"Going to take it right up to the village, now?" queried she, anxiously glancing at the crowd of white and silent faces, all eagerly staring--staring like so many wraiths in a strange dream.
He shrugged his shoulders.
"That depends," he answered. He seemed already to have forgotten Kamrou and the threatening peril in the village, near the great flame.
Even the sound of distant chanting and the thudding of dull drums stirred him not. Fascinated, he was walking all round the great mechanical bird, which now lay wounded, weed-covered, sodden and dripping, yet eloquent of infinite possibilities, there on that black, unearthly beach.
All at once he spoke.
"Up to the village with it!" he commanded, waving his pistol-hand toward the causeway and the fortified gates. "I can"t risk leaving it here. Come, father, speak to them! It"s got to go into the village right now!"
Then Kamrou"s messenger, grasping the sense if not the words of the command, strode forward--a tall, lithe figure of a man, well-knit and hard of face. Under the torchlight the dilated pupils of his pinkish eyes seemed to shine as phosph.o.r.escent as a cat"s.
Crying out something unintelligible to Stern, he blocked the way.
Stern heard the name "Kamrou! Kamrou!"
"Well, what do you want now?" shouted the engineer, a huge and sudden anger seizing him. Already super-excited by the labors of the day and by the nervous strain of having recovered the sunken biplane, all this talk of Kamrou, all this persistent opposition just at the most inauspicious moment worked powerfully upon his irritated nerves.
Cool reason would have dictated diplomacy, parley, and, if possible, truce. But Stern could not believe the Folk, for so long apparently loyal to him and dominated by his influence, could work against their vital interest and his own by deserting him now.
And, all his saner judgment failing him, heeding nothing of the patriarch"s entreaties or of the girl"s remonstrance as she caught his arm and tried to hold him back, he faced this cooly insolent barbarian.
"You, d.a.m.n you, what _d"you_ want?" he cried again, his finger itching on the trigger of the automatic. "Think I"m going to quit for you, or Kamrou, or anybody? Quit, _now?_"
"Think a civilized white man, sweating his heart out to save your people here, is going to knuckle under to any savage that happens to blow in and try to boss this job? If so, you"ve got another guess coming! Stand back, you, or you"ll get cold lead in just one minute!"
Quick words pa.s.sed from the old man to the messenger and back again.
The patriarch cried again to him, and for a moment Stern saw the barbarian"s eyes flicker uneasily toward the revolver. But the calm and cruel face never changed, nor did the savage take one step backward.
"All right, then!" shouted Stern, "seeing red" in his overpowering rage. "You want it--you"ll get it--take it, so!"
Up he jerked the automatic, fair at the big barbarian"s heart--a splendid target by the torch-light, not ten feet distant; a sure shot.
But before he could pull trigger the strange two-p.r.o.nged torch was tossed on high by somebody behind the messenger, and through the dull and foggy gloom a wild, fierce, penetrant cry wailed piercingly.
Came a shooting, numbing pain in Stern"s right elbow. The arm dropped, helpless. The boulder which, flung with accurate aim, had destroyed his aim, rolled at his feet. The pistol clattered over the wet, shining stones.
Stern, cursing madly, leaped and s.n.a.t.c.hed for it with the other hand.
Before he could even reach it a swift foot tripped him powerfully.
Headlong he fell. And in a second one of the very ropes that had been used to drag the Pauillac from the depths was lashed about his wrists, his ankles, his struggling, fighting body.
"Beatrice! Shoot! Kill!" he shouted. "Help here! _Help!_ The machine--they"ll wreck it! Everything--lost! _Help!_"
His speech died in a choking mumble, stifled by the wet and sodden gag they forced into his mouth.
About him the mob seethed. Through his brain a quick anguish thrilled, the thought of Beatrice unaided and alone. Then came a wonder when the death-stroke would fall--a frightful, sick despair that on the very eve of triumph, of salvation for this Folk and for the world as well as for Beatrice and himself, this unforeseen catastrophe should have befallen.
He struggled still to catch some glimpse of Beatrice, to cry aloud to her, to shield her; but, alone against five hundred, he was powerless.
Nowhere could he catch even a glimpse of the girl. In that shoving, pushing, shouting horde, nothing could be made out. He knew not even whether civil war had blazed or whether all alike had owned the rule of Kamrou the Terrible.
Like buoys tossing upon the surface of a raging sea, the flaring torches pitched and danced, rose, fell. And from a mult.i.tude of throats, from beach and causeway, walls and town, strange shouts rang up into the all-embracing, vague, enshrouding vapor.
Still striving to fight, bound as he was, he felt a great force driving him along, on, on, up the beach and toward the village.
Mute, desperate, stark mad, he knew the Folk were half carrying, half dragging him up the causeway.
As in a dark dream, he vaguely saw the great fortified gate with its huge, torch-lighted monolithic lintel. Even upon this some of the Folk were crowded now to watch the strange, incredible spectacle of the man who had once turned the tide of battle against the Lanskaarn and had saved all their lives, now haled like a criminal back into the community he had rescued in its hour of sorest need.
His mind leaped to their first entry into the village--it seemed months ago--also as prisoners. In a flash he recalled all that had happened since and bitterly he mocked himself for having dared to dream that their influence had really altered these strange, barbarous souls, or uplifted them, or taught them anything at all.
"Now, now just as the rescue of these people was at hand, just as the machine might have carried us and them back into the world, slowly, one by one--_now comes defeat and death!_"
An exceeding great bitterness filled his soul once more at this harsh, cynic turn of fate. But most of all he yearned toward Beatrice. That he should die mattered nothing; but the thought of this girl perishing at their hands there in the lost Abyss was dreadful as the pangs of all the fabled h.e.l.ls.
Again he fought to hold back, to try for some sight, even a fleeting glimpse of Beatrice; but the Folk with harsh cries drove him roughly forward.
He could not even see the patriarch. All was confusion, glare, smoke, noise, as he was thrust through the fortified gate, out into the thronged plaza.
Everywhere rose cries, shouts, vociferations, among which he could distinguish only one a thousand times repeated: "Kamrou! _Kamrou!_"
And through all his rage and bitter bafflement and pain, a sudden great desire welled up in him to see this chief of the Folk, at last--to lay eyes on this formidable, this terrible one--to stand face to face with him in whose hand now lay everything, Kamrou!
Across the dim, fog-covered expanse of the plaza he saw the blue-green shimmer of the great flame.
Thither, toward that strange, eternal fire and the ghastly circle of the headless skeletons the Folk were drifting now. Thither his captors were dragging him.
And there, he knew, Kamrou awaited Beatrice and him. There doom was to be dealt out to them. There, and at once!
Thicker the press became. The flame was very near now, its droning roar almost drowning the great and growing babel of cries.
On, on the Folk bore him. All at once he saw again that two-p.r.o.nged torch raised before him, going ahead; and a way cleared through the press.
Along this way he was carried, no longer struggling, but eager now to know the end, to meet it bravely and with calm philosophy, "as fits a man."
And quite at once he found himself in sight of the many dangling skeletons. Now the quivering jet of the flame grew visible. Now, suddenly, he was thrust forward into a smooth and open s.p.a.ce. Silence fell.
Before him he saw Kamrou, Kamrou the Terrible, at last.
CHAPTER x.x.xVI
GAGE OF BATTLE
The chief of the People of the Abyss was seated at his ease in a large stone chair, over which heavy layers of weed-fabric had been thrown. He was flanked on either side by spearsmen and by drummers, who still held their iron sticks poised above their copper drums with shark-skin heads.