KING AT LAST
There was a cloud over my heart; there was a pall of smoke and fumes
drawing slowly off from the scene of devastation. It seemed as if the
chasm in the hill-side were a ghastly wound of colossal proportions, for
not only was the earth torn raggedly, but blood was about, and the slope
was strewn with mangled remains.
I felt no exultation; I was ill at the sight, and weak and quite
subdued. It was a pitiful, dreadful picture, with the two elephants like
mounds of butchery, looming large in the middle distance, while down
below were numerous wounded creatures creeping away toward the jungle.
And the dying made sounds of moaning.
Not far from where I had fallen, lay part of a long, red arm—Grin’s. The
bombs had flung it nearly to the camp he had sought to betray. He must
have been among the foremost of the Links who drove the elephants up the
hill. I conjured back my vision of the charging force, at the second
when the explosion created its havoc. I remembered the huge wild animals
most distinctly, their trunks uplifted, their feet in awkward, active
motion, while to right and left and almost on their heels, the Blacks
surged up in their dance of death. I knew then that the destruction
among them must have been tremendous, for the whole length of the trench
had been covered thickly by their numbers, and the lateral force of the
bursting mines, especially down the hill, had evidently swept the slope
for rods.
I shook my head as I realised the narrowness of my own escape.
I believe I was saved only by a sort of half shoulder of the hill and
the fact that I fell and was flat on my side when the explosion
occurred.
In my brain a panorama of all the tragedy ran, time after time. It
seemed unbelievable that the Blacks had been able to drive the
elephants. I shall never cease to wonder at this remarkable performance,
for everything I know of the jungle’s greatest brute leads me always to
suppose they would turn upon their pigmy tormentors and drive them away
in confusion, no matter how great their numbers. But more incredible
than even this was the sudden blotting out of all that mad stampede. I
felt like the last man left on earth.
It was quite impossible for me to go down that dread slope as yet. I sat
on the ground, dejected, weak from hunger and the strain of all the
excitement. I rested my chin in my hand and gazed off abstractedly
toward the endless sea of green. I lost all interest in the world about
me, for all my memories and all my dreams had conveyed me afar from that
island of singular fates. At length I was aroused from my reverie by
Fatty, who came furtively down from the village and crawled in front of
my feet, to gaze in my face, with his comical, quizzical expression of
deep anxiety spread thickly on his homely phiz.
“Hullo,” said I, “did you come back at last to twist the enemy’s tail?”
Then I saw an amazing line of heads above the wall, where dozens of our
fellows were peering down upon the scene and upon myself. On their faces
I noted every conceivable look of awe and horror. That I sat there,
seemingly calm after all of that day’s fatal work, impressed them a
thousand fold more than as if I had strutted and boasted of the deed.
Perhaps my face betrayed a certain look of grimness, which events had
compelled in my thoughts; howbeit the creatures were stricken with an
overpowering dread of my presence.
The hill-shaking explosion had been infinitely more terrific than my
first little celebration with a single bomb, and this had given them all
a fright, the memory of which could never be eradicated from their
minds. But if this had rendered them respectful toward me as the
actuating spirit of it all, the sight of the slope simply drowned them
in fathomless awe. The mightiest creatures of the jungle, torn apart
like things of paper, the hill split open and altered, a yelling army
scattered and blown to atoms—this sum of deeds appalled them so
thoroughly that the strongest might have died of shock had I jabbed him
in the ribs with my thumb.
Fatty, on seeing that I lived, began to grovel on his face and to push
his head against the soil where my feet had rested, as if he were quite
unfit to abide on the surface of my earth and would therefore worm and
bore his way down and out of sight without further ado.
One after another, then, the trembling fellows came crawling down the
hill, many on their stomachs, to adore my tracks, to wriggle about my
feet and otherwise to endeavour to calm me down and humble themselves in
my exalted shadow. Even the chief came toward me on hands and knees,
dragging his club and afraid to lift his head. His downfall was
complete; there were none more thoroughly overwhelmed than he. On the
ground before me the fellow laid his great crystal weapon—at once his
sceptre and his sword—and he, too, adored the turf where my feet had
trod. The women, with the albino among them, and even the children, got
on the ground, prostrate, abject and afraid.
“Ahem, really, fellow citizens,” said I with a grin, “your attentions
quite overcome me. Pray excuse my unseemly emotion and blushes.”
I had conducted a large experiment with some success, yet I felt that my
efforts had been far from superhuman, and not even carried out with
wholly unselfish motives. I felt in fact that the whole present
proposition bordered on the lines of comic opera, for I knew that by the
token of the chiefs submission I stood there at last, the King of the
Missing Links!