To have looked at her, merely, you would never have thought Victoria
Custer, of Beatrice, Nebraska, at all the sort of girl she really was.
Her large dreamy eyes, and the graceful lines of her slender figure
gave one an impression of that physical cowardice which we have grown
to take for granted as an inherent characteristic of the truly womanly
woman. And yet I dare say there were only two things on God's green
earth that Victoria Custer feared, or beneath it or above it, for that
matter--mice and earthquakes.
She readily admitted the deadly terror which the former aroused
within her; but of earthquakes she seldom if ever would speak. To her
brother Barney, her chum and confidant, she had on one or two occasions
unburdened her soul.
The two were guests now of Lord and Lady Greystoke upon the
Englishman's vast estate in equatorial Africa, in the country of the
Waziri, to which Barney Custer had come to hunt big game--and forget.
But all that has nothing to do with this story; nor has John Clayton,
Lord Greystoke, who was, once upon a time, Tarzan of the Apes, except
that my having chanced to be a guest of his at the same time as the
Custers makes it possible for me to give you a story that otherwise
might never have been told.
South of Uziri, the country of the Waziri, lies a chain of rugged
mountains at the foot of which stretches a broad plain where antelope,
zebra, giraffe, rhinos and elephant abound, and here are lion and
leopard and hyena preying, each after his own fashion, upon the
sleek, fat herds of antelope, zebra and giraffe. Here, too, are
buffalo--irritable, savage beasts, more formidable than the lion
himself Clayton says.
It is indeed a hunter's paradise, and scarce a day passed that did not
find a party absent from the low, rambling bungalow of the Greystokes
in search of game and adventure, nor seldom was it that Victoria Custer
failed to be of the party.
Already she had bagged two leopards, in addition to numerous antelope
and zebra, and on foot had faced a bull buffalo's charge, bringing him
down with a perfect shot within ten paces of where she stood.
At first she had kept her brother in a state bordering on nervous
collapse, for the risks she took were such as few men would care to
undertake; but after he had discovered that she possessed perfect
coolness in the face of danger, and that the accuracy of her aim
was so almost uncanny as to wring unstinted praise from the oldest
hunters among them he commenced to lean a trifle too far in the other
direction, so that Victoria was often in positions where she found
herself entirely separated from the other members of the party--a
compliment to her prowess which she greatly prized, since women and
beginners were usually surrounded by precautions and guards through
which it was difficult to get within firing distance of any sort of
game.
As they were riding homeward one evening after a hunt in the foothills
Barney noticed that his sister was unusually quiet, and apparently
depressed.
"What's the matter, Vic?" he asked. "Dead tired, eh?"
The girl looked up with a bright smile, which was immediately followed
by an expression of puzzled bewilderment.
"Barney," she said, after a moment of silence, "there is something
about those hills back there that fills me with the strangest sensation
of terror imaginable. Today I passed an outcropping of volcanic
rock that gave evidence of a frightful convulsion of nature in some
bygone age. At sight of it I commenced to tremble from head to foot,
a cold perspiration breaking out all over me. But that part is not
so strange--you know I have always been subject to these same silly
attacks of unreasoning terror at sight of any evidence of the mighty
forces that have wrought changes in the earth's crust, or of the
slightest tremor of an earthquake; but today the feeling of unutterable
personal loss which overwhelmed me was almost unbearable--it was as
though one whom I loved above all others had been taken from me.
"And yet," she continued, "through all my inexplicable sorrow there
shone a ray of brilliant hope as remarkable and unfathomable as the
deeper and depressing emotion which still stirred me."
For some time neither spoke, but rode silently stirrup to stirrup
as their ponies picked their ways daintily through the knee high
grass. The girl was thinking--trying to puzzle out an explanation
of the rather weird sensations which had so recently claimed her.
Barney Custer was one of those unusual and delightful people who do
not scoff at whatever they cannot understand; the reason, doubtless,
that his sister as well as others chose him as the recipient of their
confidences. Not understanding her emotion he had nothing to offer, and
so remained silent. He was, however, not a little puzzled, as he had
always been at each new manifestation of Victoria's uncanny reaction
to every indication of the great upheavals which marked the physical
changes in the conformation of the earth's crust.
He recalled former occasions upon which his sister had confided in
him something of similar terrors. Once in The Garden of the Gods, and
again during a trip through The Grand Canyon in Arizona, and very vivid
indeed was the recollection of Victoria's nervous collapse following
the reading of the press despatches describing the San Francisco
earthquake. In all other respects his sister was an exceptionally
normal well-balanced young American woman--which fact, doubtless,
rendered her one weakness the more apparent.
But Victoria Custer's terror of earthquakes was not her only
peculiarity. The other was her strange contempt for the men who had
sued for her hand--and these had been many. Her brother had thought
several of them the salt of the earth, and Victoria had liked them,
too, but as for loving them? Perish the thought!
Oddly enough recollection of this other phase of her character obtruded
itself upon Barney's memory as the two rode on toward the Clayton
bungalow, and with it he recalled a persistent dream which Victoria had
said recurred after each reminder of a great convulsion of nature. At
the thought he broke the silence.
"Has your--ah--avatar made his customary appearance?" he asked, smiling.
The girl extended her hand toward her brother and laid it on his where
it rested upon his thigh as he rode, looking up at him with half
frightened, half longing eyes.
"Oh, Barney," she cried, "you are such a dear never to have laughed at
my silly dreams. I'm sure I should go quite mad did I not have you in
whom to confide; but lately I have hesitated to speak of it even to
you--he has been coming so often! Every night since we first hunted in
the vicinity of the hills I have walked hand in hand with him beneath a
great equatorial moon beside a restless sea, and more clearly than ever
in the past have I seen his form and features. He is very handsome,
Barney, and very tall and strong, and clean limbed--I wish that I might
meet such a man in real life. I know it is a ridiculous thing to say,
but I can never love any of the pusillanimous weaklings who are forever
falling in love with me--not after having walked hand in hand with such
as he and read the love in his clear eyes. And yet, Barney, I am afraid
of him. Is it not odd?"
At this juncture they were joined by other members of the party, so
that no further reference to the subject was made by either. At the
Claytons they found that an addition had been made to the number of
guests by the unheralded advent of two khaki clad young men, one of
whom rose and came forward to meet the returning hunters while they
were yet a hundred yards away.
He was a tall, athletic appearing man. As Victoria Custer recognized
his features she did not know whether to be pleased or angry. Here was
the one man she had ever met who came nearest to the realization of her
dream-man, and this one of all the others had never spoken a word of
love to her. His companion who had now risen from the cool shade of the
low veranda was also coming forward, but more slowly, the set of his
shoulders and the swing of his stride betokening his military vocation.
"Mr. Curtiss!" exclaimed Victoria, and looking past him, "and
Lieutenant Butzow! Where in the world did you come from?"
"The world left us," replied the officer, smiling, "and we have
followed her to the wilds of Equatorial Africa."
"We found Nebraska a very tame place after you and Barney left,"
explained Mr. Curtiss, "and when I discovered that Butzow would
accompany me we lost no time in following you, and here we are throwing
ourselves upon the mercy and hospitality of Lady Greystoke."
"I have been trying to convince them," said that lady, who had now
joined the party at the foot of the veranda steps, "that the obligation
is all upon our side. It taxes our ingenuity and the generosity of our
friends to keep the house even half full of congenial companions."
It was not until after dinner that night that Mr. William Curtiss had
an opportunity to draw Miss Victoria Custer away from the others upon
some more or less hazy pretext that he might explain for her ears alone
just why he had suddenly found Beatrice, Nebraska, such a desolate
place and had realized that it was imperative to the salvation of his
life and happiness that he travel half way around the world in search
of a certain slender bit of femininity.
This usually self-possessed young man stammered and hesitated like a
bashful school boy speaking his Friday afternoon piece; but finally he
managed to expel from his system, more or less coherently, the fact
that he was very much in love with Victoria Custer, and that he should
never again eat or sleep until she had promised to be his wife.
There was a strong appeal to the girl in the masterful thing the man
had done in searching her out in the wilds of Africa to tell her of his
love, for it seemed that he and Butzow had forced their way with but a
handful of carriers through a very savage section of the savage jungle
because it was the shortest route from the coast to the Greystoke ranch.
Then there was that about him which appealed to the same attribute of
her nature to which the young giant of her dreams appealed--a primitive
strength and masterfulness that left her both frightened and happily
helpless in the presence of both these strong loves, for the love of
her dream-man was to Victoria Custer a real and living love.
Curtiss saw assent in the silence which followed his outbreak, and
taking advantage of this tacit encouragement, he seized her hands in
his and drew her toward him.
"Oh, Victoria," he whispered, "tell me that thing I wish to hear from
your dear lips. Tell me that even a tenth part of my love is returned,
and I shall be happy."
She looked up into his eyes, shining down upon her in the moonlight,
and on her lips trembled an avowal of the love she honestly believed
she could at last bestow upon the man of her choice. In the past few
moments she had thrashed out the question of that other, unreal and
intangible love that had held her chained to a dream for years, and in
the cold light of twentieth century American rationality she had found
it possible to put her hallucinations from her and find happiness in
the love of this very real and very earnest young man.
"Billy," she said, "I--" but she got no further. Even as the words that
would have bound her to him were forming upon her tongue there came a
low sullen rumbling from the bowels of the earth--the ground rose and
fell beneath them as the swell of the sea rises and falls. Then there
came a violent trembling and shaking and a final deafening crash in the
distance that might have accompanied the birth of mountain ranges.
With a little moan of terror the girl drew away from Curtiss, and
then, before he could restrain her, she had turned and fled toward the
bungalow. At the veranda steps she was met by the other members of the
house party, and by the Greystokes and numerous servants who had rushed
out at the first premonition of the coming shock.
Barney Custer saw his sister running toward the house, and knowing
her terror of such phenomena ran to meet her. Close behind her came
Curtiss, just in time to see the girl swoon in her brother's arms.
Barney carried her to her room, where Lady Greystoke, abandoning the
youthful "Jack" to his black mammy, Esmeralda, ministered to her.