A NIGHT OF TOIL
An hour later, from the gnarled branches of the willow--up into
which Stern had fairly flung her, and where he had himself clambered
with the beasts ravening at his legs--the two sole survivors of the
human race watched the glowering eyes that dotted the velvet gloom.
"I estimate a couple of hundred, all told," judged Allan. "Odd we
never ran across any of them before to-night. Must be some kind of a
migration under way--maybe some big shift of game, of deer, or
buffalo, or what-not. But then, in that case, they wouldn't be so
starved, so dead-set on white meat as they seem to be."
Beta shifted her place on a horizontal limb.
"It's awfully hard for a _soft_ wood," she remarked. "Do you think
we'll have to stay here long, dear?"
"That depends. I don't see that the fifteen we've killed since
roosting here have served as any terrible examples to the others. And
we're about twenty cartridges to the bad. They're not worth it, these
devils. We've got to save our ammunition for something edible till I
can get my shop to running and begin making my own powder. No; must be
there's some other and better way."
"But what?" asked the girl. "We're safe enough here, but we're not
getting any nearer home--and I'm _so_ hungry!"
"Same here," Stern coincided. "And the lunch was all in the boat;
worse luck! Who the deuce could have cut her loose? I thought we'd
pretty effectually cleared out those Hinkmatinks, or whatever the
Horde consisted of. But evidently something, or somebody, is still
left alive with a terrific grudge against us, or an awful longing for
navigation."
"Was the cord broken or cut?"
"I'll see."
Stern clambered to a lower branch. With the trigger-guard of his rifle
he was able to catch the cord. All about the trunk, meanwhile, the
wolves leaped snarling. The fetid animal smell of them was strong upon
the air--that, and the scent of blood and raw meat, where they had
feasted on the slain.
With the severed cord, Allan climbed back to where Beatrice sat.
"Hold the rifle, will you?" asked he. A moment, and by the quick
showers of sparks that issued from his flint and steel, he was
examining the leather thong.
"_Cut!_"
"Cut? But then, then--"
"No tide or wind to blame. Some intelligence, even though rudimentary,
has been at work here--is at work--opposed to us."
"But what?"
"No telling. There may be more things in this world yet than either of
us dream. Perhaps we committed a very grave error to leave the
apparently peaceful little nook we've got, up there on the Hudson, and
tackle this place again. But who could ever have thought of anything
like this after that terrible slaughter?"
They kept silence a few minutes. The wolves now had sunk to a plane of
comparative insignificance. At the very worst Stern could annihilate
them, one by one, with a lavish expenditure of his ammunition.
Unnoticed now, they yelped, and scratched and howled about the tree,
sat on their haunches, waiting in the gloom, or sneaked--vague
shadows--among the deeper dusks of the forest.
And once again the east began to glow, even as when he and she had
watched the moon rise over the hills beyond the Hudson; and their
hearts beat with joy for even that relief from the dark mystery of
solitude and night.
After a while the man spoke.
"It's this way," said he. "Whoever cut that cord and either let the
banca float away or else stole it, evidently doesn't want to come to
close quarters for the present, so long as these wolves are making
themselves friendly.
"Perhaps, in a way, the wolves are a factor in our favor; perhaps,
without them, we might have had a poisoned arrow sticking into us, or
a spear or two, before now. My guess is that we'll get a wide berth so
long as the wolves stay in the neighborhood. I think the anthropoids,
or whoever they were, must have been calculating on ambushing us as we
came back, and expected to 'get' us while we were hunting for the
boat.
"They didn't reckon on this little diversion. When they heard it they
probably departed for other regions. They won't be coming around just
yet, that's a safe wager. Mighty lucky, eh? Think what Ar targets we'd
make, up here in this willow, by moonlight!"
"You're right, Allan. But when it comes daylight we'll make better
ones. And I don't know that I enjoy sitting up here and starving to
death, with a body-guard of wolves to keep away the Horde, very much
more than I would taking a chance with the arrows. It's two sixes,
either way, and not a bit nice, is it?"
"Hang the whole business! There must be some other way--some way out
of this infernal pickle! Hold on--wait--I--I almost see it now!"
"What's your plan, dear?"
"Wait! Let me think, a minute!"
She kept silence. Together they sat among the spreading branches in
the growing moonlight. A bat reeled overhead, chippering weakly. Far
away a whippoorwill began its fluty, insistent strain. A distant cry
of some hunting beast echoed, unspeakably weird, among the dead,
deserted streets buried in oblivion. The brush crackled and snapped
with the movements of the wolf-pack; the continued snarling, whining,
yapping, stilled the chorus of the frogs along the sedgy banks.
"If I could only snare a good, lively one!" suddenly broke out Stern.
"What for?"
"Why, don't you see?" And with sudden inspiration he expounded.
Together, eager as children, they planned. Beatrice clapped her hands
with sheer delight.
"But," she added pensively, "it'll be a little hard on the wolf, won't
it?"
Stern had to laugh.
"Yes," he assented; "but think how much he'll learn about the new kind
of game he tried to hunt!"
Half an hour later a grim old warrior of the pack, deftly and securely
caught by one hind leg with the slip-noosed leather cord, dangled
inverted from a limb, high out of reach of the others.
Slowly he swung, jerking, writhing, frothing as he fought in vain to
snap his jaws upon the cord he could not touch. And night grew
horrible with the stridor of his yells.
"Now then," remarked Stern calmly, "to work. The moonlight's good
enough to shoot by. No reason I should miss a single target."
Followed a time of frightful tumult as the living ate the dying and
the dead, worrying the flesh from bones that had as yet scarcely
ceased to move. Beatrice, pale and silent, yet very calm, watched the
slaughter. Stern, as quietly methodical as though working out a
reaction, sighted, fired, sighted, fired. And the work went on apace.
The bag of cartridges grew steadily lighter. The work was done long
before all the wolves had died. For the survivors, gorged to
repletion, some wounded, others whole, slunk gradually away and
disappeared in the dim glades, there to sleep off their cannibal
debauch.
At last Stern judged the time was come to descend.
"Bark away, old boy!" he exclaimed. "The louder the better. You're our
danger-signal now. As long as those poor, dull anthropoid brains keep
sensing you I guess we're safe!"
To Beatrice he added:
"Come now, dear. I'll help you down. The quicker we tackle that raft
and away, the sooner we'll be home!"
"Home!" she repeated. "Oh, how glad I'll be to see our bungalow again!
How I hate the ruins of the city now! Look out, Allan--you'll have to
let me take a minute or two to straighten out in. You don't know how
awfully cramped I am!"
"Just slide into my arms--there, that's right!" he answered, and swung
her down as easily as though she had been a child. Her arms went round
his neck; their lips met and thrilled in a long kiss.
But not even the night-breeze and the moon could now beguile them to
another. For there was hard, desperate work to do, and time was short.
A moment they stood there together, under the old tree wherein the
wolf was dangling in loud-mouthed rage.
"Well, here's where I go at it!" exclaimed the man.
He opened the big sack. Fumbling among the tools, he quickly found the
ax.
"You, Beta," he directed, "get together all the plaited rope you can
take off the bag, and cut me some strips of hide. Cut a lot of them.
I'll need all you can make. We've got to work fast--got to clear out
of here before sunrise or there may be the devil to pay!"
It was a labor of extraordinary difficulty, there in those dense and
dim-lit thickets, felling a tall spruce, limbing it out and cutting it
into three sections. But Stern attacked it like a demon. Now and again
he stopped to listen or to jab tile suspended wolf with the ax-handle.
"Go on there, you alarm-signal!" he commanded. "Let's have plenty of
music, good and loud, too. Maybe if you deliver the goods and hold
out--well, you'll get away with your life. Otherwise, not!"
Robinson Crusoe's raft had been a mere nothing to build compared with
this one that the engineer had to construct there at the water's edge,
among the sedges and the reeds For Crusoe had planks and beams and
nails to help him; while Stern had naught but his ax, the forest, and
some rough cordage.
He had to labor in the gloom, as well, listening betimes for sounds of
peril or stopping to stimulate the wolf. The dull and rusty ax
retarded him; blisters rose upon his palms, and broke, and formed
again. But still he toiled.
The three longitudinal spruce timbers he lashed together with poles
and with the cords that Beatrice prepared for him. On these, again, he
laid and lashed still other poles, rough-hewn.
In half an hour's hard work, while the moon began to sink to the
westward, he had stepped a crude mast and hewed a couple of
punt-poles.
"No use our trying to row this monstrosity," he said to Beatrice,
stopping a moment to dash the sweat off his forehead with a shaking
hand. "We either rig the skin sack in some way as a sail, or we drift
up with the tide, tie at the ebb, and so on--and if we make the
bungalow in three days we're lucky!
"Come on now, Beatrice. Lend a hand here and we'll launch her! Good
thing the tide's coming up--she almost floats already. Now, one, two,
three!"
The absurd raft yielded, moved, slid out upon the marshy water and was
afloat!
"Get aboard!" commanded Allan. "Go forward to the _salon de luxe_.
I'll stow the bag aft, so."
He lifted her in his arms and set her on the raft. The bag he
carefully deposited at what passed for the stern. The raft sank a bit
and wallowed, but bore up.
"Now then, all aboard!" cried Stern.
"The wolf, Allan, the wolf! How about _him?_"
"That's right, I almost plumb forgot! I guess he's earned his life,
all right enough."
Quickly he slashed the cord. The wolf dropped limp, tried to crawl,
but could not, and lay panting on its side, tongue lolling, eyes
glazed and dim.
"He'll be a horrible example all his life of what it means to monkey
with the new kind of meat," remarked Allan, clambering aboard. "If
wolves or anthropoids can learn, they ought to learn from him!"
Strongly, steadily, they poled the raft out through the marshy slip,
on, on, past the crumbling wreckage of the pier-head.
"Now the tide's got us," exclaimed Allan with satisfaction, as the
moonlit current, all silver and rippling with calm beauty, swung them
up-stream.
Beatrice, still strong, and full of vigorous, pulsing life, in spite
of the long vigil in the tree and the hard night of work, curled up at
the foot of the rough mast, on the mass of fir-tips Stern had piled
there.
"You steer, boy," said she, "and I'll go to work on making some kind
of sail out of the big skin. By morning we ought to have our little
craft under full control."
"It's one beautiful boat, isn't it?" mocked Stern, poling off from a
gaunt hulk that barred the way.
"It mayn't be very beautiful," she answered softly, "but it carries
the greatest, purest, noblest love that ever was since the world
began--it carries the hope of the whole world, of all the ages--and
it's taking us home!"