CHAPTER XXII
THE HOSTAGE OF THE GREAT WHITE SILENCE
“Round the bellowin’ falls of Abol we lugged him through the brush,
And Death had marked his forehead: ‘To a Woman. Kindly Rush!’”
When Christopher and Wade started up and hurried into the lean-to, the cook of the “Lazy Tom” camp went ahead carrying a lamp to light the place whose rude interior had so suddenly been made mystic by death.
“‘Yes, s’r,’ says I to him,” he repeated, with queer, bewildered, hysterical sort of chuckle. “I says to him, jolly as a chipmunk in a beech-nut tree, I says, ‘Set up and have a doughnut all fresh laid,’ and I’ll be bunga-nucked if he wa’n’t dead! And that’s a joke on me, all right!”
He held the lamp over the features of old “Ladder” Lane, and Dwight Wade and Christopher Straight bent and peered.
“Look; if he ain’t grinnin’!” whispered the cook, huskily. For one horrid moment it seemed to Wade that the fixed grimace of the death-mask expressed hideous mirth. The scrawl that the young man still clutched in his fist held the words that the dead lips seemed to be mouthing: “You stole my wife. I’ve got your daughter. Now, damn you, crawl and beg!” And at the thought of Elva Barrett, hidden, lost—worse than lost—somewhere in that great silence about them, Wade’s agony and anger found vent in the oath that he groaned above the dead man, who seemed to lie there and mock him.
But Christopher Straight gently laid his seamed hand on the shaggy fringe of the gray poll.