The Great Quest Part 38

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, hoa.r.s.e 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 trespa.s.s 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 gra.s.s 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.

CHAPTER XXVI

AN UNSEEN FOE

All day Seth Upham had scarcely said a word. From dawn until dark he had paced the hut, apparently buried deep in thought. Only his gaunt, pitiful face revealed the extent to which he shared our tortures.

Now for the first time in all that day, to our surprise, he spoke; and his first words confirmed every fear we had felt for him.

"The boys ought not to make so much noise," he said. "I must speak to the constable about it."

Matterson softly swore and s.h.i.+fted the bandage on his face. Gleazen significantly looked over at me. Abe Guptil stood with his mouth open and stared at Seth Upham.

Never boys of a New England town made such an uproar as was going on outside. Those wails and yells and hideous drummings and trumpetings were African in every weird cadence and boisterous hoot and clang.

Then, as if the first words had broken a way through his silence, Seth Upham began to talk in a low, hurried voice; and however reluctant we had hitherto been to believe that he was mad, there was no longer any hope for him at all. The man had lost his mind completely under the terrific strain that he had endured.

Small wonder when you think of all that had happened: of how, for Cornelius Gleazen's mad project, he had thrown away a place of honor and a.s.sured comfort back in Topham; of how he had been driven deeper and still deeper into Gleazen's nefarious schemes by blackmail for we knew not what crimes that he had committed in his young-manhood; of how, even in that alliance of thieves, he had fallen from a place of authority to such a place that he got not even civil treatment; of how he had lost reputation, livelihood, money, and now even his vessel.

"I declare, we must put in another constable," he muttered. "Johnson can't even keep the boys in order--In order, did you say? Who else should keep the place in order?--O Sim, if only you had wits to match your good intentions! How can you expect to keep books if you can't keep the stock in order?--" He stopped suddenly and faced the door. "Hark! Who called? I declare, I thought I was a lad again."

Moment by moment, as he paced the hut, we watched his expression change with the mood of his delirium,--sometimes I have wondered if the fever of the tropics did not precipitate his strange frenzy,--and moment by moment his emotions seemed to become more intense.

Now, pursuing that latest fancy, he talked about his boyhood and told how deeply he repented of the wicked life he had led as a young man; told us, all unwittingly, of unsuspected ambitions that had led him from wild ways into sober ones, and of his youthful determination to win a creditable place in the community; told us of the hard honest work that he had given to accomplish it. Now he revealed the pride he had taken in all that he had succeeded in doing and building, and--which touched me more than I can tell you--how he had counted on me, his only kinsman, to take his place and carry on his work. All this, you understand, not as if he were talking to us or to anyone else, but as if he were thinking out loud,--as indeed he was,--merely running over in his own mind the story of his life.

Now he reverted again to his repentance for the wicked youth that he had lived. And now, suddenly, his manner of speaking changed, and from merely thinking aloud he burst out into wild accusation.

"The dice are loaded," he cried,--his voice was hoa.r.s.e and strained with the agonies that he, like all of us, had endured and was still enduring,--"the dice are loaded. I'll not play with loaded dice, Neil Gleazen!"

At that Gleazen gasped out a queer whisper.

But already Seth Upham's mind was racing away on another tack.

"Aye, loaded with the blessed weight of salvation. Didn't my old mother, G.o.d bless her, teach me at her knee that a man's soul can never die? Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name--"

Staring at him in horror, we saw that he was not blasphemous. The words came reverently from his weak lips. He simply was mad.

Suddenly in a high-pitched voice, he began to sing,

"Low at Thy gracious feet I bend, My G.o.d, my everlasting friend."

He sang three stanzas of the hymn in a way that appalled every one of those three men who of us all, I think, were least easily appalled--indeed, I think that for once they were more appalled than the rest of us; certainly none of them had Arnold's composure or Abe's obvious, almost overpowering sympathy for poor Seth Upham.

Then he stopped and faced about with eyes strangely aflame. In his manner now there was all his old imperiousness and something more, an almost n.o.ble dignity, a commanding enthusiasm, which, whether it came from madness alone or whether it had always been in him, got respect even from Matterson and O'Hara.

"I am going to meet my G.o.d face to face at the throne of Judgment,"

he cried.

It was the first time in days that he had addressed us directly, and he spoke with a fierce intensity that amazed us; then, before we guessed what was in his disordered mind, before a man of us could stop him, he stepped outside the door and flung his arms straight out like a cross, and with his head thrown back marched, singing, into the darkness.