Beyond the Black River Read Online Free PDF Page A

not move hand or foot.
    “It was well I returned alone to the Manor,” laughed the octoroon. “I stole up to the window while this fool talked with Richard Ballville. The thought came to me to let him lead me to the place where you were hidden. It had never occurred to me that there was a hiding-place in the swamp. I had the Arab’s coat, slippers and turban; I had thought I might use them sometime. The glasses helped, too. It was not difficult to make an Arab out of myself. This man had never seen John De Albor. I was born in East Africa and grew up a slave in the house of an Arab — before I ran away and wandered to the land of Zambebwei.
    “But enough. We must go. The drum has been muttering all day. The blacks are restless. I promised them a sacrifice to Zemba. I was going to use the Arab, but by the time I had tortured out of him the information I desired, he was no longer fit for a sacrifice. Well, let them bang their silly drum. They’d like to have you for the Bride of Zemba, but they don’t know I’ve found you. I have a motor-boat hidden on the river five miles from here —”
    “You fool!” shrieked Constance, struggling passionately. “Do you think you can carry a white girl down the river, like a slave?”
    “I have a drug which will make you like a dead woman,” he said. “You will lie in the bottom of the boat, covered by sacks. When I board the steamer that shall bear us from these shores, you will go into my cabin in a large, well-ventilated trunk. You will know nothing of the discomforts of the voyage. You will awake in Africa —”
    He was fumbling in his shirt, necessarily releasing her with one hand. With a frenzied scream and a desperate wrench, she tore loose and sped out through the tunnel. John De Albor plunged after her, bellowing. A red haze floated before McGrath’s maddened eyes. The girl would plunge to her death in the swamps, unless she remembered the guide-marks — perhaps it was death she sought, in preference to the fate planned for her by the fiendish Negro.
    They had vanished from his sight, out of the tunnel; but suddenly Constance screamed again, with a new poignancy. To McGrath’s ears came an excited jabbering of Negro gutturals. De Albor’s accents were lifted in angry protest. Constance was sobbing hysterically. The voices were moving away. McGrath got a vague glimpse of a group of figures through the masking vegetation as they moved across the line of the tunnel mouth. He saw Constance being dragged along by half a dozen giant blacks, typical pineland dwellers, and after them came John De Albor, his hands eloquent in dissension. That glimpse only, through the fronds, and then the tunnel mouth gaped empty and the sound of splashing water faded away through the marsh.
    4. The Black God’s Hunger
    In the brooding silence of the cavern Bristol McGrath lay staring blankly upward, his soul a seething hell. Fool, fool, to be taken in so easily! Yet, how could he have known? He’d never seen De Albor; he had supposed he was a full-blooded Negro. Ballville had called him a black beast, but he must have been referring to his soul. De Albor, but for the betraying murk of his eyes, might pass anywhere for a white man.
    The presence of those black men meant but one thing: they had followed him and De Albor, had seized Constance as she rushed from the cave. De Albor’s evident fear bore a hideous implication; he had said the blacks wanted to sacrifice Constance — now she was in their hands.
    “God!” The word burst from McGrath’s lips, startling in the stillness, startling to the speaker. He was electrified; a few moments before he had been dumb. But now he discovered he could move his lips, his tongue. Life was stealing back through his dead limbs; they stung as if with returning circulation. Frantically he encouraged that sluggish flow. Laboriously he worked his extremities, his fingers, hands, wrists and finally, with a surge of wild triumph, his arms and legs.