CARDS AND CHESS
Hunger and thirst were stripping away the last vestige of our
pretended good-will, and our two parties glared at each other in a
sullen rage, which seemed visibly to grow more intense, until it was
the most natural thing in the world that Arnold should touch with
the toe of his shoe a board that ran from one end of the hut to the
other and divided the floor approximately into halves.
"That side," he said, "is yours. This side is ours. You shall not
cross that line. You shall guard the hut from that side; we, from
this."
Gleazen looked at Matterson, then at O'Hara, then both he and
Matterson nodded grim assent.
But although a board across the hut divided us into two hostile
camps, we shared a peril so imminent and so overwhelming that we
dared not for an instant relax our watchfulness toward our enemies
in the forest.
With one eye on our foes without and one on our foes within, we
settled ourselves for another night, which I remember by the agonies
of thirst that we endured; and with a certain grim confidence,
shared by both parties in the hut, that neither would betray the
other, since to do so would be to throw away its own one chance for
life, we watched and waited for the dawn.
And meanwhile we heard in the forest such a clamor and din as few
white men have ever been so unlucky as to hear. First, we heard
unseen people running about and furiously screaming; then, here and
there through the trees and vines we caught glimpses of flaming
torches, which they swung in great circles and again and again
touched to the ground. I was convinced that it preluded an attack,
and I screwed up my courage and fingered my pistols and tried not to
show my fear; but in a brief lull I learned from something that
O'Hara was saying to his companions that they were not preparing for
an attack; they were mourning for the wizard whom Gleazen had
killed, and with the flaming torches they were driving away evil
spirits. Now far down the valley we caught glimpses of moving
lights; and once in a while, through pauses in the nearer din, we
heard a distant droning, by which we knew that the blacks of the
countryside were converging upon us from the remotest districts,
along their narrow trails, in thin streams like ants. Minute by
minute the cries became more general, and rose to such a hideous
intermingling of wails and shrieks as I should not have believed
could issue from merely human throats.
By its volume and extent the uproar was an appalling revelation of
the number of those who had surrounded us, and I tell you that we
seven men in that hut in the clearing were properly frightened. It
seemed a miracle that they did not sweep over us in one great
irresistible wave and bear us down and blot us out. Yet such was
their superstitious fear of things they did not understand, that
from the cover of our frail little hut our few firearms still held
them at a distance.
Never dreaming that their own power was infinitely superior to ours,
attributing the death of their wizard to a witchcraft stronger than
his own, they circled round and round us under cover of the forest
and dared not come within gunshot.
As day broke, and the sun rose like a ball of fire and blazed down
on us and doubled the tortures that we had suffered in the night, we
heard the drummers who had come to pound their drums by the body of
the dead wizard. The drumming throbbed and rolled in waves; bells
rang and hands clapped; and all the time there was shrieking and
wailing and moaning.
They drummed the stars down and the sun up, and when at noon there
had been no respite from the din, which by then fairly tortured us,
the other three, who had been talking together among themselves,
called us to the board across the hut for conference.
"Now, men," O'Hara began, "we'll make no foolish talk of being
friends together; surely we and you know how much such talk is
worth. But we and you know, surely, that if one party of us is
killed, the others will be killed likewise; for we are too few to
fight for our lives, even supposing as now that every man jack of us
is alive and bustling. Is not that so?
"Now, lads, there's a chance we can break through their line and run
for the river while the niggers is praying and mourning over that
corpse yonder."
O'Hara stopped as if for us to reply, and I glanced at Arnold, who,
meeting my glance, turned to Abe Guptil and thoughtfully said,
"Shall we take that chance, Abe?"
"Take any chance, is my feeling, Mr. Lamont. Chances are all too
few."
With a nod at O'Hara, Arnold replied, "We are agreed, I think. As
you say, there is a chance. You three shall go first. We will
follow."
"It's a chance," O'Hara repeated, almost stubbornly.
"We are in a mood for chances," Arnold returned. "But you three must
go first."
When O'Hara frowned, hesitated, and acceded, I wondered if he
thought we were gullible enough to let them come behind us.
Arnold was quietly smiling, but the others, as they gathered in the
door, were grave indeed. There was not one of us who did not know in
his heart that our hope was utterly forlorn. Only Arnold--time and
again I marveled at him!--sustained that amazing equanimity.
Gleazen shouldered his pack, but the others let theirs lie.
"How about the rest of the baggage?" Arnold asked, as composedly as
if he were setting out from the store in Topham upon a two days'
journey.
"Leave it to the devils and the ants," Matterson thickly retorted.
Both he and Gleazen were lame from their wounds and must have
suffered more than any of the rest of us. How they could face the
long, forced march, I did not understand; for though hunger and
thirst were my only troubles, my head swam when I moved quickly and
my limbs were now very light, now heavier than so much lead. But
Gleazen had long since shown his mettle, and Matterson, although he
staggered when he walked, set his teeth as he leaned against the
wall and waited to start.
If the truth were told, we had no real hope of getting away; and
immediately whatever desperate dreams we clung to were frustrated;
for, as we appeared in front of the hut and weakly started down the
hill, there came a sudden lull in the mad wailing over the dead
wizard; black warriors appeared on all sides of us, and a line of
them, like hornets streaming out of their nest, emerged from the
forest and massed between us and the spring.
"Come, men, it's back to the house," said O'Hara; and back we went,
each party to its own side as before, but each turning to the others
as if for what pitiful mutual reassurance there could be in such a
situation.
"There's war from here to the coast," Matterson muttered. "Such a
war as never was before."
The voice that issued from his dry throat was so thick and husky
that I should never have known it for the light, effeminate voice of
Matterson.
"It's bad," said Gleazen, "but so help me, they'll be cleaning out
old Parmenter and putting an end to the sniveling psalm-singers on
this river. And then, lads! Ah, then'll be great times ahead, if
once we get free and clear of this accursed hornets' nest."
In the face of our desperate danger, the man was actually exultant.
But I thought of the girl at the mission, and a dread filled my
heart, so strong that the room went black and I sat down, literally
too sick to stand.
With never a word poor Uncle Seth was pacing back and forth across
the hut. Of us all, he alone had the liberty of the entire place;
but it was a tolerant, contemptuous liberty that the others gave
him, and nothing else would have testified so vividly to the way he
had fallen in their regard.
It seemed incredible that this pale, gaunt, voiceless man, who
suffered so much in silence, who without comment or remark let
matters take their own course, who resented no indignity and aspired
to no authority, could be that same Seth Upham who had made himself
one of the leading men of our own Topham. And indeed it was not the
same Seth Upham! Something was broken; something was lost. In my
heart of hearts, I knew well enough what it was, but I could not
bear to put the thought into words. No man in my place, who had a
tender regard for old times and old associations, could have done
so.
There had been no life at all in our last attempt to leave the hut.
We faced the future now in the listlessness of despair. Still the
extraordinary situation continued unchanged. Apparently, so long as
we remained in the hut, we were to be ignored. It seemed as if the
black fiends must know how bitterly we were suffering as hour after
hour the clamor of their mourning rose and fell; as if they were
deliberately torturing us.
When Matterson sat down on the floor with his back against the wall,
and began to whittle out bits of wood from one of the legs of the
table, I watched him with an inward passion that I made no effort to
control. He, for one, was responsible for Seth Upham's sad plight,
but with a heart as hard as the blade of his knife he calmly sat for
hours whittling, and smiling over his work.
All that day we heard the tumult in the forest; all that day the sun
blazed down on the hut and doubled and trebled the tortures of our
thirst; all that day Seth Upham paced the hut in silence; and from
noon till late afternoon Matterson whittled at little sticks of
wood.
Piece by piece there grew before our eyes a set of chessmen. Rough
and crude though the men were, they slowly took the familiar shapes
of kings and queens and bishops and knights and pawns. When they
were done, Matterson hunted through the pockets of the coat that the
skeleton still wore, and found a carpenter's pencil, with which he
blackened half the men. Then, grunting with pain as he moved, he
drew a crude chessboard on the floor squarely in the middle of the
hut.
"Lamont," said he, "shall we play?"
Arnold smiled. "I will play you a game," he said.
And with that the two sat down by the board and tossed for white and
set up the crudely carved men, and began perhaps the most
extraordinary game of chess that ever two men played.
[Illustration: _And with that the two sat down by the board ... and
began perhaps the most extraordinary game of chess that ever two men
played._]
There was something admirable in their very bravado. While the rest
of us watched the clearing, every man of us suffering from thirst
and hunger, the tortures of the damned, those two, swaying sometimes
from sheer weakness, played at chess as coolly as if it were one of
the games that Arnold and Sim had played of old in my uncle's store
at Topham; and although to this day I have never really mastered
chess, I knew enough of it to perceive that it was no uneven battle
that they fought. As the pawns and knights advanced, and the bishops
deployed, and the queens came out into the board, the two players
became more and more absorbed in their game, which seemed to take
them out of themselves and to enable them to forget all that had
happened and was happening.
Indeed, it well-nigh hypnotized those of us who were only watching.
The ghastly calm of the two, the fierceness with which they fixed
their eyes on each move, the coolness with which they ignored the
wild clamor, all helped to compose the rest of us, and by their
example they made us ashamed of revealing to one another the fears
we were struggling against.
"Neil," said O'Hara suddenly,--his harsh, hoarse voice startled even
the chess-players,--"shall we have a turn at cards? I do believe
there's a wonderful solace in such hazards."
"Cards!" Gleazen echoed. His own voice was stranger than O'Hara's.
"We have no cards."
From the pocket of the blue coat on the skeleton O'Hara drew out a
dingy old pack, which a dead man's fingers had placed there.
"Sure, and I know where to find them," he said. "Never did Bull
travel without them."
With that the two squatted on the floor, and shuffled the cards with
a pleasant whir, and dealt and played and dealt again.
It was as if our party had suddenly been transported back to Topham.
Such nonchalance was almost beyond my understanding. Matterson, by
his cool, bold defiance of danger, seemed to have aroused emulation
in every one of us; and Gleazen, always reckless, now talked as
lightly and gayly of the games as if it were a child's play to while
away the dull hours of a holiday afternoon.
For the time, abandoning the agreement that neither side should
trespass on the other's half of the hut, Abe and I watched from
window to window lest the blacks take us by surprise, and now and
then we would see someone observing the hut from under the trees a
long gunshot away. But although the wails and yells and moans and
the constant drumming over the dead wizard never ceased, no man came
from the cover of the vines into the clearing.
Now Arnold precisely and clearly said, "Check."
Matterson swore and snapped his fingers and moved.
Again Arnold moved, and again he said, "Check!"
Matterson bent over the board and frowned. After a long delay he
moved once more.
Instantly Arnold moved again and in his calm voice repeated,
"Check!"
Matterson looked up at him with a strange new respect in his eyes.
"You win!" he cried with an oath. "You've done well. I didn't think
you could. You _are_ a chess-player."
"I have played a good deal," Arnold quietly replied.
"You have played with better men than Sim Muzzy."
"Yes." For a moment Arnold hesitated, then he added: "I have beaten
at chess a great man. It was like to have cost me my sword and my
head."
"Your sword?" Matterson repeated slowly. "Your sword and your head?"
There was a question in his voice, but Arnold did not answer it.
Returning a curt, "Yes," as if regretting that he had said so much,
he brushed Matterson's chessmen together, and looked out of the door
and down the long slope at the tall green grass beside the spring,
which seemed as far away from us as did our own well, thousands of
miles away in Topham.
And still Gleazen and O'Hara played on. Time and again we heard the
whir of shuffling and the slap of cards flung on top of one another.
Now the sun was setting. The swift twilight came upon us and faded
into darkness, and the card-players also stopped their game.