SPEARS IN THE DARK
"O-o-oh!" he moaned. "They got me. It's a wonder they didn't kill
me. But here I am along with old Neil Gleazen."
"Where's your bundle?" Gleazen demanded.
"Down in the grass by the spring."
"Let me tell you, Matterson, it's good I carried my own."
Matterson repressed another groan and made no answer.
Blood was running from a great gash above his ear and across his
cheek, which we hastened to bind to the best of our ability, and he
lay down on the floor with his head on his hand.
"I'm on the sick list," he said at last, "but I've had water, and if
those black sons of hell have not poisoned the spring, I'll call it
quits."
Matterson's face was a ghastly sight, and already blood had reddened
the strip of sacking round his head; but I believe there was not a
man of us who would not have taken his wound to have got his chance
at water.
"If only we could catch a king," Gleazen remarked thoughtfully.
"That's the way to end a war in Africa. Catch us a king and make
peace on him."
"That's one way surely to end a war," said O'Hara, darkly, "but not
this war."
"And why not this war?"
"Because," said O'Hara, "Bull built the house on a king's grave.
It's the _spirits_ that are offended."
Gleazen laughed unkindly.
"Aye, laugh," cried O'Hara, "that's all you know about spirits. Now
I'll tell ye, believe me or not as it pleases ye, that the spirit of
a nigger is a bad thing to cross. And care as little as ye please
for jujus and fetishes and nigger gods, the times are coming when
they'd serve you well if you'd not turned them off by laughing at
them."
"Spirits--" said my uncle in an undertone. "Hm! Hollands, Scotch,
and Rye. We must lay in more Hollands, Sim; the stock's getting low.
And while you are about it, we'd best take an inventory of our
cordials."
Gleazen fluently swore, and watched Seth Upham with a keen,
appraising look. There was no doubt that in his own wandering mind
my uncle was back again in his store in Topham.
"I'm thirsty," he said suddenly. "I must get a drink of water. Now
where's the bucket? Sim, where's the bucket?"
As he fumbled along the wall, we stared at one another with eyes in
which there was fear as well as horror. I swallowed hard. Poor, poor
Uncle Seth, I thought. What was to become of him? And indeed, for
the matter of that, of us all?
By this time I had come to see clearly that poor Seth Upham was in
no condition to stand up for his own rights, and that, whether or
not he could stand up for his rights, he had no chance of getting
them from that precious trio, his associates, without a stronger
advocate than mere justice.
They had promised unconditionally that half the profits of their mad
voyage should be his, and by that promise alone they had so cruelly
persuaded him to sell home and business and embark in their
enterprise. Now, deceived, bullied, flouted, he bade fair to lose
not only those gains which were rightfully his, but also his vessel,
his stores, and every cent that he had ventured. If there was to be
a copper penny saved for him, Arnold, Abe, and I must save it.
Through the rough, less pleasant memories of his abrupt, sharp
ways--and so often, even when he was in the abruptest and sharpest
of moods he had betrayed unconsciously, even unwillingly, his
thought of my future, for which he was building, as well as for his
own--there came memories of old days, when he and my mother and I
had lived so quietly and happily together in Topham.
I started up, all at once awakened from my reveries, with Abe's
dazed voice ringing in my ears. "Look! Look!" he cried. "Look
there!"
For the moment, in our horror at my uncle's condition, we had almost
forgotten our danger from without.
"Look!" Abe cried again. "In heaven's name look there!"
We crowded shoulder to shoulder by the window where Abe had
stationed himself and saw in the moonlit clearing a strange
creature, which came dancing and rolling along from the edge of the
forest. It was dressed in skins and rags. It was painted with big
white rings and bars. Now it began to utter strange whines and
squeals and whimpers, in an unearthly tone that it might have
produced by blowing on a split quill.
From the corner of my eye I saw that Matterson was biting his lip.
At my side I felt O'Hara violently trembling.
Out in the moonlight, where the swaying creepers cast dim, spectral
shadows, the gibbering, murmuring creature was coming nearer. Its
boldness was appalling. I had been brought up in a Christian country
and given a Christian education, but even to me that clumsy, dancing
wizard, with his unearthly squeals and cries, brought a
superstitious fear so keen that I could scarcely control my wits.
Small wonder that such tricks impose on credulous savages!
"Watch, now!" Gleazen said quietly. He leveled a musket across the
window-sill. "Spirits is it? I'll show them."
"Don't shoot," O'Hara cried. "Don't shoot, Neil, don't shoot!"
He reached past me toward Gleazen; but before he could lay hands on
the gun, Gleazen fired. A spurt of flame shot from the muzzle, and
as the report went thundering off into the forest the medicine
man--wizard--devil--call him what you will--seemed curiously to wilt
like a drought-killed plant, but more suddenly than ever plant
wilted, and fell in a crumpled heap in the moonlight.
"You fool!" O'Hara cried, "you cursed fool! First it was Bull that
built the house on a king's grave and now it is you that's killed a
devil!"
"He's dead enough," Gleazen calmly replied.
"Look!"
Here and there, along the edge of the forest, men darted into the
moonlight. They carried spears, which flashed now and then when the
moon fell just so on the points. First they gathered by the body of
the wizard and carried it back into the woods. We saw them, a little
knot of men with the heavy weight of the fallen mummer in their
midst, moving slowly to the wall of vines and through it into the
mysterious depths beyond. Then, coming slowly out again, they moved
back and forth before the hut as if to appraise our chances of
defending it. Then they once more disappeared.
All this time they had walked as if in a world of death. Although we
had seen their every gesture, we had not heard a sound loud enough
to rival the almost imperceptible drone of insects in the grass. But
now we heard again that grimly familiar, haunting, wild cry. Three
times we heard it, terribly mournful and prolonged; then we heard a
voice wailing, "White man, I come 'peak: white man all go Dead
Land."
The voice died away, a few formless shrieks and yells followed it,
and a silence, long and deep, settled upon the clearing.
Once more Arnold, Abe, and I stood on one side of the hut, and
Gleazen, Matterson, and O'Hara on the other, with poor Seth Upham
wandering aimlessly between us.
There was war within and without. There was almost no food. There
was no water at all. I thought, then, that I should never see the
town of Topham again; and--which oddly enough seemed even harder to
endure--I thought that I never again should see the mission on the
river.
"I swear," O'Hara whispered,--so clearly did I hear the words, as I
stood with one eye for the inside of the hut and one for the
outside, that I jumped like a nervous girl,--"I swear we've started
a war that will reach from here to Barbary before it's done. Hearken
to that!"
We heard afar off the throbbing of native drums, the roar of distant
angry voices, a strange chant sung in some remote African
encampment.
[Illustration]