Kong crouched as the thing twisted farther out of the pool. He gave back a few steps to drop Ann roughly at the base of the cliff. Leaping forward again he stood erect and rolled out his deep challenge.
Driscoll had never thought to hear that thunder of rage without terror. But when it beat upon his ears, with its accompanying tattoo of mighty hands upon mighty chest, he was no more than a breath away from a supporting shout. He had never thought to see Kong barring the way to Ann with any emotion save hate. But when the crouching ape-beast swung before the white shoulder which marked Ann's place against the dark rock the mate could have cried out in thanks.
Roaring, Kong charged into battle. Somewhere, upon a rock at the bottom of the pool, the monster's tail had taken hold and this gave it added strength to meet Kong's rush. Kong fought with hands and long, flashing teeth. Even more than these his feet were factors. They gripped the uneven rocks and withstood the tug of the submerged tail as the monster coiled around the beast-god's pillar-like legs and tried to slip back into the pool.
Unlike Kong's earlier conflicts this was a silent fight. The water beast had no voice and Kong, after the first roar which announced his assault, had breath only for an occasional enraged whisper. His teeth slashed at the crushing coils and his hands struggled to hold the monster's head.
Driscoll, watching from behind his corner of rock, could see no advantage on either side for long minutes. The coils seemed to bind as terribly as ever. Kong's teeth slashed unrelentingly, and his hands still fought the monster's swinging head. When the end did come it came so suddenly that Driscoll had no warning. Kong dropped into a slightly lower crouch, his legs spraddled a little more widely apart, his arms snatched the monstrous head close against his deep breast. That was all. But in that all but imperceptible series of efforts were both the seed and the fruit of another victory for the beast king who dominated the lost world of Skull Mountain Island. The water boiled as the monster's tail let go in agony. The huge coils dropped to make a writhing rest for the crushed head which Kong flung down.
Kong swayed and all but fell. He was so drained of breath and strength that for a space he could not even step outside the twisting mound of flesh which still encircled his feet. He shivered, so full he was of the loathing his species has had of reptilian things since the dawn of time, but he was too spent to move. And when he had recovered enough to raise Ann once more to the crook of his arm and toil slowly up to the ledge and his lofty cave, he was still too stupefied from his struggle to look around for any other danger.
For the first time in the long pursuit, Driscoll felt no fear of detection. He came out from behind his rock and, knife in hand, half considered an attack. But he put that thought down quickly. The great hands might have spent their best strength upon the monster, but they still had strength to crush him. Reluctantly, he drew back again into hiding and prepared for what would be the hardest hours. Now, in spite of fatigue, he must keep awake to watch and listen for the rescue party; more, he must watch and listen for the moment when Ann might need him.
Where he stood was all darkness now, a safe hiding place from which to watch Kong's ascent to the ledge. Slowly, by pushing foot and lifting hand, the beast-god made his way. There was no path, but each jutting rock was good for a gain of feet. Driscoll marked the course and told himself that if need be he could climb it too.
Standing finally before the cave, Kong put Ann down between his feet. As she lay there, unmoving, he drew deep breaths. His strength came back with every inhalation. His head began to weave and his arms to swing. The arms swung higher and higher, and then they were at his chest drumming in a wild ecstasy while from his swelling throat there lifted a long peal of triumph.
High above, in the star-lit sky, a great birdlike monster soared and seemed to listen. Kong redoubled his cry and flung it upward, challengingly.
Driscoll, in the darkness below, saw Ann stir and sit erect. Uncertainly, she twisted around to look up toward the voice above her. Then she screamed, as she had screamed on the Plain of the Altar.
Kong broke off his own savage speech and looked down. In the faint light Ann was now no more than a shadow except where her dress was torn. There, however, her shoulder was white and softly gleaming. Kong squatted down. His hand went first to the foaming hair which he last remembered as brightly shining. He pulled it, as though puzzled that a thing could be so different, by night, from what it was by day. He fingered it, shook it off, and reached out to the inviting whiteness of the shoulder.
Ann screamed again. Kong snatched at her. His hand caught in her dress and the dress tore in his huge fingers. More whiteness was revealed. Kong touched the smooth revelation. He pulled again at the torn dress. Then, holding Ann tightly, he began to pluck her clothes away as a chimpanzee might clumsily undress a doll. As each garment came free into his hand, he felt it excitedly, plainly trying to find some connection between the frail tissue and the whiteness he had exposed.
Ann cried brokenly and Driscoll, darting out from his hiding place, began to climb up to the ledge. There had been no sign of a rescue party but he could wait no longer. His muscles were too tired to perform their usual service and he slipped again and again. Once he all but pitched back to the bottom. Breathless, he hung for a space, and then climbed again.
He was wondering dully why Kong had not heard him when, looking up, he saw the great face peering over the ledge. If the face had shown anger Driscoll would have given up hope. It showed, however, only a suspicious interest. Kong had heard something, but in the darkness he had not seen. Driscoll flattened himself against the rock and waited. Suddenly Kong's face drew back.
Driscoll struggled furiously up the last few feet. He reasoned that if he had been detected caution was useless. If, on the other hand, Kong had been diverted speed might possibly carry him to his goal before any fresh suspicion was aroused.
He pulled himself over the ledge in time to see Kong seize a great pterodactyl and begin its destruction.
This time the affair was not a fight. It was too one-sided for that. The reptile had swooped down to the white form on the ledge. Kong had turned about in time and, seizing it as its long talons reached for Ann, angrily tore the creature to pieces. It was to this more certain menace that the beast-god had been drawn from the uncertain danger indicated by the noise Driscoll had made.
Ann was unhurt. As Kong lifted the pterodactyl clear of her she rose and stumbled to the edge of the rocky platform. Driscoll risked a whisper.
"Ann," he called softly.
"Jack! Oh, Jack!"
She crept in the direction of his voice.
Behind Kong's back they caught at one another; they whispered like two children in an ogre's castle of terrors.
"Jack! I kept praying, and praying, and you didn't come!"
"I'm here now, Ann."
Holding her close he pretended an assurance which he did not feel.
"Jack! Don't let him touch me again."
He felt for his knife and told himself he could save her from that, at least.
"You won't let him touch me, will you, Jack?"
"Don't you worry, honey," he promised and then, looking down, he remembered. The pool!
"Ann!" he whispered. "We're going to ..."
Kong had finished his latest task of destruction. Turning, he swung the remains of the carnivorous reptile over the ledge and saw the two clasped close. His throat swelled. His angry roar sounded.
"Jump, Ann!" Driscoll cried, and with his arm fast about her waist, they leaped together.
Chapter Sixteen
The black pool poured over Ann's head and pressed her down into a warm, soundless gulf. The water was warm! She had set her teeth against a stinging chill. But the water was, actually, warm, and marvellously soothing against her unclothed flesh. It was a soft unguent, laving every bruise and long tormented muscle. Her slim body, a wavering white shadow in the black stillness, yielded to it gratefully.
Mid-air, Driscoll had cried into he
r ear "Don't be afraid; and hold your breath!" She did hold her breath, and before they had got down so far that fear seized her Driscoll twisted sideways to bring their plunge to a full stop. Then they drifted upwards. His arm had remained protectingly at her waist, but as they broke the surface it withdrew and she floated alone, filling her lungs with deep quick gasps.
"All right? Are you all right?"
Driscoll trod water at her side and blinked his eyes free of drops which trickled down from his hair.
"Yes," Ann said faintly. "I can swim. But oh, Jack! I can't believe you've really come."
"I've come all right," said Driscoll reassuringly, but he looked swiftly back toward the ledge.
Kong, because of his people's age-old distaste for water, had taken the slower way down. At that he was almost to the bottom. By hand- and foot-hold he was dropping with a speed which would have landed any other creature on the rocks in a broken heap.
"Lively it is," said Driscoll in Ann's ear.
Pointing to where the water spun into the underground channel, he explained briefly what they must do.
"I'm ready," said Ann. "But please keep close to me, Jack."
"I'll be right here." He reached out a comforting hand.
Kong made a final, long leap and came down to the bottom on resilient haunches. Hands drumming, throat full of thunder, deep-set eyes ablaze and long arms already reaching, he spraddled toward the edge of the pool.
Ann gave a cry of terror.
"Dive!" Driscoll cried.
Ann answered by jack-knifing swiftly under the water. Driscoll followed, his body taking speed from powerfully threshing legs. When Ann had to break back to the surface short of the channel's mouth he flashed past her and emerged first, on the alert.
Kong had sensed their objective, or perhaps those all but hidden eyes were sharp enough to catch their shadowy, under-water flight. A roaring fury, he lumbered toward the mouth of the channel, almost near enough to stand guard, and thrust his great arms down.
"Dive!" Driscoll cried once more.
Blindly Ann jack-knifed again.
This time the distance was easily within her limits. Deep under water her white body pointed unerringly for the goal. With every movement her few torn remnants of clothing drifted slowly alongside stroking arms and legs. She had time to be glad she had sucked her lungs full, to wish she dared look back for Driscoll, to grow cold under the shadow of a hairy, reaching paw. Then, in the same instant that Jack's hand upon her heel gave notice he was following, the suction caught her.
She had presence of mind enough not to resist the current rushing her along. From somewhere the memory came of a man in a book who had survived a fall into Canadian rapids by letting his body swing limp against every obstacle. She did likewise. Hands and arms folded about her head to protect it, she made no resistance but allowed the water to twist her as it would.
There were, indeed, no obstructions to come against save the circling wall of the tunnel, and that had been worn smooth through the centuries. Once a knee struck painfully. But the pitch-black passage was short. Her lungs had scarcely begun to protest against their burden of old breath before she was flashing in a white smother of spray out of the side of Skull Mountain. There followed a brief drop into a churning pocket, and then she found herself sweeping along in the soft moonlight between sheer, rocky banks.
"Jack!"
She called loudly, her agonized fear returning with the sense of being alone. She rolled over on her back to look for Driscoll; and there he was, at her very side, with a quick hand beneath her tired head. She closed her eyes in flooding relief. Thus sightless, she felt she was moving twice as fast as before, and the current had seemed swift even when she could see.
"Easy does it," Jack said at her ear. "This road takes us all the way back to the village. And we're making great time. Even if Kong follows, he has to travel overland, and it's dollars to doughnuts we beat him.
"If we don't," he ended solemnly, "he'll have to come into the water to get us; and dive deep, too."
Still drifting upon the supporting hand, Ann reached out to touch Driscoll in mute thankfulness.
"But Jack!" she cried then. "You're hurt."
"Kong!" he explained, and his mouth shaped into a hard curve of triumph under a torn forehead. "He reached for me just as I shot into the tunnel."
Ann put gentle dripping fingers alongside the hanging triangle of flesh.
"Well, my dear," she said, laughing to keep from crying. "I haven't got enough clothes left to dress a penny doll, let along a grown girl of my height and weight. But I certainly owe you a bandage. And if you'll just nip ashore I'll find you one, and let my maidenly modesty go hang."
That was exactly the light note the adventure required. Driscoll grinned. He had been drifting on his back, too, in order the more easily to keep his supporting hand under her head. Now he swung on his side, caught her into his arms and kissed her until they both disappeared under the water. Ann came up sputtering.
"That was only partly because I couldn't help it," Driscoll told her. "The other part was to celebrate escaping."
Ann smiled at him tremulously.
She was still haunted by her night and day of terror. She knew Kong might be following. And she was so tired that she would have dropped straight down to the swift stream's rocky bottom if Driscoll's hand had not been giving its support. She was weak from hunger too; she was only beginning to realize how famished with hunger she was. And she was aware that their flight was beset by a multitude of dangers. But she was glad, to the core of her heart.
With her eyes she called Driscoll back, and when he came close she curved an arm about his neck and kissed him lightly on the mouth.
"I want to celebrate too," she said. "And besides, I couldn't help it, either."
Driscoll kissed her a third time, but then he hauled away until he touched her only with that one hand beneath her head. In the moonlight his figure made a dark shaft apart from her drifting white shadow.
"Neither of us," he told her, "has so much as a lick of sense."
"It's nicer to be happy than sensible any day. Or night," Ann added, eyeing the moon.
"Have you," he demanded, "the faintest idea about where we are, or where we're going?"
"Wherever you say."
"Your confidence is a compliment, all right enough. But wait until I tell you a few things."
Gliding along, he explained his theory about the stream, and where he believed it led. As he talked, the bank on either side drew more deeply into shadow, and the current seemed to grow a little less strong.
"The minute you feel rested," he said, "I want you to swim. Not hard. Just enough to help the current. I don't think we have so very far to go, but we can't waste any time."
"I can swim now," Ann told him. "At least for a while."
She flashed over in the moonlight and began stroking valiantly.
"Take it easy," Driscoll cautioned. "Long ones and slow ones. All you have to do is help the current just a little."
Beneath the murky cloak of one bank's shadow Ann's arms and legs moved rhythmically in obedience to his order.
"That's fine. If you get too tired we can find a log along the shore I guess. But we'd go slower with a log. And I want to make speed. God alone knows what we're likely to meet."
"I can keep on for a while."
"We'll have to leave the water when we reach the lagoon where we found the dinosaur. No current there at all, or scarcely. We can walk around it faster than we can swim through."
At the prospect of walking Ann realized her weakness and forced herself to confess it.
"I can drift along like this," she told Driscoll, "especially when you give me a hand now and then. But Jack! I couldn't walk even a hundred feet fast enough to outdistance a snail."
"I hadn't thought you could. Honey, I'm going to carry you."
"Carry! After all you've been through! Jack! You never could."
Driscoll stroked along fo
r a little, then he said softly:
"Don't make any mistake! I could carry you ten miles if I had to."
Or, Ann said to herself, go down trying. He hadn't, she knew, the strength to carry her. Not after his night and day of pursuit. And yet, from somewhere, she was happily sure, he would find the strength when it was needed. That surging confidence in him enabled her once more to fight off terror as the captor from which she had been freed came into her mind.
"Is he following, Jack?"
"I've been wondering that same thing," Driscoll said in a tight disturbed voice. "I can't believe that brute has sense enough to follow a trail he can't see. And we've certainly outdistanced him. I can't believe either that he will go back to the village just because he remembers you. He ought to want to stop to eat. He must be as hungry as we are, and in a beast hunger comes ahead of everything."
"If he really is all beast," Ann said in a low tone.
"If?"
She was silent for a moment. Then she said in a voice which she could not keep steady:
"Jack! It was horrible being in his hands. You can't imagine such hands, unless they have really touched you ... felt you, as though trying to puzzle you out.
"And sometimes, from the way he looked at me ... from the way he carried me carefully up in the crook of his arm instead of dragging me along, as he did at the start ... I wondered ... I thought ..." Her voice went up on a note of hysterical terror.
Driscoll put out a steadying hand.
"Forget about Kong!" he ordered. "He's no mystery. And if you weren't so tired, you wouldn't think so."
"Maybe I wouldn't," said Ann, and drew close to him under the water.
They glided along, white shadow and dark shaft, beneath the soft rays of the moon. The current grew steadily less rapid, and the effort to make progress increasingly hard. Once, in spite of her protests, Driscoll made Ann go to a bank and rest. A very brief rest. He had insisted, but when she obeyed he was on edge until they got off again.
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