“How far is it?” demanded Harston.
“If we start within the hour we can be back before midnight,” answered Vulmea.
He emptied his glass, rose, hitched at his girdle and looked at Henri.
“D’Chastillon,” he said, “are you mad, to kill an Indian hunter’?”
“What do you mean?” demanded Henri, starting.
“You mean to say you don’t know that your men killed an Indian in the woods last night?”
“None of my men was in the woods last night,” declared the Count.
“Well, somebody was,” grunted Vulmea, fumbling in a pocket. “I saw his head nailed to a tree near the edge of the forest. He wasn’t painted for war. I didn’t find any boot-tracks, from which I judged it’d been nailed up there before the storm. But there were plenty of moccasin tracks on the wet ground. Indians had seen that head. They were men of some other tribe, or they’d have taken it down. If they happen to be at peace with the tribe the dead man belonged to, they’ll make tracks to his village and tell his people.”
“Perhaps they killed him,” suggested Henri.
“No, they didn’t. But they know who did, for the same reason that I know. This chain was knotted about the stump of the severed neck. You must have been utterly mad, to identify your handiwork like that.”
He drew forth something and tossed it on the table before the Count, who lurched up choking, as his hand flew to his throat. It was the gold seal-chain he habitually wore about his neck.
Vulmea glanced questioningly at the others, and Villiers made a quick gesture to indicate the Count was not quite right in the head. Vulmea sheathed his cutlass and donned his plumed hat.
“All right; let’s go.”
The captains gulped down their wine and rose, hitching at their sword-belts. Villiers laid a hand on Henri’s arm and shook him slightly. The Count started and stared about him, then followed the others out, dazedly, the chain dangling from his fingers. But not all left the hail.
Francoise and Tina, forgotten on the stair as they peeped between the balustrades, saw Gallot loiter behind until the heavy door closed behind the others. Then he hurried to the fireplace and raked carefully at the smoldering coals. He sank to his knees and peered closely at something for along space. Then he rose and stole out of the hall by another door.
“What did he find in the fire?” whispered Tina.
Francoise shook her head, then, obeying the promptings of her curiosity, rose and went down to the empty hall. An instant later she was kneeling where the major domo had knelt, and she saw what he had seen.
It was the charred remnant of the map Vulmea had thrown into the fire. It was ready to crumble at a touch, but faint lines and bits of writing were still discernible upon it. She could not read the writing, but she could trace the outlines of what seemed to be the picture of a hill or crag, surrounded by marks evidently representing dense trees. From Gallot’s actions she believed he recognized it as portraying some topographical feature familiar to him. She knew the majordomo had penetrated further inland than any other man of the settlement.
Chapter 6: The Plunder of the Dead
Francoise came down the stair and paused at the sight of Count Henri seated at the table, turning the broken chain about in his hands. The fortress stood strangely quiet in the noonday heat. Voices of people within the stockade sounded subdued, muffled. The same drowsy stillness reigned on the beach outside where the rival crews lay in armed suspicion, separated by a few hundred yards of bare sand. Far out in the bay the War-Hawk lay with a handful of men aboard her, ready to snatch her out of reach at the slightest indication of treachery. The ship was Harston’s trump card, his best guarantee against the trickery of his associates.
Vulmea had plotted shrewdly to eliminate the chances of an ambush in the forest by either party, but as far as Francoise could see he had failed utterly to safe-guard himself against the treachery of his companions. He had disappeared into the woods, leading the two captains and their thirty men, and the girl was positive she would never see him alive again.
Presently she spoke, and her voice was strained and harsh.
“When they have the treasure they will kill Vulmea. What then? Are we to go aboard the ship! Can we trust Harston?”
Henri shook his head absently.
“Villiers whispered his plan to me. He will see that night overtakes the treasure-party so they are forced to camp in the forest. He will find a way to kill the Englishmen in their sleep. Then he and his men will come stealthily on to the beach. Just before dawn I will send some of my fishermen secretly from the fort to swim out and seize the ship. Neither Harston nor Vulmea thought of that. Villiers will come out of the forest, and with our united forces we will destroy the pirates camped on the beach. Then we will sail in the War-Hawk with all the treasure.”
“And what of me?” she asked with dry lips.
“I have promised you to Villiers,” he answered harshly, and without the slightest touch of sympathy. “But for my promise he would not take us off.”
He lifted the chain so it caught the gleam of the sun, slanting through a window. “I must have dropped it on the sand,” he muttered. “He found it-”
“You did not drop it on the sand,” said Francoise, in a voice as devoid of mercy as his own; her soul seemed turned to stone. “You tore it from your throat last night when you flogged Tina. I saw it gleaming on the floor before I left the hall.”
He looked up, his face grey with a terrible fear.
She laughed bitterly, sensing the mute question in his dilated eyes.
“Yes! The black man! He was here! He must have found the chain on the floor. I saw him, padding along the upper hallway.”
He sank back in his chair, the chain slipping from his nerveless hands.
“In the manor!” he whispered. “In spite of guards and bolted doors! I can no more guard against him than I can escape him! Then it was no dream — that clawing at my door last night! At my door!” he shrieked, tearing at the lace upon his collar as though it strangled him. “God curse him!”
The paroxysm passed, leaving him faint and trembling.
“I understand,” he panted, “the bolts on my chamber door balked even him. So he destroyed the ship upon which I might have escaped him, and he slew that wretched savage and left my chain upon him, to bring down the vengeance of his people on me. They have seen that chain upon my neck many a time.”
“Who is this black man?” asked Francoise, fear crawling along her spine.
“A juju-man of the Slave Coast,” he whispered, staring at her with weird eyes that seemed to look through her and far beyond to some dim doom.
“I built my wealth on human flesh. When I was younger my ships plied between the Slave Coast and the West Indies, supplying black men to the Spanish plantations. My partner was a black wizard of a coasttribe. He captured the slaves with his warriors, and I delivered them to the Indies. I was evil in those days, but he was ten times more evil. If ever a man sold -his soul to the Devil, he was that man. Even now in nightmares I am haunted by the sights I saw in his village when the moon hung red in the jungle trees, and the drums bellowed, and human victims screamed on the altars of his heathen gods.
“In the end I tricked him out of his share of the trade, and sold him to the Spaniards who chained him to a galley’s oar. He swore an awful vengeance upon me, but I laughed, for I believed not even he could escape the fate to which I had delivered him.
“As the years passed, however, I could not forget him, and would wake sometimes in fright, his threat ringing in my ears. I told myself that he was dead, long ago, under the lashes of the Spaniards. Then one day there came to me word that a strange black man, with the scars of galley-chains on his wrists, had come to France and was seeking me.
“He knew me by another name, in the old days, but I knew he would trace me out. In haste I sold my lands and put to sea, as you know. With a whole world between us, I thought I would be safe. But he has t
racked me down and he is lurking out there, like a coiled cobra.”
“What do you mean, ‘He destroyed the ship’?’ asked Francoise uneasily.
“The wizards of the Slave Coast have the power of raising tempests!” whispered the Count, from grey lips. “Witchcraft!”
Francoise shuddered. That sudden tempest, she knew, had been but a freak of chance; no man could summon a storm at will. And a savage raised in the blackness of a West Coast jungle might be able to enter a fortress guarded by armed men, when there was a mist to blur their sight. This grim stranger was only a man of flesh and blood. But she shivered, remembering a drum that droned exultantly above the whine of the storm-
Henri’s weird eyes lit palely as he gazed beyond the tapestried walls to far, invisible horizons.
“I’ll trick him yet,” he whispered. “Let him delay to strike this night-dawn will find me with a ship under my heels and again I’ll cast an ocean between me and his vengeance.”
“Hell’s fire!”
Vulmea stopped short. Behind him the seamen halted, in two compact clumps. They were following an old Indian path which led due east, and the beach was no longer visible.
“What are you stopping for?” demanded Harston suspiciously.
Somebody’s on the trail ahead of us,” growled Vulmea. “Somebody in boots. His spoor’s not more than an hour old. Did either of you swine send a man ahead of us for any reason?”
Both captains loudly disclaimed any such act, glaring at each other with mutual disbelief. Vulmea shook his head disgustedly and strode on, and the seamen rolled after him. Men of the sea, accustomed to the wide expanses of blue water, they were ill at ease with the green mysterious walls of trees and vines hemming them in. The path wound and twisted until most of them lost all sense of direction.
“Damned peculiar things going on around here,” growled Vulmea. “If Henri didn’t hang up that Indian’s head, who did? They’ll believe he did, anyway. That’s an insult. When his tribe learns about it, there’ll be hell to pay. I hope we’re out of these woods before they take the warpath.”
When the trail veered northward Vulmea left it, and began threading his way through the dense trees in a southeasterly direction. Harston glanced uneasily at Villiers. This might force a change in their plans. Within a few hundred feet from the path both were hopelessly lost.
Suspicions of many kinds were gnawing both men when they suddenly emerged from the thick woods and saw just ahead of them a gaunt crag that jutted up from the forest floor. A dim path leading out of the woods from the east ran among a cluster of boulders and wound up the crag on a ladder of stony shelves to a flat ledge near the summit.
“That trail is the one I followed, running from the Indians,” said Vulmea, halting. “It leads up to a cave behind that ledge. In that cave are the bodies of da Verrazano and his men, and the treasure. But a word before we go up after it: if you kill me here, you’ll never find your way back to the trail. I know how helpless you all are in the deep woods. Of course the beach lies due west, but if you have to make your way through the tangled woods, burdened with the plunder, it’ll take you days instead of hours. I don’t think these woods will be very safe for white men when the Indians learn about that head in the tree.”
He laughed at the ghastly, mirthless smiles with which they greeted his recognition of their secret intentions. And he also comprehended the thought that sprang in the mind of each: let the Irishman secure the loot for them, and lead them back to the trail before they killed him.
“Three of us are enough to lug the loot down from the cave,” he said.
Harston laughed sardonically.
“Do you think I’m fool enough to go tip there alone with you and Villiers? My boatswain comes with me!” He designated a brawny, hard-faced giant, naked to his belt, with gold hoops in his ears, and a crimson scarf knotted about his head.
“And my executioner comes with me!” growled Villiers. He beckoned a lean sea-thief with a face like a parchmentcovered skull, who carried a great scimitar naked over his bony shoulder.
Vulmea shrugged his shoulders. “Very well. Follow me.”
They were close on his heels as he strode up the winding path. They crowded him close as he passed through the cleft in the wall behind the ledge, and their breath sucked in greedily as he called their attention to the iron-bound chests on either side of the short tunnel.
“A rich cargo there,” he said carelessly. “Garments, weapons, ornaments. But the real treasure lies beyond that door.”
He pushed it partly open and drew aside to let his companions look through.
They looked into a wide cavern, lit vaguely by a blue glow that shimmered through it smoky mist-like haze. A great ebon table stood in the midst of the cavern, and in a carved chair with a high back and broad arms sat a giant figure, fabulous and fantastic-there sat Giovanni da Verrazano, his great head sunk on his bosom, one shrivelled hand still gripping a jeweled goblet; da Verrazano. in his plumed hat, his gilt-embroidered coat with jeweled buttons that winked in the blue flame, his flaring boots and gold-worked baldric that upheld a jewel-hilted sword in a golden sheath.
And ranging the board, each with his chin resting on his lace-bedecked breast, sat the eleven buccaneers. The blue fire played weirdly on them, as it played like a nimbus of frozen fire about the heap of curiously-cut gems which shone in the center of the table- the jewels of the Montezumas! The stones whose value was greater than the value of all the rest of the known gems in the world put together!
The faces of the pirates showed pallid in the blue glow.
“Go in and take them,” invited Vulmea, and Harston and Villiers crowded past him, jostling one another in their haste. Their followers were treading on their heels. Villiers kicked the door wide open-and halted with one foot on the threshold at the sight of a figure on the floor, previously hidden by the partly-closed door. It was a man, prone and contorted, head drawn back between his shoulders, white face twisted in a grin of mortal agony, clawed fingers gripping his own throat.
“Gallot!” ejaculated Villiers. “What-!” With sudden suspicion he thrust his head into the bluish mist that filled the inner cavern. And he choked and screamed: “There is death in the smoke!”
Even as he screamed, Vulmea hurled his weight against the four men bunched in the doorway, sending them staggering-but not headlong into the cavern as he had planned. They were recoiling at the sight of the dead man and the realization of the trap, and his violent impact, while it threw them off their feet, yet failed of the result he desired. Harston and Villiers sprawled half over the threshold on their knees, the boatswain tumbling over their legs, and the executioner caromed against the wall. Before Vulmea could follow up his intention of kicking the fallen men into the cavern and holding the door against them until the poisonous mist did its deadly work, he had to turn and defend himself against the frothing onslaught of the executioner.
The Frenchman missed a tremendous swipe with his headsman’s sword as the Irishman ducked, and the great blade banged against the stone wall, scattering blue sparks. The next instant his skull-faced head rolled on the cavern floor under the bite of Vulmea’s cutlass.
In the split seconds this action had consumed, the boatswain regained his feet and fell on the Irishman, raining blows with a cutlass. Blade met blade with a ring of steel that was deafening in the narrow tunnel. The two captains rolled back across the threshold, gagging and purple in the face, too near strangled to shout, and Vulmea redoubled his efforts, striving to dispose of his antagonist so he could cut down his rivals before they could recover from the effects of the poison. The boatswain was driven backward, dripping blood at each step, and he began desperately to bellow for his mates. But before Vulmea could deal the final stroke, the two chiefs, gasping but murderous, came at him with swords in their hands, croaking for their men.
Vulmea bounded back and leaped out onto the ledge, fearing to be trapped by the men coming in response to their captains’ yells.
These were not coming as fast as he expected, however. They heard the muffled shouts issuing from the cavern, but no man dared start up the path for fear of a sword in the back. Each band faced the other tensely, grasping weapons but incapable of decision, and when they saw Vulmea bound out on the ledge, they merely gaped. While they stood with their matches smoldering he ran up the ladder of handholds niched in the rock and threw himself prone on the summit of the crag, out of their sight.
The captains stormed out on the ledge and their men, seeing their leaders were not at sword-strokes, ceased menacing each other and gaped in greater bewilderment.
“Dog!” screamed Villiers. “You planned to poison us! Traitor!”
Vulmea mocked them from above.
“What did you expect? You two were planning to cut my throat as soon as I got the plunder for you. If it hadn’t been for that fool Gallot I’d have trapped the four of you and explained to your men how you rushed in heedless to your doom!”
“And you’d have taken my ship and all the loot!” frothed Harston.
“Aye! And the pick of both crews! It was Gallot’s footprints I saw on the trail. I wonder how the fool learned of this cave.”
“If we hadn’t seen his body we’d have walked into that death-trap,” muttered Villiers, his dark face still ashy. “That blue smoke was like unseen fingers crushing my throat.”
“Well, what are you going to do’?” their tormentor yelled sardonically.
“What are we going to do?” asked Villiers of Harston.
“You can’t get the jewels,” Vulmea assured them with satisfaction from his aerie. “That mist will strangle you. It nearly got me, when I stepped in there. Listen and I’ll tell you a tale the Indians tell in their lodges when the fires burn low! Once, long ago, twelve strange men came out of the sea and found a cave and heaped it with gold and gems. But while they sat drinking and singing, the earth shook and smoke came out of the earth and strangled them. Thereafter the tribes all shunned the spot as haunted and accursed by evil spirits.
Delphi Works of Robert E. Howard (Illustrated) (Series Four) Page 325