Then Allan, fired with a burning fury, laid the girl down again, and seizing a great boulder from the top of the parapet that guarded the terraced walk, dashed it against the door. The planks groaned and quivered, but held.
Recoiling, exhausted by even this single effort, the disheveled, wounded man stared with haggard eyes at the barrier.
The very strength he had put into that door to guard his treasures, his wife and his son, now defied him. And a curse, bitter as death, burst from his trembling lips.
But now he heard a sound, a word, a phrase or two of incoherent speech.
Whirling, he saw the girl's mouth move. In her delirium she was speaking.
He knelt again beside her, cradled her in his arms, kissed and cherished her--and he heard broken, disjointed words--words that filled him with passionate rage and overpowering woe.
“So many dead--so many!--And so many dying.--You, H'yemba! You beast! Let me go!--Oh, when the master comes!”
Allan understood at last. His mind, now clear, despite the maddening torments of the past week, grasped the situation in a kind of supersensitive clairvoyance.
As by a lightning-flash on a dark night, so now the blackness of his wonder, of this mystery, all stood instantly illumined. He understood.
“What incredible fiendishness!” he exclaimed, quite slowly, as though unable to imagine it in human bounds. “At a time of disaster and of death, such as has smitten the colony--what hellish villainy!”