Works of Robert W Chambers

by Robert W. Chambers

  Whether the beast meant to punish him, whether in fact it saw him at all or came on merely in the fury of flight, Smith never knew. The letter was doubtless the case.

  But the creature, growling and snarling, was almost on top of him before he concluded to fire. After that he remembered nothing.

  They discovered him lying flat in the grass all over blood. Across his body sprawled the panther, still kicking and biting at the empty air and tearing Smith’s clothes to ribbons. And over both of them swarmed the dogs, snarling, tugging, and nipping at the panther’s tough hide.

  Smith, who had been knocked senseless by the impact, deprived of breath also, but not otherwise injured, came to when Tiger-foot soused him with water from the branch.

  Damaris, deadly pale, kneeling beside him, saw him open his eyes and mouth, and she bent her head to hear what he was trying to say.

  “Did I get him?” were the words of Smith.

  And Damaris knew that she was in love.

  OWL’S HEAD

  WHEN an old palmetto tree falls or is cut down it takes a long while for the trunk to decay. This fact is contrary to general opinion.

  Brown happened to have heard it.

  For reasons known only to itself the Government had sent Brown to Iris Lake to find out why there were no stagnant pools there and why the clear, shallow waters of the lake were always in motion. In addition, the Government desired to be informed why there was a rock basin to the lake; whether the crystalline flood welled up through bottom crevices or whether there was an inlet through the forests; whether the waters finally were drained through subterranean depths or through surface channels that ultimately found a way to the Atlantic.

  With Bown went a scientific gentleman named Gibb, commissioned also by the Government to find out whether the Carolina parroquet really did nest in the Iris Lake region, and whether it was true that any scarlet flamingoes still visited that somewhat isolated sheet of semi-tropical water.

  Saw-grass had left its wicked insignia on Gibb’s nose and ears, and had slashed up Brown more or less; sun, briers, creepers, saw-palmetto, and prickly vegetation had added nothing to the physical beauty of either. Also, the seat of Gibb’s breeches was missing, having been detained on a thorn bush; and the person of Gibb was now decorated with a section of spare sacking.

  That morning Brown cooked breakfast on Owl’s Head, a small and almost circular island dominating the water level of Iris Lake by an inch or so. Dry land being at a premium in that region, and having sighted the lone palmetto on Owl’s Head, they had made for it with pole and paddle.

  Brown fried a youthful limpkin in bacon and mush; Gibb, whistling cheerfully, beat about with his brush hook to clear out any rattlers and moccasins that might have been inclined to join in the festivities. Finally he came back to the fire and gazed upon the limpkin with unfeigned loathing.

  “A complete change of diet is what we need,” he said. “Of koonti I’ve had enough, also of palm cabbage, fried fishy birds and mush—”

  “Oh, shut up and tell me a story,” said Brown, amiably. Gibb was the volunteer bard of the expedition.

  He began:

  “Once upon a time there lived at Delmonico’s a rich and handsome tenderloin steak — so rich, in fact, that he was soon trimmed and smothered in onions, and that was the end of that rich, handsome, juicy—”

  “Quit!” shouted Brown, hurling at his comrade the head of the defunct limpkin.

  “That settles it; I eat no breakfast,” observed Gibb, dodging the feathered missile with a shudder. But he did, gnawing away lustily and with every symptom of satisfaction, until the breakfast was all gone and the plates closely scraped.

  “How old is that tree?” inquired Brown, glancing up at the palmetto from the huge trunk of a fallen tree of the same species upon which he was squatting cross-legged. Gibbs looked around.

  “About two hundred years,” he said.

  Naturally, the “boot-jacks” had disappeared years and years ago. The tree stood like an enormous column of silver, tufted at the top with sweeping plumes of green.

  “If that tree,” said Brown, “is as old as you say, what about this one I’m sitting on?”

  “A hundred years older.”

  “It’s very solid yet.”

  “Quite.”

  “No doubt the Spaniards saw it.”

  “No doubt,” said Gibb, gnawing thoughtfully upon the wishbone.

  Brown looked aloft at the towering green feather dusters above him.

  “This tree would make a fine lookout. Probably the Seminoles used it for such in that disgraceful war with us.”

  “Maybe the Spaniards used the one you’re sitting on.”

  Brown gravely rubbed his fingers over the surface of the trunk. It scaled off in spots, but the wood underneath appeared to be sound. After he had inadvertently dislodged and enraged a scorpion, he desisted, slew the villainous little poisoner, and, rising, walked over to the standing tree.

  “Hello!” he said presently. “Somebody has decorated the trunk with knife and colour. Come here, Gibb.”

  “Seminoles, probably.”

  “Maybe. But — there is no Owl Clan in the Seminole nation, is there?”

  “None.”

  “Was there ever?” inquired Brown, fingering the tree trunk curiously.

  They both studied the decoration on the bark for a few moments; then Gibb said:

  “Yes, there was an Owl Clan in the Seminole nation. I think the Spaniards slew the last living representatives of the clan. Beckerlin mentions the episode in his biography of Ponce de Leon, I believe.”

  “That’s interesting,” murmured Brown. “What do you make out of this decoration, anyway?”

  The young men examined it attentively. Deep in the trunk had been carved the head of a tiger owl. How long ago the original incisions had been made it was impossible to say, because it appeared evident that, from time to time, whenever the tree seemed inclined to cover the scar with healing bark and fibre, somebody had recut the original design.

  The last cutting had been done recently. Moreover, somebody had painted the relief with a brownish-red substance picked out in blue and black.

  “That’s a tiger owl’s head all right,” said Brown, “but what is the rest of the stuff? It’s all smeared with Spanish red.”

  “Seminole hieroglyphics, I suppose — pictographs — whatever you call ‘em.”

  “Recent?”

  “Well these, of course, are recent. Maybe they’re retracings from originals painted there a century ago — perhaps more.”

  Brown fished out his notebook and a pencil, and standing before the tree he made a careful drawing of the embellishments on the trunk.

  Gibb, watching him over his shoulder, said:

  “You know that upper design looks like the arms of Spain.”

  “What!”

  “There’s the Spanish crown — and the collar of the Fleece — or Saint Esprit — or whatever it is. But what is that thing on the left? By jinks! It’s a Spanish dagger!”

  After a while Brown said:

  “That’s funny, isn’t it?”

  “It’s so funny,” replied Gibb, “that I want to dig holes around this tree.”

  “Dig holes?”

  “There may be things in the ground, here,” he said vaguely.

  “Why do you think so?”

  “I just seem to think so; I don’t know why,” admitted Gibb, still more vaguely, looking about him where he stood. “There are the Spanish arms, there’s the owl’s head; there’s a Seminole war arrow; there’s a Spanish dagger. Who knows what they once signified? A fight, here, on this tiny island? — Spaniard versus Seminole — arrow against dagger? Did the last warrior of the Owl Clan fall here under a Spanish dagger? Did the Spaniard fall with a Seminole war arrow through the joint of his gorget? Did they both die? Is this decoration marking their burial places? Or is it merely a ‘be it remembered’?”

  “You always were a good story t
eller,” conceded Brown, smiling. “Write it up for some magazine.”

  “That may be; but I’m going to dig.”

  “Go on and dig then.”

  “That means we camp here, you’ understand?”

  “It’s dry. Why not?”

  “You’re on,” said Gibb; and he went to the beached canoe, picked up both axes, a pick, a shovel, and a tent, and brought back the bundle on his shoulders.

  “We can look for parroquets, flamingoes, and outlets this afternoon,” he remarked. “Now let’s pitch the tent, cut firewood, and then do a little pleasurable Egging.”

  Brown erected the tent; Gibb, flourishing his axe, looked about for dry wood. His eye presently fell on the fallen palmetto; he marked a section, then, swinging his axe, began to hew it.

  Which was no child’s work; and presently Brown picked up his axe and took a hand; and the silvery chips flew like hail.

  Resting presently, one foot on the fallen tree, Gibb said:

  “There’s another odd thing about that tree. It didn’t fall by any act of God: somebody cut it down. Look closely.”

  “That’s right,” nodded Brown.

  “Think of it,” continued the other. “This ancient palmetto was probably chopped down in the days of the Spaniards. What do you know about that, Brown?”

  They fell to hewing again; chips rained all around them, amazing them to find much of the fibre so sound.

  When at length the trunk was hewn through, they rolled the heavy section from its immemorial but perfectly dry bed, and pushed it into place for a backlog to their fire.

  Gibb was carefully building the fire against it, and Brown squatted on his haunches looking on, when something on the under side of the backlog attracted his attention. And the next moment he had scattered the brands and rolled the log away from the fire.

  “Gibb,” he said excitedly, “look at that!”

  There could me no mistake; imbedded in the trunk of the fallen palmetto, driven in deep and held by ancient spikes, was a plate of metal.

  The metal plate was black, whether so enamelled, or whether the thin sheet of beaten silver welded to its surface had turned black, they did not know.

  But on it, scratched through to the steel underneath with some keen-pointed instrument, was a replica of the design on the standing tree — the Spanish arms, the owl’s head, an arrow, and a dagger — all deeply incised and now outlined in brilliant orange rust against the black metallic background.

  “That tree,” said Gibb, in an awed voice, “bore that plate when it was standing in the days of Ponce de Leon!”

  Brown felt himself trembling slightly, but he examined the metal plate and finally managed to pry it from the trunk with the hook of his adz.

  Whereupon, Gibb became greatly agitated.

  “Do you know what it is!” he cried. “It’s a part of a suit of Spanish armour! I know enough about armour to tell that much. It’s what they called a ‘tasset.’ Tassets covered the thighs in a series of overlapping steel plates, like the jointed scales on a lobster’s tail. Do you get me?”

  “Sure,” said Brown feverishly; “let’s dig!” And the glitter in his eyes was that unholy blaze kindled only by the lust for buried treasure. No other desire arouses such a tigerish lustre in the human eye.

  From them they flung everything save undershirts and trousers; then they went at it, pick and shovel.

  By noon they had excavated a hole large enough for them to see that there was nothing in it except more dirt. Brown leaned upon the handle of his pick and panted; Gibb sat back upon the butt of his shovel.

  “Somebody,” he said gloomily, “has got to go out in the canoe and shoot one of those accursed limpkins for dinner. The other had better continue to dig.”

  Brown fished out his lucky penny.

  “Heads, I go,” he said, and flipped it up. It came down tails.

  Gibbs, afloat in the canoe presently, lingered near, shouting at intervals across the water for news. There was no news of buried treasure; no limpkins either in that neighborhood, as Brown pointed out to him.

  So little by little Gibb edged along the saw-grass, northward; and, flushing no game of any description in the vicinity of Owl’s Head, he picked up his paddle, settled down to the nauseating business of food getting, and, cursing, started for parts remote.

  Brown, pausing in his violent assault upon the ground, looked out across Iris Lake and saw a speck on the waters, miles to the north. The speck was Gibb in his canoe, still hunting the loathly limpkin.

  It grew hot on Owl’s Head. The noon sun signalled Brown to cut it out, but he disregarded the celestial hint until, suddenly, under his flat sun helmet, he found himself gazing at a dull-black world instead of a sunny, green one.

  Which scared him sufficiently, and he reeled to the lagoon and stuck his head into the water, where the palmetto’s shadow fell.

  It was a close call. Had his helmet not been lined with solaro it might have gone hard with Brown.

  In the shadow of the palmetto, therefore, he sat down and filled his cob pipe. Gradually the darkness and dizziness wore away; the world resumed its sunny, green tints; a little breeze ruffled the blue lagoon. Gibb and his canoe had disappeared.

  When the sun had declined a little and the sea breeze blew fresher, Brown laid away his pipe.

  It was not yet safe to resume his digging in the sunshine, but he could prowl around under the shade and plan future excavations. As a matter of fact, he couldn’t keep away from the place very long. Such is the insidious lust for buried treasure.

  And what happened to Brown was this: he walked back to the tent and the scene of his digging; and under the standing palmetto, bolt upright, he saw a girl. Which spectacle for a moment deprived him of breath.

  She was young and ragged to an immodest degree, her sun-tanned knees being apparent through rents in her skirt. Her bodice was laced with the tough tendrils of a vine. She wore a brilliant scarlet kerchief around her head, and nothing else of clothing except a mass of thick, lustrous brown hair.

  Her small, naked feet were as smooth as amber and seemed almost translucent to Brown — like the clear, golden skin of a chameleon.

  She looked at Brown; and something immediately suggested that he take off his helmet — whether instinctive good manners or the poise of her small head, he did not stop to analyze. But the sun immediately suggested that he cover his head, which he did.

  “Where did you come from?” she asked tranquilly — as though a youthful princess were asking the business of a strange beggar at her door.

  The cool demand for his credentials nonplussed him for a moment, then, oddly enough, he experienced a desire for self-vindication — though why he should have desired to figure importantly in the eyes of this young and ragged girl, he did not clearly understand.

  “I have been sent,” he said, “by the United States Government, to report upon the physical phenomena of Iris Lake.”

  “Why don’t you do it, then?” she said quietly. Which question jolted Brown disagreeably.

  “I am in process of doing it,” he said.

  “You are in process of digging holes on Owl’s Head,” she remarked. “Please don’t dig any more.”

  “Why not?” he asked, astonished.

  “Because Owl’s Head belongs to us.”

  “This island belongs to you?”

  “Why, yes.”

  “Since when?”

  “Always,” she said, dreamily.

  “And what is your name?”

  “Isene Herrara.”

  “Do you live near here?” he demanded.

  She turned her slender body from the hips, her feet remaining motionless, and pointed toward the southeast A point of palms jutted out into the lake there, perhaps a mile away, but the foreground seemed an impenetrable waste of high and poisonous saw-grass.

  “I live there,” she replied.

  He said:

  “I had no idea that anybody lived in this region. When did you
r family come here?”

  “They have always been here.”

  “Always?”

  She shrugged her youthful shoulders.

  “No, not always.” And, looking down into the excavation, her hands clasped behind her: “Why were you digging? I saw your smoke from the house, through the sea-glass. That is why I came. Why are you digging?” And, turning her head, she looked over her shoulder at Brown.

  The face he saw, framed in the silky hair under the brow kerchief of scarlet, was a smooth, narrow oval, flawless as ivory. A delicate carmine flush tinted the cheeks; her lips were brilliant, her eyes had the splendour of dark stars.

  “I was digging,” said Brown slowly, “out of sheer curiosity. We — my friend Gibb and I — found here what we thought might be evidences of ancient Spanish occupation. So we began to dig.”

  “But why?”

  “Well,” he said, reddening, “we thought something might have been buried here — gold perhaps.”

  “Gold?”

  “Why not? Didn’t it ever occur to you?”

  “No,” she said.

  “Then you — your people — have never dug up this place?”

  “Never.”

  “And yet you say the island is yours!”

  “Yes.”

  Brown pointed at the design on the palmetto behind her, and she turned and glanced at it.

  “What is that?” he asked.

  “That? Oh, it is something concerning my own family. It was done many, many years ago. Every four or five years my father recuts it and our friend, Tiger-Owl, paints it.”

  “Tiger-Owl?”

  “A Seminole Indian.”

  “Do you know what this design signifies?” asked Brown, amazed.

  “Father has told me; his father told him — and so it goes, very, very far back—” she made a graceful gesture— “until it tires me to count the years.”

  She stepped back, daintily, from the excavation and turned and looked at the palmetto tree. Brown came up and stood beside her. She laid one slim finger on the deeply scored carving.

  “The arms of Spain,” she said: “the first of my family to come here was Spanish.... And this owl’s head is in memory of a Seminole warrior of the Owl Clan. He was the first of my friend Tiger-Owl’s people-” she moved her finger to the right: “the Spaniard slew him with this dagger, here on this island — years and years ago.... And the broken arrow confirms his death and the Spaniard’s victory.... This is what we have been taught — we Herraras — year after year, century after century — living in the palm forest yonder, generation after generation.... So we keep the record cut clean on the palmetto, here; and Tiger-Owl’s people, for generations, have kept it painted. That is the story, senor!”