Suddenly the little head turned in his direction. “Hurry, Bridge,” admonished The Oskaloosa Kid, “you’re coming home with us.”
The man stepped toward the car, shaking his head. “Oh, no, Miss Prim,” he said, “I can’t do that. Here’s your ‘swag.’” And he smiled as he passed over her jewels and money.
Mr. Prim’s eyes widened; he looked suspiciously at Bridge. Abigail laughed merrily. “I stole them myself, Dad,” she explained, “and then Mr. Bridge took them from me in the jail to make the mob think he had stolen them and not I — he didn’t know then that I was a girl, did you?”
“It was in the jail that I first guessed; but I didn’t quite realize who you were until you said that the jewels were yours — then I knew. The picture in the paper gave me the first inkling that you were a girl, for you looked so much like the one of Miss Prim. Then I commenced to recall little things, until I wondered that I hadn’t known from the first that you were a girl; but you made a bully boy!” and they both laughed. “And now good-by, and may God bless you!” His voice trembled ever so little, and he extended his hand. The girl drew back.
“I want you to come with us,” she said. “I want Father to know you and to know how you have cared for me. Won’t you come — for me?”
“I couldn’t refuse, if you put it that way,” replied Bridge; and he climbed into the car. As the machine started off a boy leaped to the running-board.
“Hey!” he yelled, “where’s my reward? I want my reward. I’m Willie Case.”
“Oh!” exclaimed Bridge. “I gave your reward to your father — maybe he’ll split it with you. Go ask him.” And the car moved off.
“You see,” said Burton, with a wry smile, “how simple is the detective’s job. Willie is a natural-born detective. He got everything wrong from A to Izzard, yet if it hadn’t been for Willie we might not have cleared up the mystery so soon.”
“It isn’t all cleared up yet,” said Jonas Prim. “Who murdered Baggs?”
“Two yeggs known as Dopey Charlie and the General,” replied Burton. “They are in the jail at Oakdale; but they don’t know yet that I know they are guilty. They think they are being held merely as suspects in the case of your daughter’s disappearance, whereas I have known since morning that they were implicated in the killing of Baggs; for after I got them in the car I went behind the bushes where we discovered them and dug up everything that was missing from Baggs’ house, as nearly as is known — currency, gold and bonds.”
“Good!” exclaimed Mr. Prim.
On the trip back to Oakdale, Abigail Prim cuddled in the back seat beside her father, told him all that she could think to tell of Bridge and his goodness to her.
“But the man didn’t know you were a girl,” suggested Mr. Prim.
“There were two other girls with us, both very pretty,” replied Abigail, “and he was as courteous and kindly to them as a man could be to a woman. I don’t care anything about his clothes, Daddy; Bridge is a gentleman born and raised — anyone could tell it after half an hour with him.”
Bridge sat on the front seat with the driver and one of Burton’s men, while Burton, sitting in the back seat next to the girl, could not but overhear her conversation.
“You are right,” he said. “Bridge, as you call him, is a gentleman. He comes of one of the finest families of Virginia and one of the wealthiest. You need have no hesitancy, Mr. Prim, in inviting him into your home.”
For a while the three sat in silence; and then Jonas Prim turned to his daughter. “Gail,” he said, “before we get home I wish you’d tell me why you did this thing. I think you’d rather tell me before we see Mrs. P.”
“It was Sam Benham, Daddy,” whispered the girl. “I couldn’t marry him. I’d rather die, and so I ran away. I was going to be a tramp; but I had no idea a tramp’s existence was so adventurous. You won’t make me marry him, Daddy, will you? I wouldn’t be happy, Daddy.”
“I should say not, Gail; you can be an old maid all your life if you want to.”
“But I don’t want to — I only want to choose my own husband,” replied Abigail.
Mrs. Prim met them all in the living-room. At sight of Abigail in the ill-fitting man’s clothing she raised her hands in holy horror; but she couldn’t see Bridge at all, until Burton found an opportunity to draw her to one side and whisper something in her ear, after which she was graciousness personified to the dusky Bridge, insisting that he spend a fortnight with them to recuperate.
Between them, Burton and Jonas Prim fitted Bridge out as he had not been dressed in years, and with the feel of fresh linen and pressed clothing, even if ill fitting, a sensation of comfort and ease pervaded him which the man would not have thought possible from such a source an hour before.
He smiled ruefully as Burton looked him over. “I venture to say,” he drawled, “that there are other things in the world besides the open road.”
Burton smiled.
It was midnight when the Prims and their guests arose from the table. Hettie Penning was with them, and everyone present had been sworn to secrecy about her share in the tragedy of the previous night. On the morrow she would return to Payson and no one there the wiser; but first she had Burton send to the jail for Giova, who was being held as a witness, and Giova promised to come and work for the Pennings.
At last Bridge stole a few minutes alone with Abigail, or, to be more strictly a truthful historian, Abigail outgeneraled the others of the company and drew Bridge out upon the veranda.
“Tell me,” demanded the girl, “why you were so kind to me when you thought me a worthless little scamp of a boy who had robbed some one’s home.”
“I couldn’t have told you a few hours ago,” said Bridge. “I used to wonder myself why I should feel toward a boy as I felt toward you, — it was inexplicable, — and then when I knew that you were a girl, I understood, for I knew that I loved you and had loved you from the moment that we met there in the dark and the rain beside the Road to Anywhere.”
“Isn’t it wonderful?” murmured the girl, and she had other things in her heart to murmur; but a man’s lips smothered hers as Bridge gathered her into his arms and strained her to him.
The Jungle Adventures
This series of relatively obscure adventures, linked by their jungle setting, began in 1915 with The Man-Eater. Burroughs had written the story as a film treatment, but it finally became a serial in the New York Evening World and eventually reprinted in book form in 1955.
The Man-Eater deals with an expedition to a ruined mission in Africa, with the aim of uncovering the evidence needed to prove the rightful heir of the wealthy Jefferson Scott. The next novel in the series, The Cave Girl (actually two stories published in the All-Story magazine in 1913 and 1914), tells of the adventures of the cowardly weakling Waldo Emerson Smith-Jones, who is forced to discover his inner manhood when he is shipwrecked on a jungle island populated by a violent prehistoric tribe. The subsequent novel in the series, The Eternal Lover, reverses the situation by having a prehistoric warrior transported into the present, where he falls in love with the reincarnation of his lover Nat-ul. Two more jungle adventures followed in the 1930s – Jungle Girl (1932) and The Lad and the Lion (1938).
First edition cover of ‘The Eternal Lover’
THE ETERNAL LOVER (1913)
OR, THE ETERNAL SAVAGE
CONTENTS
THE ETERNAL LOVER
1. NU OF THE NIOCENE
2. THE EARTHQUAKE
3. NU, THE SLEEPER, AWAKES
4. THE MYSTERIOUS HUNTER
5. THE WATCHER
6. NU AND THE LION
7. VICTORIA OBEYS THE CALL
8. CAPTURED BY ARABS
9. NU GOES TO FIND NAT-AL
10. ON THE TRAIL
11. THE ABDUCTION
12. THE CAVE MAN FINDS HIS MATE
13. INTO THE JUNGLE
SWEETHEART PRIMEVAL
1. AGAIN A WORLD UPHEAVAL
2. BACK TO THE STONE
AGE
3. THE GREAT CAVE-BEAR
4. THE BOAT BUILDERS
5. NU’S FIRST VOYAGE
7. THE ANTHROPOID APES
7. THE BEAST-FIRES
8. BOUND TO THE STAKE
9. THE FIGHT
10. GRON’S REVENGE
11. THE AUROCHS
12. TUR’S DECEPTION
13. NAT-UL IS HEART-BROKEN
14. “I HAVE COME TO SAVE YOU”
15. WHAT THE CAVE REVEALED
THE ETERNAL LOVER
1. NU OF THE NIOCENE
Nu the son of Nu, his mighty muscles rolling beneath his smooth bronzed skin, moved silently through the jungle primeval. His handsome head with its shock of black hair, roughly cropped between sharpened stones, was high held, the delicate nostrils questioning each vagrant breeze for word of Oo, hunter of men.
Now his trained senses catch the familiar odor of Ta, the great woolly rhinoceros, directly in his path, but Nu, the son of Nu, does not hunt Ta this day. Does not the hide of Ta’s brother already hang before the entrance of Nu’s cave? No, today Nu hunts the gigantic cat, the fierce saber-toothed tiger, Oo, for Nat-ul, wondrous daughter of old Tha, will mate with none but the mightiest of hunters.
Only so recently as the last darkness, as, beneath the great, equatorial moon, the two had walked hand in hand beside the restless sea she had made it quite plain to Nu, the son of Nu, that not even he, son of the chief of chiefs, could claim her unless there hung at the thong of his loin cloth the fangs of Oo.
“Nat-ul,” she had said to him, “wishes her man to be greater than other men. She loves Nu now better than her very life, but if Love is to walk at her side during a long life Pride and Respect must walk with it.” Her slender hand reached up to stroke the young giant’s black hair. “I am very proud of my Nu even now,” she continued, “for among all the young men of the tribe there is no greater hunter, or no mightier fighter than Nu, the son of Nu. Should you, single-handed, slay Oo before a grown man’s beard has darkened your cheek there will be none greater in all the world than Nat-ul’s mate, Nu, the son of Nu.”
The young man was still sensible to the sound of her soft voice and the caress of her gentle touch upon his brow. As these things had sent him speeding forth into the savage jungle in search of Oo while the day was still so young that the night-prowling beasts of prey were yet abroad, so they urged him forward deeper and deeper into the dark and trackless mazes of the tangled forest.
As he forged on the scent of Ta became stronger, until at last the huge, ungainly beast loomed large before Nu’s eyes. He was standing in a little clearing, in deep, rank jungle grasses and had he not been head on toward Nu he would not have seen him, since even his acute hearing was far too dull to apprehend the noiseless tread of the cave man, moving lightly up wind.
As the tiny, blood-shot eyes of the primordial beast discovered the man the great head went down, and Ta, ill natured and bellicose progenitor of the equally ill natured and bellicose rhino of the twentieth century, charged the lithe giant who had disturbed his antediluvian meditation.
The creature’s great bulk and awkward, uncouth lines belied his speed, for he tore down upon Nu with all the swiftness of a thoroughbred and had not the brain and muscle of the troglodyte been fitted by heritage and training to the successful meeting of such emergencies there would be no tale to tell today of Nu of the Niocene.
But the young man was prepared, and turning he ran with the swiftness of a hare toward the nearest tree, a huge, arboraceous fern towering upon the verge of the little clearing. Like a cat the man ran up the perpendicular bole, his hands and feet seeming barely to touch the projecting knobs marking the remains of former fronds which converted the towering stem into an easy stairway for such as he.
About Nu’s neck his stone-tipped spear hung by its rawhide thong down his back, while stone hatchet and stone knife dangled from his G-string, giving him free use of his hands for climbing. You or I, having once gained the seeming safety of the lowest fronds of the great tree, fifty feet above the ground, might have heaved a great sigh of relief that we had thus easily escaped the hideous monster beneath; but not so Nu, who was wise to the ways of the creatures of his remote age.
Not one whit did he abate his speed as he neared the lowest branch, nor did he even waste a precious second in a downward glance at his enemy. What need, indeed? Did he not know precisely what Ta would do? Instead he swung, monkey-like, to the broad leaf, and though the chances he took would have paled the face of a brave man today they did not cause Nu even to hesitate, as he ran lightly and swiftly along the bending, swaying frond, leaping just at the right instant toward the bole of a nearby jungle giant.
Nor was he an instant too soon. The frond from which he had sprung had scarce whipped up from beneath his weight when Ta, with all the force and momentum of a runaway locomotive, struck the base of the tree head on. The jar of that terrific collision shook the earth, there was the sound of the splintering of wood, and the mighty tree toppled to the ground with a deafening crash.
Nu, from an adjoining tree, looked down and grinned. He was not hunting Ta that day, and so he sprang from tree to tree until he had passed around the clearing, and then, coming to the surface once more, continued his way toward the distant lava cliffs where Oo, the man hunter, made his grim lair.
From among the tangled creepers through which the man wormed his sinuous way ugly little eyes peered down upon him from beneath shaggy, beetling brows, and great fighting tusks were bared, as the hairy ones growled and threatened from above; but Nu paid not the slightest attention to the huge, ferocious creatures that menaced him upon every hand. From earliest childhood he had been accustomed to the jabberings and scoldings of the ape-people, and so he knew that if he went his way in peace, harming them not, they would offer him no harm. One of lesser experience might have attempted to drive them away with menacing spear, or well-aimed hatchet, and thus have drawn down upon him a half dozen or more ferocious bulls against which no single warrior, however doughty, might have lived long enough to count his antagonists.
Threatening and unfriendly as the apes seemed the cave man really looked upon them as friends and allies, since between them and his own people there existed a species of friendly alliance, due no doubt to the similarity of their form and structure. In that long gone age when the world was young and its broad bosom teemed with countless thousands of carnivorous beasts and reptiles, and other myriads blackened the bosoms of its inland seas, and filled its warm, moist air with the flutter of their mighty, bat-like wings, man’s battle for survival stretched from sun to sun — there was no respite. His semi- arboreal habits took him often into the domains of the great and lesser apes, and from this contact had arisen what might best be termed an armed truce, for they alone of all the other inhabitants of the earth had spoken languages, both meager it is true, yet sufficient to their primitive wants, and as both languages had been born of the same needs to deal with identical conditions there were many words and phrases identical to both. Thus the troglodyte and the primordial ape could converse when necessity demanded, and as Nu traversed their country he understood their grumbling and chattering merely as warnings to him against the performance of any overt act. Had danger lurked in his path the hairy ones would have warned him of that too, for of such was their service to man who in return often hunted the more remorseless of their enemies, driving them from the land of the anthropoids.
On and on went Nu occasionally questioning the hairy ones he encountered for word of Oo, and always the replies confirmed him in his belief that he should come upon the man eater before the sun crawled into its dark cave for the night.
And so he did. He had passed out of the heavier vegetation, and was ascending a gentle rise that terminated in low volcanic cliffs when there came down upon the breeze to his alert nostrils the strong scent of Oo. There was little or no cover now, other than the rank jungle grass that overgrew the slope, and an occasional lofty fern rearing it
s tufted pinnacle a hundred feet; above the ground; but Nu was in no way desirous of cover. Cover that would protect him from the view of Go would hide Oo from him. He was not afraid that the saber-toothed tiger would run away from him — that was not Oo’s way — but he did not wish to come unexpectedly upon the animal in the thick grass.
He had approached to within a hundred yards of the cliffs now, and the scent of Oo had become as a stench in the sensitive nostrils of the cave man. Just ahead he could see the openings to several caves in the face of the rocky barrier, and in one of these he knew must lie the lair of his quarry.
Fifty yards from the cliff the grasses ceased except for scattered tufts that had found foothold among the broken rocks that strewed the ground, and as Nu emerged into this clear space he breathed a sigh of relief for during the past fifty yards a considerable portion of the way had been through a matted jungle that rose above his head. To have met Oo there would have spelled almost certain death for the cave man.
Now, as he bent his eyes toward the nearby cave mouths he discovered one before which was strewn such an array of gigantic bones that he needed no other evidence as to the identity of its occupant. Here, indeed, laired no lesser creature than the awesome Oo, the gigantic, saber-toothed tiger of antiquity. Even as Nu looked there came a low and ominous growl from the dark mouth of the foul cavern, and then in the blackness beyond the entrance Nu saw two flaming blotches of yellow glaring out upon him.
A moment later the mighty beast itself sauntered majestically into the sunlight. There it stood lashing its long tail from side to side, glaring with unblinking eyes straight at the rash man-thing who dared venture thus near its abode of death. The huge body, fully as large as that of a full grown bull, was beautifully marked with black stripes upon a vivid yellow ground, while the belly and breast were of the purest white.
Delphi Collected Works of Edgar Rice Burroughs (Illustrated) (Series Four Book 26) Page 442