The Crystal Sceptre: A Story of Adventure

by Philip Verrill Mighels

For another week I lay like a baby, in the shelter, eating fruits and bits of meat which the goddess prepared as best she could. How I yearned to see her face, whenever she left me for a moment! Then came the time when I began to mend, and desired to have back my strength and my title of king.

When I stood up and wobbled about on my pins one day, I made a discovery which did much to hasten a return to my old condition. The crystal club, presented to me by the ex-chief, in token of my exalted station and regal attainments, had been stolen. I learned that the ex-chief had dared to carry this sceptre of power into the jungle; I learned from Fatty that the jealous Madame Albino had been the one to rob me of my trophy. She feared the goddess—who in truth was more of a queen of the tribe than I had even been a king,—but the creature had not feared a man who was crazy and likely to die.

So wroth did I wax over this outrage to my dignity that I became unmanageable at once. Thin as a rail, but able to stagger about, next day, I dug up one of my lesser bombs from the magazine, and waving it wildly above my head, marched up to the guilty ex-chief, while he had the club underneath him, as he sat on the ground, and scared him half to death. He knew the bomb,—no trouble about that. I therefore took the crystal club away from him, rudely, and slapped his face. He fell down instantly and began to adore my tracks in the proper spirit of humiliation, followed without delay by all the tribe. Madame Albino fled to the woods, though what manner of personal violence the lady expected I have never been able to guess. This fine, large bluff, of a man as white as paper and thin as a hair-pin, had a most salutary effect. It made all the fellows love me more than before, even the chief, for all were much like dogs in disposition, and a dog is the better for it when he learns that man is the master. I was more of a monarch every day.

Yet I was slow in regaining my old weight, for the heat was increasing steadily, and my system had been much depressed by the fever. In consequence of this, I did more at playing than at work. With my fellows I practiced archery in the cooler parts of the days, coaxing back the strength to my arms, body and legs, but I made my excursions to the jungle brief.

During this period of convalescence, the goddess reassumed the company of her snake. But the dear girl followed me about with her gaze, which I frequently felt drawing my own. When I would glance toward her, I always saw her glorious eyes filled with longing and sympathy and a tenderness which went straight to my heart. But she would blush and look away, nearly always at the hideous snake.

With my returning strength came the recurrent desire to depart from the place forever. Also, in spite of all I could do, the thought of my gold—lying in the thicket, the treasure for which I had laboured so hard—would persist in returning. I tried to banish the dream of avarice, but it is a fearsome clutch which riches maintain on the imagination of poor, weak man. I felt quite convinced that great as my longing was for the world outside, that of the goddess was ten-fold greater. Of this I spoke, one day, when my restored condition gave promise that I should not fail for lack of strength in what I might undertake. Into the eyes of that faithful girl came a burning light, which would have made the heart of any man bound with feeling. She spoke, however, with her usual control.

“I should like to leave this place,” she said, “but I prefer to wait until you are strong and masterful, as you were when I saw you first.”

At this it was on my tongue to speak of the future, and of certain hopes which had grown in my thoughts, of a home to be and of happiness, but I curbed this desire as being untimely while she depended so entirely upon myself for deliverance.

Having dwelt no little on the prospect of the future in this camp, in which—unless we escaped—I could see my own skeleton hung up on a stump, and with no fine plating of gold upon it, either, I had small desire to remain in the land another day. Strangely enough, however, I had no sooner begun to make our preparations for leaving, than memory dragged in every happy day I had spent with my Links, every thrill of triumph in my puny successes, every faithful or affectionate deed which these simple, half-animal creatures had ever performed toward myself. I own I was foolishly attached to a number of the poor forest-children, who watched me always with such a dumb look of regard, and wonder as to what I was.

It is not a boast to say that I had wrought an ineradicable effect upon these less than merely primitive people. In turn they had been my willing slaves, my companions—my everything of life. I thought of Little Tike, and blessed his memory for the days of real enjoyment he had given me when I was mending from a serious injury once before. But after all—there was that gilded skeleton to think about and to dread. What profit was it to a skeleton that sundry Missing Links still adored the ground before it? I preferred to be a man of meat, unadored for the rest of my life, rather than to be a gold-plated pile of bones, worshipped madly throughout the centuries to come.