In the centre of the temple, on a rude stone altar, smoked the unquenched fire which had never died since the natal spark had flamed in a Mexican temple two hundred years before. This half a dozen hideously painted priests fed with fragrant barks and gums. Around them five hundred warriors squatted on the ground, and passed the council-pipe, while the priests mumbled and chanted, and a portion of the sacred band drew forth soft and monotonous music from long reed instruments. A rattlesnake, coiled around the right arm of the chief priest, swayed its crest with an undulating motion to the cadences of the music, and its bright eyes seemed to watch every motion with malign intentness, as if it were the guiding spirit of the council. The braves wore no war-paint, for their expedition was not meant to blazon its own purpose; but their faces, so far as they could be seen through the smoke, were distorted with such ferocity and lust of blood that they could dispense with the help of pigments. And so the priests chanted, and the players played their soft melody, and the high-priest stroked his serpent’s hideous head as it curved and swayed to the rhythm of the tune, while the watching Jean was maddened by the delay and the passage of time and opportunity. At last, perhaps mindful of some signal from the high-priest, the snake darted its full length and struck with open mouth as if at some enemy,[C] Big Serpent arose from the seated ranks.
The Great Sun’s oration to his warriors, spoken in the Indian tongue, was mostly jargon to the listener, but he construed enough of it to unravel the Natchez plot. Under the guise of paying their tribute, they would surprise the fort the next morning.
Jean waited for nothing more, but withdrew swiftly, and dashed into the forest. To reach Fort Rosalie as quickly as possible he took his way again through the noisome swamp which formed so much of the short-cut to the French post. He had found his way well towards the heart of that place of gloom and reptilian life. Inspection of every tuft of grass and weed now made progress slow, and Jean looked forward to a few moments of rest on the hummock twenty feet off which projected from the edge of a canebrake. How lucky, he thought, that he had escaped without detection! On top of this thought came the shock of a challenge, which made his heart leap.
“Halte, là!” and the figure of Akbal pushed through the reeds. His gun lay in the hollow of one arm, and from the other hand dangled a silver clasp with which Jean’s hunting-shirt had been fastened, and which he had not missed till this moment. It had been found in the bowery lane near the temple.
“Better Akbal than another Natchez bring this back to his French brother,” he went on, with a note of mockery in his voice. “Jan Akbal’s prisoner; no hurt him; to-morrow set free.”
Quick as a flash Jean’s gun swung to his shoulder.
“Stand aside, Akbal, or I shoot you dead. It must be that or pledge of free passage.”
The two stood like duellists with levelled weapons, waiting for the word, with stern faces and flashing eyes. This was not the time nor place to remember old comradeship and the rite of blood-brotherhood which had once been solemnized between them. That rite swore them to an undying amity, as if born of the same mother and they had tasted the red drops hot from each other’s veins in testimony. But all this was forgotten. To Jean, Akbal was the barrier to prevent his saving the garrison. To Akbal, Jean was the agent bent on foiling his people’s revolt from French oppression. But though their fingers touched triggers, they did not press them. Perhaps this hesitation would have lasted but a second.
But now Jean heard a whirring noise that disturbed even his tense train of thinking with a cold chill. He dashed his musket butt at something, but it flecked him like a giant whip-lash. A monstrous rattlesnake had fastened its fangs deep in his thigh. Another duellist had stepped to the fore. Akbal saw the snake spring, and was himself almost as swift in leaping the interval. He shook his head as he saw the enormous size of the serpent, which was in the deadliest season of its venom, wriggling with a broken back.
“Much bad bite, but try save Jean,” said he, as he helped him across to the larger hummock. Luckily Jean’s canteen was full of brandy, and this he gulped down eagerly, while the Indian cut away the buckskin from his leg. Two needle-point punctures, to be sure, seemed scarcely worth bothering about, but with an apology, “Knife much hurt, but good,” he plunged the keen-edged blade into the flesh, cutting out the envenomed parts, and followed it by applying his lips and sucking at the wound for a full five minutes.