As It Was in the Beginning

by Philip Verrill Mighels

Once more he adjusted his weary limbs upon the ledge, reflecting on what expedient he must now adopt, since this, his coup-de-main, had so egregiously failed. He thought he was planning brilliantly when he once more fell asleep. The slightest of sounds that was foreign alike to tide or breeze now failed to arouse his senses as his head came forward on his breast.

Not another sound was made where that one had strangely risen from the front of the shattered ledge. Even the sharpest eyes would have been for a moment tricked by the shadows of the rocky niche, where the tide was darkly swirling. A fragment of the lower cliff then appeared to be detached.

It was simply Grenville's catamaran, with two or three natives upon its deck, silently maneuvering to land. Back of it, just well off the frowning headland wall, the bow of a larger Dyak craft appeared for the fraction of a minute.

The head-hunting fiends had arrived! They had chosen the hour when exhaustion finally culminates and claims the helpless sentinel, heavily dreaming that all is well!

Aware that the slightest disturbance might warn their intended victims in the cave, the Dyaks labored with the utmost caution to fetch the float to the ledge. This they presently accomplished, fending it off at a vital moment lest it scrape against the rock.

Two of the half-clad demons now landed, their movements as sinuous and silent as a serpent's. Instantly flattening down upon the tide-lapped shelf, while the third of their party skillfully guided the catamaran once more to the larger craft without, they waited as patiently as the shadows, of which they seemed a part.

The plans of the crew on the boat without had been matured with much sagacity. The transfer of two more men to the raft was quickly and noiselessly accomplished, and once again the catamaran was permitted to swing on the tide's rotation into the open entrance of the inlet.

This second pair, with knives between their teeth and hands therefore unencumbered, were a trifle overeager to gain the mouth of the cave. One of them caught at the fissured edge of tufa with avid fingers, while the float was responding to the force of the whirl. His hold was rudely broken, yet so sharply had he dug in his nails that a fragment of rock was broken away. It plumped with a gurgle in the water.

Grenville was suddenly awakened—not so much by the sound the bit of rock had made as by something more subtle in the very air—a something only to be interpreted by that instinct surviving from ages dark and old.

He was suddenly alive to a sense of imminent danger lurking fearfully close at hand. None too soon and none too silently he rose to his feet, for there at the ledge the catamaran was halted and, even as the two impatient Dyaks landed, their companions came worming up the shelf.