"If Simon Turner isn't a coward," Bruce said slowly to the clan, "he
will give me a chance to fight him now."
The room was wholly silent, and the clan turned expectant eyes to their
leader. Simon scowled, but he knew he had to make answer. His eyes crept
over Bruce's powerful body. "There is no obligation on my part to answer
any challenges by you," he said. "You are a prisoner. But if you think
you can sleep better in the pasture because of it, I'll let you have
your chance. Take off his ropes."
A knife slashed at his bonds. Simon stood up, and Bruce sprang from his
chair like a wild cat, aiming his hardened knuckles straight for the
leering lips. He made the attack with astonishing swiftness and power,
and his intention was to deliver at least one terrific blow before Simon
could get his arms up to defend himself. He had given the huge clan
leader credit for tremendous physical strength, but he didn't think that
the heavy body could move with real agility. But the great muscles
seemed to snap into tension, the head ducked to one side, and his own
huge fists struck out.
If Bruce's blow had gone straight home where it had been aimed, Simon
would have had nothing more to say for a few moments at least. When man
was built of clay, Nature saw fit to leave him with certain
imperfections lest he should think himself a god, and a weak spot in the
region of the chin is one of them. The jaw bones carry the impact of a
hard blow to certain nerve centers near the temples, and restful sleep
comes quickly. There are never any ill effects, unless further damage is
inflicted while unconsciousness is upon him. In spite of the fact that
Simon got quickly into a position of defense, that first blow still had
a fair chance of bringing the fight to an abrupt end. But still another
consideration remained.
Bruce's muscles had refused to respond. The leap had been powerful and
swift yet wholly inaccurate. And the reason was just that his wrists and
ankles had been numbed by the tight thongs by which they had been
confined. Simon met the leap with a short, powerful blow into Bruce's
face; and he reeled backward. The arms of the clansmen alone kept him
from falling.
The blow seemed to daze Bruce; and at first his only realization was
that the room suddenly rang with harsh and grating laughter. Then
Simon's words broke through it. "Put back the thongs," he ordered, "and
go get your horses."
Bruce was dimly aware of the falling of a silence, and then the arms of
strong men half carrying him to the door. But he couldn't see plainly at
first. The group stood in the shadow of the building; the moon was
behind. He knew that the clan had brought their horses and were waiting
for Simon's command. They loosened the ropes from about his ankles, and
two of the clansmen swung him on to the back of a horse. Then they
passed a rope under the horse's belly and tied his ankles anew.
Simon gave a command, and the strange file started. The night air
dispelled the mists in Bruce's brain, and full realization of all things
came to him again. One of the men--he recognized him as Young Bill--led
the horse on which he rode. Two of the clansmen rode in front, grim,
silent, incredibly tall figures in the moonlight. The remainder rode
immediately behind. Simon himself, bowed in his saddle, kept a little to
one side. Their shadows were long and grotesque on the soft grass of the
meadows, and the only sound was the soft footfall of their mounts.
A full mile distant across the lush fields the cavalcade halted about a
grotesque shadow in the grass. Bruce didn't have to look at it twice to
know what it was: the half-devoured body of the yearling calf that had
been the Killer's prey the night before. From thence on, their
operations became as outlandish occurrences in a dream. They seemed to
know just what to do. They took him from the saddle and bound his feet
again; then laid him in the fragrant grass. They searched his pockets,
taking the forged note that had led to his downfall. "It saves me a
trip," Simon commented. He saw two of them lift the torn body of the
animal on to the back of one of the horses, and he watched dully as the
horse plunged and wheeled under the unfamiliar weight. He thought for an
instant that it would step upon his own prone body, but he didn't
flinch. Simon spoke in the silence, but his words seemed to come from
far away.
"Quiet that horse or kill him," he said softly. "You can't drag the
carcass with your rope--the Killer would trace it if you did and maybe
spoil the evening for Bruce."
Strong arms sawed at the bits, and the horse quieted, trembling. For a
moment Bruce saw their white moonlit faces as they stared down at him.
"What about a gag?" one of them asked.
"No. Let him shout if he likes. There is no one to hear him here."
Then the tall men swung on their horses and headed back across the
fields. Bruce watched them dully. Their forms grew constantly more dim,
the sense of utter isolation increased. Then he saw the file pause, and
it seemed to him that words, too faint for him to understand, reached
him across the moonlit spaces. Then one of the party turned off toward
the ridge.
He guessed that it was Simon. He thought the man was riding toward
Linda's home.
He watched until the shadows had hidden them all. Then, straining
upward, he tested his bonds. He tugged with the full strength of his
arms, but there was not the play of an inch between his wrists. The
Turners had done their work well. Not the slightest chance of escape lay
in this quarter.
He wrenched himself to one side, then looked about him. The fields
stretched even and distant on one side, but he saw that the dark forest
was but fifty yards away on the other. He listened; and the little
night sounds reached him clearly. They had been sounds to rejoice in
before,--impulses to delightful fancies of a fawn stealing through the
thickets, or some of the Little People in their scurried, tremulous
business of the night hours. But lying helpless at the edge of the
forest, they were nothing to rejoice in now. He tried to shut his ears
to them.
He rolled again to his back and tried to find peace for his spirit in
the stars. There were millions of them. They were larger and more bright
than any time he had ever seen them. They stood in their high places,
wholly indifferent and impassive to all the strife and confusion of the
world below them; and Bruce wished that he could partake of their spirit
enough so that he could rise above the fear and bitterness that had
begun to oppress him. But only the pines could talk to them. Only the
tall trees, stretching upward toward them, could reach into their
mysterious calm.
His eyes discerned a thin filament of cloud that had swept up from
behind the ridges, and the sight recalled him to his own position with
added force. The moonlight, soft as it was, had been a tremendous relief
to him. At least, it would have enabled him to keep watch, and now he
dreaded the fall of utter darkness more than he had ever dreaded
anything in his life. It was an ancient instinct, coming straight from
the young days of the world when nightfall brought the hunting creatures
to the mouth of the cave, but he had never really experienced it before.
If the clouds spread, the moon that was his last remaining solace would
be obscured.
He watched with growing horror the slow extension of the clouds. One by
one the stars slipped beneath them. They drew slowly up to the moon and
for a long minute seemed to hover. They were not heavy clouds, however,
and in their thinner patches the stars looked dimly through. Finally the
moon swept under them.
The shadow fell around Bruce. For the first time he knew the age-old
terror of the darkness. Dreadful memories arose within him,--vague
things that had their font in the labyrinthal depths of the germ-plasm.
It is a knowledge that no man, with the weapons of the twentieth century
in his hands and in the glow of that great symbol of domain, the camp
fire, can really possess; but here, bound hand and foot in the darkness,
full understanding came to Bruce. He no longer knew himself as one of a
dominant breed, master of all the wild things in the world. He was
simply a living creature in a grim and unconquered world, alone and
helpless in the terror of the darkness.
The moonlight alternately grew and died as the moon passed in and out of
the heavier cloud patches. Winds must have been blowing in the high
lanes of the air, but there was no breath of them where Bruce lay. The
forests were silent, and the little rustlings and stirrings that reached
him from time to time only seemed to accentuate the quiet.
He speculated on how many hours had passed. He wondered if he could dare
to hope that midnight had already gone by and, through some divergence
from wilderness customs, the grizzly had failed to return to his feast.
It seemed endless hours since he had reentered the empty rooms of
Linda's home. A wave of hope crept through the whole hydraulic system of
his veins. And then, as a sudden sound reached him from the forests at
one side, that bright wave of hope turned black, receded, and left only
despair.
He heard the sound but dimly. In fact, except for his straining with
every nerve alert, he might not have heard it at all. Nevertheless,
distance alone had dimmed it; it had been a large sound to start with.
So far had it come that only a scratch on the eardrums was left of it;
but there was no chance to misunderstand it. It cracked out to him
through the unfathomable silence, and all the elements by which he might
recognize it were distinct. It was the noise of a heavy thicket being
broken down and parted before an enormous body.
He waited, scarcely breathing, trying to tell himself he had been
mistaken. But a wiser, calmer self deep within him would not accept the
lie. He listened, straining. Then he heard the sound again.
Whoever came toward him had passed the heavy brush by now. The sounds
that reached him were just faint and intermittent whispers,--first of a
twig cracking beneath a heavy foot, then the rattle of two pebbles
knocked together. Long moments of utter silence would ensue between, in
which he could hear the steady drum of his heart in his breast and the
long roll of his blood in his veins. The shadows grew and deepened and
faded and grew again, as the moon passed from cloud to cloud.
The limbs of a young fir tree rustled and whispered as something brushed
against them. Leaves flicked together, and once a heavy limb popped like
a distant small-calibered rifle as a great weight broke it in two. Then,
as if the gods of the wilderness were using all their ingenuity to
torture him, the silence closed down deeper than ever before.
It lasted so long that he began to hope again. Perhaps the sounds had
been made by a deer stealing on its way to feed in the pastures. Yet he
knew the step had been too heavy for anything but the largest deer, and
their way was to encircle a thicket rather than crash through it. The
deer make it their business always to go with silence in these hours
when the beasts of prey are abroad, and usually a beetle in the leaves
makes more noise than they. It might have been the step of one of the
small, black bears--a harmless and friendly wilderness dweller. Yet the
impression lingered and strengthened that only some great hunter, a
beast who feared neither other beasts nor men, had been steadily coming
toward him through the forest. In the long silence that ensued Bruce
began to hope that the animal had turned off.
At that instant the moon slipped under a particularly heavy fragment of
cloud, and deep darkness settled over him. Even his white face was no
longer discernible in the dusk. He lay scarcely breathing, trying to
fight down his growing terror.
This silence could mean but one of two things. One of them was that the
creature who had made the sounds had turned off on one of the many
intersecting game trails that wind through the forest. This was his
hope. The alternative was one of despair. It was simply that the
creature had detected his presence and was stalking him in silence
through the shadows.
He thought that the light would never come. He strained again at his
ropes. The dark cloud swept on; and the moonlight, silver and bright,
broke over the scene.
The forest stood once more in sharp silhouette against the sky. The moon
stood high above the tapering tops of the pines. He studied with
straining eyes the dark fringe of shadows one hundred feet distant. And
at first he could see only the irregularities cast by the young trees,
the firs between which lay the brush coverts.
Then he detected a strange variation in the dark border of shadows. It
held his gaze, and its outlines slowly strengthened. So still it stood,
so seemingly a natural shadow that some irregularly shaped tree had
cast, that his eyes refused to recognize it. But in an instant more he
knew the truth.
The shadow was that of a great beast that had stalked him clear to the
border of the moonlight. The Killer had come for his dead.