Victoria Custer had gone to her room much earlier in the evening than
was her custom, but not to sleep. She did not even disrobe, but sat
instead in the darkness beside her window looking out toward the black
and mysterious jungle in the distance, and the shadowy outlines of the
southern hills.
She was trying to fight down forever the foolish obsession that had
been growing upon her slowly and insidiously for years. Since the first
awakening of developing womanhood within her she had been subject to
the strange dream that was now becoming an almost nightly occurrence.
At first she had thought nothing of it, other than it was odd that she
should continue to dream the same thing so many times; but of late
these nightly visions had seemed to hold more of reality than formerly,
and to presage some eventful happening in her career--some crisis that
was to alter the course of her life. Even by day she could not rid
herself of the vision of the black-haired young giant, and tonight the
culmination had come when she had heard his voice calling her from the
rose thicket. She knew that he was but a creature of her dreams, and it
was this knowledge which frightened her so--for it meant but one thing;
her mind was tottering beneath the burden of the nervous strain these
hallucinations had imposed upon it.
She must gather all the resources of her nervous energy and throw off
this terrible obsession forever. She must! She _must_! Rising, the
girl paced back and forth the length of her room. She felt stifled and
confined within its narrow limits. Outside, beneath the open sky, with
no boundaries save the distant horizon was the place best fitted for
such a battle as was raging within her. Snatching up a silken scarf she
threw it about her shoulders--a concession to habit, for the night was
hot--and stepping through her window to the porch that encircled the
bungalow she passed on into the garden.
Just around the nearest angle of the house her brother and Billy
Curtiss sat smoking before the window of their bed room, clad in
pajamas and slippers. Curtiss was cleaning the rifle he had used that
day--the same that he had carried into the rose garden earlier in the
evening. Neither heard the girl's light footsteps upon the sward, and
the corner of the building hid her from their view.
In the open moonlight beside the rose thicket Victoria Custer paced
back and forth. A dozen times she reached a determination to seek the
first opportunity upon the morrow to give Billy Curtiss an affirmative
answer to the question he had asked her the night before--the night of
the earthquake; but each time that she thought she had disposed of the
matter definitely she found herself involuntarily comparing him with
the heroic figure of her dream-man, and again she must need rewage her
battle.
As she walked in the moonlight two pair of eyes watched her every
movement--one pair, clear, black eyes, from the rose thicket--the other
flaming yellow-green orbs hidden in a little clump of bushes at the
point where she turned in her passing to retrace her steps--at the
point farthest from the watcher among the roses.
Twenty times Nu was on the point of leaping from his concealment and
taking the girl in his arms, for to him she was Nat-ul, daughter of
Tha, and it had not been a hundred thousand years, but only since the
day before yesterday that he had last seen her. Yet each time something
deterred him--a strange, vague, indefinable fear of this wondrous
creature who was Nat-ul, and yet who was not Nat-ul, but another made
in Nat-ul's image.
The strange things that covered her fair form seemed to have raised a
barrier between them--the last time that he had walked hand in hand
with her upon the beach naught but a soft strip of the skin of a red
doe's calf had circled her gracefully undulating hips. Her familiar
association, too, with these strange people, coupled with the fact
that she spoke and understood their language only tended to remove her
further from him. Nu was very sad, and very lonely; and the sight of
Nat-ul seemed to accentuate rather than relieve his depression. Slowly
there was born within him the conviction that Nat-ul was no longer for
Nu, the son of Nu. Why, he could not guess; but the bitter fact seemed
irrevocable.
The girl had turned quite close to him now, and was retracing her steps
toward the bushes twenty yards away. Behind their screening verdure
"old Raffles" twitched his tufted tail and drew his steel thewed legs
beneath him for the spring, and as he waited just the faintest of purrs
escaped his slavering jowls. Too faint the sound to pierce the dulled
senses of the twentieth century maiden; but to the man hiding in the
rose thicket twenty paces further from the lion than she it fell deep
and sinister upon his unspoiled ear.
Like a bolt of lightning--so quickly his muscles responded to his
will--the cave man hurtled the intervening rose bushes with a single
bound, and, raised spear in hand, bounded after the unconscious girl.
The great lion saw him coming, and lest he be cheated of his prey
leaped into the moonlight before his intended victim was quite within
the radius of his spring.
The beast emitted a horrid roar that froze the girl with terror, and
then in the face of his terrific charge the figure of a naked giant
leaped past her. She saw a great arm, wielding a mighty spear, hurl the
weapon at the infuriated beast--and then she swooned.
As the savage note of the lion's roar broke the stillness of the quiet
night Curtiss and Barney Custer sprang to their feet, running toward
the side of the bungalow from which the sound had come. Curtiss grasped
the rifle he had but just reloaded, and as he turned the corner of the
building he caught one fleeting glimpse of something moving near the
bushes fifty yards away. Raising his weapon he fired.
The whole household had been aroused by the lion's deep voice and the
answering boom of the big rifle, so that scarcely a minute after Barney
and Curtiss reached the side of the prostrate girl a score of white men
and black were gathered about them.
The dead body of a huge lion lay scarce twenty feet from Victoria
Custer, but a hurried examination of the girl brought unutterable
relief to them all, for she was uninjured. Barney lifted her in his
arms and carried her to her room while the others examined the dead
beast. From the center of the breast a wooden shaft protruded, and when
they had drawn this out, and it required the united efforts of four
strong men to do it, they found that a stone-tipped spear had passed
straight through the savage heart almost the full length of the brute's
body.
"The zebra killer," said Brown to Greystoke. The latter nodded his head.
"We must find him," he said. "He has rendered us a great service. But
for him Miss Custer would not be alive now;" but though twenty men
scouted the grounds and the plain beyond for several hours no trace of
the killer of "old Raffles" could be found, and the reason that they
did not find him abroad was because he lay directly beneath their noses
in a little clump of low, flowering shrubs, with a bullet wound in his
head.