The bushes up the trail parted and a fearsome figure strode out—a figure as forbidding as one might well conceive an evil spirit to be. His face was almost black and on his cheek-bones stood out two livid red gashes. He wore no head-covering save a band of purple which held a single eagle’s feather in place in his lank, black hair. Round his neck were hung string upon string of gleaming white wolves’ teeth.
At the girl’s involuntary cry of dismay he whirled, the whites of his evil black eyes showing garishly in his satanic visage. It afterwards recurred to her that he had at first appeared quite as startled as she had been, but he almost immediately straightened, and, folding his arms on his chest, pronounced himself in deep, strangely-vibrating guttural tones.
“Ogima Bush,” he said, “big Medicine Man. Him no hurt white lady. Un-n-n-n—white lady pass.”
But Josephine Stone waited to have no further parley. She turned and fled on trembling limbs back toward the island. And, as she ran, there fell upon her ears a penetrating, wailing cry, long-drawn-out and blood-curdling in its mixture of mockery and despair—a cry that for subsequent reasons she was destined to remember all the days of her life.
CHAPTER XII
“WHEN ALL THE WORLD IS YOUNG, LAD!”
I
Louis Hammond returned to the camp that morning after he had parted with Josephine Stone down on the beach near Amethyst Island in a seventh heaven of ecstatic speculation. It was his first genuine love affair. The thrill of having held the svelte, firm form of that lovely creature yielding in the embrace of his arms was still upon him. He had discovered a new world—mating youth’s own wonder world, where the blue sky, the waving trees and the dancing water take on a new significance and seem to weave out of a sympathetic gladness the song of Eden’s first splendrous dawn. Ah, the magic and the poetry that come with the first sweep of Cupid’s wand in the early flush of manhood. . . . Youth that has yet to encounter it dreams not of the completeness of its power. . . . Middle life sighs for the dream that has vanished. . . . Age secretly revels in its memory as a miser gloats over his hoarded treasure. If, as the glum-faced realists tell us, it is all illusion—then, let Illusion reign!
“When all the world is young, lad,
And every field is green;
And every goose a swan, lad,
And every lass a queen,
Then hey for boot and horse, lad,
And round the world away;
Young blood must have its course, lad,
And every dog his day.”
Already young Hammond was looking forward to their next meeting—the very next morning, in fact, he planned to again saunter down to Amethyst Island on a chance of gaining a few hours of her exquisite society. She—she must be his own completely.
But always our profoundest dreams are ephemeral when grim Reality stalks in the background. Later, the natural law of moods brought to Hammond the inevitable reaction. He was smitten with a sense of duty unperformed. He could not exactly define it, but he had a feeling of uselessness, a vague notion that he was drifting nowhere. What indeed had a man, situated as he was at present, to offer a girl of Josephine Stone’s evident refinement and high aspirations? So far as appearances were concerned he was nothing more than a vagrant biding his time on the pulp limits at the whim of a man who had dropped out of sight.