The Adventure Megapack: 25 Classic Adventure Stories
Page 55
At the sight, the watching savages beneath him let out a series of loud, whining wails. With a final savage thrust, the white man came upright, cut down the dummy, and flung the blade he had been using into the cage that stood close beside him. Instantly the beast behind the bamboo bars pounced upon it, bawling loudly and clawing the stakes of his cage with legs and arms, the steel blade clenched between his bared fangs.
“Great God, Jeff! It—it’s—” Macrae broke off and clutched the ivory hunter’s arm. “Look! The black they’re dragging up there now! It— look at his face—dyed white with ngula dye. By God, it’s Tamwa!”
Half a dozen of the hairy dwarfs were dragging the black man up on the dais. His limbs twitched occasionally. Life was still in him. The white man with the mask lifted both his arms toward the cage and started a weird, chanting wail. The surrounding worshipers took it up. The air filled with frightful sound. Inside the cage the beast snarled and raved, pulling in a fury at the bars.
Westman turned his head. There was loathing and grim bitterness on his face.
“No question of it,” he growled in a low, husky bass. “That blasted renegade in the mask will pull the door open in a minute, Mac. That sacred ape in there—he’s on a braided rope. He’s been trained to make their sacrifices for them by watching the white swine knife dummies. When the cage opens—stand ready. Kilimi, do you hear? And your Wambuba men?”
“We hear, bwana,” the Kilimi whispered softly.
Westman turned forward again. The white renegade had the door-trip of the cage in both hands. Suddenly he yanked it clear and leaped aside.
A wild shriek of savage joy sounded from the throats of the worshipers as the beast leaped out of its prison, stopped short only by the restraint of the rope that fastened it. Whipped to a frenzy, it crouched on all fours, snarling. Then, spying the supine body of Tamwa, it let out a throaty chortle and seized the dagger from its teeth by the haft.
The white-smeared face seemed to enrage it beyond all measure. And as it leaped upon the unstirring black, the crouching dwarfs shrieked their insane pleasure at the expected blood orgy, goading the beast on.
Westman snapped his gun from safety and brought it to his shoulder. Carefully he sighted down the sleek barrel. Only a moment he hesitated—and then he pulled the trigger.
The reverberating shot echoed like a clap of thunder through the fevered jungle night. Whether he had scored a hit or not, it was impossible to say, for the beast had leaped at the very instant of firing. It struggled ferociously now against its rope. The dwarf at the drum leaped in panic from the platform. Below them, the mob sprang to their feet, screaming and milling in terror.
On the raised dais, the white man with the masked face bellowed orders. Turning, he plucked a rifle from a corner. The dwarfs whirled about, blowguns at their mouths. A whizz of poisoned darts, like a flight of angry gnats, flew toward Westman and his hidden party.
“Let ’em have it, Scotty!” the ivory hunter cried, pumping his Winchester. “Careful of those darts.”
The man on the dais emptied his weapon at the darting tongues of flame that leaped at him from the rim of the jungle. Kilimi and the Wambubas strained at their own enforced inaction like hounds on the leash. Suddenly the man on the dais, his gun empty, sprang side-wise toward the beast before its cage. It still chattered and snarled in bestial frenzy.
Feverishly he undid the animal’s restraining rope and leaped clear. The freed beast let out a single inhuman snarl and sprang for the nearest tree, the gleaming knife-blade showing dazzlingly white between its teeth.
“Now, Kilimi!” Westman roared.
The black leaped to his feet, assegai in hand, an ancient Bantu war cry on his lips. Behind him, his Wambubas followed, roaring the battle cry of their native tongue. Macrae staggered upright, ramming fresh shells into his gun. Westman dragged him to earth.
“Leave be, mon!” the Scot bellowed angrily, the blaze of battle in his eyes. “Do ye think I’m sitting here while your blacks do my fighting for me? Leave be, mon!”
“Mud—dirt,” the ivory hunter answered inexplicably. “Smear it on your face, Mac. Quick!”
His rifle momentarily at his side, Westman was clawing at the soft, wet earth at his feet. This he smeared thickly on his face, masking his sun-scorched countenance until its white texture was totally covered. The Scot looked at him in utter amazement.
“Are ye mad?” he shrieked.
“Mad or not, do as I tell you. Smear this mud on your face if you want to come out of this alive.”
He fairly thrust Macrae’s face into the soggy earth. Then, leaping to their feet, they followed the charge of Kilimi and his battle-crazed Wambubas. The blacks were far in the lead now. The air was filled with the blood-curdling bellow of their age-old war cry. Westman and Macrae fired as they raced forward.
The white renegade had vanished into the jungle. At his disappearance, the scattering Wambute dwarfs screamed in terror. On the edge of the clearing, they made their last stand. Arrows and darts from blowguns whirred through the air: But they had lost heart. Their magic gods had deserted them. Suddenly the last remnants of them turned tail and fled squealing from the shambles. Kilimi and his men took up the pursuit.
Westman bellowed after them. Hesitatingly the giant black man let off the chase. Panting and exulting, the party collected about the base of the tree platform. But the mystery of it still showed on Macrae’s face, all smeared with blackening mud. There was little time then for explanations.
“Two of you make a litter for Tamwa here,” the ivory hunter commanded. “Take him back to the diggings, Mac. Fast as we can make it. I’ve a hunch that’s where we’ll find the renegade—whoever he is. Quick! We’ve got to cauterize any wounds from those darts and arrows, or it means the finish.”
In feverish haste, the blacks worked under Kilimi’s direction. Not five minutes later, they were heading back for Macrae’s compound at a trot. They flung all caution to the winds now. Speed was what was wanted.
CHAPTER V
Big Stakes
A fierce terrorized wailing greeted them as they crashed from the jungle to the edge of their own compound. The camp looked deserted. Every living soul had crammed into the space enclosed by the tall stockade. Then, from behind it, issued a few agonized shrieks from the superstition-ridden blacks. A few braver souls peered fearfully from the opening.
Smeared with the mud, as Westman had so inexplicably ordered, Macrae stopped in his tracks, panting. The Wambubas dropped their burden and flattened on the ground. Kilimi alone sprang to the ivory hunter’s side.
“Look, bwana!” he cried “Shenzi nzombi! The Monkey God!”
Directly before them, behind Macrae’s grass hut, in the towering branches of the banyan tree, a weird struggle was being enacted. A blood-curdling human scream sounded. It was answered by an angry chattering. The creepers of the banyan swayed and danced a grotesque dance.
“Shenzi!” Kilimi bellowed again.
A white shape leaped from the tree to the ground, bellowing in abject terror. It was the white renegade. But the black mask was gone from his face. His bare chest was gory and dripping blood. Following him from the branches of the banyan, another shape hurtled downward. It landed squarely on the renegade’s back.
The man staggered, struggling vainly. Steel flashed before either Macrae or Westman could bring their rifles to their shoulders. Upward and downward it came in savage swinging arcs. The blade buried itself each time to the hilt between the man’s shoulder blades.
Westman’s gun spat flame. Three times he fired in rapid succession, his lips set. The two gruesome shapes collapsed to the ground.
“My God!” Macrae gasped in awe.
Westman led them forward in silence. The white man was on his back in a pool of dark blood, his glazed eyes staring sightlessly up at the purple velvet of the Congo sky. Beside him, the sacred monkey writhed in its last agonies, Westman’s slugs in its heart, the glistening steel blade still clutched
in its paw.
“What—what is it, Westman?” the Scot managed to gasp.
“The finest specimen of an Ituri Colobus ape I’ve ever seen,” the ivory hunter replied. “That, Mac,” he went on with grim quiet, “that was your murderer.”
“It—it’s uncanny, Jeff. It’s almost as bad as jungle magic.”
“The Congo is uncanny, Scotty,” Westman agreed softly. “Who’s the white man? Know him?”
The Scot nodded. “Joe Swango—the trader from Lulatala.”
“White? He’s a quarter-breed. See the kinky hair; the high, cheek-bones, and the thick lips? He—” Westman broke off. “God, what a game he played!”
“It don’t make sense to me, Jeff,” Macrae insisted, shaking his head. “Swango couldn’t have done the killings. I tell you, he was in Lulatala on the night most of my blacks were murdered. And why—”
“Don’t you see it, Mac?” the ivory hunter went on quietly. “He wanted to scare you off. The Colobus ape is highly intelligent. Swango trained it, the way we saw, to pounce on the back of every white-faced man it saw. Taught it how to use a white man’s dagger. Swango himself could be in Lulatala—and the murders still be done miles away. That’s why we never found tracks after the killings. The ape didn’t walk. It swung along through the trees. Joe Swango knew that any black traveling at night from your compound would smear his face with white dye. I had you and myself smear our faces with mud in the temple of the Monkey God for that reason, to cover the white of our flesh.”
Macrae nodded slow. “Aye.”
“Then Swango, thinking his beast would attack us because our faces were white, came flying back here. He knew who we were the minute he heard our rifles back there. He traveled fast to get here first—and lost his black mask. When the ape didn’t see any white faces back there, he followed his master. When he did see a white face—you saw what happened. The white face was Joe Swango’s.”
“But, Jeff. Why the orgy? Why did he turn king of a tribe of savage dwarf pygmies? Why want us out of the way at all? It don’t make sense. Didn’t he get what he was after when he trained the monkey to kill the escaping blacks and pluck out the diamonds they had hidden in their hair? He—”
“No, Mac, he was after bigger game. What he wanted was to get rid of you entirely—scare you away. As for his tribe of pygmies, he intended to use them as his final alibi. The Belgian government would have put the whole thing—if you and I had been murdered—to his pygmy tribe, while he went scot free with his loot.”
“His—what?” the Scot burst out incredulously.
“Look—up in the tree. I spotted him trying to get it down.” He climbed into the branches and heaved loose a lead-covered box still half hidden in a crook of the tree. It was heavy. He lowered it down, and the Scot took it and set it on the ground with a thump. It was a large oblong box of teakwood, covered with pounded lead as protection against decay and the ravages of the dread Congo ant.
Jeff said, “This must what he was after, Mac. Open it.”
In silence, the Scot knocked off the padlock with the butt of his rifle. As the lid came off, he gasped aloud.
“Diamonds, Jeff! A rajah’s ransom in raw diamonds! Look at that top one. Look at the size of—”
“Exactly, Mac,” the ivory hunter cut in dryly. “Diamonds. Before Abd el Hussan died, he had already been working this diamond field for no one knows how long. It wasn’t until after you and I got here some six months ago that we even knew there was blue diamond ground here.”
Macra was nodding. “At that time, my company was simply prospecting.”
“Abd el Hussan never shipped the stones away from here,” Jeff continued. “It was too dangerous. Yet he must have mined them for a year or more before we broke up his little party. So they were still here. That was Joe Swango’s logic. And somehow he discovered they were cached in that banyan tree. He meant to have them before you discovered them. Another week of his black magic, and he’d have scared every black of yours away. And you’d have followed. You couldn’t have stayed on here alone. That was what he wanted.”
Macrae looked at his friend, the ivory hunter, for a long time in silence. Then, still without a word, he turned and led the way to the stoep of his hut. The precious box was in his hand as he vanished behind the curtain of kasai cloth.
Inside, by the light of the fire, Westman and Macrae dressed carefully with antiseptic from their kits the wounds of the Wambubas. At length the two white men were alone. The tall, gaunt ivory hunter rose, a little wearily.
“I need sleep, Mac,” he growled. “Been on the go ever since I got your message in Murumwa. Better turn in now.”
“Jeff, you—I—” The Scot sputtered, then went on in a husky growl: “I’ll have to hang on here until the company engineers come up from the coast, Jeff. Then I’m heading for Boma. I’ll sure tell the directors about this—and about you. You deserve—”
“Yeah; all right, Mac. You always did have a touchy conscience. You think I need pay to come along when a friend like you—”
“Then what in blazes do you want, Jeff? You’re a queer bird. Trekking the jungle. What for? What do you want?”
“Sleep right now.” Jeffrey Westman grinned wistfully. “I saw some mighty fine elephant spoor out there, Mac. Tomorrow, Kilimi and I will have a try at finding the father of all the elephants an ivory hunter always dreams about. Some day I’ll bring him down, Mac, the tusker whose ivory drags the ground.”
He smiled again, his strong, lean face a deep red-brown against the grease-lamp light. “It gets into the blood, Scotty, elephants and the jungle.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
“The Black Adder,” by Dorothy Quick, originally appeared in Oriental Stories, Summer 1932.
“Every Man a King, by E. Hoffmann Price, originally appeared in Speed Adventure, Nov. 1943.
“Son of the White Wolf,” by Robert E. Howard, originally appeared in Thrilling Adventure, December 1936.
“Pearl Hunger,” by Albert Richard Wetjen, originally appeared in Action Novels, April 1929.
“A Meal For the Devil,” by K. Christopher Barr, originally appeared in Action Novels, October 1930.
“Jack Grey, Second Mate,” by William Hope Hodgson, originally appeared in Adventure, July 1917.
“Said Afzel’s Elephant,” by Harold Lamb, originally appeared in Adventure, December 13, 1919.
“Adventure’s Heart,” by Albert Dorrington, originally appeared in Top-Notch magazine, May 1, 1922.
“Another Pawn of Fate,” by F. St. Mars, originally appeared in Adventure, June 20, 1922.
“Mystery on Dead Man Reef,” by George Armin Shaftel, originally appeared in South Sea Stories, October, 1940.
“Hag Gold,” by James Francis Dwyer, originally appeared in Blue Book, May 1941.
“Maori Justice,” by Bob Du Soe, originally appeared in Far East Adventure Stories, September 1931.
“Javelin of Death,” by Captain A.E. Dingle, originally appeared in High Seas Adventures, February, 1935.
“The Screaming Skull,” by J. Allan Dunn, originally appeared in Frontier, October 1924.
“Six Shells Left”, by Allan R. Bosworth, originally appeared in Submarine Stories, March 1930.
“The Mindoon Maneater,” by C. M. Cross, originally appeared in All-Story Weekly, March 10, 1917.
“The Spirit of France,” by S. B. H. Hurst, originally appeared in Ace-High Magazine, First February Number, 1931.
“The Box of the Ivory Dragon,” by James L. Aton, originally appeared in Danger Trail, June 1926.
“Checkered Flag,” by Cliff Farrell, originally appeared in Short Stories, May 10, 1931.
“The Fighting Fool,” by Perley Poore Sheehan, originally appeared in Thrilling Adventures, July, 1932.
“Ghost Lanterns,” by Alan B. LeMay, originally appeared in Adventure, December 20, 1922.
“Stories of the Legion: Choc,” by H. De Vere Stacpoole, originally appeared in The Popular Magazine, April 1916.
“The Monkey God,” by Jacland Marmur, originally appeared in Thrilling Adventures, November 1934.