made it impossible to see a person standing only a few feet away.
We stayed our appetites with wild guavas and yams, and moved slowly forward in the direction that we surmised that Leith was moving in. Our inability to find the path left us the only alternative of pushing on toward the hills in the hope that we would intercept the party before it reached the caverns which made the basalt cliffs a secure hiding place. Once the arch villain reached the caves it would be a difficult matter to locate him, and we damned the crazy brain of the Professor as we thought of the lonely position of the Isle of Tears. If the captain of The Waif was in league with Leith it would be absolutely impossible to obtain help to rescue the girls and their father, and we would be marooned upon the island for an indefinite period.
It was within a few minutes of sunset when our despondency was suddenly swept away. The silence of the jungle was disturbed by a shrill voice that protested loudly against something which the owner was called upon to do, and our hearts punched our ribs with mighty blows as we crawled forward. The voice belonged to Professor Clinton Herndon of California.
