9
THE VAMPIRE BAT
He was one of the island's few plantation owners and a solid pillar of the Crown. He had gone forth at the King's trumpet call to buck the Boer's hairy anger. But at last the guerilla warrior had become a glorious ghost and the jaunty buckras were trekking back to Barbadoes.
Flying into a breastwork of foam, the English torpedo boat had suddenly stopped, wedged in a sargasso reef a dozen miles from the Caribbean sea. After landing at a remote corner on the jungle coast, Bellon was forced to make the trip, a twelve mile affair, on drays and mule carts over the brown, hoof-caked road to Mount Tabor.
But Mount Tabor, once a star on a pinnacle of wooded earth, was lost to old Sharon Prout's Boer-fighting son.
Wrecked in the storm which swept the island the very week Bellon had embarked for South Africa—it was a garden of lustrous desolation. Weedy growth overspread it. The lichened caverns below the stoke hole, once giving berth to hills of cane husk—fodder for the zooming fire—fertilized beds of purple beans. A stable, housing a mare and landau, stood on the old mill's bank. Rows of taches—troughs into which the cane's juice was boiled and brewed through a succession of stages until it became a quarry of loaf sugar—frothed green on the rich, muggy land. One was a pond. Frogs and green water lilies floated on it. Another, filled to the maw, gave fathomless earth to breadfruit.
The old shaggy mare, a relic of the refining era at Mount Tabor, plodded through the dead, thick marl. Wearing a cork hat and a cricketer's white flannel shirt, open at the throat, Bellon drew near the woods to Airy Hill.