I was about to follow in pursuit of Trust, and had even taken a few
steps towards the undergrowth upon the right bank of the brook, when
Bannister called me back.
"What's the use?" said he. "Let dogs delight. We have our own friends
to think of."
"Our own friends?" said I.
"Have you forgotten Rushby? We have left him alone too long as it is.
His life is more to us than the fate of either Trust or Baverstock; and
he is in danger just as great."
At those words, I felt something of shame that I had indeed forgotten
one who had proved himself so loyal and true a comrade.
"Then, what's to be done?" I asked.
"That's not so easy to decide," said Bannister. "I take it," he added,
turning again to Forsyth, "that you are now willing to cast in your lot
with us, to give up all thought of plunder?"
Forsyth actually yawned.
"Have it your own way," said he. "I have made a promise which I will
faithfully keep. I have always believed that there was honour among
thieves; but, even here, I find I was mistaken. To speak the truth, I
am heartily sick of the whole business, which has cost me a pretty penny
with nothing to show for it, save a scratched skin and a score of
bruises, and the loss of an ear. You may count me as one of yourselves.
I have little enough, perhaps, upon which to flatter myself, but if
there is skill in gaining, there is at least an art in losing. It can
be done gracefully. Do you not agree?"
"Moralise as much as you like," laughed Bannister. "It amounts to no
more than this: you have failed dismally, and are glad enough to find
yourself alive. You are wise to accept the situation as it is. That's
all the same to me. Henceforward, you are under my orders, and I expect
prompt obedience."
"I shall be charmed," said Forsyth, with a mock bow. "And what of
Rushby?"
"He lies some way to the north," said Bannister. "I am alarmed at his
condition. The wound in his leg is septic, and it is very doubtful
whether he will recover."
"I am distressed to hear it," answered the other, to whose effrontery
there seemed no end; for he added, "If the truth be told, it was I
myself who shot him--with the best intentions in the world."
"No doubt," said Bannister grimly. "There has been give and take on
both sides; and I am the more glad to have saved your life, since I know
for a fact that you stood between Dick, here, and certain death, when
Amos would have killed him. But we waste time in useless talk. Before
we leave this place, I propose to cover the slab with earth, to hide all
traces of an intrusion so utterly worthless, doomed to failure from the
start."
And thereupon the four of us set to work, scraping the soft earth back
upon the stone slab; for Bannister, who had enough of Spanish to express
his meaning, soon found another ally in Vasco, who, after all, was a
weak, shiftless kind of fellow, with few opinions of his own. Though the
man had been bewildered by the sight of so much gold, the Treasure had
had much the same effect on him as on myself when I first went down into
that vast, amazing chamber. He was frightened of it all; and as well as
that, he now realised for the first time that he had served for all
these months one who was both treacherous and mad; and had it not been
for Bannister and me, he would not have escaped with life.
We were all hard at work upon our hands and knees, when we were
surprised by the sound of a rifle-shot, fired at no great distance in
the Wood, in a northerly direction.
Bannister got slowly to his feet, and stood listening; and then,
although he turned in my direction, it was as if he spoke quietly to
himself.
"One shot," said he. "And one shot only."
That was all he said.
"Trust was never armed," said I.
"That signifies nothing," answered Bannister. "Amos is loaded down by
gold. If he carried a rifle, Trust may have wrenched it from his
hands."
We waited for some minutes, expecting to hear another shot, or perhaps
some other sound. But the whole Wood was silent--the silence of midday,
when the sun is at its height and all the wilderness is resting, the
wild things seeking refuge from the fierce rays of the tropic sun.
"Come," said Bannister, "we had best see to this."
He led the way into the undergrowth, and we followed him in single file.
The trail of Amos was broad as a road, for, in his madness, he had
rushed forward, breaking down all obstacles that stood in his path by
the sheer weight of the gold he carried and the impetuous, headlong
nature of his flight.
There could be little doubt that Joshua Trust had followed him with as
little difficulty as we. Certain it was that they could not be far
ahead, since Trust himself had not yet been absent half an hour. In all
probability, the night before, Amos himself, overtaken by the darkness,
had fallen sound asleep, and, being exhausted by his frenzied efforts,
had slumbered on until long after daybreak.
In any case, we had not journeyed far before we came upon the still,
huddled form of him who had once been known as Joshua Trust, who now lay
a corpse, in a pool of his own blood, upon the trail that he had
followed.
John Bannister kneeled down upon the ground beside the body, but
presently got sharply to his feet.
"Stone-dead," said he, and nodded sagely, as if to signify that hither
in the end go all things weak and mortal.
"Shot?" I asked.
"By Amos. Through the heart."
We stood in silence around the body, and I know that I was thinking that
it would be no more than common decency to bury this poor, misguided man
where he had fallen, when there came to my ears a sound that made my
very blood run cold.
It was a sound of laughter, faint and far away. Never in my wildest
nightmares had I heard laughter to compare to that. It was the laughter
of a fiend, terrible to listen to, for there was something in it of the
chuckling of an old, demented man, the cry of a new-born child, and the
senseless mirth of one who is delirious.
In that half-light we looked at one another. There was cold fear in the
eyes of us all, even in the eyes of John Bannister, who I did not know
had fear of anything that lived upon the earth.
"Amos!" he exclaimed. But his voice was no more than a whisper.
I saw that Forsyth shuddered. And then that man, as a rule so calm and
nonchalant, who had always seemed to me to dread nothing so much as that
he might show his feelings, burst forth in the hottest indignation. I
shall never forget that moment, for it was the only occasion upon which
I saw John Bannister afraid, and Mr. Forsyth alive--a living, sentient
being--in every fibre of his body.
"This madman must not live!" he shouted.
Bannister answered slowly, in the same quiet voice in which he had
spoken before.
"I am inclined to think you right," said he. "His very existence upon
the face of the earth is a blot upon Creation. The sound of that
hideous laughter robs the wilderness of all its beauty."
"Then, after him!" cried Forsyth.
"Leave that to me," said Bannister.
He opened his rifle, and slipped a cartridge into the breech. I heard
the click of the lock, and I saw how tightly his right hand gripped the
small of the butt. And I knew that death was still in the pot, that we
were not yet at the end of all this strife and horrid bloodshed.
We went forward in pursuit, Bannister leading, hot upon the trail, the
other three of us following at his heels.
All that afternoon we journeyed in a direction north-eastward, so far as
we could judge. And from time to time we heard the shrill, savage
laughter of that maniac, but a little way before us. And each time we
heard it, we were filled with dread--the dread that comes naturally to
one who finds himself confronted by the supernatural--the same dread
that is believed to make the human hair to stand on end in the presence
of a ghost.
For Amos Baverstock, body, mind, and soul, was still in the possession
of his seven raging devils; and it was as if these evil spirits infested
the humid, stifling atmosphere of the very jungle through which we
passed in hot pursuit. Hitherto, we had been adventurers in a savage
land; we had walked in the midst of dangers that were material and real.
But now, with that unearthly laughter for ever in our ears, we felt that
we were wayfarers in the dark nether regions, that not only our lives,
but our very souls as well, were in peril of perdition, of everlasting
death. The fleeting shadows of the Wood were to us the twilight of the
Underworld. We were opposed by forces stronger and more evil than wild
beasts and wicked men.
Darkness caught us before we had overtaken the madman whom we chased.
How he had managed to elude us for so long is little short of a miracle;
for he was weighed down by the gold he carried on his back. There were
times when he was quite near to us, when we could distinctly hear him
breaking his way through the thickets, rushing blindly onward. And at
such times he was silent--ominously silent. But he would always, quite
suddenly, shoot ahead again--how, we could not tell--and presently, we
would hear his wild laughter as before, far away from us--laughter in
which there was something of triumphant glee, as well as lunacy and
senseless mirth, incomprehensible and terrible to hear.
All that night, during which we rested twice--on each occasion for an
hour or more--we heard his laughter in the Wood, throughout the length
and breadth of which it was as if fear of the man had spread. I verily
believe the monkeys sat shivering above us in the tree-tops, and the
great beasts of prey, who were wont to hunt by night, crouched with
flattened ears like frightened cats in the dark places of the jungle.
Speaking for myself, I know that I experienced a most novel and insecure
sensation. I felt that the constant sound of this demoniacal laughter
would in the end drive me also mad; and Vasco, I am certain, felt the
same, though I cannot speak for the others.
For all that, I had never seen an expression of such invincible
determination as the daylight disclosed upon the face of Bannister. His
jaw was set: his lips tight pressed, and there was a look in his eyes as
hard as steel.
He said not a word to any one of us; and we had no thought of food,
though we all four drank deeply of water at the first stream to which we
came.
Then we went on, following the trail, with the sound of that maniac's
laughter to guide us like the siren of a ship in a fog at sea.
Never was a journey more strange, more ghostly. We were haunted men,
though we found upon the road evidence of the material. For, here and
there, lay golden ingots that had fallen from his arms, and there was
blood, too, upon the dead leaves upon the ground, where he had torn his
flesh upon the thorns.
And then, at last, we sighted him, in a place where the undergrowth was
sparse and the trees a little way apart. For no longer than an instant
did we see him, else John Bannister had shot him dead; for it was a mad
dog we hunted, and it was not right that he should live. Strange as it
may seem--since they had sojourned for so many months in one another's
company--it was Mr. Gilbert Forsyth who was most keen upon the chase. He
was like a bloodhound on the trail. It was as much as Bannister could
do to keep him back.
"Have at him!" he cried. "There he is! Shoot, man! Shoot him down!"
But--as I have said--we caught no more than a glimpse of him. That
glimpse, however, was enough. If it had been terrible to hear his
laughter, it was even more terrible to behold him with our eyes. Every
shred of clothing had been torn from his back. He was plastered with
black mud from the swamp in which he had waded; and this mud--though we
could not see that--was still alive with little leeches that were
draining the life's blood in his veins. His hair was all ragged and
dirty; and without clothes he was more hideous than ever. We could see
the ingots, tied in a great bundle upon his back; and we marvelled that
any human being could carry so great a load. He shot a look at us
before he dived again into the undergrowth; and in that look there was
that for which we could not fail to pity him, vile and evil though the
man had been all the days of his life.
His eyes were bright as ever, yet seemed to have grown larger, and, at
the same time, to have sunk deep into his head. His mouth, which was
never straight, was twisted to a degree that was alarming. He had
always the thinnest of lips, which he kept as a rule pressed tight
together; but now his mouth was opened wide, and he was slobbering. As
for his eyebrows, they reminded me of Satan himself as I have seen him
pictured, for they met upon the bridge of his nose, to slant upward,
arrow-shaped.
John Bannister dashed forward. I saw that he meant to make a supreme
effort to overtake the man. We all wanted it to end, for the whole
affair was ghastly; and yet we dreaded the end, just as a hangman must
have no liking for his duty. And ours--we thought--was the very
hangman's work.
It so happened that in this place the Wood was dense. Amos did not
laugh again, but we could hear him just in front of us; though, strive
as we might, we could not overtake him, until the pursuit had lasted,
perhaps, another twenty minutes--for, in such a case as this, it is
impossible to keep account of time.
Bannister, who was still leading, of a sudden caught his foot in the
root of a tree, and pitched forward on his face. Without pausing an
instant, Forsyth rushed past him; and I, knowing that Forsyth was
unarmed, and fearing that he might come to the same violent end as
Joshua Trust, hastened after him, without looking to see if Bannister
were hurt.
Almost at once I caught sight of Amos, but dared not fire at him,
because Forsyth was in front of me. And then, suddenly and
unaccountably, to my amazement Amos stopped, and looked back at us with
a face hideously contorted.
I carried my rifle to my shoulder, and I believe I would have pressed
the trigger, had I not then seen what it was that had brought the
fugitive to a standstill. He had broken his way headlong through the
thickets, and now found himself upon the bank of a wide, dark pool, and
we were so close upon his heels that he had no time to turn either to
the right or to the left.
It is my great regret that I did not fire; but I may be excused,
inasmuch as I did not at once recognise the place, and had then not the
least suspicion of what was about to happen. No sooner was my rifle to
my shoulder than Amos turned away from me, and, without a sound, with
his great load of gold upon his back, plunged straight into the pool.
He sank so low at first that we thought he must be well beyond his
depth; but, almost at once, his feet found something firm--I think the
fallen trunk of a tree buried beneath the water. He rose to his full
height with the water no higher than his knees, and began to stumble
onward, when the whole of this uncanny business reached its tragic and
terrible conclusion.
I saw something move upon the surface of the water--something that shot
across the pool in utter silence and with the rapidity of an arrow.
Right round Amos it swerved, and passed so close to us--who stood gaping
on the bank--that we could not fail to recognise what this horror was.
It was the flat and evil head of a gigantic, loathsome serpent.
Then the truth burst upon me like a sudden rush of ice, and I realised
that Amos Baverstock was come to that place which I myself had named the
Glade of Silent Death.