The Great Quest Part 32

"Gentlemen," said Arnold, speaking for the third time, ever quietly and precisely, "I am not afraid to go in."

When he boldly went up to the house ahead of us, we, ashamed to hang back, reluctantly followed.

To this day I can see him in every detail as he laid his hand on the latch. His blue coat, which fitted so snugly his tall, straight figure, seemed to draw from the warm sunlight a brighter, more intense hue. His black hair and white, handsome face stood out in bold relief against the dark door, and the green leaves drooped round him and formed a living frame.

Setting his shoulders against the door, he straightened his body and heaved mightily and broke the rusty latch. The hinges creaked loudly, the vine tore away, the door opened, and in we walked, to see the most dreadful sight my eyes have ever beheld.

There in a chair by the table sat a stark skeleton dressed in good sound clothes. The arms and skull lay on the table itself beside a great heap of those rough quartz-like stones,--I knew now well enough what they were,--and the bony fingers still held a pen, which rested on a sheet of yellow foolscap where a great brown blot marked the end of the last word that the man they called Bull had ever written. Between the ribs of the skeleton, through the good coat and into the back of the chair in such a way that it held the body in a sitting posture, stuck a long spear.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _There in a chair by the table sat a stark skeleton dressed in good sound clothes._]

Of the seven of us who stared in horror at that terrible object, Matterson was the first to utter a word. His voice was singularly meditative, detached.

"He never knew--see!--it took him unawares."

O'Hara slowly went to the table, leaned over it, and looking incredulously at the paper, as if he could not believe his eyes, burst suddenly into a frenzy of grief and rage.

"Lads," he cried, "look there! My name was the last thing he wrote.

O Bull, I warned ye, I warned ye--how many times I warned ye! And yet ye _would_, _would_, _would_ build the house on the king's grave. O Bull!"

He drew the yellow paper out from under the fleshless fingers and held it up for all of us to see, and we read in a clear flowing hand the following inscription:--

MY DEAR O'HARA:--

Not having heard from you this long time, I take my pen in hand to inform you that I am well and that despite your silly fears, no harm has come of building our house on the sightliest spot hereabouts. Martin Brown, the trader, from whom I bought the hinges and fittings will carry this letter to you and--

There it ended in a great blot. Whence had the spear come? Why had Martin Brown never called for the letter? Or had he called and gone away again?

What scenes that page of cheap, yellowed paper, from which the faded brown writing stared at us, had witnessed! It was indeed as if a dead man were speaking; and more than that, for the paper on which the man had been writing when he died had remained ever since under his very hands, undisturbed by all that had happened. How long must the man have been dead, I wondered. The stark white bones uncannily fascinated me. I saw that the feather had been stripped from the bare quill of the pen: could moths have done that? A knife could not have stripped it so cleanly.

Abe Guptil, who had been prowling about, now spoke, and we looked where he pointed and saw on the floor under a window the print of a single bare foot as clearly marked in mud as if it had been placed there yesterday.

"Hm! He saw that the job was done and went away again," said Gleazen, coolly.

I stared about the hut, from which apparently not a thing had been stolen, and thought that it was the more remarkable, because there were pans and knives in plain sight that would have been a fortune to an African black. The open ink-bottle, in which were a few brown crystals, the pen, which was cut from the quill of some African bird, and the faded letter, which was scarcely begun, told us that the spear, hurled through the open window, had pierced the man's body and snuffed out his life, without so much as a word of warning.

O'Hara unsteadily laid the letter down and stepped back. His face was still white. "It's words from the dead," he gasped.

"So it is," said Matterson, "but he's panned out a n.o.ble lot of stones."

As if Matterson's effeminate voice had again goaded him to fury, O'Hara burst out anew.

"You'd talk o' stones, would ye? Stones to me, that has lost the best friend surely ever man had? A man that would ha' laid down his very life for me; and now the n.i.g.g.e.rs have got him and the ants have stripped his bones! O-o-oh!--" And throwing himself into a rough chair that the dead man himself had made, O'Hara sobbed like a little boy.

Matterson and Gleazen nodded to each other, as much as to say that it was too bad, but that no one had any call to take on to such an extent; and Gleazen with a shrug thrust a finger into that heap of stones, slowly, as if he could not quite believe his senses,--little _he_ cared for any man's life!--while those of us who until now had been so hypnotized by horror that we had not laid down our packs dropped them on the floor.

"Ants," O'Hara had said: I knew now why the bones were so clean and white; why the feather was stripped from the quill.

From the windows of the hut, which stood in a clearing at the very top of the hill, we could see for miles through occasional vistas in the tall timber below us. The edge of the clearing, on all sides except that by which we had approached it, had grown into a tangled net of vines, which had crept out into the open s.p.a.ce to mingle with saplings and green shrubs. Half way down the hill, where we had pa.s.sed it in our haste, I now saw, by the character of the vegetation, was the spring from which issued the brook whose course we had followed.

Uncle Seth, who had been striving to appear at ease since the first shock of seeing the single occupant of the house, came over beside me; and after a few remarks, which touched me because they were so obviously a pathetic effort to win back my friends.h.i.+p and affection, said in a louder voice, "Thank G.o.d, _we_, at least, are safe!"

The word to O'Hara was like spark to powder.

Flaring up again, he shrieked, "Safe--_you!_--and you thank G.o.d for it! You white-livered milk-sop of a country storekeeper, what is your cowardly life worth to yourself or to any one else? You safe!"

He swore mightily. "You! I tell you, Upham, _there_--" he pointed at the skeleton by the table--"_there_ was a _man_! You safe!"

Withered by the contempt in the fellow's voice, Uncle Seth stepped back from the window, turned round, and, as if puzzling what to say next, bent his head.

As he did so, a single arrow flew with a soft hiss in through the window, pa.s.sed exactly where his head had just that moment been, and with a hollow _thump_ struck trembling into the opposite wall. There was not a sound outside, not the motion of a leaf, to show whence the arrow came. Only the arrow whispering through the air and trembling in the wall.

Uncle Seth, as yellow as old parchment, looked up with distended eyes at the still quivering missile.

"Safe, you say?" cried Gleazen with a hoa.r.s.e laugh, still letting those little stones fall between his fingers. The man at times was a fiend for utter recklessness. "Aye, safe on the knees of Mumbo-Jumbo!"

I heard this, of course, but in a singularly absent way; for at that moment, when every man of us was staring at the arrow in the wall, I, strangely enough, was thinking of the girl at the mission.

CHAPTER XXII

SIEGE

Much as I hated and distrusted Cornelius Gleazen,--and in the months since I first saw him sitting on the tavern porch in Topham he had given me reason for both,--I continually wondered at his reckless nonchalance.

As coolly as if he were in our village store, with a codfish swinging above the table, instead of a skeleton leaning against it, and with a boy's dart trembling in a beam, instead of an arrow thrust half through the wall--with just such a grand gesture as he had used to overawe the good people of Topham, he stepped to the door and brushed his hair back from his forehead. The diamond still flashed on his finger; his bearing was as impressive as ever.

"Well, lads," he said,--and little as I liked him, his calmness was somehow rea.s.suring,--"there _may_ be a hundred of 'em out there, but again there _may_ be only one. First of all, we'll need water. I'll fetch it."

From a peg on the wall he took down a bucket and, returning to the door, stepped out.

In the clearing, where the hot sun was s.h.i.+ning, I could see no sign of life.

Pausing on the doorstone, Gleazen shrugged his great shoulders and stretched himself and moved his fingers so that the diamond in his ring flashed a score of colors. He was a handsome man in his big, rakeh.e.l.l way; and in spite of all I knew against him, I could but admire his bravado as he turned from us.

Boldly, deliberately, he stepped down into the gra.s.s, while we crowded in the door and watched him. After all, it seemed that there was really nothing to be afraid of. The rest of us were startled and angry when O'Hara suddenly called out, "Come back, you blithering fool! Come back! You don't know them, Neil; I say, you don't know them. Come back, I say!"

With a scornful smile Gleazen turned again and airily waved his hand--I saw the diamond catch the sunlight as he did so. Then he gave a groan and dropped the bucket and cried out in pain and stumbled back over the threshold.

With muskets we sprang to guard door and window. But outside the hut there was no living thing to be seen. There was not even wind enough to move the leaves of the trees, which hung motionless in the sunlight.

It was as if we were in the midst of a nightmare from which shortly we should wake up. The whole ghastly incident seemed so utterly unreal! But when we looked at Gleazen, we knew that it was no mere nightmare. It was terrible reality. Blood was dripping from his left hand and running down on his shoe.

Through his hand, half on one side of it, half on the other, was thrust an arrow. A second arrow had pa.s.sed just under the skin of his leg.

From the door I could see the bucket lying in the gra.s.s where he had dropped it; but except for a pair of parrots, which were flying from tree to tree, there still was no living thing in sight.