"Ha!" the Wolf sent up a shout of ferocious laughter as the blood
started from a cut on Kane's cheek. As if the sight drove him to
further fury, he attacked like the beast men named him. Kane was forced
back before that blood-lusting onslaught, but the Puritan's expression
did not alter.
Minutes flew by; the clang and clash of steel did not diminish. Now
they stood squarely in the center of the glade, Le Loup untouched,
Kane's garments red with the blood that oozed from wounds on cheek,
breast, arm and thigh. The Wolf grinned savagely and mockingly in the
moonlight, but he had begun to doubt.
His breath came hissing fast and his arm began to weary; who was this
man of steel and ice who never seemed to weaken? Le Loup knew that the
wounds he had inflicted on Kane were not deep, but even so, the steady
flow of blood should have sapped some of the man's strength and speed
by this time. But if Kane felt the ebb of his powers, it did not show.
His brooding countenance did not change in expression, and he pressed
the fight with as much cold fury as at the beginning.
Le Loup felt his might fading, and with one last desperate effort he
rallied all his fury and strength into a single plunge. A sudden,
unexpected attack too wild and swift for the eye to follow, a dynamic
burst of speed and fury no man could have withstood, and Solomon Kane
reeled for the first time as he felt cold steel tear through his body.
He reeled back, and Le Loup, with a wild shout, plunged after him, his
reddened sword free, a gasping taunt on his lips.
Kane's sword, backed by the force of desperation, met Le Loup's in
midair; met, held and wrenched. The Wolf's yell of triumph died on his
lips as his sword flew singing from his hand.
For a fleeting instant he stopped short, arms flung wide as a
crucifix, and Kane heard his wild, mocking laughter peal forth for
the last time, as the Englishman's rapier made a silver line in the
moonlight.
* * * * *
Far away came the mutter of the drums. Kane mechanically cleansed his
sword on his tattered garments. The trail ended here, and Kane was
conscious of a strange feeling of futility. He always felt that, after
he had killed a foe. Somehow it always seemed that no real good had
been wrought; as if the foe had, after all, escaped his just vengeance.
With a shrug of his shoulders Kane turned his attention to his bodily
needs. Now that the heat of battle had passed, he began to feel weak
and faint from the loss of blood. That last thrust had been close; had
he not managed to avoid its full point by a twist of his body, the
blade had transfixed him. As it was, the sword had struck glancingly,
plowed along his ribs and sunk deep in the muscles beneath the
shoulder-blade, inflicting a long, shallow wound.
Kane looked about him and saw that a small stream trickled through the
glade at the far side. Here he made the only mistake of that kind that
he ever made in his entire life. Mayhap he was dizzy from loss of blood
and still mazed from the weird happenings of the night; be that as it
may, he laid down his rapier and crossed, weaponless, to the stream.
There he laved his wounds and bandaged them as best he could, with
strips torn from his clothing.
Then he rose and was about to re-trace his steps when a motion among
the trees on the side of the glade where he first entered, caught
his eye. A huge figure stepped out of the jungle, and Kane saw, and
recognized, his doom. The man was Gulka, the gorilla-slayer. Kane
remembered that he had not seen the black among those doing homage
to N'Longa. How could he know the craft and hatred in that dusky,
slanting skull that had led the negro, escaping the vengeance of his
tribesmen, to trail down the only man he had ever feared? The Black God
had been kind to his neophyte; had led him upon his victim helpless and
unarmed. Now Gulka could kill his man openly--and slowly, as a leopard
kills, not smiting him down from ambush as he had planned, silently and
suddenly.
A wide grin split the negro's face, and he moistened his lips. Kane,
watching him, was coldly and deliberately weighing his chances. Gulka
had already spied the rapiers. He was closer to them than was Kane. The
Englishman knew that there was no chance of his winning in a sudden
race for the swords.
A slow, deadly rage surged in him--the fury of helplessness. The blood
churned in his temples and his eyes smoldered with a terrible light as
he eyed the negro. His fingers spread and closed like claws. They were
strong, those hands; men had died in their clutch. Even Gulka's huge
black column of a neck might break like a rotten branch between them--a
wave of weakness made the futility of these thoughts apparent to an
extent that needed not the verification of the moonlight glimmering
from the spear in Gulka's black hand. Kane could not even have fled had
he wished--and he had never fled from a single foe.
The gorilla-slayer moved out into the glade. Massive, terrible, he was
the personification of the primitive, the Stone Age. His mouth yawned
in a red cavern of a grin; he bore himself with the haughty arrogance
of savage might.
Kane tensed himself for the struggle that could end but one way. He
strove to rally his waning forces. Useless; he had lost too much blood.
At least he would meet his death on his feet, and somehow he stiffened
his buckling knees and held himself erect, though the glade shimmered
before him in uncertain waves and the moonlight seemed to have become a
red fog through which he dimly glimpsed the approaching black man.
Kane stooped, though the effort nearly pitched him on his face; he
dipped water in his cupped hands and dashed it into his face. This
revived him, and he straightened, hoping that Gulka would charge and
get it over with before his weakness crumpled him to the earth.
Gulka was now about the center of the glade, moving with the slow,
easy stride of a great cat stalking a victim. He was not at all in a
hurry to consummate his purpose. He wanted to toy with his victim, to
see fear come into those grim eyes which had looked him down, even
when the possessor of those eyes had been bound to the death stake. He
wanted to slay, at last, slowly, glutting his tigerish blood-lust and
torture-lust to the fullest extent.
Then suddenly he halted, turned swiftly, facing another side of the
glade. Kane, wondering, followed his glance.
* * * * *
At first it seemed like a blacker shadow among the jungle shadows.
At first there was no motion, no sound, but Kane instinctively knew
that some terrible menace lurked there in the darkness that masked and
merged the silent trees. A sullen horror brooded there, and Kane felt
as if, from that monstrous shadow, inhuman eyes seared his very soul.
Yet simultaneously there came the fantastic sensation that these eyes
were not directed on him. He looked at the gorilla-slayer.
The black man had apparently forgotten him; he stood, half crouching,
spear lifted, eyes fixed upon that clump of blackness. Kane looked
again. Now there was motion in the shadows; they merged fantastically
and moved out into the glade, much as Gulka had done. Kane blinked: was
this the illusion that precedes death? The shape he looked upon was
such as he had visioned dimly in wild nightmares, when the wings of
sleep bore him back through lost ages.
He thought at first it was some blasphemous mockery of a man, for it
went erect and was tall as a tall man. But it was inhumanly broad and
thick, and its gigantic arms hung nearly to its misshapen feet. Then
the moonlight smote full upon its bestial face, and Kane's mazed mind
thought that the thing was the Black God coming out of the shadows,
animated and blood-lusting. Then he saw that it was covered with hair,
and he remembered the manlike thing dangling from the roof-pole in the
native village. He looked at Gulka.
The negro was facing the gorilla, spear at the charge. He was not
afraid, but his sluggish mind was wondering over the miracle that
brought this beast so far from his native jungles.
The mighty ape came out into the moonlight and there was a terrible
majesty about his movements. He was nearer Kane than Gulka but he did
not seem to be aware of the white man. His small, blazing eyes were
fixed on the black man with terrible intensity. He advanced with a
curious swaying stride.
Far away the drums whispered through the night, like an accompaniment
to this grim Stone Age drama. The savage crouched in the middle of the
glade, but the primordial came out of the jungle with eyes bloodshot
and blood-lusting. The negro was face to face with a thing more
primitive than he. Again ghosts of memories whispered to Kane: you have
seen such sights before (they murmured), back in the dim days, the dawn
days, when beast and beast-man battled for supremacy.
Gulka moved away from the ape in a half-circle, crouching, spear ready.
With all his craft he was seeking to trick the gorilla, to make a swift
kill, for he had never before met such a monster as this, and though he
did not fear, he had begun to doubt. The ape made no attempt to stalk
or circle; he strode straight forward toward Gulka.
The black man who faced him and the white man who watched could not
know the brutish love, the brutish hate that had driven the monster
down from the low, forest-covered hills of the north to follow for
leagues the trail of him who was the scourge of his kind--the slayer of
his mate, whose body now hung from the roof-pole of the negro village.
The end came swiftly, almost like a sudden gesture. They were close,
now, beast and beast-man; and suddenly, with an earth-shaking roar, the
gorilla charged. A great hairy arm smote aside the thrusting spear,
and the ape closed with the negro. There was a shattering sound as of
many branches breaking simultaneously, and Gulka slumped silently to
the earth, to lie with arms, legs and body flung in strange, unnatural
positions. The ape towered an instant above him, like a statue of the
primordial triumphant.
Far away Kane heard the drums murmur. The soul of the jungle, the soul
of the jungle: this phrase surged through his mind with monotonous
reiteration.
The three who had stood in power before the Black God that night, where
were they? Back in the village where the drums rustled lay Songa--King
Songa, once lord of life and death, now a shriveled corpse with a face
set in a mask of horror. Stretched on his back in the middle of the
glade lay he whom Kane had followed many a league by land and sea. And
Gulka the gorilla-slayer lay at the feet of his killer, broken at last
by the savagery which had made him a true son of this grim land which
had at last overwhelmed him.
Yet the Black God still reigned, thought Kane dizzily, brooding back in
the shadows of this dark country, bestial, blood-lusting, caring naught
who lived or died, so that he drank.
Kane watched the mighty ape, wondering how long it would be before the
huge simian spied and charged him. But the gorilla gave no evidence
of having even seen him. Some dim impulse of vengeance yet unglutted
prompting him, he bent and raised the negro. Then he slouched toward
the jungle, Gulka's limbs trailing limply and grotesquely. As he
reached the trees, the ape halted, whirling the giant form high in
the air with seemingly no effort, and dashed the dead man up among
the branches. There was a rending sound as a broken projecting limb
tore through the body hurled so powerfully against it, and the dead
gorilla-slayer dangled there hideously.
A moment the clear moon limned the great ape in its glimmer, as he
stood silently gazing up at his victim; then like a dark shadow he
melted noiselessly into the jungle.
Kane walked slowly to the middle of the glade and took up his rapier.
The blood had ceased to flow from his wounds, and some of his strength
was returning, enough, at least, for him to reach the coast where his
ship awaited him. He halted at the edge of the glade for a backward
glance at Le Loup's upturned face and still form, white in the
moonlight, and at the dark shadow among the trees that was Gulka, left
by some bestial whim, hanging as the she-gorilla hung in the village.
Afar the drums muttered: "The wisdom of our land is ancient; the wisdom
of our land is dark; whom we serve, we destroy. Flee if you would live,
but you will never forget our chant. Never, never," sang the drums.
Kane turned to the trail which led to the beach and the ship waiting
there.