The Third Murray Leinster

by Murray Leinster

  “I wonder what’s the matter with the drums?” she said wearily. “I’ve been noticing them for the last ten minutes.”

  We listened. The monotonous rhythm was still going on, rolling through the hot midday air in muffled waves of sound. The drums seemed louder than they had been.

  “They’re beating more rapidly,” Evan remarked in a puzzled tone. “They were going along slowly. Now they’re quite fast.”

  Only one of the drums had quickened its beat, however. The others thumped on monotonously. About four o’clock in the afternoon—allowing the length of time necessary for a runner to get from the first village to another—a second began to beat more furiously, and shortly after dark, the third joined in the trilogy. Our dogs were moving restlessly about, chafing because of being tied. We all were increasingly anxious, but this new danger had, strangely enough, the effect of steadying us.

  We waited a long time, and at last the two women lay down to try to rest. Through the moonlight night the drums rolled and rumbled. Standing out on the veranda with my rifle in my hands, I listened intently. I saw with some disquiet that the night threatened to become cloudy, but hoped that the dogs would give warning of any danger that might impend. For an hour I stood there, looking and listening. There was no mistaking the new note of the drums. They meant resolution, renewed activity. Faintly, beneath their muttering, I caught a high, sustained ululation. The yelling of the natives had not been audible before. Evidently they were in perfect frenzy. That meant that an attack was imminent.

  Arthur came out on the veranda beside me. He listened as I was listening.

  “They’ll attempt to rush us in the morning, I suppose,” he remarked grimly. “They’ll hardly try it before dawn, though. Blacks don’t like the nighttime.”

  One of the dogs tied to a pile below the house growled softly. The dog on the veranda echoed the growl. I glanced at him quickly. He had risen and was standing tense, looking toward the edge of the bush. He growled again.

  At just this moment, one of the little wisps of cloud overshadowed the moon and left the courtyard in darkness. I moved quietly over beside the dog and felt the hairs on his neck bristling. Finding him staring steadfastly in one direction, I strained my eyes trying to pierce the darkness. The cloud thinned a trifle and objects were dimly visible. I saw a shape coming slowly and cautiously toward the house, a shape that moved hesitatingly and furtively.

  Arthur exclaimed softly. “Murray, it’s the gorilla!”

  The figure was hunched up and apelike. It moved awkwardly toward us. The cloud thinned still more and we could distinguish its location clearly, though it was still impossible for us to see distinctly.

  “For the body,” Arthur whispered.

  We raised our rifles together and aimed carefully. Arthur’s rifle flashed, and mine an instant later. We heard a choking, beastlike cry, and the figure toppled and fell.

  CHAPTER VII

  A STRANGE ALLY.

  Evan rushed out from the interior of the house, rifle in hand.

  “What’s up? The natives?”

  “We’ve got the gorilla, I think,” said Arthur quietly.

  He reached into his pocket and pulled out a flash light. The three of us started down the steps and approached the fallen figure cautiously. As we drew near, we could hear it moaning. The moans were curiously human. I glanced up at the sky. The last wisp of the cloud was just passing before the face of the moon, and when I looked down again, the figure was outlined in the pitiless glare of the moonlight.

  Evan uttered an exclamation. The moaning figure was not that of the gorilla. It was a man, a black man, in the monkey skin of a juju priest, with all the amulets and charms of his calling strung about him. Evan started forward and shot out a string of questions in the local dialect. I could not catch a word, but Evan’s voice was stern and angry. The moaning witch doctor spoke feebly, his voice growing weaker and weaker, and his words interrupted by gasps of pain. At last he choked and coughed weakly and was still.

  Evan turned to us in a towering passion.

  “Those damned natives are going to try to rush us at dawn! The witch doctor came to put a spell on us so they’d succeed. Oh, when I get at the black animals—”

  He burst out into a string of profanity. The slave owner in him had come uppermost, and the news that his blacks were going to attack us aroused his anger at their presumption more than his fear that they might succeed. He stirred the dead figure with his foot.

  “They dare to threaten me!” he rasped. “I’ll shoot one man in every four of them! I’ll whip the rest until they can’t stand. I’ll—”

  My old dislike of the man returned, I could not doubt his courage, but I had never been particularly fond of the servaçal system and had their effort not imperiled the lives of the four of us, I would have had the best of wishes for the natives in their attempt to liberate themselves.

  “We’d better decide how we’re going to stand them off before we decide how we’re going to punish them,” I remarked. “There are three of us. There are at least six hundred of them.”

  Arthur suddenly turned with a start.

  “Alicia’s in the casa,” he said sharply, “and the beast may come back.”

  He started for the house on a run. We heard his voice as he called to Alicia and heard her answer. Evan and I followed more slowly, discussing methods of protecting ourselves against the coming attack.

  “There’s one thing,” I observed thoughtfully, “with the bush about the clearing full of natives, the gorilla will either keep a safe distance away—as is most likely—or else will have to fight his way through to get to us.”

  “Perhaps,” said Evan gloomily, his voice still full of anger toward the blacks. “We’ll worry about him when we have to. The important thing is the siege we’ll have to stand. If we can stop the first rush, I think we’ll be all right.”

  “We’re all right for ammunition?” I asked.

  He nodded. “I could outfit a small army from my gun chest and I’ve ammunition to last a year.”

  We mounted the steps of the casa.

  Alicia greeted us with a white face. “I can shoot,” she told us both bravely, “and I shan’t mind shooting at these people.”

  “You shall shoot,” said Evan grimly, “if they get a foothold in the house. Otherwise there’s no need. You know enough not to be taken alive.”

  “I know,” said Alicia quietly.

  The last I saw of her for an hour or more, she was going through Evan’s assortment of firearms, picking out a light rifle for her own use and another for Mrs. Braymore. She already had a small-caliber automatic pistol hidden in her bosom.

  For an hour or more we worked, moving the bundles Evan pointed out in the storeroom to form a breastwork behind which the women would be safe from stray shots. We tore up a section or so of flooring, too, so we could fire down in case any of the blacks found a refuge from our weapons beneath the house. Bars nailed across the openings at once provided us with assurance that they could not climb up, and that we would not accidentally fall through. We brought supplies of food and water where they would be close at hand.

  For close quarters, we were depending on repeating shotguns loaded with buckshot. Three of us with those weapons should be able to stop almost any number of blacks. These lay close beside us. We had our rifles and our pistols in addition.

  The drums were beating madly now. The high-pitched ululation that was the blended note of all the frantic yelling came clearly to our ears. When we had finished our preparations I went outside to listen. I instantly realized that the drums were nearer, much nearer. The dogs were excited and restless.

  “We’d better get the dogs up from the ground,” I suggested. “They’ll only be killed.”

  Evan went silently down and unleashed them. They were growling and bristling, particularly those near the back. T
hey seemed to realize the imminence of danger.

  I looked at my watch. It lacked two hours of dawn. The drums were growing louder and louder, and the yelling more distinct and defiant. From three sides the drums closed in on us, and from three sides choruses of high-pitched yells informed us of the hatred of the blacks for their masters. Evan interpreted as he caught some of the words.

  “They say the juju has declared we are to be killed,” he announced with a faint smile. “We are to be slaughtered and our flesh boiled down until the fat can be collected, when it will be used to light fires. Pigs will feed upon us, and our bones will be scattered among the juju priests of a thousand villages to tell them to rise and slay all white men.”

  The drums came up to the very edge of the clearing, and their thunderous voices boomed with a full-throated bellow across the open space in a deafening volume of sound. In the moonlight, we became conscious of darker bodies moving among the bush. Evan sighted from an open window and with compressed lips fired. There was a mocking yell.

  “They say our guns have been bewitched so we cannot harm them,” he informed us a second later. “Give me a shotgun.”

  The load of buckshot gave better results. Two or three shrieks of pain announced its arrival. Then the drums boomed forth more loudly. Evan fired again and again. There was a yell of rage at the third shot, when the resonant voice of the huge drum became muted and a mere shadow of itself.

  “I was trying for the drum,” he remarked. “They were brought from a thousand miles inland, and there’s no way to tell what price was paid for that one.”

  The two other drums hastily shifted their positions, and recommenced their devil’s tattoo. Emboldened by the fury of sound, one or two of the more daring spirits ventured to advance a little way out in the clearing to howl maledictions upon us.

  Arthur’s rifle cracked spitefully, and mine followed. Two bold spirits ceased to yell.

  From time to time, as we saw an opportunity and a target in the moonlight, we shot vengefully into the bush, and several times cries of different timbre from the hysterical yelling of the blacks followed our shots. Once or twice, too, I had that curious feeling of certitude that follows some shots, when one is confident he has hit his mark, though no cry came to assure me.

  Evan fired again and again with his heavy shotgun, almost every deep explosion being followed by a cry. The range was hardly more than a hundred yards, and the buckshot carried that distance easily. Spreading as it did, it had a daunting effect.

  Our object in taking the initiative was solely that of dampening the blacks’ enthusiasm. Allowed to cheer themselves with yells, they would make a rush that would be formidable in the extreme, but if we began to inflict losses before their attack began, the edge of their determination would be taken off. They would no longer believe in the efficacy of their juju to compass our destruction, and we would have a fraction of that psychological superiority that the white man must possess in order to handle natives, the complete possession of which enables a single fever-ridden white man to cow and rule ten thousand blacks.

  Evan made a tour of the house, to make sure that the natives were equally reluctant to advance on all sides. We heard him fire twice back there, and painful yells followed each shot. He rejoined us.

  “I’m going to take the rear,” he said briefly. “They’re in the bush all around. I’ll hold them off easily. They’ll make their main rush from this side, so you two stay together.”

  Arthur’s answer was a deliberate squeeze of his trigger. A yell followed.

  “At a hundred yards,” he commented, looking up, “one can make good practice in moonlight like this.”

  “Dawn soon,” said Evan and went once more to the rear. We heard him settling himself for the rush that we expected.

  So far, there had been nothing but yells from the natives. We knew they had some firearms, but ammunition is very valuable in the bush. Natives are never supposed to have arms of precision, and when they possess modern rifles, they have to keep them concealed lest they be taken away by the Portuguese; but now and then a black boy will make off with a rifle and a store of shells, and there are other sources of supply.

  At that, though, rifles and ammunition are immensely valuable back in the hill country. Up beyond the Hungry Country, I have known slaves to be sold for three rifle cartridges apiece. In fact, my boy Mboka—now run off in the bush with the rest of them—had cost me exactly six .30-.30 shells. I had found him the slave of a portly Kuloga chieftain who was about to sell him to a half-caste Arab for export to the Sudan.

  I had wondered why the house servants did not clean out the gun chest when they ran away in the middle of the night, but thanked my luck that they failed to do so. Half a dozen rifles in the hands of the blacks would have made matters awkward for us at close quarters. Off in the bush we could have disregarded them, as the native custom is to fill the barrel with slugs and fire from the hip. Anything like accuracy is impossible to them, of course.

  When the sky began to pale toward the east, however, they opened up. No less than six firearms began to bellow at us, from an ancient fowling piece of who knows what ancient lineage to a modern smokeless-powder magazine rifle. The slugs and bullets tore through the flimsy walls of the house, or else imbedded themselves with a thud in one of the posts that supported the roof. Arthur and myself began to concentrate upon those weapons. The black-powder arms showed their position at every fire in the now growing dawnlight, and we fired vengefully at the puffs of smoke.

  The sky was growing lighter now. The stars above us were paling and winking feebly in an attempt to outshine the sun. The first dim grayness became nearly white. The east turned from pallid luminosity to rich rose and then to gold. The gold, in its turn, faded to yellow, and the first rays of the sun struck the tips of the highest trees about the clearing. The drumming became fast and furious. The fires of the guns in the bush ceased for a moment, and wild yelling began. We heard Evan firing occasionally from the rear of the house. Now his shots came more rapidly.

  With a hideous yell, the fringe of bush about the casa erupted black figures. Ancient spears, knobbed and gnarled war clubs, fiercely pointed arrows, and occasional rusted and long-cherished firearms armed the motley throng that ran yelling toward us.

  Arthur dropped his rifle and took up the repeating shotgun by his side. I took my stand at a window and opened on the advancing mob. In such a mass it was impossible to miss, and the buckshot was deadly. If we had had sawed-off shotguns, the loads would have spread more and inflicted more damage, but as it was we had merely to pull the triggers to see one or more figures crumple or spin half around and fall. In their state of frenzy, that did not stop the blacks.

  Evan’s gun was booming from the rear of the house. Arthur’s spoke with a shattering roar. My own barked angrily. The drums in the bush were pounding in a mad rhythm that made the universe a place of unbearable sound. The yells, the shots, the cries, and the thunderous drumming created an uproar in which I loaded my weapon and emptied it with a sense of curious detachment. Alicia and Mrs. Braymore were behind the breastwork we had made for them. I cannot speak for Mrs. Braymore, but I glanced once at Alicia and saw her grimly holding her light rifle in readiness.

  The blacks came on. The losses we inflicted went unnoticed. They swarmed up the rise on which the house was built. We took heavy toll of them, but from sheer weight of numbers their casualties seemed insignificant. Their yells were deafening as they swept up the last twenty yards. I emptied my shotgun and began to use my two automatics.

  A mass of black humanity flowed up the steps, though a gap in the stream widened for a moment as Arthur poured the last shells from his shotgun into them. They clambered the pillars that supported the veranda and made for the windows.

  At that distance, barely ten feet, we could not miss. The veranda was a shambles. They could not live there. Arthur and myself with an automatic in ea
ch hand swept the place. I heard a shot and a yell behind me. One of the openings in the floor showed the barrel of an ancient musket that was just falling back. Alicia had fired down the opening and undoubtedly saved my life. The musket was aimed directly for my back, and would have torn my head from my body.

  There was a crashing, and an antique blunderbuss appeared through a hole smashed in the flimsy side wall of the house. Arthur fired quickly. Then I heard Evan cry out at the rear of the house. Before we could move, there was an outburst of demoniacal, bestial screamings of rage. To one who had once heard that sound, the noise was unmistakable. The gorilla had appeared in a killing fury and was going for the blacks, as their panic testified. In a moment the clearing was dotted with running natives. They dared face our weapons, but the gorilla—

  Evan’s rifle was silent. There was an instant of almost unbearable quietness. Then came a triumphant, horrible outcry from the beast. It had slain.

  CHAPTER VIII

  UNMASKED.

  The quiet was deadly. Where five minutes before had been the yelling of the natives and the roaring of the drums, the sharp cracks of our rifles, and the bellowing of the native firearms, now there was not a sound.

  Arthur and I, shaken by the suddenness of the transition, waited in cold apprehension. Would the door from the rear of the house burst open and the shaggy beast rage into the room, its colossal arms crushing whatever might come within its grasp? Would we, the four in that one room, fire futilely into its barrellike chest, and then be rent and tore in the huge ape’s hairy arms, while its great discolored fangs sank into our flesh?

  The stillness was broken by a feeble sound, and we quivered, gripping our rifles the more tightly. The tension was terrific. Another feeble sound, a scraping sound. Then two or three faint jars, followed by an uncertain, tottering footstep, and a second. We heard Evan’s voice, barely above a whisper, muttering pain-racked imprecations.

  The door opened slowly and he limped weakly into the room. His clothes were torn and gory. Blood dripped from a deep cut across the back of his hand. He stared at us uncertainly, and a look of relief came across his face.