Back to Cliff Villa he returned, his step heavy and his heart like lead. In a few brief hours, how great, how terrible, how devastating the changes that had come upon Settlement Cliffs!
Attack, destruction, pestilence and flame had all worked their will there; and many a dream, a plan, a hope now lay in ashes, even like those smoldering cinder-piles across the river--those pyres that marked the death-field of the hateful, venomous, inhuman Horde!
Numb with exhaustion and emotions, he staggered up the path, knocked, and was admitted to his home by the old nurse.
He heard the crying of his son, vigorously protesting against some infant grievance, and his tired heart yearned with strong father-love.
"A hard world, boy!" thought he. "A hard fight, all the way through.
G.o.d grant, before you come to take the burden and the shock, I may have been able to lighten both for you?"
The old woman touched his arm.
"O, master! Is the fighting past?"
"It is past and done, Gesafam. _That_ enemy, at least, will never come again! But tell me, what causes the boy to cry?"
"He is hungered, master. And I--I do not know the way to milk the strange animal!"
Despite his exhaustion, pain and dour forebodings, Allan had to smile a second.
"That"s one thing you"ve got to learn, old mother!" he exclaimed.
"I"ll milk presently. But not just yet!"
For first of all he must see Beatrice again. The boy must cry a bit, till he had seen her!
To the bed he hastened, and beside it fell on his knees. His eager eyes devoured the girl"s face; his trembling hand sought her brow.
Then a glad cry broke from his lips.
Her face no longer burned with fever, and her pulse was slower now. A profuse and saving perspiration told him the crisis had been pa.s.sed.
"Thank G.o.d! Thank G.o.d!" he breathed from his inmost soul. In his arms he caught her. He drew her to his breast.
And even in that hour of confusion and distress he knew the greatest joy of life was his.
CHAPTER XXIX
ALLAN"S NARRATIVE
The week that followed was one of terrible labor, vigil and responsibility for Stern. Not yet recovered from his wounds nor fully rested from his flight before the Horde--now forever happily wiped out--the man nevertheless plunged with untiring energy into the stupendous tasks before him.
He was at once the life, the brain, the inspiration of the colony.
Without him all must have perished. In the hollow of his hand he held them, every one; and he alone it was who wrought some measure of reconstruction in the smitten settlement.
Once Beatrice was out of danger, he turned his attention to the others. He administered his treatment and regimen with a strong hand, and allowed no opposition. Under his direction a little cemetery grew in the palisade--a mournful sight for this early stage in the reconstruction of the world.
Here the Folk, according to their own custom, marked the graves with totem emblems as down in the Abyss, and at night they wailed and chanted there under the bright or misty moon; and day by day the number of graves increased till more than twenty crowned the cliff.
The two Anthropoids were not buried, however, but were thrown into the river from the place where they had been shot down while rolling rocks over the edge. They vanished in a tumbling, eddying swirl, misshapen and hideous to the last.
With his accustomed energy he set his men to work repairing the damage as well as possible, rearranging the living quarters, and bringing order out of chaos. Beta was now able to sit up a little. Allan decided she must have had a touch of brain-fever.
But in his thankfulness at her recovery he took no great thought as to the nature of the disease.
"Thank G.o.d, you"re on the road to full recovery now, dear!" he said to her on the tenth day as they sat together in the sun before the home cave. "A mighty close call for you--and for the boy, too! Without that good old goat what mightn"t have happened? She"ll be a privileged character for life in these diggings."
Beta laughed, and with a thin hand stroked his hair as he bent over her.
"Do you remember those funny goat-pictures Powers used to draw, a thousand years ago?" she asked. "Well, he ought to be here now to make a sketch of you handing one to our kiddums? But--it was no joke, after all, was it? It was life and death for him!"
He kissed her tenderly, and for a while they said nothing. Then he asked:
"You"re really feeling much--much better to-day?"
"Awfully much! Why, I"m nearly well again! In a day or two I"ll be at work, just as though nothing had happened at all."
"No, no; you must rest a while. Just so you"re better, that"s enough for me."
Beatrice was really gaining fast. The fever had at least left her with an insatiable appet.i.te.
Allan decided she was now well enough again to nurse the baby. So he and the famous goat were mutually spared many a _mauvais quart d"heure_.
Tallying up matters and things on the evening of the twelfth day, as they sat once more on the terrace in front of Cliff Villa, he inventoried the situation thus:
1--Twenty-six of the Folk are dead.
2--H"yemba is disposed of--praise be!
3--Forty still survive--twenty-eight men, nine women, three children.
Of these forty, thirty-three are sound.
4--The Pauillac is lost.
5--The bridge is destroyed, and eight of the caves are gone.
6--The entire forest area to the northward, as far as the eye can reach, is totally devastated.
7--The Horde is wiped out.
"Some good items and some bad, you see, in this trial balance," he commented as he checked up the items. "It means a fresh start in some ways, and no end of work. But, after all, the damage isn"t fatal, as it might easily have been. We"re about a thousand times better off than there was any hope for."
"You haven"t counted in your own wounds just healing, or the terrific time you had with the Horde," suggested Beatrice. "How in this world you ever got through I don"t see."
"I don"t either. It was a miracle, that"s all. From the place where I descended for a little repair work, and where they suddenly attacked us, to the colony, can"t be less than one hundred and fifty miles. And such hills, valleys, jungles! Perfectly unimaginable difficulties, Beta! Now that I look back on it myself, I don"t see how I ever got here."
"They killed both the men you had with you?"
"Yes; but one of them not till the second day. You see, the carburetor got clogged and wouldn"t spray properly. I realized I could never reach Settlement Cliffs without overhauling it. So I scouted for a likely place to land, far from any sign of the cursed signal-fires.
"Well, we hadn"t been on the ground fifteen minutes before I"m blest if one of my men didn"t hear the brushwood crackling to eastward.