CHAPTER XXI
TOGETHER AGAIN
It is impossible to set down any statement that will enable the reader to form a mental picture of the meeting which took place in that spot of eternal night. Hands groped for hands in the darkness, and sobs and cries and words of comfort went out into the silence. Edith and Barbara Herndon wept, the Professor shrieked out denunciations of Leith, and Holman and I were nearly choked by the lumps that rose in our throats.
Explanations came in broken sentences. The Professor's anger prevented him from giving the story in detail, and the girls were not in a condition to give a lucid account of their sufferings since the night we had left them to investigate the light in the hills. We gathered from the hysterical utterances, however, that Leith had rushed them to the hills on hearing from the escaped dancer that we had dodged the fate he intended for us when he had dispatched us to the table of the centipede. The reduction in his bodyguard caused him to make immediately for the secret retreat, and as he considered it inadvisable to press his argument with the Professor and Edith at that moment, he had lowered his three prisoners into the devil chamber into which we had accidentally fallen.
"This is the place you mentioned to me the night you left the camp," said the Professor.
"We mentioned?" repeated Holman in amazement. "We didn't know the place existed till we rolled into it!"
"But you read it out of the note that Soma dropped," cried the scientist. "Don't you remember where he threatened to put the five babies?"
"The Black Kindergarten!" I stammered.
"The Black Kindergarten," said the old man. "That is what the inhuman brute called the place when he lowered us into it. We are to stay here till I sign papers that will give him possession of my property, and till—till Edith consents to marry him!"
He flung the words out into the stillness, and for a few minutes no one spoke. The horror of the situation had the same effect upon me as a blow from a sandbag. Three days before, we were in possession of Leith's letter to the one-eyed man, in which he had remarked that we would be occupants of the place of eternal night, and yet we had not been able to avert the fate which the brute had in store for us in case the Professor and Edith Herndon refused to consider his villainous proposals. The Professor's money and the girl's hand! The words made me physically sick, and I sat down upon the floor of the place till the dizziness had passed from my brain.