If the hideous outcry slackened, but an instant, you heard the sick man raving with the preternatural strength of delirium, or of mad resentment. For some time it seemed a serious question as to who would come out ahead. Just as you began to feel that the old Chief was at the end of his tether, and ready to give up the ghost, the Shamán, rising suddenly with a demoniac yell, flung himself down on the floor in a convulsion. His body writhed horribly; he kicked and snapped and quivered.
The Boy was for shielding Muckluck from the crazy flinging out of legs and arms; but she leaned over, breathless, to catch what words might escape the Shamán during the fit, for these were omens of deep significance.
When at last the convulsive movements quieted, and the Shamán lay like one dead, except for an occasional faint twitch, the Boy realised for the first time that the sick man, too, was dumb. Dead? The only sound now was the wind up in the world above. Even the dog was still.
The silence was more horrible than the hell-let-loose of a few minutes before.
The dim group sat there, motionless, under the spell of the stillness even more than they had been under the spell of the noise. At last a queer, indescribable scratching and scraping came up out of the bowels of the earth.
How does the old devil manage to do that? thought the Boy. But the plain truth was that his heart was in his mouth, for the sound came from the opposite direction, behind the Boy, and not near the Shamán at all. It grew louder, came nearer, more inexplicable, more awful. He felt he could not bear it another minute, sprang up, and stood there, tense, waiting for what might befall. Were all the others dead, then?
Not a sound in the place, only that indescribable stirring of something in the solid earth under his feet.
The Shamán had his knife. A ghastly sensation of stifling came over the Boy as he thought of a struggle down there under the earth and the snow.
On came the horrible underground thing. Desperately the Boy stirred the almost extinct embers with his foot, and a faint glow fell on the terror-frozen faces of the natives, fell on the bear-skin flap. It moved! A huge hand came stealing round. A hand? The skeleton of a hand—white, ghastly, with fingers unimaginably long. No mortal in Pymeut had a hand like that—no mortal in all the world!
A crisp, smart sound, and a match blazed. A tall, lean figure rose up from behind the bear-skin and received the sudden brightness full in his face, pale and beautiful, but angry as an avenging angel's. For an instant the Boy still thought it a spectre, the delusion of a bewildered brain, till the girl cried out, "Brother Paul!" and fell forward on the floor, hiding her face in her hands.