_By_ Artemus Calloway
The very atmosphere seemed surcharged with mystery—danger—death.
Even the clear blue sky above seemed to shrink away from The Tropical Gem
Plantation as from a thing accursed. Out in the muddy waters of the Ulua,
apparently as lifeless as a water-soaked log, a sleepy-eyed crocodile
waited—waited as if he, too, sensed impending calamity for the creatures
on shore and intended being at hand to assert his rights should the
threatened catastrophe bring food for his kind.
All this impressed Bart Condon, standing in the protecting shade of the
softly rustling banana jungle, eyes focused on the busy scene across the
river, brain busy with the disquieting events of the past few weeks.
Bart Condon was troubled. Here was something he knew not how to fight,
because it was something he could not see. Until recently, he had thought
himself fairly familiar with Honduras and the trials of a plantation
manager there, but this was something new—something which hid in the
shadows and struck when one was not looking.
First there had been the matter of the cistern water in the laborers’
quarters. Some one had poisoned it—not in a manner to cause death, but
illness. Condon had been mystified by the epidemic which descended upon
the place until the plantation physician made an examination of the
water. Then he was the more at sea. Who could have done this—and why?
Close upon this trouble came whispers—rumors that the place was
bewitched. More than a dozen of the more superstitious blacks and half
blacks slipped away. And their places had been hard to fill.
Then had come the fires, starting no one knew when or how. Once a
manacca shack, in which a sick man lived, burned; and he was brought out
half-stifled, scorched and raving about the devils that infested the
place.
Other things occurred. And there was more whispering, more
dissatisfaction.
And then had come death. A partly devoured body had been found lodged
against a mud bar in the river. The work of crocodiles, Condon had
thought, until examination disclosed the fact that there was a bullet in
the man’s brain. And then he knew that the crocodiles had profited from
the work of a murderer.
And now all the plantation laborers threatened to leave. Somehow Condon
felt that he could not blame them, though he knew that their desertion
meant his ruin.
The activity along the river bank increased. The crocodile moved slowly
downstream. Simultaneously with the arrival of a noisy fruit train on
Condon’s side of the river, another chugged into view on the opposite
shore.
As soon as the trains came to a stop natives commenced transferring
bananas from the cars to the fruit racks at the water’s edge; here they
would later be picked up by the river boat of the big fruit company which
purchased the output of many Ulua River plantations, afterward shipping
the bananas to the States on its own steamers.
Condon saw George Armstrong standing to the right of the train across the
river, and, for some unknown reason he disliked the man more than ever.
There was no real reason why he should dislike and distrust Armstrong.
Yet he did dislike him, and never, from the first moment his eyes rested
upon the man, had he trusted him. For two years now Condon had known the
manager of the Royal Palm Plantation Company, and for that length of time
some instinct had whispered that the other would be a dangerous foe.
True, Armstrong had always evinced the greatest friendliness, frequently
coming across the river, which separated the plantations, to visit
Condon. And occasionally—when common courtesy demanded—Condon had
returned the visits.
Bart Condon had been in Honduras one year longer than Armstrong, and this
year’s experience as manager of the plantation of which he was majority
stockholder had taught him many things of value, which he had passed
on to the newcomer. But Armstrong’s company was stronger financially
than Condon’s, and was desirous of expanding. So, for three months now,
Armstrong had been trying to buy the Tropical Gem. And for nearly that
length of time the Tropical Gem had been having trouble.
* * * * *
But it was only this morning that Condon had first commenced wondering
what connection, if any, there might be between Armstrong’s desire for
the Tropical Gem and the trouble which had come to that plantation.
Of course such thoughts were silly. Unworthy. He should be ashamed of
himself.... And yet....
Standing where he was, in the shelter of the tall banana plants which at
a distance resembled a forest of green trees, Condon knew Armstrong had
not seen him. And for some reason, which he himself did not understand,
he did not want the other man to see him this morning.
Bart Condon turned and slowly made his way from the river to a trail
about two hundred yards away. There he paused to watch some men cutting
fruit which would be carried by mule cart to the river, the railroad
being employed only for the longer hauls.
Finally he turned to his pony, fastened to a young avacado tree, mounted
and rode away. Twenty minutes later he was at plantation headquarters.
An hour after reaching headquarters Condon was sitting at his office
desk, a slender young native opposite him. This man—Juan Hernandez—one of
Condon’s foremen, possessed intelligence above the average. He was one of
the very few natives of that section of Honduras who boasted pure Spanish
blood, but at the same time he understood thoroughly the mixed breeds
in whose veins there flowed the blood of African, Indian, Chinese and
others, to say nothing of the full-blood negroes from Jamaica, Barbadoes,
and elsewhere.
Once facing Hernandez, Condon lost no time in getting to the subject:
“The men—they are very much upset?”
Hernandez nodded.
“They are, Mr. Condon,” he replied in perfect English, thanks to a
States education. “They are whispering that there is a curse upon the
plantation; that you are the cause of it; that the spirits are displeased
with you, and I don’t know what else. They——”
Hernandez hesitated. Then:
“Why, they are even beginning to blame you for the death of that man
found in the river, although they don’t know, as we do, that someone shot
him.”
Condon frowned. “Somehow I suspect as much. But you are sure your
information—what you tell me is correct?”
Hernandez nodded. “I am positive of it. Further than that I feel that I
have discovered what is behind it all. You know you told me a week ago to
look into it——”
“Yes?”
“It is voodooism. A witch doctor who lives in the jungle is behind the
trouble here. And a white man is behind the witch doctor!”
Condon started. “You mean—?”
For a moment Hernandez said nothing, staring at the desk before him. Then:
“Armstrong!”
Condon’s hands twitched nervously. “How do you know—or suspect—this,
Hernandez?”
“I am positive, Mr. Condon. I have a man working under me whom I trust
implicitly. He is an Indian—one of those commonly known as a Mosquito
Indian—they live down on the Mosquito Coast, you know——”
“Yes. Go on. What about him?”
“Well, he is a very intelligent fellow. Not a drop of black blood in
his veins. Of course, many of the Indians in this country have their
own superstitious beliefs, but not so this man. For years he has worked
around foreigners—those ideas, if he ever had them, have been supplanted
by those of civilization.
“This man told me that the witch doctor—an old dried-up black fellow, no
telling how old he is—has been coming to the plantation. He was here the
night before the water was poisoned. He has been here since. And lately
the laborers have been going to see him—holding ceremonies and that sort
of thing.
“And tonight——” Hernandez lowered his voice—“they go again! They are to
be there at ten o’clock. The witch doctor is going to tell them that
their lives are not safe on this plantation as long as you have anything
to do with it. Tomorrow they will leave. And no other laborers will come
here. Then—Armstrong thinks he can buy you out. You see, with Armstrong
in charge, the curse will be removed.”
Condon secured a box of cigars from his desk, handed it to Hernandez,
found a box of matches, lighted a cigar himself.
“_Hmm!_ Pretty clever scheme. But—Oh! hang it, Hernandez, do you suppose
this _can_ be correct?”
Hernandez regarded his cigar thoughtfully. “I _know_ it is!”
“Well——”
“Just a moment, please, Mr. Condon. There is one chance for us—only
one. That is to discredit the witch doctor. Once the superstitious
mixed breeds and blacks find that he is not infallible, that there is
something more powerful than he, they will lose confidence in him.
They will believe nothing he has told them. But until that is done the
case is hopeless. You see, many of the men working here were raised on
superstition—on voodooism. The blacks brought it from Africa, and their
descendants in this and the other nearby countries cling to it. And, as I
have said, we have them here from many places.”
“How are we to discredit the witch doctor?”
Hernandez smiled. “Armstrong visits him at eight o’clock this evening, to
pay half the price for running the laborers away from here. He is to pay
the other half when they are gone. Of course, he has paid something all
along for the various little jobs, but this is the big one—the big money
job.”
“What on earth would that old fellow want with money?”
Hernandez laughed. “Square-faced gin. He stays soaked all the time. But I
have a plan——”
“But how,” interrupted Condon, “did your man learn all this?”
“By pretending to believe in voodooism—and by watching. He has attended
the ceremonies with the others. And he has followed Armstrong there when
the witch doctor was alone. That is how he learned of the poisoned water.
He has heard nothing there about the murder of the native, but I am sure
there is a connection there somewhere if we can find it.”
Hernandez made a significant gesture.
“You don’t know the confidence those people have in that old fellow.
He has a pond there in front of his cave. A natural sort of pond. Been
there for centuries, I suppose, and it is full of crocodiles. Sacrifices
to these crocodiles have been hinted at—but of course I couldn’t swear
to that. I do know, however, that the laborers here are blind enough in
their belief of him to do anything he might tell them.”
Condon’s face was wrinkled in thought. “But your plan?” Hernandez leaned
nearer. “Listen....”
* * * * *
Seven-thirty o’clock that evening found Bart Condon, Juan Hernandez and
the Indian of whom Condon had been told concealed on the side of the
little jungle hill above the witch doctor’s cave. Almost at his doorway
was the pond of which Hernandez had spoken. An occasional _swish_ of
the water told of life in it. Just in front of the cave, squatted on
the ground beside a faint brush fire, was the witch doctor, an old,
shriveled, dried-up, gray-headed black.
“We can hear from this place?” Condon whispered.
“Yes,” replied Hernandez, “but be quiet. He might hear you.”
Back in the jungle, monkeys chattered. Baboons howled nearby. A macaw set
up a shrill shrieking. Once Condon heard the helpless, hopeless cry of
some small animal as it met the death of the jungle. Some beast of the
tropics slipped past them. Bart Condon gripped his revolver.
And then they heard somebody approaching. Down a little trail—the same
trail which Condon had traveled part of the way—a man was coming. A few
moments later Armstrong was standing before the witch doctor’s fire.
With every nerve on edge, Condon watched. Armstrong and the witch doctor,
both now seated before the blaze, wasted no time on inconsequential talk.
Armstrong was speaking in Spanish: “You understand exactly what you are
to tell those people when they come here tonight.”
“I do.”
“Very well. Here is half the money. You will receive as much
more—provided you get Condon’s laborers away tomorrow—and keep them and
all others away.”
The witch doctor nodded. “They will be away before tomorrow. When they
leave here they will be afraid to return to the man Condon’s plantation.”
“They won’t even return for their things?”
The old man laughed shrilly. “They will believe everything on that
plantation accursed when I have finished with them and will never desire
to see their things again. I intended telling them that they must leave
tomorrow. Now I have decided to have them leave tonight. It is better so.”
Again the witch doctor laughed.
“But——” and now there was something in his voice Condon had not detected
there before—“there is more money to come to me, Senor.”
Armstrong’s tone was impatient. “You get that when the laborers have quit
the plantation.”
The old man chuckled. “But I mean other money.”
“What other money?”
“The money for keeping your secret about the man you shot!”
George Armstrong jumped to his feet. “You’re crazy! I shot no man.”
The witch doctor also was on his feet. “But you did, Senor, I saw you! I
don’t blame you for what you did. The fellow saw you coming from here and
he might have been suspicious. I, also, would have killed him, but you
did the job for me. And now you will pay me for keeping the secret.”
The witch doctor’s words seemed to madden the manager of the Royal Palm
Plantation. Straight at the old man’s throat he sprang. They fought like
wild animals. The witch doctor, for all his frailness, possessed enormous
strength.
Suddenly Hernandez caught Condon’s arm: “Look! Down the trail!” he
whispered.
Condon looked. Then he gasped in amazement. The trail was filled, as far
as he could see, with men.
* * * * *
Suddenly Condon’s attention was brought back to the struggle by a scream
of terror, which burst from Armstrong’s lips. And then, locked in
embrace, the plantation manager and the witch doctor disappeared in the
crocodile pool.
There was a sudden rush—horrid grunts—the crushing of bones—and Condon
imagined he could see the water redden. Armstrong and the witch doctor
were no more.
Then, from Condon’s laborers in the trail, came cries of denunciation.
“He is no witch doctor! He fought with the white man and was eaten by
crocodiles—he who told us that he could destroy white men by pointing his
finger at them. He told us that the crocodiles could not harm him.”
Unafraid of that which was now no mystery, some of the bolder ones
advanced to the fire. One picked up some gold pieces, which the witch
doctor had dropped. Another found Armstrong’s purse.
They turned and rejoined their companions. Five minutes later the entire
party had passed out of hearing.
Hernandez touched Condon on the shoulder. “We can go now. And our
troubles are over. The men will remain on the plantation perfectly
satisfied.”
“But I don’t understand,” said Condon slowly, rising to his feet and
rubbing his cramped legs, “why they came so early. I thought they were to
get here at ten o’clock.”
“So Armstrong and the witch doctor thought,” laughed Hernandez. “But the
message was carried by our friend here—and he asked my advice before
delivering it. And he made the hour earlier so they would find Armstrong
here. That alone would have destroyed their confidence in the witch
doctor, for he is supposed to have nothing to do with white men.”
Hernandez smiled.
“They were told, although this man professed not to believe it, that
there was a report to the effect that Armstrong had bought the witch
doctor—had paid him to betray them. That is why they understood
everything so readily when they saw the end of the fight.”
“Voodooism,” said Condon thoughtfully, “loses its strength when it mixes
up with white men.”
_Farnsworth Wright Offers Another Tale of Diabolic Terror_
_The SNAKE FIEND_
Even as a child, Jack Crimi delighted in collecting reptiles, and he
seemed to absorb much of their venomous nature.
His best-loved pet was a large blacksnake; but when it caused him a
whipping by crawling into his father’s bedroom, he roasted it over a slow
fire in a large pot, listening with glee to its agonized hissing and
pushing it back with a stick when it strove to crawl out of the searing
container. It is no cause for wonder, then, that his burning love for the
girl of his dreams turned to fierce hate when she became the bride of
another.
Crimi’s sentiment for Marjorie Bressi was aroused by her fine Italian
beauty, which reminded him of his mother. He could have fallen in love
with any other girl as easily, if he had set his mind to it in the same
way. By dint of comparing her with his mother’s picture, he conceived a
great admiration for her: then he wished to possess her, to be her lord
and master, to marry her. Gazing on her every day with this thought in
his mind, his admiration grew to a burning passion. Of all this he said
nothing to Marjorie, and then it was too late.
Marjorie loved, and was loved by, Allen Jimerson, a young civil engineer.
Crimi neither threatened nor cajoled. He simply accepted the fact, and
meditated revenge. He was all smiles at their wedding, and he gave them a
wedding present beyond what he could reasonably afford, while he planned
to tumble their happiness in ruins about their ears.
After a short honeymoon, Jimerson departed with his wife to take up
his duties as resident engineer of some construction work on a western
railroad. Crimi, his face glowing with friendship and good will, was the
last to clasp Marjorie’s hand in farewell, as the train pulled out of the
station.
“Write to me often, Marjorie,” was his parting injunction. “Send me a
letter as soon as you get settled, and let me know how you are getting
along. I don’t want to lose touch with either of you.”
And he meant it.
* * * * *
Marjorie was fond of the handsome, manly-looking Italian youth, and
liked him immensely as a friend, although she had never been in love
with him. No sooner was she settled in her new home than she wrote him
a long letter, telling of her husband’s work, the bleakness of the
desert country, and the strange newness of her life. She and her husband
occupied a cabin together, apart from the bunk-houses of the construction
camp, in the sagebrush region of northern California, not far from the
Nevada border.
A fierce joy and exultation leapt in Crimi’s heart as he read Marjorie’s
letter.
_“You would like the country better than I do.” she wrote.
“for it is infested with rattlesnakes. The bare desert rocks
on the ridge four miles from our cabin are swarming with them.
Ugh! They sun themselves in tangled masses, Allen says, but
truly I can’t bring myself to go near the place. I get quite
too much of snakes without that, for we are constantly killing
them in the sagebrush. This country has never been settled, and
except for an occasional prospector, there was nobody to kill
them before the surveyors came. The Indians never bother the
snakes, but pass by on the other side of a sagebrush and leave
them in peace.”_
Crimi scored these lines in red ink, word by word, as if to blazon them
on his memory, and he drew little pictures of snakes on the margin. He
burned out Marjorie’s signature with acid, spitefully watching with
minute care as the letters faded, and gleaning a savage satisfaction from
seeing the paper rot away under the venomous bite of the poison. Then he
fed the letter to the flames, as he had roasted his blacksnake, years
before, and watched the missive burn into black ashes and crumble slowly
away, page by page, into gray dust.
Followed Crimi’s pursuit of the pair. His arrival was not expected by
either Jimerson or Marjorie, but it was none the less welcome, for both
of them liked the genial, companionable Italian. Life on the edge of
the desert had few distractions at best. Crimi’s eyes lit with genuine
pleasure at sight of his prospective victims. The joy on both sides was
sincere.
“No, this isn’t a pleasure trip,” he explained to them, “although I
expect to have pleasure enough out of it before I get through. I have
turned from collecting reptiles to studying their lives and habits. I
intend to write a monograph on rattlesnakes. When I got your letter,
Marjorie, I knew that I could do no better than to come here. I expect
to become very well acquainted with that ridge you wrote about, where the
snakes sun themselves in tangled masses.”
Marjorie shuddered, and Crimi laughed.
“Well, don’t bring any of your snakes around here,” she said. “I turn
cold and something grips at my insides every time I hear one rattle.”
Crimi built himself a small cabin about a mile from the Jimersons, in the
direction of the rattlesnake ridge. He adorned the shack tastefully, and
Marjorie’s deft hand gave a distinctly feminine neatness and charm to its
appearance.
He became a frequent visitor at the Jimerson cabin, and evening after
evening he read to them in his melodious, well modulated voice. Sometimes
the draughtsman or transitman would come in, and Crimi would join in
playing cards until late at night.
He seemed to take keen pleasure in the company of Marjorie and her
husband, and his face always lit up at sight of them, especially when
they were together. But it was the joy of a boy who sees the apples
ripening for him on his neighbor’s tree, and knows that they will soon
be ready for him to pluck. He was most happy when he was meditating his
frightful revenge. As his preparations drew near their end, he often
spent whole hours gloating over the fate in store for the couple. For
Marjorie, in loving Jimerson, had aroused him to insane jealousy, and
Jimerson, having robbed him of his heart’s desire, was included in
Crimi’s fierce hate for the girl who had crossed him.
When, one evening, Marjorie and her husband happened in at Crimi’s cabin,
Marjorie expressed her horror at the thought of Crimi wandering among the
snake-infested rocks of the rattlesnake ridge. The snake-hunter seated
her on a box that contained a twisting knot of the venomous reptiles.
Marjorie, serenely unaware, talked on blithely, and Crimi’s merry laugh
pealed out at regular intervals. He was in right jovial mood that
evening, for he was ready to spring the death-trap prepared for his two
friends. He only awaited a favorable opportunity to strike.
* * * * *
The opportunity came when the surveyors’ cook, crazed by bad whisky,
smashed up the kitchen. Jimerson discharged him, and the cook muttered
threats of a horrible vengeance.
“Shut up,” Jimerson ordered. “This is the third time you’ve been seeing
snakes, and now you’ve wrecked the cook shack. You ought to be sent to
jail—or a lunatic asylum.”
“It’s _you_ that will be seeing snakes,” the cook spluttered. “You an’
that Italian wife of yours’ll see plenty of ’em—red, an’ green, an’——”
Jimerson struck him across the mouth and sent him on his way. This was
in the evening. The draughtsman and rodman went to town the next day to
hire a new cook, while Jimerson and Marjorie went on an outing up the
headwaters of Feather Creek. It was Sunday, and they intended to spend
the day there.
Crimi declined their invitation to accompany them. It was the moulting
season, he explained, when the snakes were casting their skins. He could
ill afford to lose a day of observation at this time, for he had several
perplexing points to clear up before writing his monograph.
Crimi walked fearlessly from rock to rock of the rattlesnake ridge,
chuckling to himself. The tangled masses of snakes, of which he had been
told, existed only in rumor, although there were snakes in plenty if one
but looked for them. Tangled masses would serve his purpose later, but he
had gathered them here and there, one or two at a time.
By noon the little cluster of cabins occupied by the engineers was
deserted. Marjorie and her husband had been gone since sun-up, and the
surveyors were all in town. Not a soul was stirring in the neighborhood
of the shacks, and the men at the construction camp were mostly lying
around in their bunks, or playing cards.
Crimi nailed fast the windows of Jimerson’s cabin. Then he entered
and secured the bed to the floor so that it could not be moved. He
laboriously carried his boxes of snakes a mile or more, from his room
to the little gully behind the surveyors’ cabins, and hid them in the
sagebrush.
Marjorie and her husband came back from their tramp after dark that
evening, dog-tired. Marjorie cooked a little supper, and by 10 o’clock
the two were asleep. Crimi entered their cabin about midnight. They were
fast in the chains of slumber, and he did not even find it necessary to
muffle his tread. He removed the chairs, shoes, clothes, and even the
hand mirror and toilet articles. Everything that might serve as a weapon,
no matter how slight, he took away.
Then he brought his snakes from the gully, and collected them in front
of the cabin. When he had assembled them all, he knocked the top from
the largest box, carried it into the room, and, in the audacity of his
certain triumph, he dumped the twisting mass of rattlesnakes on the bed
where Marjorie and her husband lay asleep.
The other boxes he emptied quickly just inside of the door, and withdrew,
for he had no wish to set foot among the venomous serpents. Revenge is
never satisfied if retribution overtakes the avenger, and Crimi had
no wish to share the fate of his victims. He locked the door from the
outside, and battened it. Then he removed the boxes that had contained
the snakes, and returned to his cabin and peacefully went to sleep.
* * * * *
Marjorie awoke with the first rays of the sun, and lazily opened her eyes.
Her heart leapt suddenly into her throat, and she was wide awake in
an instant. The flat, squat head of a rattlesnake was creeping along
her breast. Its beady eyes were fixed on her face, and its red tongue
flickered before her like a forked flame. For a moment she thought
she was still dreaming, but the familiar outlines of the room limned
themselves in her consciousness, and she knew that what she saw was real.
Her shriek rent the air, as she threw back the bed clothes and sprang
to the floor. She stepped on a coiled serpent, which sounded an ominous
warning as it struck out blindly.
She quickly climbed back on the bed, and stood on the pillow, screaming.
Her husband was beside her at once, hazily trying to understand the
import of the hysterical torrent of words she was sobbing into his ears.
For an instant he thought she must be in the clutch of some horrible
nightmare. Then a quick, startled glance around the room turned his blood
to ice.
There was now a continuous rattling, as of dry leaves blowing against
a stone wall, for Marjorie’s screams had galvanized the snakes into
activity. The room was filled with their angry din. It sounded in
Jimerson’s ears like the crack of doom. The floor seemed covered with the
creeping reptiles. Some were coiled, the whirring tips of their tails
making an indistinct blur as they rattled, and their heads swaying slowly
back and forth. Others writhed along the floor, their venomous squat
heads thrusting forward and withdrawing, and their tongues darting out
like red flames.
On the bed itself there was motion underneath the thrown-back coverlet,
and the ugly, gray head of a thick, four-foot snake protruded from
under it, its evil eyes shining dully, as if through a film of dust. It
extricated itself, and coiled as if to strike, while Marjorie shrank
fearfully against the wall, wide-eyed with horror.
Jimerson attacked the reptile with a pillow, sweeping it from the bed
onto the floor. He quickly looked about him for a weapon, and saw at once
that he was trapped. There was not even a shoe or a pincushion with which
to fight the crawling, rattling creatures.
He tried to rock the bed toward the window, as boys move saw-horses
forward while sitting on them. But the bed was firmly fastened to the
floor, and in his efforts to release it he was bitten on the wrist by the
strike of a large snake coiled near the foot of the bed.
Jimerson flung the reptile across the room, and sprang to the floor with
an oath, crushing a large rattler with his heel as he jumped. He raced
to the door, and wrestled with it for a full minute before he discovered
that he and Marjorie were locked in that serpent-hole.
He sprang to the window, and felt a sharp stab of pain in the flesh of
his calf as the open jaws of another reptile found their mark, and the
poison fangs were imbedded deep in the flesh. The window, like the door,
was nailed fast, but he broke out the glass with his bare fists.
Unmindful of the blood on his lacerated hands, he was back at the
bedside, treading over reptiles with his bare feet. Marjorie lay on the
bed, unconscious.
He lifted her in his bleeding arms and hurled her through the window to
safety. He struggled out after her, tearing open his bitten leg on the
jagged pieces of glass still left in the window frame. The spurting blood
drenched him, and he leaned, faint and dizzy, against the cabin as three
of his surveyors came running up, having been attracted by Marjorie’s
screams.
In almost incoherent words he told them what had happened. He asked them
to make immediate search for the discharged cook, for there was no doubt
in Jimerson’s mind that it was the cook who had placed the snakes in the
room.
Then the sky went suddenly black before his eyes, and he lost
consciousness.
* * * * *
At that minute Crimi was waking from peaceful dreams. He recalled what he
had done the night before, and blissfully mused on what must be taking
place in the Jimerson cabin.
A phantasmagoric succession of pictures weltered in his mind—Marjorie and
her husband fighting with bare hands against the serpents—bitten a score
of times by the angry fangs of the rattlesnakes—clinging to each other in
terror—sinking to the floor in agony as the poison swelled their tortured
limbs and overcame them—lying green and blue in death, with rattlesnakes
crawling and hissing over their dead bodies.
It is remarkable how few people die from rattlesnake bites even when
as badly bitten as Jimerson was. Probably not one adult victim in a
hundred succumbs to the venom, although mistaken popular belief considers
rattlesnake poison as fatal as the death-potion of the Borgias.
Jimerson had known too many cases of snake bite to believe his case
hopeless. He did not give up and die, nor did he try to poison his
system with whisky. He knew that his condition was serious but he let
rest and permanganate of potash, rubbed into his wounds, effect a cure.
The bleeding from the lacerated leg had almost entirely washed out the
poison, and there was little swelling. The pain of his swollen wrist,
however, distended almost to bursting, kept him from sleeping, and the
sickly green hue of the bite distressed him. But it did not kill him.
Crimi, careful observer of reptiles though he was, had never known an
actual case of snake bite, and he shared the popular illusion that the
bite of the rattlesnake dooms its victim to death. Hence he was certain
of the complete success of his revenge, and his gloating glee was
unclouded by even the shadow of a doubt that Marjorie and her husband
had been killed in his death-trap. He awaited only the supreme joy of
drinking in the details of his success, to feel the exultant thrill of
complete victory.
As Crimi sat alone, two days after that horrible morning, Jimerson was
limping slowly toward his cabin. His swollen hand still pained him badly,
and there was a dull ache in his ankle when he put too much weight on it,
but he thought the fresh air would benefit him.
Supporting himself with a cane, and leaning heavily on Marjorie at times,
he went painfully toward the young Italian’s desert home. Not once had
his suspicion pointed toward Crimi as author of the crime, for the guilt
of the lunatic cook seemed all too clear. Besides, he liked Crimi for his
genial camaraderie, his joviality and good humor, and his frank interest
in everything that concerned either him or Marjorie.
So intent was the snake fiend on passing the torments of his victims
before his fancy, that he did not hear the knock on his cabin door. His
brain was too busy to heed the message sent by his ears, for he was
feasting on the mental and physical tortures that Jimerson and Marjorie
must have endured before they lay cold in death on the floor of the
cabin, hideously discolored by the venom of the rattlesnakes.
By degrees he became conscious that he was not alone. Two persons stood
before him, and he raised his eyes in eager anticipation, to feed his
revengeful spirit on the story he had waited two days to hear.
Even when he gazed on those whom he had consigned to a horrible death,
the thought that they were alive did not penetrate his consciousness. The
idea of failure had never entered his mind for even an instant. They were
dead, beyond the peradventure of a doubt, and now—_their avenging ghosts
stood before him_!
* * * * *
Crimi dropped to his knees in white terror and crawled behind his chair.
He clasped and unclasped his hands in agony of fear. Sweat poured
from his face and bathed his body. He implored mercy. He screamed for
forgiveness. He gibbered like a frightened ape. Half forgotten words of
Italian, learned at his mother’s knee, fell from his lips. He pleaded
and begged for his life, crawling on his face toward the amazed couple in
an endeavor to clasp their knees.
As the meaning of his broken ejaculations was borne in on them, a
tremendous loathing and disgust overcame them. Marjorie clung to her
husband, unnerved at the repulsive sight of the malicious coward
groveling on the floor and trying to kiss their feet.
Crimi shrieked and gnawed his hands as he saw the avenging angels of his
victims leave the cabin.
* * * * *
It was impossible for the stern hand of the law to inflict a greater
punishment on Jack Crimi than his own malice had wrought for him. Today
he occupies a padded cell in a hospital for the incurably insane.