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Title: The Iron Star
Author: Taine, John [Bell, Eric Temple] (1883-1960)
Author [1943 introductory description]: Anonymous
Date of first publication: 1930
Edition used as base for this ebook:
   Famous Fantastic Mysteries, September 1943
   [Chicago and New York: All-Fiction Field, Inc.]
Date first posted: 23 August 2015
Date last updated: 23 August 2015
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #1268

This ebook was produced by Al Haines


PUBLISHER'S NOTE

Italics in the original printed edition are indicated _thus_.

As part of the conversion of the book to its new digital
format, we have made certain minor adjustments in its layout.

A table of contents has been added for the convenience of
the reader.






THE IRON STAR

By John Taine


_He felt the paw of the beast on his shoulder--the beast that once was
a man--and before long he must turn back on all his human kind, to
march back with the laggard brutes to a gray and dawnless past....
Could medical science find the answer to the riddle in the jungle's
depths, before it was too late to save him--and the world?_



_First magazine rights purchased from the author_




  CONTENTS

  I.  MYSTERY OUT OF THE JUNGLE
  II.  MAD IMPULSE
  III.  HIS PEOPLE
  IV.  THE FIGHT AT THE RAVINE
  V.  THE CAPTAIN
  VI.  THEIR SLAVE
  VII.  THE IRON FACE
  VIII.  THE IDOL BREAKERS
  IX.  THE SHINING CITY
  X.  THE SECRET OF THE METEOR




CHAPTER I

MYSTERY OUT OF THE JUNGLE

YOUNG Doctor Colton was puzzled.  His patient, a grizzled, muscular man
of about forty-five, showed no signs of a nervous breakdown, nor was
there any evidence of organic disease.  Swain had stripped to the skin,
and the long drawn out examination left no part of his anatomy
unexplored.  Yet it had disclosed precisely nothing.  Nevertheless he
was a very sick man, in fact sicker than he himself guessed.

Twenty years as a medical missionary in the fever-ridden swamps and
jungles of the upper Congo had sapped his vitality and rotted his
character to its very roots.  In his secret heart Swain knew what ailed
him, yet such was his disorder that he strove to deceive even himself
as to its true nature.

Once as frank and open as the day, the ex-missionary now was as tricky
a liar as ever fooled a doctor.  Five years after his return to America
Swain had sought out Colton--"Colton of Chicago"--the brilliant leader
in tropical medicine, with the self-avowed purpose of being cured, but
with the subconscious desire to prove himself incurable and smarter
than any physician living.  And now, gloating over the doctor's puzzled
frown, he felt that he had triumphed.

As he buttoned up his shirt and fastened his collar, he experienced a
subtle thrill of simian cunning.  Like a clever ape making a monkey of
its master, he, the humble missionary, with no more science presumably
than sufficed to reduce a fracture or prescribe for a colic, had routed
the great Colton on his own specialty.

His disease was tropical because it had been contracted in the tropics.
But neither Colton nor any other minister to human ills could name the
disorder, for it was not human.  Swain knew that henceforth he could
sin in perfect security.  If tropical medicine at its brainiest, as
represented by Colton, was powerless to detect him, the Chicago police
could spread no net to snare his nimble feet.

"So you don't know what is the matter with me?" he asked with an
ironical smile.  "I was told you are the best man in America on
tropical diseases."

Colton ignored the back-handed compliment.

"You are ill," he replied slowly.  "A country druggist could see that
much.  But I am not sure that you have come to the right man, in spite
of your twenty years in the tropics."  He paused, and gazed out over
the flashing waters of the lake while Swain tied his shoes.  "By the
way," he resumed casually, "have you ever used drugs?"

An expression of virtuous obstinacy deepened the severe lines about the
eyes and mouth of the retired missionary.

"I prefer to think," he replied with puritanical precision, "that I
contracted some obscure tropical fever during my work in Africa."

"You do not deny that you have taken harmful drugs?" Colton persisted.

For a fraction of a second Swain hesitated.  His code had long since
grown sufficiently elastic to embrace lies, provided they were white,
or at worst gray.  With a truly animal craftiness he decided that a
frank statement of the whole truth would be more deceptive than a white
lie.

"No," he said, with a defiant glance at the skeptical physician, "I
have never been a drug addict.  I have been tempted, often, to sink to
the level of the degenerate natives whom I tried to rescue.  But I
never gave way.  You would not call the occasional use of veronal for
insomnia a harmful habit, would you?"

"That depends upon what you consider 'occasional'," the doctor retorted
dryly.  "But I need not press the point, if veronal is your only
weakness.  You are not a victim of that particular foolishness--at
least not yet.  Something else, some less obvious vice, is at the root
of your trouble."  His manner abruptly hardened.  "It isn't veronal, or
morphine, or chloral that has made you what you are.  Those things are
rather hard to get, I imagine, in the jungles of the Congo.  But," and
his voice stung like a whip, "you discovered some rottener beastliness
in that forsaken hole, and you are its slave.  No doctor on earth can
do you one particle of good so long as you use your perverted ingenuity
to conceal your trouble.  Come on, now, confess.  Then I may be able to
help you.  Otherwise you might as well pitch your money out of the
window."

"I came to your office to consult you about my health, not to be
insulted.  Good afternoon."

Colton laughed good humoredly.  He thought he understood the tantrums
of the sick, and he did, provided the patient was an ordinary human
being.

"All right, Mr. Swain, if you choose to take it that way there will be
no fee.  So you can save your money to throw in the lake.  It will be
less of a waste.  Drop in again when you feel like talking."

Swain slammed the door and strode through the waiting room, looking
neither to right nor left.  It was not merely his desire to escape from
the vicinity of Colton's quiet sarcasm that drove him headlong down the
hall to the elevator.  His craving had taken him suddenly by the
throat, and to appease his abnormal hunger he must reach the privacy of
his apartment.

While waiting impatiently for the elevator he had to strain his
self-control to the breaking point to refrain from wrenching open the
iron gates and clambering hand over hand down the steel cable.  The
brutal muscles on his neck stood out like knotted cords, and his lean,
powerful hands clenched and unclenched nervously.  At last the elevator
stopped opposite him, the gates clashed open, and he darted into the
cage like a hunted beast.  Half a minute later he was dashing across
Michigan Avenue, dodging in and out of the traffic like a ferret, on
his reckless way to the nearest I. C. station.  A southbound express
whisked him and his terrible disease off with a hundred normal human
beings to the Hyde Park residence district.



AFTER his patient's precipitate departure, Colton paced slowly back and
forth before the open windows of his office, pausing occasionally to
glance down on the scudding automobiles or out over the lake, all the
time thinking desperately of the man whose case had baffled him
completely.  It was the first serious setback to his diagnostic skill
which he had encountered, and his total failure to understand the
patient irritated him.

He had a curious sensation of having almost grasped the clue to a
riddle whose solution eluded his mind for the lack of a single, simple
word.  His eyes idly explored the signs on the windows of the office
building opposite his own on the cross street, as if seeking there the
key to the mystery.

Far down on the street level the tall gilt letters of a beauty parlor
flashing in the afternoon sun challenged his attention.  Those letters
held the clue to his problem, but his mind, seeking elsewhere, did not
yet register.  Turning from the window, Colton resumed his slow pacing
back and forth.  Suddenly, and apparently from nowhere, the word for
which he groped leaped into his consciousness.  It was hair.

All through his minute examination of Swain, the doctor had struggled
with a feeling of eerie familiarity which he could not place.  Why, he
puzzled, did the patient remind him so persistently of something a
little less than human?  And what, exactly, did Swain's body recall?
Colton gave it up.  The curious arrangement of the hair on Swain's body
might only be one of those rare freaks of nature that mean nothing in
particular.

As he now remembered it, there were numerous tiny whorls of down on
certain spots of Swain's skin which, on the normal human body, are
smooth and bare.  The net impression left by this anomaly was decidedly
unpleasant.

Colton decided to forget what he had seen.  Brooding over it could do
neither him nor the patient any good.  Turning resolutely to his desk
he set to work on the manuscript of his forthcoming book, _Man and the
Amoeba_.  The disagreeable thought which was to uproot his life and
transplant it to strange regions of which few human beings have ever
dreamed, was forgotten for the moment in the alluring mazes of medical
research.

In the meantime Swain, tensely muscular as a gorilla, had bounded from
the express at Fifty-third Street and was hurrying west as fast as his
long, ambling stride could take him.  He must reach his apartment at
once or go mad.  Suddenly he stopped short, arrested by the shrill cry
of an Italian fruit peddler.

"Banan', oranges, fresha banan', nice sweeta oranges!" the man chanted
in a high treble as he pushed his barrow slowly along, close to the
sidewalk.

Swain's eyes devoured the red and gold fruit heaped high on the barrow
not ten feet away.  His muscles tightened, and a trickle of saliva
appeared at the corners of his mouth.  Seeing a prospective customer in
the wild-looking man by the lamp post, the peddler abandoned his push
cart and hastened forward with a basket of bananas.  For a moment it
seemed as if the peddler would not reach the sidewalk alive.

A bestial look of insensate rage distorted the lowering face of the
ex-missionary, his eyes rounded and became small as they fixed in a red
glare on those of the astonished peddler, and the distended muscles of
his legs tightened for the leap.  But he never sprang.  The expression
of hatred and inhuman desire relaxed suddenly in a spasm of shocked
surprise, and with a curious, ferine movement, unlike anything human,
Swain swung himself by one arm round the lamp post and made off to the
west with a rolling, lurching amble like that of a drunken man.

At Ellis Avenue he turned south.  In a few moments he had let himself
in by his latchkey, which blundered for the keyhole in his trembling
fingers.  Three steps at a time he sprang up the stairs to his
apartment.  The whole second floor was his, so he made no effort to
conceal his movements.

His face working in a horrible agony, he crouched down by the side of
his bed and peered under it.  The small flat steamer trunk was where he
had left it; no thief had tampered with his nameless treasure in his
absence.  One muscular hand shot under the bed and grasped the iron
handle of the trunk.  For perhaps thirty seconds the slave of a strange
sin tugged and panted to budge that insignificant steamer trunk.  At
last, putting forth all the knotted strength of his back, arm and
muscular chest, he got the proper leverage.  Half an inch at a time the
trunk was jerked free of the bed.

Whatever lay in that trunk was phenomenally heavy.

Still panting from his exertions, Swain fumbled for the key.  The
perspiration streamed down his face and neck as he turned the key in
the lock and raised the lid.

The trunk was empty.  Not so much as the customary paper or cloth
lining concealed the bare boards.  Swain's visiting card, with his
Congo address scribbled in pencil, had been secured by a single small
tack to the floor of the trunk.  Beyond this somewhat unusual mark
there was nothing to identify the ownership.  On the outside appeared
the usual steamer labels, but no name.



SEATING himself on the edge of the bed, Swain propped his elbows on his
knees and sunk his fists into his cheeks.  For fully ten minutes he sat
thus, with his face over the empty trunk, staring down at the tack
which fastened his visiting card.  Seeing him sitting there fascinated
a casual observer would have jumped to the conclusion that Swain was
practising self-hypnotism.

As he stared motionless at the tack his features underwent a curious
transformation.  It would be difficult to describe exactly the nature
of the subtle change which gradually overspread the tense muscles of
his face.  Although it is inaccurate and at best a rough approximation
to the truth, the word "inhuman" perhaps depicts as closely as any
other the changed aspect of that unfortunate man's features.
Intelligence died in the eyes, and a mask of brutish indifference
filmed over the blurred outlines of the mouth and nostrils.  The
features did not actually thicken; they merely seemed to become more
gross.

At last the vacant eyes rekindled, and the slave of a strange new sin
breathed deeply.  Bending lower, he immersed his head in the air within
the trunk and inhaled several times to the capacity of his lungs.
Again the casual observer would have been deceived by too obvious
appearances.  What more natural than to assume that the inside of the
steamer trunk had been painted with some volatile alkaloid whose
powerful fumes, heavier than air, filled the interior with invisible
drunkenness and drugged oblivion?

As Colton was to learn long afterward, this simple explanation was far
from the truth.  The evil influence, whatever its nature, was without
taste, odor or color.  But Colton had not yet begun his investigation
of the nameless evil which, with startling rapidity, was destroying
Swain's body and his soul.  Before the mystery could be approached
Swain must confess, and before Swain could bring himself to acknowledge
his inhuman vice he must be deprived of its malignant inspiration.

A faint scratching on the farther side of the door leading to the inner
bedroom brought Swain to his senses.  He started up and hastened to the
locked, door, leaving the trunk gaping by the side of the bed.  Taking
a key from his pocket he unlocked the door and opened it two inches.

"What do you want?" he demanded.

An unintelligible, guttural grunt was the only response.  Nevertheless
Swain seemed to understand what the occupant of the inner bedroom
wanted.  With an impatient exclamation he glanced around his own room.
Not finding what he sought, he hurriedly proceeded to the kitchen.

Presently he returned with a large pan of fresh water.

"Here it is," he said, opening the door a good two feet.

A brown, muscular arm, all but completely covered with coarse black
hair, shot out and a powerful hand grasped the pan.  With a shudder of
revulsion Swain hastily closed and locked the door.  Then, with much
panting and straining, he pushed back the trunk under his bed, and with
a last look around the room, hastily made his exit.  In a few moments
he was swinging along Ellis Avenue toward the Midway with a peculiar,
lurching gait which made passers-by avoid him for a drunkard.

Disregarding the traffic signal at the Midway, he wove his hazardous
way in and out between the whizzing automobiles, and hurried south
toward Sixty-third Street.  A fruit and vegetable store was his
objective.

"Bananas," he muttered to the Italian who came to wait on him.  Either
the man was too slow in executing the simple order, or the evil
influence which ruled him had made Swain reckless of appearances.  With
an inarticulate sound of rage he bounded forward, knocked the curved
fruit knife from the man's hand, and wrenched the whole bunch of
bananas free.  Then, indifferent to the amazement on the faces of the
customers in the shop, he began stripping the bananas from the stalk
and devouring them, skins and all, with brutal ferocity.  A dozen, two
dozen, three dozen disappeared into that snarling mouth.  Swain now ate
but once a day, and hunger to him meant a ravenous appetite.  At last
he was appeased.

"How much?" he demanded, ignoring the astonishment on the Italian's
face.

"A dollar and forty-five cents."

Swain paid and lurched from the shop.  Turning east, he made for
Jackson Park.  An uncontrollable desire to escape from the clatter of
the elevated railway and the jangle of the surface cars urged him
forward almost at a run.  Pedestrians scattered to let him through, but
he seemed oblivious of the shocked wonder on their faces.  The traffic
policeman at Woodlawn Avenue shouted to him to wait for the crossing
signal.  The driven man only hastened his gait, and with incredible
agility escaped death under the wheels of an oil truck by less than an
inch.



HE REACHED the park entrance shortly before sunset.  To his hunted eyes
the carefully tended shrubberies and manicured trees were but a
wretched substitute for the tangled mazes of the Congo.  These were not
trees, but pampered weaklings from some anaemic hothouse.  The very air
was cramped and fetid with the reek of too much humanity.

The crowds returning from the golf course or tennis courts gave this
wild, haggard man with the grizzled hair a wide berth.  More than one
shuddered at the thought of meeting such a creature alone at night on
some dark path of the park, and one couple decided to warn the police.
But they forgot, or lost interest, and contented themselves with a
golfer's dinner to take the bad taste of the lunatic's appearance off
their minds.  No more was heard of him till the next morning, when
scores remembered their unpleasant experience of the previous evening.

According to the newspaper story, the policeman on guard at the bathing
beach had heard shrieks in the park shortly after ten o'clock.  It is
notoriously difficult to locate the direction of a sound with any
accuracy.  The policeman judged that the shrieks came from a clump of
trees at the south end of the lagoon.  On reaching the spot he found
nothing unusual.  The moonlight showed only a tranquil expanse of lawn
under the trees, and the calm surface of the lagoon without a ripple.
Having investigated the surroundings to his own satisfaction, he
started back toward the bathing pavilion to call up the station and
report.

He returned by a different path from the one he had taken in his run to
the trees.  This path passed under several large willows.  Hearing a
slight noise above him the policeman glanced up, and distinctly saw,
high up in the boughs of the willow under which he was passing, the
black bulk of a man or some apelike animal hanging by its arms from a
swaying branch.  His order to descend being disobeyed, he warned the
creature that he would shoot to kill.  At the first crack of the
policeman's pistol the creature seemed suddenly to come to life.  With
unbelievable speed and ease it swung lightly from branch to branch,
leaped to the neighboring tree, flashed through it, and finally dropped
on all fours to the ground.  Instantly it straightened up, and in two
leaps had reached a clump of shrubbery into which it disappeared with a
crash of breaking twigs.  The policeman fired point blank into the
bushes.  No cry or groan answered.

Thinking that he had shot the creature through the brain, he proceeded
to investigate.  Just as he broke his way into the dense growth, a dark
figure started up almost at his feet and tore through the shrubs to the
path on the other side.  Unable to take aim on account of the twigs
which fouled his arms, the policeman fired at random.  All of the shots
went wild, for when he finally ripped his way through to the path, he
found no trace of the fugitive.

The detectives summoned from headquarters found only two sets of
footprints, those of the baffled officer and another, presumably left
by the fugitive.  It was impossible to trace these among the hundreds
on the well traveled path from the bathing pavilion to the golf links.
The mystery of the shrieks remained unsolved.  Probably the responsible
parties disliked newspaper notoriety and were thankful to escape with
nothing more serious than a bad fright.

With a general warning to the public to keep to the well lighted paths
after dark, the police posted plain clothes men at strategic spots all
through the park, and waited for the "maniac" to reappear.  Their
precautions were wasted.



THE Medical Congress was just drawing to a close.  For six days the
leading physicians of the United States, assembled in Chicago, had
listened to discussions and lectures by world authorities in the
constant fight against disease.  This, the last lecture of the session,
was of a popular nature and open to the public.  Sir Ambrose Paget, the
foremost authority on the artificial growth of human tissue, was to
give an account of his work in terms comprehensible to the layman.

An hour before the lecture the huge auditorium was jammed to the
galleries.  Not only the medical and student population of the city had
turned out in full force, but also, to judge from the brilliant display
of gowns and millinery, the four hundred.

Colton, wise in his generation, had arrived early and secured a seat in
the first row of the balcony.  With him were the famous Blakes, father
and son, the experts on atomic disintegration.  The scientific world
referred to this unique pair as Big Tom and Little Tom.  Big Tom, the
father, not yet fifty, had trained his son to follow in his own
footsteps.  Little Tom, now twenty-four, was following so closely that
Big Tom would presently be forced into a run if he was not to be
hopelessly outdistanced in the race for scientific honors.  Their
latest work, a radical improvement of radio valves, was largely the
work of Little Tom alone.  At the present moment father and son were
engaged in a hot argument with Colton.

"I tell you," Big Tom was saying with great emphasis, "that doctor is a
fool.  I no more need a change than he does.  The idea of wasting a
year in 'travel and rest' is merely ridiculous.  A man of my
temperament gets no real rest by loafing.  Besides, I always detest
stuffy cars and breezy steamships."

"Try a walking tour," Colton suggested.  "Take it from me, all doctors
are not fakes.  And your man, I happen to know, is a first rate
conservative of the older school.  If he says you need a year's layoff,
the chances are a hundred to one that you do."

"Second the motion," Little Tom concurred heartily.  "If Big Tom takes
a year off, I must follow suit.  And I'm fed up on work for a while.
We'll take that trip, and see some foreign glamour girls."

"You've seen altogether too many of the domestic breed lately," his
father retorted dryly.  "If we must take that rotten trip I insist upon
going to some country where the women don't wear fascinators."

"The new secretary tried to vamp him," Little Tom elucidated for
Colton's benefit, "and he pretended not to like it.  All right, Big
Tom, we'll go to Africa if you like."

"Not a bad idea, honestly," Colton agreed.  "Why don't you two come
with me to the Congo?"

"And get the sleeping sickness?" Big Tom objected.  "No, thanks; I'm
thick-headed enough as it is."

"But," Colton expostulated with an aggrieved air, "we have conquered
the sleeping sickness."

"And just to prove it," Little Tom suggested, "the Institute is sending
you out there to count the corpses."

"Not at all," Colton replied with some heat.  "You miss the point
entirely.  This new drug, Bayer 205, does the trick.  The Institute is
sending me out to get facts and figures for a talking campaign.  The
business man--the fellow with the dollars--must be convinced that
medical research pays, or he won't cough up any more cash.  From the
standpoint of tropical medicine my little expedition will be a huge
joke.  It is like painting a peach a blush pink.  But as a talking
point to get millions for our work on other diseases, my trip will be
quite the tops, if you know what I mean."

"I think I do," Big Tom admitted.  "One of those sirens in our
accounting department said just that of my promising young son."

"Which one?" Little Tom demanded eagerly.

"Never mind," his father replied.  "She resigned yesterday."

"You mean you fired her, mean, jealous old devil."

"Here, you two!" Colton admonished.  "You can divide the spoils of war
outside, not here.  This is a scientific arena, not a prize ring.
Well, think it over.  I'll show you a real good time in the Congo.  We
need be away only nine months if you must get back.  Hullo," he broke
off suddenly, "I wonder what that fellow finds to interest him here?"

Colton indicated the tall, muscular figure of Swain, just about to take
his seat well forward on the main floor.  In a few sentences he
explained to his friends what he knew of Swain, without betraying the
latter's confidence.

"Used to be a medical missionary in the Congo, I believe.  Tropical
diseases would interest him more, I should think, than Paget's stuff on
artificial growth of human tissue.  I wonder if he knows what he's in
for?"

"Can't say I like your friend's looks," Big Tom remarked after a close
scrutiny of the unsuspecting Swain.  "Rather restless, isn't he?"

"Too much Congo, perhaps," Little Tom suggested.  "That's what you'll
be like," he added, addressing his father, "after we come back."

"Unless the sleeping sickness gets us," Big Tom returned gloomily.

"There is no danger from sleeping sickness, I tell you," Colton
reiterated with a show of irritation.  His further remarks were cut
short by the appearance of the lecturer on the platform.  When the
enthusiastic applause finally died down, Sir Ambrose went directly to
the heart of the subject.  To most of the medical men present it was
already an old story, although Sir Ambrose's investigations had begun
but two years previously.  The rest of the audience hung breathless on
the simple revelation of a new world, just dawning above the black
horizon of the unknown.



AFTER the first few introductory sentences Colton found himself
watching Swain.  Presently he became so absorbed in the play of
conflicting emotions on the ex-missionary's face that he no longer
glanced at the lecturer.  Fascinated fear, incredulity and secret
triumph flickered across Swain's face like the changing reflections on
a lake.  Evidently Swain had no idea that he was being watched and
pitilessly analyzed.

As Sir Ambrose briefly related the history of the experiments from
which his own work had started, Swain leaned forward in his seat with
an expression of rapt, morbid curiosity.  The account of the startling
achievement of de Seguier, now classic, in which the great French
surgeon succeeded in keeping a human heart alive and beating in a weak
solution of certain salts for sixty hours after its excision from the
body of an executed murderer, caused a look of fearful joy to light up
that tense face.  As the lecturer passed to his own researches, Swain's
excitement all but broke bounds.

Sir Ambrose, with admirable clearness, sketched his work on the
influence of radium and other radioactive minerals, upon the growth or
destruction of cells--the stuff of which we are made--when segregated
from the living body.  The audience, perhaps, inferred more than the
lecturer said or even hinted.

He did not assert that it is possible to make dead flesh live, nor did
he declare that he could control the growth of human tissue at will.
Yet, from what he did set forth as sober scientific fact, it was but an
easy and natural step for a mind untrained in the cold, precise
language of science to infer that Sir Ambrose Paget, the great medical
expert, had indeed asserted these very things.  Such is the usual
outcome of the average popular scientific lecture.

Although he strove to be conservative to a fault, Sir Ambrose did not
wholly succeed.  More than one layman in the audience left the hall
with the fixed and ineradicable belief that it is possible, by the
proper use of the right chemicals or radioactive emanations--"rays," in
the vague language of the street--so to control the ductless glands of
the human body that physical appearance, sex, character and brain power
can be profoundly modified if not wholly transformed.  Sir Ambrose said
nothing of the kind.  The nearest he came to it was a mild prophecy
that some day, somehow, such things will be commonplaces of every
doctor's office.  Then, he playfully declared, it will be a matter of
simple routine to change idiots into geniuses and criminals into saints.

Further, he ventured to prophesy in the same humorous vein, it will be
easy, by spraying a patient's ductless glands with the appropriate type
of "rays" to make two hairs sprout where none grew before, and so to
endow the bald with thatches and the ladies with beards.  With this
comforting word of hope to the hairless he concluded his brilliant
lecture, and bowed himself off the platform to the accompaniment of
volleys of applause.

It is to be regretted that the press, in announcing Sir Ambrose's
lecture, omitted to state that he is as well known in England for his
pauky sense of humor as for his dryer contributions to medical
research.  It seems to be as dangerous for an Englishman to joke in New
York or Chicago as it is for an American to joke in London or
Manchester.  They should not do it.

No profounder impression, true or false, was produced on any member of
the audience than upon Swain.  Prom the dazed, triumphant look on his
face as he rose to leave the hall, Colton inferred that every shot,
blank or bullet, had found its easy mark.

"Well," said Big Tom with a sour grimace, "how did you like it, doctor?"

"How did you?"

"So-so.  Good enough for a Sunday supplement story, but not quite up to
the level of this crowd.  He must think we're a lot of boobs."

"Not necessarily.  I mean perhaps we are.  Excuse me.  I'll see you
both tomorrow, and we can make our plans for the Congo."

Colton hurried down to the entrance to intercept Swain before he could
get away.  He wished the encounter to appear accidental.  Luck favored
him.  He reached the ground floor just as Swain emerged.

"Well," he began, "how did you like the lecture?"

Swain seemed disinclined to be communicative.

"All right," he replied noncommittally, and started to elbow his way
through the crowd.

The doctor was not to be so easily shaken.

"I thought he was a trifle radical toward the end.  Didn't you?"

"No."

Colton affected surprise at the curt denial.

"You have read about these things?"

Swain shot him a suspicious glance.

"Why shouldn't I if I like?" he demanded.

"No reason at all.  In fact I should be very much surprised if you, an
old medical campaigner with lots of spare time on your hands, did not
keep up your reading.  Which way are you going?"

"Home."

"Well, let's walk part of the way together.  Where do you live?"

"Ellis."

"That suits me fine.  I need a breath of fresh air after that stuffy
hall.  I live on the other side of Washington Park, so we can go past
your place.  By the way," he remarked with a pleasant laugh, "you're
not sore, are you, about what I said the other day?  You have no cause
to be.  Just consider it as between any doctor and any patient."

Swain stopped short.

"Look here," he snapped, "what do you want with me?  I'm not consulting
you."

Colton refused to be put out.

"Who said you were?  I just proposed a stroll together on our way home,
as we happen to be going in the same direction.  There is one thing I
never stand for," he laughed, "and that is to have my former patients
get sore at me.  I do them as little harm as I know how, and I expect
them to overlook my blunders."

Swain grunted, and Colton continued.

"Now we're getting onto a human basis.  You asked what I want with you.
Just this; it's very simple.  The Institute people are sending me out
to the Congo to get statistics on the sleeping sickness.  You have
heard about the Bayer's cure, of course?  Well, they want me to find
out how it works in the field.  And I want you to give me any pointers
you may have as to my outfit.  What does a white man traveling through
the jungle need?  What is the least he can get along with?"

Swain's suspicions, if he had any, were allayed.  He became almost
garrulous in a surly, dog-in-the-manger fashion.  The doctor seemed
perfectly satisfied, and did not once recur to personal matters.  At
Fifty-fifth Street he bade his former patient good night, and turned
west toward Washington Park.



COLTON was halfway across the park when he heard a terrified shout,
followed almost instantly by a shot.  Thinking it was a holdup, he
dodged behind a tree and waited.  Unarmed, he could be of little
assistance.  He must think what to do.  Hearing nothing further, he
crept cautiously toward the clump of trees from which he judged the
shot had been fired.  The shrill summons of a police whistle quickened
him into a run.

Reaching the trees, he saw by the soft glow of the moonlight a
policeman bending over a black form huddled in a pathetic mass at his
feet.  In that pitiful resignation to death of the creature that would
never again taste the freedom and joy of life there was something
inexpressibly sad and touching.

"I had to shoot," the officer apologized, "It was a shame to kill the
poor beast, but I thought it was one of these park prowlers."

Colton bent over the dark, still figure.

"Escaped from the circus or the zoo, I suppose," he remarked.

"I guess so.  What is it?"

"Some kind of an ape, I should judge.  What a magnificent specimen!
Just look at the muscles on that arm."

Two patrolmen hurrying up from the avenue cut short the conversation.

"Did you get him?" the first asked.

"Couldn't help myself.  I saw this up the tree, just as Brown did at
Jackson Park, and fired when it didn't answer.  This gentleman says
it's an ape."

Colton handed the officer his professional card.

"The Medical College would be glad to have the carcass for the
comparative anatomy class.  Ask the sergeant to call them up.  They
will pay whatever is reasonable."

With a good night to the three he resumed his walk home.

The morning papers featured the story, thankfully pointing out that the
Jackson Park mystery was now cleared up, and lovers might enjoy the
moonlight without fear of being strangled.  They added that the City
police, acting on the suggestion of Dr. Colton, had donated the carcass
to the Medical College to be dissected and studied.  The body was that
of an exceptionally large and well-formed female ape.  It had been shot
clean through the heart.

The pathetic picture in the moonlight still lingered on Colton's mind
with a strange persistence.  What was there about that huddled body
that made it so ineffably sad?  Trying to forget what he had witnessed,
he pulled himself together and went down to his office in the Loop.  To
his relief he found Big Tom and Little Tom waiting for him.  Soon the
trio were in animated discussion.

Big Tom had secretly made up his mind to take a year off and accompany
Colton to the Congo, but to save his face he wished to be persuaded
against his official will.  Little Tom, having only an avid appetite
for adventure and no official will to work when he didn't want to,
clamored for immediate departure.

The argument was at its height when the secretary rapped on the door.

"Come in," Colton cried.

"Mr. Swain would like to see you at once in private.  He says it is
urgent."

The two Toms hastily made their exit.

"Did you see his face?" Little Tom whispered, as they gained the
hallway.

"Yes," his father replied, with a glance back at the waiting room.
"And I hope I never see an expression like that again on any face.  It
was hellish."

Swain stumbled into the consulting room.  After one look at him Colton
hastily locked the door.

"Well?" he said.

"The Medical College must not get that body."

"Why?"

"She was my wife."




CHAPTER II

MAD IMPULSE

EVEN the little that Swain confided to him convinced Colton that the
body must be destroyed immediately.  The most cursory examination by
any medical student would reveal the startling truth that it was a
human cadaver, and not that of a female anthropoid ape.

Colton thought rapidly.  He stepped to the telephone, called the
police, and asked if the body of the ape shot last night in Washington
Park had been sent out to the Medical College.  Receiving a reply in
the negative he sprang his hastily prepared fabrication.  The owner of
the ape, he said, had just called to inform him of the facts in the
case.  The ape had been kept in close confinement and under strict
watch for several months until last night, when it escaped during the
owner's absence at a medical lecture.  For at least two months it had
suffered from an extremely dangerous tropical disease.

In seeking to cure his pet the owner himself had contracted the same
malady.  Evidently, therefore, the disease was contagious, and like
glanders, for instance, communicable from animals to man.  The owner,
Colton asserted, was actually in his office at that moment consulting
him about his own sickness.  In view of the obvious danger, would the
police see that the body was at once cremated?  Colton would take the
responsibility and square things with the Medical College, of which he
was clinical professor in tropical diseases.

At the other end of the wire there was a sudden commotion.  The police
could not set about the necessary business fast enough.  Colton resumed
his care of Swain.

The wretched man was in terrible shape.  In spite of the mild opiates
which Colton made him swallow he continued to start and tremble at
nothing, as if tormented by some invisible fiend.  His enemy was taking
a cruel revenge.  Like all victims of evil habits Swain deserved pity,
not censure.  It was not his fault that his character was what it was,
but the unpunishable crime of generations dead and forgotten.  He
should never have been thrust "but half made up" into a world that
gives no quarter to the weak or the defective, to battle for his life
and his soul against insuperable odds.

How was he, once conceived, to alter the inalterable, and adjust a
normal balance between the upper part of his brain and the lower?  The
upper, reasoning half was far above normal.  Swain's intelligence
placed him well in the top tenth of the population.  But morally he was
little better than an imbecile.  Literally he was emotionally insane,
without the power to choose between good and evil, or between sane
constructiveness and idiotic ruin, and all because his lower brain was
definitely, physically malformed before he was born.

No science yet perfected could change the structure of that pitiably
misshapen brain.  To the end of his bitter life he must blunder and
bruise himself, body and soul, against a society whose only remedy for
his kind is the gallows or the electric chair.  Sooner or later he must
commit the capital crime.

Thus far his errors had been abnormal, inhumanly perverted dallyings
with the unspeakable.  Science had not yet invented a name for his
disease.  That it had taken the unnatural course which it followed was
due solely to the accident of a life in the jungles of the Congo.

Given a civilized environment, his unbalanced brain must have driven
him to one or other of the banal, brutal excesses which sometimes seem
to make all of our civilization and its science a farce.  And the black
truth, the challenge to our cocksure ethics and imperfect laws, is the
sober fact that Swain was not a great rarity.  Two men out of every
hundred in any civilized society are afflicted with precisely the same
fundamental defect of the brain.  From this two per cent the constant
army of the criminal is steadily recruited.

All this passed through Colton's mind as he tried to make the stricken
wretch less miserable.

"Damn all sentimentality and half-way reforms," he said with
dispassionate emphasis as he sat watching the thing before him.  "There
is one and only one cure for your disease, Swain.  Prevention is the
proper medicine.  But will the sob-loving public ever come to it?  Not
in my lifetime."

The telephone jangled, and he answered the call.

"Police?  Yes, this is Dr. Colton talking.  You have disposed of the
body?  Fine; it was too dangerous a specimen to have lying around
loose.  What?  Oh, just your hands in lysol and water--a teaspoonful to
a pail.  Yes, you may as well burn your clothes for safety.  There is
not much danger, but it is just as well to be on the safe side.  What's
that?  No, it hadn't struck me.  As you say, there's a screw loose
somewhere.  He's still here; I'll ask him."

Putting his hand over the mouthpiece, Colton turned to Swain.

"The sergeant wants to know how you explain the Jackson Park incident.
I told him that last night was the first time the thing had escaped.
So the Jackson Park one cannot have been what they shot last night.
Had you two of them?"

"Tell him she must have got out without my knowledge, and slipped back
again to the apartment before I returned."

This explanation seemed to satisfy the police.

"He's sure he hasn't another of the brutes?" the sergeant persisted.

"You only had the one?" Colton repeated, again covering the mouthpiece.

Swain broke into a horrible, agonized laugh.

"Only one here.  My daughter died five years ago, just before my wife
and I left the Congo to come to America."

"He's perfectly plain on that point, sergeant," Colton resumed over the
wire.  "If you like you can search his apartment.  It won't be
necessary?  All right.  Much obliged; good-by."

The doctor stood looking down on his distraught patient.

"Feeling better?  Have another shot of this?"

He deftly administered a hypodermic of morphia.

"You don't feel like talking yet?  Very well.  Any time you wish to
confide in anyone I'll listen.  Now, just one thing more.  You are not
the lost sinner you say you are.  All this chatter about sin is the
bunk, anyway.  You're sick--physically ill.  What you need is medical
attention, not hell fire sermons calling you to repentance.  Come back
tomorrow morning at nine sharp.  I'll see what can be done about it
all.  Here, take two of these the moment you get home, and go to bed.
They'll make you sleep."



SWAIN was indeed not the "lost sinner" that he thought himself.  The
memory of his daughter's tragic end, and the still bleeding horror of
his wife's death, awakened the rudimentary stirrings of remorse.  It
was not the emotion which normal human beings experience, but something
more primitive, as old as evolution.  He could not bring himself to
picture his wife as she had been in the days of her bloom.  Not for
five years had he thought of her as the young girl and gay wife who
gladly gave up all to follow him.  Still, almost to the last, and long
after the terrible change which transformed her into something not
human had begun to efface her charm and womanly beauty, he had been
tender to her.

During the last stages of her illness he had not trusted himself to
look at her.  Nor had she sought to show herself.  To the last, when
new instincts overmastered the dying remnants of her human reserve, she
had been content to crouch behind a locked door.  And so it happened
that her keeper never knew how ghastly was the progress of her disease,
but only guessed the lesser half of it from the rapidly changing
appearance of the arm thrust out to grasp the fruit and water which
kept her alive.

It was the memory of that arm which pointed his way through hell.  And
it was the thought of what her last struggle with the brute nature
which finally overpowered her human instinct for concealment must have
been, driving her like a lash of fire to escape from the confinement of
her cage and range free under the stars, that stirred his remorse.  She
who had been so proud, so clean, had finally thrown decency to the
winds and sought the trees, the stars and the waters which called her
with a new voice, with a voice not heard by human beings.

At the last she had ceased to be human, as her daughter before her had
ceased to be human and found death with the beasts.  Swain pitied her,
so far as pity was possible to his deformed mind, with a new
understanding.  He too felt the paw of the beast on his shoulder, and
knew that before long he must turn his back on all his human kind, to
march back with the laggard brutes to a gray and dawnless past.

Stunned and bruised by his battle with the ineluctable truth of nature,
he stumbled into his bedroom.  Perhaps it was merely the drugs which
Colton had pumped into him, and not the embryo stirrings of remorse,
which made him for once forget his unnatural craving.

With a groan of utter despair he flung himself face downward on the bed
and waited for his throbbing brain to burst and blind him.  He had
forgotten the opiate in his pocket.  Nothing remained in his
consciousness but the sense of irreparable loss and the full knowledge
of death.

The oblong of sunlight from the open window crept slowly round with the
hours, narrowed to a thin spear of white fire as it passed inch by inch
over the prostrate figure, and became extinct.  The deepening purple of
the sky hinted the advent of evening, and still the slave of a futile
grief lay motionless as a fallen pillar.  With the first hint of
darkness he stirred, raised himself into a sitting posture, and stared
about the room.  Remorse still gripped him.  Rising unsteadily to his
feet he stamped to restore his circulation, stretched, and shook
himself together.  He was in the mood for a great renunciation.

Like many a penitent he did not stop to reckon, the cost of repentance.
Only the glow of the moment suffused his features; the cold,
irremediable despair for his rash righteousness was to come later, when
the transitory urge to a new life had shot its mark.  A drug addict, or
the victim of any other tyrannical vice, who deliberately and finally
cuts himself off from the means of gratifying his evil habit is either
a saint or a fool.  It is heaven to repent; it is hell to reform.

An insane strength seemed to possess the wretched man as he wrenched
the accursed trunk from under his bed, hoisted it on his shoulder, and
staggered to the door.  Yesterday he could no more have lifted that
dead weight above his knees than he could have stopped an express train
with his hand.  But this evening he was inspired, or insane.  His
strength was that of a dozen madmen.

Gaining the open air he reeled with his intolerable burden for block
after block toward the bathing beach.  No man in his senses could have
carried that weight a yard.  Swain reached the pier without once
putting it down.  His lips were blue, and his eyes bulged from their
sockets as he panted along the pier to the ticket gate, and still he
did not falter.  The steamer for the municipal dock was on the point of
departure when he staggered aboard and, an inch at a time, lowered the
trunk to the deck close to the guardrail.

The crowd of pleasure seekers regarded him curiously, but he paid no
attention.  He seemed to be alone, as indeed he was, cut off from the
world of men.  His thoughts were not their thoughts.  Where they saw
the freshened waters of the lake and the twinkling swarms of the city
lights beyond, he visioned the lazy current of a great river and the
stark brilliance of innumerable stars thickly studded in a tropical
sky.  The distant park to them was an orderly pleasure ground of walks
and shrubberies; to him it was the wild tangle of a trackless jungle,
dim and mystical in the moonlight.



FIFTEEN minutes out from the pier he brushed aside his revery, and
acted.  The mad impulse to sever himself forever from his evil habit
blurred his reason and endowed him with the sudden strength of twenty
maniacs.  Before he knew what he had done the trunk had splashed and
sunk to the bottom of the lake.  And instantly he knew that he had been
a fool.  Life without the means of gratifying the unnatural passion
which had enslaved him would be an unendurable torment.  He had
repented, and now when it was too late, he knew that he was damned.

The shouts of the passengers brought the officers and deckhands on the
spot on the run.  What had this wild looking man pitched overboard?  A
trunk?  Ah, it was all clear; another of those "trunk murders."  The
man must be seized and handed over to the police when the steamer
reached the municipal dock.

Swain only dimly comprehended what was going on.  Instinct saved him.
He was over the side in a flash, swimming like an ape for the beach.
The captain drew his revolver and took aim at the bobbing head, fast
disappearing in the choppy water.  Then he hesitated.  Had he any right
to shoot?  What had the man done, anyway?  Who knew definitely what was
in that trunk?  Nobody!  Well, it was up to the police.  His duty was
to notify them as soon as possible.  If there was anything amiss they
were the proper authorities to set it right.  He slipped his revolver
back into his pocket.  Swain for the moment was free.  But his passion
swam with him, stroke by stroke, and the paw of the beast tightened its
grip on his shoulder.

That night Chicago experienced one of the strangest crimes in all its
bizarre history.  There was a touch of the ludicrous about this latest
addition to the city's depressing annals which caused even the stolid
police sergeants to smile.  That any man could have gone to such
trouble to steal thirty cents worth of stale fruit--bananas at
that--was somewhat of a joke.  Many a yegg had expended less effort to
loot a bank.

Colton heard of the freak crime before the midday editions of the
papers headlined it.  The Blakes were in his office when the Hyde Park
police station called him up.

"Dr. Colton?  There's a man here, Swain, who says you know him.  Ever
hear of him?"

"I believe I recall the name," Colton admitted cautiously.  "What about
him?"

"Was he a patient of yours?"

"Hold the line while I look up my case records."

Colton put his hand over the mouthpiece and turned to Big Tom.

"What would you do in my fix?  Swain is evidently in trouble.  Shall I
say I know him, or not?  I want to get him out if I can."

"Say you treated him for a nervous breakdown," Big Tom advised.  "Then,
whatever he has done can be excused on the ground of a temporary
relapse."

"Is that you, Sergeant?  Yes, I know Swain well now.  He is booked for
an appointment at nine, I see, but I forgot it when he didn't turn up.
His name escaped me for the moment.  He was in here a day or two ago
complaining of insomnia.  A plain case of nervous exhaustion, I should
say.  Yes, that's right.  No, I shouldn't hold him responsible just now
for his actions.  He's probably delirious--fever-crazy, you know.  Oh
yes, he will get over it all right.  All he needs is a rest in bed with
proper nursing.  What's that?  Drugs?  No, he is not a hophead.  I know
that he has taken no drugs except veronal occasionally for
sleeplessness.  Perhaps I had better come out and see him?  All right.
Thanks, I will."

"Come on," he said to the two Toms.  "I'm no diplomat.  We must get
that fellow out of the hoosegow somehow or other."

"Why?" Little Tom demanded.  "Is he a particular crony of yours?"

"Not yet.  Before I finish with him I hope to make him my bosom friend.
That fellow knows a lot that he won't tell."



AT THE police station Big Tom established diplomatic relations by a
liberal distribution of cigars.

"These men will put up bail if necessary," Colton announced.

"The deuce we will," Big Tom muttered under his breath.  "What makes
you think that?"

Colton's only reply was a gentle kick on the shin.

"What's the charge against him, Sergeant?"

"Burglary."

"Pretty serious, eh?  Well, I'm not surprised.  A man in Swain's
condition is likely to do almost anything unless he's watched.  He
ought to be home, in bed.  I'll bet his temperature is about 104 right
now.  How did it happen?"

"It's a queer case.  He took no care whatever to conceal his movements.
The patrolman on Fifty-fifth Street was going his rounds last night
about ten o'clock, when he noticed that the iron gates of a fruitstand
had been wrenched open.  The bars were bent as if somebody had tried to
force an entrance with a jimmy, and the steel padlock lay on the
sidewalk.  It had been sprung by sheer brute force.

"The patrolman knew there was nothing much of value in the shop, as the
cash register is emptied every day at closing time.  So he felt a
little bit leery about going in to investigate.  Just as he got inside
he heard a sound of quick, steady eating, like an animal at its food.
He switched on his flashlight and saw your man Swain stuffing bananas
in his mouth at a pace to beat the monkeys.  That fellow must like
fruit.  The only reason he gave for burglarizing the store was that he
felt hungry, and it was long past his dinner time."

"The whole incident is natural enough," Colton replied, "to a man
suffering from such a breakdown as Swain's.  Is that the whole story?"

"Not quite.  His clothes were sopping wet."

"Probably he had been taking a swim earlier in the evening," Little Tom
suggested, quite in the Sherlock Holmes manner.

"You're a smart young fellow," the sergeant remarked with a sour,
sarcastic grin.  "What's your line, anyway?"

Little Tom was squashed.

"Bull," he answered humbly, and the sergeant was appeased.

"So I guessed," he snorted.  "Well, doctor, what do you make of the wet
clothes?"

Colton cast about desperately for some guess which would not compromise
Swain.  Big Tom came to his rescue.

"Perhaps you have forgotten," he remarked to the doctor, "about what
happened the other day?  Don't you remember telling me how you found
Swain spending the afternoon in his bathtub?"

"Of course!  A man with a fever like Swain's would be as likely as not
to take a swim fully dressed in the lake."

"That's just what he did," the sergeant admitted, quite impressed by
Colton's medical skill.  He made a mental note to call in the doctor
the next time he suffered from too much Scotch and soda.  With
unsuspecting frankness he related the incident of the nut who had
pitched his trunk overboard before trying to walk ashore.

"As for the burglary," he concluded, "he has offered to pay for the
bananas and the damage he did to the iron gates.  But it beats me how
he could have forced them open, and broken off that steel padlock, with
nothing but his hands."

"Just the strength of a high fever," Colton explained offhandedly.  "We
may as well take him home now, I suppose."

"Sure.  He's sick, all right.  I just wanted to get in touch with the
right parties."

"My friends have a room all ready for him," Colton announced, with a
wave of the hand toward the Blakes.  "They'll see that he doesn't get
out till he has fully recovered."

"Who told you that lie?" Big Tom asked in a stage whisper which,
luckily, the sergeant failed to overhear.  At the moment he was on his
way to fetch Swain.

"Well, here are your friends," he said when presently he returned with
his prisoner.  "Is this your doctor?"

Swain, shaking like a frightened horse, started to reply.  Then an
extraordinary thing happened.  He seemed to lose control of his chest
and his legs.  He crumpled up and hunched suddenly to the floor on all
fours.  Then, whining like an animal, he took three or four ambling
steps toward Colton, the knuckles of his hands tapping awkwardly on the
stones.

The four spectators looked on in pitying horror.  To the sergeant and
the Blakes it was merely an exhibition of the depths to which a man
temporarily insane by sickness will sink.  To Colton, who had seen
Swain's wife before her body cooled, the tragedy had a deeper
significance.

"I guess he's sick, all right enough," the sergeant observed.

"He's in worse shape than I thought," the doctor admitted.  He spoke
sharply to Swain.  "Straighten up!  Come on home.  I'll take care of
you."

With an expression of dazed surprise Swain tottered into a human
posture and quietly followed the doctor out of the station.



THE Belgian mailboat, _Ville de Lige_ of Antwerp, was steaming briskly
along the drab West Coast of Africa, en route to Matadai, the portal to
the vast Congo basin with its rivers and impenetrable forests, its
sleeping sickness and its smallpox, its deserted native villages and
abandoned trading posts, and its irresistible call to every human being
who has once lived in its alluring, pestilent wilds.  It has been said,
and possibly it is true, that an exile spent in the Congo begets a sort
of recurrent fever to return, so that whoever has once been infected
with its perverse charm craves incessantly to suffer again.

Of the party who stood well forward, viewing the monotonous coastline,
only one was answering the Call.  Swain had begged to be allowed to
accompany Colton on his trip of investigation, declaring that life
anywhere but in the dank forests of the Congo, now that his wife was
dead, was a torment not to be endured.  He pointed out that he would be
an invaluable guide and aid in the latter's work, for he himself in his
term as a medical missionary had given much time to the sleeping
sickness.  Colton did not credit this plausible reason for Swain's
eagerness to revisit the Congo at its face value.  Fully aware that his
patient was concealing his true motives, Colton kept his suspicions to
himself and accepted Swain's offer.  The ex-missionary was to pay his
own expenses, except when acting as guide.  During the passage from
Antwerp, Colton kept as close a watch as he dared over the erratic
invalid, for Swain was still in a precarious condition mentally.

The conviction that not the sleeping sickness but Swain's illness was
to be the major objective of his expedition, gradually strengthened its
hold on Colton's mind as he studied the man's eccentric behavior.  The
work for which he was being paid was merely a routine job.  It would
take time, but little else.  The mystery of Swain's disorder, however,
might well tax his ingenuity to the limit.  Here was something new to
science, a living challenge to the doctor's powers as any investigator.
He vowed to solve the problem or leave his bones in the forest.  He
came very nearly doing both.

Big Tom had finally been persuaded by his son's need of a change.  It
is not true that Little Tom needed a change of any kind, except perhaps
a little more work and a little less partying, but it was so much
easier to blame him for the expensive holiday than to lay it to
himself, that Big Tom joyfully followed the line of least resistance
and saved his face behind his son's back.  As a sop to his demoralized
conscience he had carted along with him half a ton of expensive
apparatus.  With this he played in the evenings, pretending that he was
making important discoveries in the X-ray analysis of crystals.  He
deceived nobody, not even himself.  Colton looked on this half-ton of
excess baggage with extreme disfavor.

"Who do you expect is going to lug all that junk through the swamps and
jungles?" he demanded irritably twenty times a day.

"Heaven knows," Big Tom piously replied, "I don't."

"Why do you take it?"

"What shall we do with the evenings?"

"Sleep," Little Tom suggested with sinister meaning.

That balmy word never failed to rout Big Tom.  At the slightest hint of
anything bordering on sleeping sickness he would become glum and
silent.  In his brass bound steamer trunk there was a private cache of
Bayer 205 sufficiently large to cure a sleeping county.  Castor oil
would have been more practical baggage.  Heaving a morose sigh he would
quit the gay party and sneak into his cabin.  Once there he would
unlock his trunk and reassure himself that his treasure was still
unviolated.  If he had known of Swain's similar obsession he would have
been entirely sympathetic.

As it was, Big Tom had developed a hearty dislike for the unfortunate
ex-missionary.  At first he had tried to be decent, but Swain's
persistent, boring questions on all manner of scientific topics had
finally driven the long-suffering Big Tom to curt incivility.

"What the devil is that to you?" he retorted more than once, as Swain,
the picture of a nervous wreck, hovered over the intricate apparatus
asking questions and biting his nails or clawing at his face.  "What's
on your mind, anyway?  Can't you see I'm busy?  Go and bother
Colton--or Little Tom.  They got me into this."

"But what--" the tormented wretch would persist, only to be cut short
by the exasperated experimenter.

Naturally, not much love survived between the two.  Big Tom looked upon
"the hophead"--as he mistakenly dubbed Swain--as an unmitigated pest
with the brain of a mosquito.  But that he was a scientist with a
normally balanced mind, Big Tom could cheerfully have pitched this
curiously apelike nuisance of a man overboard to the sharks or the
sunfish, or whatever it might be that scavenged these muddy seas.



SWAIN for his part was less clear-headed about his emotions.  Perhaps,
if he had succeeded in translating what he felt into words, he would
have expressed a longing to sink his canine teeth viciously into the
flesh of Big Tom's capable right hand.  But he was so far along the
road to the past, and progressing so rapidly toward a dim gray world of
primitive shadows, that he no longer tried to rationalize his emotions.
To him, as to certain artists and most animals, the thing and what he
felt toward it were one and the same.  He had already lost one of the
chief powers which distinguish man from the beast.  He no longer was
capable of abstraction.

It is a great pity that Swain had never learned to draw or to paint; he
was too far gone to write.  For this defect in Swain's education the
world is today the poorer by the supreme artistic masterpiece toward
which it has striven since the last ice age, and toward which it will
fruitlessly strive for ages to come.

Swain was all compact of feeling, emotion, sensibility--call it what we
will--and totally destitute of intellect or even sense.  The picture
that he might have painted would have been pure emotion, clear as a
diamond, muddy as ditchwater, chaste as ice, lawless as fire, mystical,
comprehensible in the ultimate sense of utter senselessness,
self-revealing, self-contradictory.  It would have been all of these,
for it could not have exhibited one spore of that mildew which blights
all art, even the highest, intelligence.  The picture that Swain might
have painted will hang forever on the azure walls of the fourth
dimension.  There will never be another Swain; Big Tom and his
unfeeling associates locked the door to that mystic gallery of a higher
universe and threw the key where nobody will ever think of looking for
it.

If Big Tom's enjoyment of the trip was not as keen as it might have
been, Little Tom's perpetual picnic more than compensated.  Two minutes
after the mail boat cast off from the pier at Antwerp he discovered a
goldmine of delight.  At least her hair was that color, and the rest of
her, from the trim little shoes to the firm chin slightly contradicted
by a piquant nose, was a challenge to all mankind.  Little Tom accepted
the challenge.  He soon discovered that Lila Meredith was no merely
photogenic glamour girl, but a ludicrously serious-minded damsel who
took life and herself very gravely indeed--except when her sense of
humor got the better of the universe and, incidentally, of herself.

When Big Tom first came upon them, some fifteen minutes out from
Antwerp, he found his promising son sitting with the beauty behind a
ventilator, holding forth on the nobility of the teaching profession.
Being introduced to the lady, he deftly took the conversation into his
own more experienced hands.  Here was indeed a charming deck companion.
His opinion of his son's taste in girls rose several points.  But she
was not the girl for Little Tom; obviously a young woman of her
remarkable talents would prefer the company of an older, more
sophisticated man--himself, for instance.  In half an hour he had
learned her life history, while Little Tom, with an enigmatic grin on
his face, sat silently taking it all in and waiting his turn.

Lila Meredith was proud of her record, and took no pains to conceal the
fact.  She had graduated in English from some frightful college in the
Middle West at the phenomenal age of eighteen, and had immediately
taken up the white man's burden in Canton--China, not Ohio.  There she
had taught in the college for four years, vainly battling to make three
hundred Chinese youths say rice when they meant rice, and not lice.  At
this point of her narrative Little Tom performed a feat of lightning
calculation, and noted that eighteen and four make twenty-two.  She
didn't look a day over seventeen.  Being an unusually intelligent girl,
she realized after four years of it that she was beaten.  All the l's
in the Chinese language were immovably displaced by the devil shortly
after the Flood.  With this outstanding discovery to her credit she
left the three hundred still clamoring for parasites, and returned to
her beloved Middle West.

She had loved it when she left it.  Even in China she had continued to
worship her home town.  But when she saw it at close quarters, and not
through a sentimental haze several thousand miles thick, she wanted to
shut her eyes.  Before the first week was out she knew that she was a
natural-born wanderer.

After China the next step of course was India.  So many American girls
work in the Indian missions, trying to awaken their sisters who love
nothing so much as sleep, that Lila thought it would be easy to land
one of the desirable, romantic positions.  It was easy.  The other girl
got the job.  Lila's rival had the advantage of two years' Japanese
experience--quite respectable--in addition to the regulation four years
of Canton.

But Lila Meredith, having tasted blood, thirsted for gore.  She had
seen one corner of the world; now she would see it all.  Her luck was
in.  To that terrible college in the Middle West came a despairing cry
from the Congo.  "Send out to us a young woman," cried the united
voices of the Rev. Jonas Simpkins and his helpmate, "send out to us a
young woman to help us in our mission to the heathen.  Let her be one
wise in the proper use of calico, for these degenerate sons and
daughters of Ham use pants as earmuffs and petticoats as mufflers."
This, of course, was not what the Simpkinses actually wrote; it is,
however, an accurate although free translation into the vernacular.



AND so it happened that Lila, as fresh and pretty as a daisy, and
greener than grass, was going out to some god-forsaken clearing in the
Congo forest to teach a village or two of blacks the conventional use
of cotton prints.  She would not be utterly without protection, it is
true.  But what is one white man, whose profession forbids him to carry
firearms, against a regiment of unregenerate savages who know how to
brew a very potent beer?

Little Tom was shocked, but held his tongue.  Big Tom, presuming on the
privileges of middle age, gave utterance to his thoughts.

"But my dear child," he expostulated, "have you the faintest conception
of what you are running into?  Whoever sent you out on this fools'
errand ought to be lynched.  But leave that aside.  Have you thought of
the sleeping sickness?  Have you--"

"You had better be looking after your precious junk," Little Tom
interrupted with a triumphant grin.  "I just saw Swain sneak into your
cabin."

Big Tom departed without a word of farewell.

"Big Tom has sleeping sickness on the brain," Little Tom explained.
"Don't mind what he says."

"I won't," she promised, with a glance of utter confidence.  The little
wretch knew how to flirt, Tom Junior reflected, and the discovery
filled him with soul-satisfying peace.  The success of the voyage was
assured.

Swain's uninvited visit to Big Tom's cabin brought the hostility
between the two men to a head.  When he reached the door and peered in,
Big Tom saw the invalid clumsily trying to get the X-ray tube working.
For a few seconds the owner looked on in silence, while Swain, ignorant
that he was observed, fussed and fiddled awkwardly with the apparatus.
Big Tom soon reached the limit of his endurance.

"Monkey see, monkey do," he remarked with grim good humor.

Swain glanced back over his shoulder and snarled.  For an instant his
expression was that of an escaped ape caught in the act of rifling his
master's sideboard.  Big Tom was on him in two strides.  With something
between a yelp and a curse Swain bolted for the opposite door.  His
blundering hand had just turned the knob when Big Tom's foot helped him
through and sent him sprawling on the deck.  Swain got up, mad with
rage.  His lips curled back, baring the strong, white teeth, and his
powerful body balanced lightly on the muscular legs, aiming for a
spring at Blake's throat.  Big Tom watched, fascinated.  He was too
astonished to defend himself.  The man was nine-tenths animal.

Colton's shout saved the day.  The doctor had seen the last of the
fracas from his nook behind a ventilator.  Like a dog coming to heel at
the sound of its master's voice, Swain snapped back into a human being.
The same flash of amazed wonder passed over his face as had transformed
it when he was saved by a hair from assaulting the fruit peddler, and
with a despairing groan the wretched man turned and walked rapidly aft
to his own cabin.  He did not reappear for three days.  His food, an
inordinate allowance of fresh fruit, was taken to him once a day by the
puzzled deck steward.

When, on the fourth day out, he emerged to get some fresh air, his
friends ignored the incident, and treated him like an ordinary human
being.  Except for his persistent, irritating cross questioning of Big
Tom on all manner of scientific topics, and occasional violent fits of
trembling, he was unobjectionable enough.  Colton watched him
incessantly.  He was beginning to understand the case.  A little more
frankness on Swain's part would have given him the key to the riddle
which he was still to seek through desperate months of unwished
adventure.

Tomorrow they would reach Matadai, and the journey up country would
begin.



"IS YOUR friend ill?" Lila asked the doctor.  It was the first time she
had asked any of them an intimate question concerning their eccentric
friend.

"Yes," Colton replied, "he is making rather a slow recovery from a bad
nervous breakdown."

Lila said nothing for the moment, but gazed speculatively toward the
door of Swain's cabin.

Swain had left the party talking by the rail to attend to his own
business in his own cabin.

"Do you think he will get better?" she asked.

"No," Colton replied decisively.  "You will be leaving us soon, so I
can be frank.  Poor Swain's is a hopeless fight.  The odds are all
against him.  He lost his daughter out here, and his wife in Chicago.
He will never be a normal man again.  The shock of his wife's death was
too much for him."

"You never told us that," Big Tom remarked.  "Why did you keep us in
the dark?  Poor devil, I take a different view of his case now."

"I didn't tell you," Colton explained, "because the circumstances were
too shocking.  They were enough to unbalance any mind, let alone
Swain's already tipped by his daughter's tragic death in the Congo.
Some day I will tell you what I know, but not now.  It could do no
good."

"He began pestering us with questions," Big Tom resumed, "before we
left Chicago.  The hiss of the X-ray machine was always the signal for
him to come lurching in like a drunken person.  We let him stand around
and watch so long as he kept quiet, but when he started on his
questions we were forced to kick him out.  You can't measure the
diffraction pattern of a crystal with a pest asking you if the X-ray
will destroy the brain cells."

"Yes," Colton agreed, "he has been after me, too.  That lecture of
Paget's on the artificial growth of tissue seems to have sent him off
on some queer tangent.  He is chock full of scraps of scientific
theories that he has picked up from college text books and the current
hairraisers.  Somehow he has got it into his head that 'rays'--X-rays,
alpha rays, or some, mystical kind not yet discovered--can change the
rate of growth of the human body.

"There is a crazy sort of logic about some of his ravings.  For
instance, he makes me admit that the ductless glands control growth,
intelligence, and perhaps sex.  Then he will point out that an injury
or disease of certain other glands will totally change a human being's
appearance, transforming him from a man into a hairy, sideshow freak.
His next step is to drag in a little of your sensational physics.  Is
it not true, he asks, bombardments with alpha 'rays' have smashed the
so-called atoms of thirteen of the commoner chemical elements--oxygen,
and so forth?  Of course I can't deny an accepted fact.  Being neatly
trapped I am powerless to defend myself from Swain's carefully loaded
club.

"Put two and two together, he says, and you see how it should be
possible, by spraying the human brain and other nerve centres with the
proper 'rays' to decompose--transmute, if you like--the chemical
elements composing the brain and nerves into new elements.  Take iron,
for instance, he will say, or phosphorus.  Both are common in the human
body.  But suppose these elements were broken down, _in the body_, to
sodium, or fluorine, or iodine, or helium.  The breaking down need not
be complete.  Only a small fraction of the iron or whatnot would have
to decompose into helium, say, to modify the chemistry of the body
radically, unalterably.

"And, he goes on like a logical lunatic, the chemistry of the body
being thus upset, it follows that the excretions of the ductless
glands--all highly complex chemical substances in the most beautifully
delicate balance--will run wild in a dozen new and unsuspected
abnormalities.  Our lunatic is now ready for his grand conclusion.
Since the fluids excreted by the glands are largely responsible for
man, body and mind, and since we have profoundly changed the chemical
nature of those fluids, it must follow that man himself will be
transformed into something not, human.  And all this 'sea change into
something new and strange,' as Shakespeare would put it, is the direct
result of spraying the brain and nerves with the right kind of rays.

"It is as crazy a theory and as logical a tissue of nonsense as was
ever spun by any lunatic in a madhouse for reduced philosophers."

"Do you know what it reminds me of?" Little Tom asked with sly
innocence.

"What?" the unsuspecting Colton asked.

"Sir Ambrose Paget's lecture.  And," he went on, with a patronizing
wave of the hand, "medicine is still in its infancy.  It was only with
Pasteur's work that it began to be a science.  It follows then, as
Swain is always saying, that whenever one of you medical fellows tries
his hand at a theory, he gets himself all balled up like a cat in a
knitting basket.  Being in its infancy, medicine is bound to evolve
infantile theories.  It can't--"

But he did not finish.  Colton pursued him round the deck and finally
down to the lower regions.  Left alone with the disputed peach, Big Tom
became quite tender.

"So you know nothing about these Simpkinses to whom you are going?"

Lila confirmed his suspicions.

"They are just missionaries who have worked for the last fifteen years
in Africa.  They have been in the Congo district a little over six
months, I believe.  So naturally they find it rather strange and
difficult at first.  That is why they want me to help.  Where they were
before--Uganda--everything is lovely, quite civilized in fact."

"Then why did the fools leave it?" Big Tom demanded.

Lila gave him a reproving glance, not unmixed with admiration.

"Because they were called to a new and harder field."

"Called?  You mean they were fired.  Now look here, Lila.  I don't like
this business at all.  If you were a red-nosed freak with mouse-colored
hair and pimples, I would say, 'Go into the forests of the Congo and
convert the blacks, and God bless you.'  I would even advise you to get
the sleeping sickness before applying for leave to visit your dump in
the Middle West after five years' faithful service in the swamps.  But
let me be frank, Lila."

"Yes?" she encouraged softly.

"Just this.  You are too nice a girl, and far too pretty a nice girl,
to be wasting your fragrance on the desert air."

"But I am not going to the desert, Big Tom," she objected simply.

"Hang it!  You know what I mean," he blurted out.  "What does it matter
if I do hash my metaphors in trying to say it?  You should get married."

"Should I?  Why?"

"Oh, damn it all, how do I know, if you don't?"

"Mr. Blake!"

"I beg your pardon, Lila.  I'm too old, I suppose.  But for all that,
what _I_ said stands good.  You should get married."

"Did it never strike you that a girl might feel she owes a duty to the
world?"

"A duty?  Teaching savages who don't want to know the A.B.C. and who
would have no use for it if they did?  Bah!  Your 'mission,' if you
have any, is to have a good time yourself and help someone else to
share your fun."

"I am not a hedonist, Mr. Blake," she said stiffly.

"Good Lord, what's that?  It sounds awful.  Has it anything to do with
futurism?"



IN spite of herself she laughed.  She saw that Big Tom was merely
trying to develop her sense of humor and her feeling for proportion.

"But honestly," she said, "I do feel that I am fitted to help these
people.  And why shouldn't I?"

"Do you really want me to tell you?  Very well then, I shall.  My
friend Colton has taught me quite a little about modern psychology.  It
is all very interesting, and helps me no end in understanding the
people I meet.  There is a very common human trait--I won't call it a
failing--to which psychologists have given the name 'substitution.'  It
is a very simple process.  When we wish to do something of which we are
a little bit ashamed because we imagine it mean, or selfish, or
undignified, we scratch around for some perfectly respectable disguise
to cover up our real motives.  The true motive, the mean, selfish drive
behind our actions, is paraded forth in solemn black clothes that
deceive even ourselves as to what is underneath.  As they say, we
substitute for the true motive a fake one which will enable us to keep
our sham self-respect.

"To give you an example from my own life: when I was a young fellow,
just starting out in science as Little Tom is now, I told myself that I
was going into scientific research because it was the one sure way of
benefiting the human race with what brains I had.  But science makes a
man look at things in cold blood, I soon realized that my true reason
for doing research was the personal pleasure I derived from my work.
And I admitted--to myself only, of course, for it doesn't do to smash
popular idols in the public market place--that _I_ would continue to
plug away at research for just so long as I got a kick out of it,
whether or not humanity was advanced a cent's worth.

"At first this was rather a shock.  My vanity suffered.  It had been so
much nicer, giving me a sort of puffed-up feeling like a pouter pigeon,
to think that I was sacrificing my life for the good of the race, while
more selfish men were piling up fortunes and having a good time.  But
after I got used to the truth, I liked it much better than the sham.  I
thought what fools those other fellows were to miss all the fun I was
having.

"So much for my own case.  Now for yours.  You are adventurous and ache
to see the world.  But you can't confess to a low love of excitement
and keep your self-respect.  So you substitute for the real drive to
your life a fake desire to help the heathen.  As a matter of fact you
would be twice as happy as you are if you only had the nerve to face
the unflattering truth and see yourself as you are.  It will hurt at
first.  But in the end absolute honesty with yourself will double your
enjoyment.  You may even become a very good hedonist in time."

"But I don't want to!" she protested, half crying.

"Oh, yes, you do, my dear.  We all do, whether we call it that or not.
The martyr who spends his life strapped to the business side of an iron
harrow is no less of a hedonist than the fellow who dissipates ten
million on expensive high life.  The martyr gets his pleasure out of
thinking how miserable he is, and how miserable the morbid crowd thinks
he is, while the Johnny gets his kick out of making all the girls
happy.  Just think it over."

"I shall," she promised shamefacedly.  "But even if what you say is
true, how can I go about to see the world?  I have no money beyond what
I earn."

Big Tom burst into a roar of laughter.

"You don't need to think it over.  You have admitted everything.  Now
don't you feel better?"

"I think you're horrid," she pouted.

"Sorry I can't say the same about you," he sighed.

"Hadn't you better be seeing what Little Tom and the doctor are doing?
I saw them going into your cabin a few minutes ago when," she concluded
maliciously, "you were lecturing.  Mr. Swain hasn't been about all day."

Blake hastily rose and hurried to his cabin.  Within, he found Little
Tom and Colton questioning Swain.

"What were you trying to do, anyway?" Colton asked.

Swain maintained an obstinate silence.  His face bore a stupid filmed
look, as if he had been drinking.

"It's no use asking him," Little Tom remarked.  "He's drunk.  Turn him
out to take the air."

Colton explained what had happened.  Hearing the hissing crackle of the
X-ray tube, they had entered Blake's cabin and found Swain with the
apparatus going at full blast.  He was stooped over, with his head
under the tube, so that the impinging pencil of rays focussed on the
back of his skull at the base of the brain.

"He's crazy," Big Tom remarked contemptuously.  "A hell of a fine guide
he'll make.  Why don't you ditch him at Matadai?"

"Because," Colton answered slowly, "his case is as interesting to me as
the sleeping sickness is to you, Big Tom.  I have about made up my
mind," he continued, "to let you gather the statistics while I gather
honey.  Swain's problem is unique."

"That's obvious," Big Tom rejoined dryly.  "He ought to be in a circus
with Jo Jo and the other dogfaced boys.  The nearer we get to the Congo
the more like an ape he looks.  It is almost impossible to believe that
he was ever an educated man, and a physician at that."

"I shouldn't be surprised to learn some day that he was trained as a
physicist," Colton retorted.  He took his profession very seriously and
resented any slur on its sanctity.

The next morning they woke as the mailboat docked at Matadai.  They did
not stay long in that little port of white warehouses and green,
rolling hills that swathed the river in their folds.  By noon they were
off in the train, and past the long rapids to Leopoldville, where
Colton's work was to begin.  Lila accompanied them, for it was in
Leopoldville that she was to meet the Simpkinses.  From there she was
to be snatched into the forest, miles away to the forsaken clearings
where the white man is only less of a curiosity than his calico.




CHAPTER III

HIS PEOPLE

At Leopoldville the party met an unforeseen check.  The three men of
course offered to see Lila safely handed over to her new friends, and
accompanied her to the office of the station agent, expecting to meet
the Simpkinses there.  The agent had been notified of Colton's purpose
in visiting the Congo, and ordered to help the doctor in every way
possible, with supplies, "boys" and transport.  But he had not been
forewarned of Miss Meredith's invasion.  Consequently he looked a
little blank when Colton introduced her.

"Your secretary?" he inquired.

Colton explained.  The expression of polite interest on the agent's
face changed to one of pained concern when the Simpkinses were
mentioned.

"You will pardon me a moment," he said, with a significant glance at
Colton, "but I must consult my records to find the exact address of
your friends, Miss Meredith."

Colton guessed, and so did Big Tom.  During the agent's absence they
tried their best to prepare her for what they knew was coming.  The
agent had expected as much of Colton.

"You are not very keen on this job, are you, Lila?" Colton asked.  "Why
not reconsider before it is too late, and go back to the States?  Get a
decent position in a civilized country.  There's not much to see here.
You saw how monotonous it was coming up in the train.  Just a dirty
river and a steaming forest--that's all there is to it."

"And the natives," Big Tom seconded, "are not really companionable."

"What's the matter?" she asked in alarm.  "Why are you trying to scare
me off?"

They had no chance to explain, for just then the agent returned,
looking grave.

"You did not get the cablegram the Mission headquarters sent you?" he
began.

"No.  When was it sent?"

"Four weeks ago yesterday."

"I left home five weeks ago."

"The Mission will doubtless pay your passage back, Miss Meredith," he
hurried on.  "I am sorry to have to tell you that your services will
not be needed."

"But why?"

"The cablegram would have explained," he replied vaguely.  "The
Simpkinses were relatives of yours, or perhaps friends?"

"I never heard of them in my life until I got the offer of this
position."

"Then I can tell you everything," he said.  "Mr. and Mrs. Simpkins were
so ill four weeks ago that they thought you had better not come.  They
died ten days ago."

"Sleeping sickness?" Big Tom asked.

The agent nodded.  "They were in one of the worst districts.  Now, Miss
Meredith, won't you take the next train back to Matadai?  I can
telegraph ahead and get a berth reserved for you on the steamer.  You
need not worry about the money; I'll settle with the Mission."

"It is all so sudden," she said faintly.  "Give me a few moments to
think."

She retired to a corner of the room and sat silent, while the men tried
to appear natural.  Presently the agent drew Colton aside.

"Your friend Swain," he whispered, "is an old timer in these parts.
Know anything about him?"

"A little," the doctor admitted guardedly.  "Do you?"

"A lot," the agent replied with a curious laugh.  "Is he one of your
party?"

"Unofficially.  I have engaged him as my guide.  He says he knows the
country from A to Z."

"He does.  You had better give him the slip this evening and come to my
house for dinner.  The others are invited too, of course, but I draw
the line at Swain."

"It seems rather a scurvy trick," the doctor demurred.  "Swain is my
patient."

"He is also your guide," the agent added significantly.  "Better accept
my invitation."

"Thanks, I will.  Well, Miss Meredith seems to have made up her mind.
What is it to be, Lila?"

"I am not going back."

"No?  Then what do you propose to do?  You can't live on the scenery."

"I might open a school for the white children," she began slowly, "but
I shan't.  I've had enough teaching.  That five minutes of thinking did
me more good than any five years I've spent on earth."

"So you found out that you don't like teaching?" Big Tom commented with
approval.  "I knew it the minute I saw you.  Still, like Colton, I'm
curious to know how you are going to make a living.  Why not get
married?"

"Because I haven't been asked, for one thing," she replied.  "No, I
shall be a secretary."

"To whom?" Little Tom inquired.

"Dr. Colton.  I can get out his reports and statistics in good shape.
I'm quick at figures, and a fair stenographer."

"Well, of all the nerve--" Colton began, but she quickly stopped him.

"Please think it over," she begged.  "I simply can't go back to that
awful town.  Everybody would laugh at me.  I'll work for ten dollars a
month and my board."

"But we are going into the most outlandish places--forests and swamps
and jungles where no white woman and very few white men, if any, have
ever set foot.  I even feel conscience stricken about dragging the
Blakes along with me, and they're old friends and strong, capable men."

"I give in.  I really need someone," Colton said, "as I'm an awful dub
on the typewriter."

Lila thanked him with her eyes.  Little Tom regretted that he needed no
secretary.  His father, older in the ways of the world, rose to his
opportunity.

"I'll give you another ten a month if you keep my scientific apparatus
clean and in good shape.  It is likely to get pretty filthy in these
sweaty forests, to say nothing of that muddy ditch."

Lila's thanks were cut short by Colton's indignation.

"Do you mean to say you are going to drag all that junk through the
jungle?  I thought we had talked you out of it a week ago."

"I'll leave it here if you can suggest some more exciting way of
killing time in the villages while you are off counting corpses.  You
can't?  Well, then, my outfit goes.  So that's that."



THAT evening Colton dined alone with the agent.  Swain disappeared
early in the afternoon "to see some friends."  The two Toms, feeling
that they had been invited merely out of politeness, made the excuse of
wishing to see as much of the town as possible during their short stay.
They took Lila with them to the only decent hotel in the place, run by
a Frenchman, and spent a very cosy evening.

The agent at first was not inclined to be talkative.  He waited for
Colton to give him a lead.  The doctor, for his part, was a trifle
reticent about betraying anything that might compromise a patient.  So
progress was slow.  At last, with the coffee, the agent decided to take
the bull by the horns.

"Swain, you say, is a patient of yours?"

"More or less.  He does not consider himself so, but I treat him as
one.  He did consult me once, however."

"About himself?"

"Yes.  Why do you ask?"

"I thought it might have been about his wife.  She was perfectly well
when she left the Congo, but one can never tell what fever germs will
wake up when we get away from this infernal hole."

"You are interested in medicine?" the doctor parried.

"Who isn't in this swamp?  We have to keep awake.  But I'm only an
amateur, and a very superficial one at that.  Still, I suspected that
Mrs. Swain might not last long after she got away.  Do you happen to
know what she died of?"

"She never consulted me, so I can't say.  I saw the body."

"And you formed no opinion?"

"Not at the time.  Later I thought over what I had seen, and made a
very rough guess."

"Care to say what it was?"

"Not directly.  I can say this much, without betraying a confidence.
Swain for some time, both before and after his wife's death, was under
a severe mental strain.  I do not know yet what caused his condition.
Do the natives here use drugs to any extent?"

"They chew leaves and bark of various kinds--at least the low-down
blacks indulge.  Also they drink a good deal, palm wine, native beer,
and the like.  So you think Swain may have fallen into bad habits?"

"I'm not sure.  What sort of a reputation did he have out here?"

"Pretty bad.  In fact it couldn't have been worse.  There was never
anything very tangible to fix on him, though the black mark was quite
generally recognized."  The agent paused.  "Try one of these cigars?
They kick like a wounded bull elephant.  Nothing like them for settling
the digestion."

When their cigars were lit, the agent got up and began slowly pacing
back and forth.

"I'm going to tell you what I know of Swain," he resumed, "for your
protection.  As agent here I feel that I must, even at the risk of
blackening another man's character.  In a way I am responsible for your
safety as long as you stay in the Congo, so I am within my rights in
warning you.  Swain is an out and out rotter."

"Criminal?"

"Worse.  He has no conception of the difference between right and
wrong.  I used to talk with him by the hour.  His utter failure to show
indignation or disgust at the most revolting native atrocities marked
him as a man without the first notions of civilized decency.  He is
incapable, I believe, of any emotion.  As a medical missionary he did
his work well enough, but always it was just part of his
bread-and-butter job, never with the least spark of human sympathy.
Naturally I became interested in trying to learn why he ever entered
the profession, so I quizzed him.

"His answer was illuminating.  I didn't get it all out of him at once.
In fact it took me the better part of three years to strike the bottom
of his character.  I must go back and tell you something of his life.

"Swain was born in Nebraska, the son of an evangelist of the old
school.  The only books allowed about the house were tracts and other
literature of a similar kind used by the father in his work.  At about
the age of fifteen, while in high school, young Swain first heard of
science.  There was a course of botany, and another in elementary
biology, both of which Swain devoured.  For the first time in his life
he heard of Charles Darwin and of evolution.  The theory made a deep
impression on his adolescent mind, and he talked constantly of it at
home.

"His father was shocked.  He argued with the boy, and always got the
worst of it, because his own education was limited, to say the least.
His knowledge of science seems to have been nil.  Failing to get the
better of his son, he attacked the school, and succeeded in getting the
teaching of science abolished.  Then, according to Swain junior, the
miracle happened.  He was just a few days over sixteen when he was
converted at a camp meeting conducted by his father.  The father's joy
can be imagined.  His zeal had been rewarded beyond his hopes.

"But the mischief was done.  Young Swain had read all of Darwin, and
had digested, more or less, what he read.  It was impossible to get it
out of his system.  He was in a bad fix.  His sixteen-year-old brain
had to hold the theory of evolution and his father's teachings without
bursting.  But, as I said, the miracle had happened."



"TO HIS father's tearful joy the son announced his intention of
disproving the theory of evolution and confounding Darwin and all his
followers.  At first he conceived the idea of abolishing science by
oratory.  The boy preacher was a success for exactly three months.
Then the public--it was in New York--began to laugh openly, and the
press finished him in a series of cruel cartoons.  Nebraska welcomed
him home and soothed his lacerated vanity with a monster mass meeting
in his honor.

"He was not deceived by all this local fame.  The lesson of New York
had gone home.  To smash science he must first master a few tricks of
the scientific game.  Here his father came to his rescue.  Why not
study medicine and see with his own eyes the facts to refute Darwin's
wool-gatherings about monkey-made men?  The idea fired the boy's
imagination.  He would become a medical missionary and slay a whole
academy of monkeys with a single syllogism.  As a medical student he
would learn comparative anatomy; as a medical missionary to Africa he
would see men and monkeys in action together and, by a skilful
application of his medical lore, demonstrate once and for all the
ludicrous absurdity of evolution.

"For a boy of sixteen you must admit it was no mean ambition.  His home
town in Nebraska gladly subscribed the necessary funds to pay for the
medical education.  It was money well spent, in a way.  If you care to
look up the records of the medical college you will find that Swain
graduated at the top of his class."

"That is the inconceivable part of it," Colton remarked.  "I took the
trouble, before leaving Chicago, to find out what I could about Swain.
His year at the medical college is one of the best in its history.
Robertson, Bancroft, H. S. Smith, Tyson, and a dozen less eminent men,
but still first raters, were all of that crop.  Yet Swain beat the lot.
It seems impossible now that Swain could ever have had a mentality that
showed up in such a list.  Sickness or something else must have played
the devil with his mind."

"It was the 'something else,' I suspect," the agent resumed dryly.
"Well, Swain had his medical degree, and a good one.  There was no
difficulty about getting him a post in Africa.  He could have had the
best on the continent.  Instead he chose an obscure station out here in
the Congo.  Before leaving the States he was married.  His bride came
out with him, and followed him without a complaint into the foulest
corners of this godforsaken country.  Their daughter was born in a
filthy native hut three hundred miles from the nearest white settlement.

"Swain never spent more than a few months in any one place.  Every move
he made took him deeper and deeper into the forest.  I suspect that
many of his expeditions had little to do with healing the sick.  He
acknowledged as much.  His heart was with the monkeys, not with men.
For weeks and months he almost lived with apes, baboons, monkeys and
chimpanzees in their native forests.

"Six years ago he claimed, justly I believe, to know more about the
life and habits of monkeys in general than any man living or dead.  His
family did not always accompany him on these queer expeditions,
especially when his daughter was a mere child.  But as she grew
up--from about the age of fifteen on--the whole family would disappear
into the forest for weeks.  Swain sacrificed his wife and daughter, no
less than himself, to his fantastic mania for disproving evolution.

"Now I come to the part which earned Swain the contempt of every white
man in the Congo.  Not content with mastering a score of native
dialects, Swain actually joined four of the lowest tribes.  He did
this, he said, in order to get closer to the black man's soul.

"If reports told the truth, Swain got about as close to his black
brothers' souls as it is possible for a human being to get, black or
white.  It is said that for a considerable time he became a witch
doctor.  You know the sort of thing I mean; the low down native fakir
who prances about, covered with dog's blood and chicken brains,
pretending to smell out witches and other evil doers."

"Have you any idea of his motive?"

"I can't say that I have.  Although Swain is a monomaniac on evolution
he is not crazy enough to believe in African magic.  The agents up the
river said it was all a commercial scheme.  They may have been right.
It is certain that Swain made quite a lot of money out of the ivory and
pelts he collected as fees for his witch doctoring."

"Did he give up his regular medical work?"

"Yes, he cut loose from the Mission about six years before he retired
on the proceeds from his new profession.  The new beat the old out of
sight as a money maker."

"What about his character?"

"Haven't I given you a hint?  Out here we don't think much of a man who
goes as low as the lowest natives.  But, if that is not enough, I can
tell you that he was kicked out of all four tribes which had taken him
in.  He was too dishonest for even the credulous black mind to stomach."

"And his wife?"

"She stuck to him through it all.  Why?  Because she thought he was a
knight errant from Heaven to upset evolution."

"What became of the daughter?"  Colton asked quietly.  He remembered
Swain's agonized confession that his daughter had died in the Congo,
and the intended inference that she had suffered from the same disease
as her mother.

"I never saw Edith Swain," the agent replied.  "But by common report
she was a beautiful thing when young.  At about the age of eighteen she
began to lose her good looks.  All accounts agree on this.  From a
vivacious, intelligent girl she changed into a morose, brooding, almost
sexless lump of flesh.  Her father, in an effort to reawaken her
interest in life, took her with him on one of his wildest expeditions
into the forest.  She had always loved the butterflies and insect life
of the real wilderness.

"So it was natural that Swain should think of a long stay in the forest
as a probable cure for his daughter's sickness.  They left Mrs. Swain
in one of the filthy native villages and entered the wildest part of
the forest with three native guides.  Four weeks later Swain emerged,
alone.  The guides, he said, had been bitten and killed by horned
vipers.  Edith met her death while attempting to swim a treacherous
rapid.  I never believed either assertion."

Colton started.  "You think he did away with her, and shot the guides
to keep their mouths shut?"

"That is farther than I care to go.  It is a pretty serious thing to
accuse a man of killing his own daughter."

"I believe you are mistaken," Colton said slowly.  He was thinking of
Swain's wife.  Surely the man who had cherished that poor creature to
the end would not have treated his daughter otherwise, however
repulsive her affliction.  "No; Swain is innocent on that count.  I
can't tell you my reasons for believing what I say, but they are pretty
good.  We shall learn everything in time.  What made you think that
Mrs. Swain would not last long after she left the Congo?"

"It was just a guess.  I may have been wrong, if what you say about
Swain should turn out to be true.  Before she left she was beginning to
look like the descriptions of her daughter.  All her spirit seemed to
have died.  She was beautiful when I first knew her.  When she took the
steamer she was gross, unintelligent, sensual--in fact half-way toward
the beasts.  The Congo had got her at last."

"One thing is certain," Colton said, after a long silence.  "Your
suspicion about the daughter is not borne out by what happened to the
mother.  Swain was miles away when she died.  It was an accident.  I
saw it with my own eyes."

"What sort of an accident?"

"She was run down in the park."

Colton, with intent to deceive, had told the truth.  It all depended
upon how one interpreted the words "run down."  The agent pictured an
automobile tragedy, as Colton intended he should.  The doctor felt that
the agent was getting too hot on the trail.  A little hotter and he
would have Swain arrested for murder.  That wouldn't do at all.  Colton
wished to study Swain thoroughly before seeing the last of him.

"I'm very grateful," he said, as he rose to say good night, "for all
your pointers.  I shall keep a sharp eye out on friend Swain."

He walked to the hotel, where he sat up till daylight, thinking.



SIX months of routine work along the fever stricken banks of the great
river; with Leopoldville and Kinshassa as his headquarters, had given
Colton two-thirds of the information he required for his report.  There
had been numerous expeditions into the sparsely settled hinterland, or
up the river to the last outlying ports of the white traders, but on
the whole six months passed in one monotonous grind of tabulating and
checking the reports which accumulated in bales in the main office.  In
all this work Lila was a real help.

After the third excursion into the rotting forests, Big Tom decided
that a clean room with matting on the floor was preferable to an
ant-infested litter of decaying vegetation three feet deep.  The gloomy
silences where, literally, the sun never penetrated might be an
insects' paradise, but they were unspeakably depressing to a white man
with nerves.  Big Tom settled down to an endless X-ray analysis of the
fascinating mineral specimens which the Kinshassa agent kindly placed
at his disposal.

"Finding anything interesting?" Colton queried.

Big Tom held up a small splinter of metal, crisscrossed by a flat,
crystalline pattern.  "You recognize what it is, of course."

The doctor nodded.  "A piece of meteoric iron, isn't it?"

"Yes.  It is almost chemically pure iron.  The structure is normal, and
the X-ray pattern of one of its salts which I made shows it to be
nothing but iron."

"That's what you would expect, isn't it?"

"Precisely.  I should also expect its specific gravity to be
practically the same as that of pure iron.  But it isn't.  This iron,
bulk for bulk, is two and a half times as heavy as common, pure iron."

Colton looked incredulous.  "Better let me take your temperature," he
advised.

"The heat has nothing to do with it.  Here, check up for yourself."

In half an hour Colton had performed the simple weighing and measuring
necessary to verify Blake's statement.

"Well I'm jiggered," he observed, rising.  "There is no doubt about it.
A snake with a dog's head would be less of a freak of nature.  Where
did you get the specimen?"

"The agent lent it to me with the rest.  He says that it was brought in
some years ago by McKay, one of the government geologists at the time.
This man, it seems, found a fragment of a meteor half buried in the
forest about five hundred miles northeast of here.  He chipped off this
splinter.  I would give a good deal to see the rest of the chunk.
McKay disappeared about six years ago, so there is no hope of anything
from him.  He is supposed to have met his death in the pygmy country.
In addition to his geology he seems to have been quite an explorer.
Too bad he's dead."

"How do you explain the weight?"

"I don't," Big Tom replied.  "Still, there is one rational guess.  This
is an isotope of terrestrial iron."

Colton shook his head.  "You've got me."

"The idea is quite simple.  Aston and others have found that what we
thought were chemical elements a few years ago--lead, oxygen, gold, and
so on--are not simple substances at all, but very close mixtures of
several different things.  Each element in the mixture has chemical
properties identical with those of the whole mixture, but the atomic
weights of the several constituents are different.  For instance,
mercury is made up of about half a dozen distinct elements, all having
exactly the same chemical properties.  But a gallon of one constituent
would weigh more than a gallon of another.

"Now this iron," he continued, "probably bears a similar relation to
common iron found on earth.  It was made under very different
conditions, perhaps in a much hotter and denser star than our sun.  But
even at that it's a freak.  There is no other case known I believe,
where the weight, bulk for bulk, of one variety of an element is two
and a half times that of another variety."

"I don't blame you for sticking in your room rather than going out to
make a Roman holiday for the ants."

A board creaked.  They turned sharply to find Swain glaring at them
like an enraged beast.  In the shock of their surprise neither man
spoke.  Swain broke the silence.

"That belongs to me," he snarled, pointing at the splinter of meteoric
iron in Blake's hand.

"How long have you been eavesdropping?" Big Tom asked with deliberate
insolence.  He had never overcome his intense dislike for the man.



SWAIN took a step forward.  His features lapsed into the brutal mask
that had stared down into the empty trunk in his Chicago flat.  Colton
stood watching Swain's face with a cold, fascinated attention.  To him
the situation was an extremely interesting medical problem, not an act
in a human tragedy.  Blake grasped a spanner.

"Come to your senses," he said sharply, "or I'll rap you over the head
with this."

For a second it seemed as if Swain was about to spring.  Then instantly
the mask changed.  A spasm of amazed pain, like the wondering terror of
a soul awakening in hell, shot across his face, the muscles relaxed,
and his features became those of a human being.

"I beg your pardon for entering without knocking," he mumbled.  "I came
to see if you would let me use the X-ray machine for a few minutes."

Blake was about to make a curt refusal when a glance from Colton
stopped him.

"All right," he said.  "Go ahead; help yourself."

"Thank you, I don't need it now."  His eyes were riveted on the
splinter of iron in Blake's hand.

"That seems to interest you," Colton remarked, nodding at the iron.
"Ever see it before?"

Swain stumbled into a chair, hunched over the table, and broke into a
horrible sobbing.  The two men looked on in helpless shame.  No man
should see another give way to his feelings.  To Colton it was a new
aspect of the case, to Blake, a disgusting and maudlin exhibition of
bad taste.  The doctor began to think he had been mistaken about his
patient.  This man after all was capable of emotion.  So Colton
thought, but the truth, as he learned later, was much less simple.  One
does not attribute emotions to a whiskey soak or a drug fiend in the
weeping stage.

At last Big Tom could stand it no longer.

"Pull yourself together, man, and sit up!  Don't go all to pieces over
nothing."

Swain choked, stopped his horrible noises, and faced Colton.

"The last time I saw that iron," he gulped, "was the day my daughter
died."

Big Tom felt contrite, and looked it.  The doctor, remembering what the
agent had told him, merely waited.

"You were prospecting?" he suggested, knowing perfectly that Swain had
been doing nothing of the kind.

"No," he answered vaguely.

"Then what the devil were you doing?" Big Tom snapped, again irritated
by his natural enemy's meekness.

"I was running away," Swain replied with an idiotic leer, half conceit,
half pleasure in the mystification he was producing.

Colton decided to put two and two together and observe the effect.

"By the way, Swain," he began, "the agent at Leopoldville told me the
night we arrived that you did not get on very well with several of the
black tribes.  As I recall it now he mentioned exactly four tribes with
whom you had a falling out.  Was it from one of these that you were
running away the day your daughter died?  She was drowned, was she not?"

Swain's answer was a snarl.

"They still lie.  Why should I tell you the truth?  You would not
believe it."

"I have believed stranger things than the truth," Colton assured him
with a laugh.  "As to why you should tell us anything, that's another
matter.  Let me tell you something first.  Then if you want to swap
secrets it's up to you."  Colton's knowledge of Swain's psychology had
taught him how to unlock the twisted man's confidence.  Flattery and an
appeal to vanity are the proper keys to the primitive or degenerated
mind.  Swain's mentality was now about half-way between the two.  It is
perhaps doubtful if it ever had been higher on the scale.  An apelike
imitativeness and a parrot's aptitude in repeating other men's ideas
would readily account for his record at college and his less reputable
adventures in education.

"That piece of iron in Blake's hand," Colton resumed, "is probably the
most extraordinary piece of iron on earth.  It is two and a half times
as heavy as any other piece of iron the same size.  So if you are the
man who found it originally you made an interesting scientific
discovery.  There is no telling what may come out of this find."

"Yes," Blake concurred, "smaller things, less startling finds than this
one, have changed the world's history.  If you care to say how and
where it came into your hands the whole scientific public would like to
hear you."

"The scientific public?" Swain repeated, in a voice shaken and hoarse
with hatred.  "The servants of the devil!"

His face had taken on the bestial look, the heavy intolerance of the
brainless fanatic, but only for a moment.

"Perhaps you are right," Colton agreed.  "You yourself once served the
devil indirectly.  Medicine is a science, in spite of what my friend
Blake thinks of it.  And remember this; to destroy the works of the
devil we must first understand them.  You admit that?  Evolution is an
example."

Colton was not slow to note the flash of insane conceit on Swain's
face.  He had flicked him on the raw.

"So if you tell us about this piece of iron," he continued, with just
that subtle lack of logic which would convince a mind like Swain's,
"you would be helping us to understand it, and our enemies to destroy
us.  Don't you see the point?"

The fanatic did, clearly, chiefly because there was no point to see.
Only an imbecile wastes reason on an idiot.  Logic, after all, has its
uses in an insane universe.  Swain became craftily confidential.  His
story somehow sounded plausible; but it did not ring true.

"I gave that piece of iron to a white man in the forest."

"That scarcely agrees with what the present owner told me," Big Tom
objected.  "According to him this was found by a geologist."

"He thought he found it," Swain sneered.  "But he would never have seen
it if it hadn't been for me.  I was hiding behind a lump of black rock
when he mistook me for an animal, or a savage.  My hair must have
showed above the rock.  He shot.  The bullet chipped off that piece of
iron."

"And you escaped?"

"Not even a native can track me in the woods," he answered conceitedly,
"when I want to disappear."



COLTON thought it was time for some shooting on his own account.

"You must be almost as clever as that fellow who got away from the
policeman in Jackson Park," he remarked dryly.

Swain's only answer was a dumb look of stupidity and hatred.  Colton
felt that he had solved the Jackson Park mystery.  But the knowledge
only made him keener to get to the bottom of the whole business.

"You said you were running away," he prompted, "when the geologist
mistook you for an ape?"

Swain had had enough for one day.

"My daughter was drowned that day, as I have told you.  It is painful
for me to recall the circumstances."

Drawing the rags of his dignity about him he lurched from the room.

"Queer fish," Colton laughed.

"As crazy as a loon," Big Tom agreed.  "I wonder, how much time he has
spent spying on me?  It was no accident that brought him in just now."

"Your apparatus seems to fascinate him.  I shouldn't be surprised if he
plays the peeping Tom every hour he's in the settlement.  By the way, I
wonder what he has been up to these last six weeks?  We have seen
precious little of him."

"I have wondered, too.  That fellow needs a shadow.  What sort of a
guide did he make on your trips?"

"First rate.  Couldn't have been better.  He knows this country like a
book.  And his command of the native dialects is astonishing."

"Well, we can remember that before we hang him, and give him a soft
collar.  I hate the sight of him."

"Rot!" Colton laughed.  "You couldn't hate anyone."

"I could come pretty close to the real thing in his case.  Don't you
get a crawly, uneasy feeling every time he comes near you?"

"Not particularly.  There are lots like him in the insane asylums.
They never make the doctors' hair stand on end."

"No, because they are safely locked up.  But this beauty is roaming the
forest at large.  And you saw how easily he sneaked in here when we
weren't looking.  Hereafter I work with my face to the door.  Then he
can't get the drop on me.  There's no window behind my back, thank
Heaven."

Colton had to hurry away to inspect Lila's typing.  A few minutes
later, Little Tom sauntered in, proudly exhibiting a new home-made
butterfly net.  While his father pottered with minerals, Little Tom
pursued the lazy, elusive butterflies.  His collection now numbered
some five hundred gorgeous specimens, all neatly mounted on cork and
properly labelled with the date and place of capture.

"Well, how goes it?" he inquired.

"So--so.  There is no mistake about this iron.  I sent off an account
of it to the _Philosophical Magazine_ by this morning's mail."

"Hope it makes you famous," Little Tom grinned.  His father's weakness
was a morbid dislike of publicity.

"Run away, little boy, and catch some pretty butterflies.  Don't bother
papa just now; he's busy."

"You bet I'll run.  Lila is coming out with me this afternoon.  This is
Saturday, you know."

Big Tom tried to look only casually interested.

"I believe I'll take a layoff myself," he announced.

"Why don't you?" Little Tom encouraged, confident of his ability to
lose his father in the first five yards of the forest.  "It's awfully
stuffy in here."

"Wait a minute, while I lock up, and I'll go with you."

Big Tom bustled about and put away his junk in record time.  On the way
to Lila's place he told Little Tom of Swain's visit.

"Suppose you keep an eye on him while you're chasing butterflies
through these bramble thickets."

"You poor old fathead," Little Tom rejoined affectionately, "did you
think I have been collecting butterflies all these weeks?"

"What has he been up to?  Of course I don't expect you to know what he
has been doing on these mysterious trips of his into the jungles.  But
if you are as smart as you say you are, you ought to know in a general
way what his little game is."

"If I knew the native languages I might have a theory.  I have followed
him like a shadow as closely as I dared, and as far as it was safe to
go without a guide into the forests.  He seems to be interested in just
two things, the lowest scum of the natives and the animal life of the
forests.  You have heard all these signal drums booming?"

"The hollow log contraptions?"

"Yes, the native wireless.  Well, so far as I can make out, Swain waits
till the racket begins, and then hotfoots it through the tall timber to
the source of disturbance.  There have been no end of palavers at all
the reeking native villages within a radius of fifteen miles during the
past three months.  And brother Swain seems to have been the main
attraction.

"The blacks, especially the women and warriors, go daffy over him.
Their friendship is a little disgusting in some ways.  These blacks
have a different set of manners and morals from ours.  Swain finds
himself right at home wherever he goes.  The things they eat would make
a white man sick.  Not all the time, of course, but just at these high
feasts."

"You can't make out what it's all about?"

"As I said, I can't get the hang of this native lingo.  Still, I have a
theory."

"Let's hear it."

"Swain is crazy."

"Is that all?  I knew that before we left Chicago."

"So did I.  But I didn't know just how crazy.  He thinks he's the
Napoleon of the Congo, or I miss my guess."

"And he is trying to raise the blacks to wipe out the godless whites?"

"Not by a long shot.  He plans the most spectacular campaign in the
history of Africa.  From what I have seen, I believe he is going to
clean up the forests."

"And put the natives into pants and petticoats?  It would be just like
him."

"Wrong again.  The blacks are his trusted allies.  Swain is planning a
drive against the monkeys, apes, gorillas, chimpanzees and the rest of
his ancestors from here to the far east coast."

Big Tom hooted.

"Who's crazy now?  You've been seeing things in the timber."

"You bet I have.  I have seen Swain climb a tree faster than any monkey
ever born.  And I have watched him spying on the domestic affairs of
the apes in the most curious way imaginable.  That fellow has no
manners."

"What about yourself?" his father laughed.  "You seem to have been
looking through the keyhole too."

"I always looked the other way.  There is something so human about the
apes and monkeys around here that I can't think of them as animals.  I
would as soon spy on Lila as on some of these poor beasts I have seen
Swain gloating over.  The longer he watches the more like an ape he
becomes himself.  His shoulders hunch up, his jaw shoots upward, and he
squats on a branch, hanging on to another, just like an old
orangoutang."

"But what about this Napoleonic campaign of his to purify the forests?"

"That may be his nutty notion, or it may not.  He is just crazy enough
to preach to the monkeys and try to convert them to wearing clothes."



"IT wouldn't be the first time in history," Big Tom chuckled, "that an
enthusiast has tried to reform the beasts."

"Swain isn't trying to teach the baboons because he likes them.  In
fact he hates the whole outfit like poison.  If you don't believe it,
just follow him on one of his trips into the forest and watch his face.
There's murder in his eye every time he sees one of them up in the
trees.  But it is the old fellows, with gray whiskers, who look like
senators of Abe Lincoln's time, that make him really furious.

"Some of these old chaps are at least three-quarters human and as
dignified as deacons.  A dozen times I have seen Swain reach for a club
or a brickbat when one of these old boys ambles by.  But he always gets
the better of his rage, and lets the old gentleman live.  So you see
where I got my theory.  It wouldn't do to wreck the campaign by getting
killed in a single-handed, private brawl with one of the elders.
Napoleon is going to make the blacks do his dirty work."

"Hadn't we better tell Colton?  A nut like Swain shouldn't be allowed
to roam around without a keeper.  He may start a serious row among the
blacks before he's satisfied."

"I have told him already," Little Tom announced with a superior air.

"Smart Alec!  Why didn't you tell me?"

"You never asked me how many butterflies I had caught.  Colton did."

"And what did he say?"

"Nothing much.  Merely remarked that if there is anything in it, he
would expect about as much of Swain."

"I wonder why?" Big Tom muttered.

The reason for Colton's belief is obvious enough.  Knowing what he did
of Swain's mission in life he guessed that the unfortunate man's
disorder would make him regard apes, monkeys and their cousins as
children of the devil, deliberately let loose in the world by that
gentleman to lead evolutionists astray.  It would be a brilliant and
satanic piece of strategy.  The superficial analogies between men and
monkeys could not fail to mislead the less intelligent of the two into
all sorts of crazy theories.  The chattering, eloquent congresses of
the apes, their perpetual quarrels and their absurd self-respect were
too devilishly human in the eyes of the scientists to be mere accidents.

Pedants among them might insist upon comparing the anatomy of men and
monkeys, and even delving deep into obscure corners of embryology, but
the great majority of the intellectuals would be immediately convinced
of man's kinship to the apes by the diabolical similarities between the
social ethics of the two races.  This being so, how could Swain better
execute his worthy mission than by wiping out en masse these luckless
pawns of Satan's ingenuity?

It did not enter Colton's innocent mind that there might be another
explanation, and a far more human one, for Swain's perverse zeal.  The
doctor was too simple, too honest to imagine this more probable
alternative.  Being by nature open and aboveboard in his dealings with
men, he was incapable of imputing more than ordinary, decent evil to
his fellow sinners.  That a human being could be both a flaming torch
of righteousness, of a sort, and a mean sneak, never occurred to
Colton's unsophisticated innocence.

It may be that Swain, having seen the apes and lived with them in
closer intimacy than has, perhaps, any other white man, became
convinced of the truth of evolution.  He was a physician, it must be
remembered, with an excellent training originally, whatever an
inherited tendency to degeneracy of the intellect may have made him
ultimately.  Possibly, then, being convinced that human evolution was
not the infernal fraud that he had ignorantly imagined, but an
elementary law of nature, Swain had determined to wipe out the most
conclusive evidence in its favor.

And why?  It would be difficult to say.  The cynical answer would reply
that Swain, being still in the boy orator stage of development, wished
to perform some spectacular feat of ignorant prejudice for the greater
glory of himself.  A less harsh judgment would say that he was merely
trying to save his vanity at the expense of his self-respect, a common
and pardonable human expedient.

The kindest theory is that he was merely a stupid fanatic who wished at
any cost to uphold his own pet delusion because, like all propagandists
of absurdities, he honestly believed that what best suited his own
narrow mind would be the one salvation of all mankind.  On this theory
he would gladly admit the truth--to himself--of the science which he
had set out to demolish, but would nevertheless seek to destroy it by
abolishing the evidence on which it was founded because, although human
evolution appeared to him as an indisputable fact, it was a dangerous
doctrine to put before the minds of the young.

The truth, he probably argued like hundreds of great leaders before
him, must be upheld even at the cost of trampling it flat in the mire
of superstition.  The trick of bolstering up a paying fraud by
suppressing the evidence against it is one of the best recognized and
least disreputable means of stabilizing society.  Swain was well within
his human rights.

Finally there is a certain intriguing largeness about his grandiose
project of setting back the clock a full hundred years that must engage
our sympathetic respect.  A man who could imagine himself competent to
dam the floods of time can have been no mean paranoiac, but a potential
statesman of extraordinary ability and forcefulness of character.

Swain was without doubt one of the greatest men of our century.  It is
merely his misfortune that his greatness puttered itself out in talk
and fantastic crusades against windmills, instead of carrying him
heavenward like a Fourth of July rocket to the firmament of popular
fame.

"Shall we go gunning for him this afternoon?" Big Tom asked as they
reached Lila's door.

"This is officially a butterfly expedition," Little Tom demurred.
"Still, if the gods see fit to raise a hairy ape in my path I shall
crown him with my little net."

This afternoon being the Saturday half holiday, Lila was Lila and not
Miss Meredith.  She emerged to greet her friends, clad in a sensible
flannel shirt, knickers, leather gloves and military leggings.  It is
only common sense when entering the Congo forest to expose the minimum
temptation to the ants, wild bees, bloodsuckers, thorn bushes and other
delights that make the cool green twilight less like the interior of a
cathedral than it might otherwise be.  Her first brief excursion behind
the green veil had robbed the mystery of its sentimental charm.  Lila
had packed an appetizing supper for two.  Seeing Big Tom she hastily
ducked into the kitchen and slapped together an extra ration.

"Whither away?" she asked, smiling.  "Shall we chase butterflies or
take the trail to that deserted village Dr. Colton wants us to see?"

"I'm for the village," Big Tom voted.

"Butterflies for me," Little Tom spoke up.  "Lila, you must cast the
deciding vote.  It's a deuce of a predicament for a woman, I know, but
you'll have to do it.  As you can't agree with both of us you are bound
to make one sore.  I'll bet it's Big Tom."



LILA was saved by the booming of a native drum.  The hollow
_tum-tum-tum_ seemed to originate not more than a mile away behind the
dense green wall to their left.

"He's getting bolder," Little Tom observed.  "The pow-wow must be in
that clearing we saw the other day, Lila.  Next time he will probably
hold his reunion right here in the public market.  Well, it seems to be
settled in favor of butterflies.  Come on, all.  Big Tom carries the
grub; I've got my net to manage."

Twenty minutes' march along a good trail over the rotting leaves took
them through the depressing gloom of the first belt of forest to the
hint of sunshine again.

"There's the clearing," Little Tom announced.  "Do you see any
butterflies?"

They crept closer, carefully avoiding twigs and tanglefoot, till they
could see distinctly through a natural window in the green dungeon out
to the dazzling sunlight of the clearing.  A curious sight met their
eyes.  In the open space, surrounded by broad leaved bananas and
bedraggled palms, they saw a silent double ring of blacks, men and
women, seated on the litter of a hundred previous orgies.

The first unusual thing that struck their attention was the uncanny
silence of that ring.  From even their short experience they knew that
the black man on a holiday is rather a noisy fellow, full of quips and
cracks.  Perhaps the beer had not yet arrived.  The second thing, which
riveted their eyes, was the focus of attention of all that silent ring.
In its exact center a huge ape had been securely fastened to a stake by
a tight rope collar around the neck.  How they had ever succeeded in
securing the brute was a mystery.  Probably they had half-poisoned it
in the forest with drugged bait before venturing to make it prisoner.
It was a powerful beast, more like a gorilla than an ape.

The tormented creature writhed.

"Does it remind you of anyone?" Big Tom whispered to Lila.

"Yes," Lila whispered back.  "But don't say whom.  It is too unkind."

"What devilishness are they up to now?" Little Tom muttered, as two
blacks, only less brutal looking than their victim, emerged from the
opposite thicket bearing bundles of dry palm leaves.  "I wish I had a
revolver."

"Same here," Big Tom muttered, as the two blacks dumped their bundles
at the victim's feet.

More bundles were brought and heaped up, all in the same sinister
silence.  It was a feast of anticipated cruelty too sweet to be broken
by idle chatter.

"They shan't finish it," Big Tom said under his breath, "so long as I
keep my health."

He searched about now in the litter at his feet and found a stout club
covered with sharp, hard thorns.  Kicking off the thorns at the thin
end he fashioned the weapon into a very serviceable mace, warranted to
inflict considerable pain on a bare black hide.  Little Tom followed
his example.  At a gesture from Lila he prepared a lighter club for
her.  The three were ready for the fun to begin.

So were those sadistic savages.  A human beast, more of a brute than
the helpless thing tied to the stake, leaped yelling into the ring with
a jangling clatter of its shell and bone charms.  It was the witch
doctor intent on smelling out evil.

Primitive religion at its best is rather a bestial thing.  The three
white spectators saw it at its best.  That filthy savage, the seer and
high priest of his tribe, pranced shrieking about the victim till the
sweat washed the caked dogs' blood and fresh chickens' brains from his
chest to his thighs, and still he bounded over the offals like an idiot
on springs.  To the frenzied cries of the spectators he responded with
meaningless yells and frothings at the mouth.

His feathers and repulsive finery wilted in draggled clouts and clung
to his glistening skin, but still he whirled about the victim.  And the
victim, dazed and terrified by these witless antics of a higher race,
followed every gyration of its tormentor with jerks of its head and
dumb fear in its eyes.  Suddenly the anointed one collapsed in a
screaming fit.  Almost directly in front of the doomed ape he kicked
and clawed at the offal, smearing himself with filth.  The dumb brute
for the moment had the better of the argument.  It at least kept its
dignity.

But the fun had scarcely begun.  Like Spanish ladies at a bullfight, or
Nordics at a prize ring, the women of the audience clapped and yelled
for the next round.  They were a red-blooded lot; there was nothing
anaemic about those strong mothers of warriors.  They were there to see
blood, and they would stick it out till they got their money's worth.


The ape had an unfair advantage over them.  Being denied the gift of
speech it couldn't exhibit its emotions in the usual way.  Therefore it
was impossible to say just how much of a beast it really was at heart.
The contrast between the spectators and their victim was almost of
itself a conclusive disproof of the theory of evolution.

It is incredible that any ancestors of those women, however remote,
could have resembled in the slightest degree that reserved ape.  Could
Swain have brushed the cobwebs from his eyes he would have seen in this
incident the destroying evidence for which he had sought in vain for a
quarter of a century.  But Swain was too far-sighted to observe any
truth in his immediate neighborhood.



THE second act began in ominous silence.  Through the slowly parted
leaves of the banana screen an impressive figure, wearing only a
scarlet calico clout, and a band of the same material binding up its
grizzled hair, advanced like a spectre straight toward the ape.

"There's our friend," Big Tom whispered.  "Some beauty, isn't he?"

Swain had not stooped to the cheap finery of his predecessor.  His only
concession to tradition was a smear of yellow ochre on each cheek and a
carefully adjusted dab of wet white chalk on each eyelid.  Nevertheless
he was, if anything, more repulsive than the cataleptic wreck clawing
at the offal.  His face was that of a man walking in his sleep.  It had
a dazed look, filmed over with coarse brutality.

"I wonder if he knows where he is?" Little Tom muttered.  "Well, he
will soon find out if he gets fresh with that ape."

Lila said nothing.  There was something inexpressibly revolting about
Swain's appearance and the way he walked.

In contrast to the first act, which might be described as a farce
comedy, the second was performed in dead silence.  Swain beckoned for
the torch.  The banana leaves parted, and a woman ran forward, bearing
the smoking brand.

"Come on!" Big Tom shouted, tearing through the tangle of underbrush
which separated them from the clearing.

It was a short fight and a merry one.  The element of surprise, added
to the natural cowardice of the blacks, aided justice quite materially.
In their terror-stricken confusion those pious worshipers tumbled over
one another, exposing recklessly their most fleshy spots to the rapid
thwacking of the three thorny clubs.  Swain alone escaped.  He had seen
them coming.  But his friends suffered freely, if not gladly, for him,
and the demands of common decency were generously met.

"Oh!" Lila panted, when they found themselves alone with the wretched
ape.  "How awful!"

"How the dickens are we to turn it loose?" Big Tom asked, cautiously
approaching the powerful ape.  "He may have taken a dislike to us."

The imploring eyes of the unhappy creature all but spoke.

"Here," said Little Tom, opening his pocket knife, "we've got to take
some chances in this life.  Get ready to run.  Ready?  All right; here
goes."

He deftly cut the cruel cords binding the ape's neck to the stake.
There was a flash of fur, a crash in the brush behind them, and it was
gone.

"He might have stopped to say thank you," Big Tom laughed.  "All things
considered though I'm glad that he didn't."

"Ugh!  I hope I never see that beast again," Lila said.

"The ape?" Little Tom asked innocently.

"No.  You know whom I mean.  Let's go home.  I can't eat anything."

"Nor I," Big Tom agreed.  "This has been a hell of a picnic, I must
say."

"There's one thing worth having out of all this wild afternoon," Little
Tom remarked.  "We know now who Swain's home folks are.  He is one of
the black crowd, right enough."

They discussed what was to be done about the incident.  Should they
tell the police?  If they did, what good would it do?  They decided to
tell only Colton, and have it out with Swain in private.  Leaving Lila
at her place, the Blakes went home to clean up before they all met once
more at dinner.  Having recovered from their squeamishness they all had
ravenous appetites.

On reaching their quarters the two Toms received an unpleasant
surprise.  The door had been wrenched open.  Big Tom's workroom looked
as if a cyclone had paid it a short visit.

"Anything missing?" Little Tom asked after the search.

"Only that splinter of meteoric iron.  Swain's been here and spirited
it away.  What the devil am I to do?"

"Oh, just explain to the agent that your room was burglarized.  He'll
understand."

"I'm not worrying about that end of it.  The agent is a decent fellow
and will let the specimen go, I am sure.  But the account I sent off to
the _Phil. Mag._ this morning is a horse of a different color.  Nobody
will believe me when I say the specimen was lost.  I'm done for.  They
will call me the champion ironclad liar of all time."

He sunk into a chair with a groan.

"Cheer up, father," Little Tom consoled.  "I'll cable to the editor to
return your manuscript unopened."

"Bright boy!" his father exclaimed with real joy.  "And now the next
thing on the program is to find Swain."

"Fat chance."

"Anyway I'm going to have a good try.  For one thing I want to know
where he found that meteor, and for another I crave to learn what
perverted use that skunk is going to make of the splinter.  Come on;
dinner first."




CHAPTER IV

THE FIGHT AT THE RAVINE

SWAIN'S trail was easily followed so long as he fled by highways and
waterways that could be called--by courtesy--half civilized.  The
pursuers met their first serious check at Basoko, the last strong link
between Central Africa and the outside world.  In this historic
outpost, famous once as Stanley's headquarters, but now strangely
inadequate and out of date with its low, battlemented walls, they
learned from the executive in charge that Swain had been there less
than twenty-four hours previously.  Where had he gone?  The agent
shrugged his shoulders.  In any direction there was at least plenty of
room.  From that point an ambitious or harassed traveler might skip to
any part of the African continent.  Swain had skipped.

Colton had decided abruptly, on hearing Blake's account of what they
had seen in the forest, to close up shop and follow Swain.  The
remainder of his work lay well inland anyway, and he might as well
inspect the interior now as later.  For some months he had secretly
held the opinion that an elucidation of Swain's case was of more
importance scientifically than the compilation of superfluous
statistics on the sleeping sickness.  So he had shifted his base at the
earliest moment possible.

"Don't think you have to come just because I am going," he said to Big
Tom.  "You two are here for a holiday, not for business as I am."

"I'm not so sure about that," Big Tom objected.  "Friend Swain has run
off with the most valuable piece of metal in the world.  Like you, I
have a holy curiosity to unscramble that fellow's eggs.  Little Tom is
coming along merely for the childish love of vulgar adventure."

"What about me?" a small voice inquired from the far corner.  "I can't
go back to that awful town in the Middle West.  All my friends--"

"Would laugh at you," Little Tom finished for her.  "Doctor Colton
still needs a secretary.  Don't you, Doc?"

"No worse than you need a nurse.  If I did my duty she would cry.  I
suppose she has to come."

"Thank you," said Lila, demure as a cat who has stolen the fish.

On the trip up the river she made herself as unobtrusive as possible,
attending to her everlasting reports and never butting into the men's
deliberations.  Although she said little, she listened hard and thought
a lot.  In many ways besides her beauty Lila Meredith was a most
remarkable young woman.

"Well," said Colton after their discouraging interview with the agent
at Basoko, "it's up to us.  Let us see if any of these ivory-headed
guides are good for anything.  Where's the interpreter?"

Erasmus, the interpreter, was a queer specimen for a full blooded
African.  He was a pink-eyed, white-skinned, yellow-haired albino.  His
kind is less of a rarity than might be thought.  Like most of them he
was considerably above the average intelligence of the natives.
Understanding at once what was wanted of him, he set about in his own
way to gather clues.  By nightfall he reported what he had picked up
from the sleepy-eyed but observant blacks.  Swain had gone farther up
the river in a dugout with six native paddlers.  Erasmus had even
learned what tributary the dugout would follow.  The paddlers somehow
had managed to gossip before their hurried departure.

As quickly as possible the party, with their guides and carriers,
bundled into dugouts and gave chase.  Rather, they gave crawl; it is
impossible to make a black man hurry when he wants to loaf.

For three weeks they pursued a rumor ever farther into the watery mazes
of the central forest.  At night they would hear that the fugitive had
passed that way early the same morning; the next morning he would still
be ahead.  The truth began to dawn on them.  Swain knew every ditch in
the steaming forest as well as he knew the streets of Chicago, if not
better.  Where they took the long way round he took the short.  The
weary paddlers, almost on the point of open mutiny, hinted as much.
They were ready to quit when the blind chase entered a new phase and
set them free of hard labor.

At noon of the twenty-second day out from Basoko they ran slap onto
Swain's dugout drawn up out of the mud.  The footprints of the paddlers
were still fresh.  Following his lead the pursuers tied up their own
lumbering dugouts, ordered the carriers to tote their loads, and took
up the spoor of Swain's party.  From the obvious lack of concealment on
Swain's part it was evident that he did not know he was being followed.

The trail had been kept open, and that was about all that could be said
of it.  Probably it was a goatwalk, or a passage frequented by heavier
animals in their passage to and fro in the forest; it certainly made
slow going for the loaded porters.  It was as dark as an ordinary
cellar with but a single small window, and it smelt mustier, mouldier
than the dampest cellar along the Mississippi.  If the mystery of the
primeval forest has a charm, the whites of the party failed to discover
it.

It was not long in that semidark tunnel floored with dank vegetation,
decayed wood and slimy fungi, before they lost trace of their quarry.
But they did not worry.  Swain, expert woodsman as he was, could not
have gone a yard either to right or left of the trail.  It was as true
a tunnel as any blasted through solid rock.  The matted roots and the
solid nets of huge convolvuli walling the trees made as impenetrable a
barrier as the steel grill of a bank vault.



THEIR first trace of the fugitive was a faint, pungent whiff of wood
smoke.  The party ahead had stopped to cook a meal.  How they had
managed to make any of that sodden punk burn was a mystery.

"They must have reached a clearing or an old plantation," Lila said.

Such proved to be the case.  The ashes of the fire were still warm when
the pursuers emerged into the blinding sunlight of a deserted clearing.
On the farther side, the trail again plunged into the dim, gloomy
forest.

"Not too fast," Colton advised.  "Let us spy out the land before we
attack.  The more we learn of his doings by keeping our eyes open the
less we shall have to drag out of him with questions.  Swain isn't a
talkative fellow."

During the two hours of their stay in the sunshine, Colton and the
Blakes explored the clearing.  A few tumble-down native huts, almost
overgrown with rank vines, told the story.  One hasty look inside the
largest hut was enough.

"Sleeping sickness got them," Big Tom remarked, with a rather green
look at Colton.

"Yes, and it proves one point I'm after.  The infected flies can get
through the jungle or up the river if you give them time.  They're
persevering pests."

"Shall we spend the night here?" Lila asked hopefully.

"Afraid of the dark?" Colton laughed.  "No; we'll go on till we smell
their evening smoke."

And so they followed for five days, ever deeper and deeper into the
depressing forest.  After the second day they trudged along from dawn
to dusk with scarcely a word.  The little conversation that passed was
confined to Tom junior's attempts to cheer up Lila.  The excursion on
the whole was about as cheerful as an unduly prolonged funeral.

The sixth day was critical.  They all but missed their game.  The noon
smoke guided them safely as usual, but when evening fell there was
nothing on the air but the eternal, damp mustiness of rotting wood and
decaying leaves.

"We've missed them," Big Tom announced in tones hollow with tragedy.

"So it seems," Colton agreed.  "Back we go over the trail.  They must
have branched off some time between lunch and dinner."

For the last day and a half the forest had grown opener.  Occasional
stretches of a half mile or so were easily penetrable.  The party had
been deceived by what they mistook for a clearly defined main trail.
It was plain enough now that Swain and his paddlers had taken a side
path through the forest.

"Our only hope is their evening fire," Lila sighed.  "I wish they would
sing, or make some noise.  This church effect is getting on my nerves."

"Suppose two of us run back," Little Tom suggested, "so as to catch
their fire before it goes out?  The porters can't do more than three
miles an hour.  Come on, Lila."

They ran back as fast as they could in the fading daylight over their
afternoon tracks.  Night fell like a blanket, and still they kept on,
guessing their way by the trees and undergrowth into which they
blundered.

"Isn't this rather dangerous?" Lila hazarded.

"Babes in the wood, you mean?  I suppose it is.  Still, we can't let
the bird escape now after all our trouble, can we?  Gosh!"

Little Tom's mild exclamation was drowned by Lila's stifled shriek.
Her arms were about his neck in a strangling embrace, not of affection
but good, honest fright.  The poor girl was scared as stiff as a corpse.

"What was it?" she stammered, when at last she could speak.

"Probably an ape.  We woke him up when we walked under his roost, and
he just dropped down to investigate."

They could still hear the faint padding of the great creature which had
barely missed falling on their heads.  The steady pat pat of its
jogging over the sodden leaves, as it receded before them into the
pitch darkness of the forest, had a curiously human sound.  If Little
Tom had heard the story of Swain's tree-climbing antics in Jackson
Park, he would have been less bold about continuing the search.  An
honest ape wakened from its slumbers is less of a hair raiser in a dark
forest than is an ex-medical missionary with apelike proclivities and a
penchant for arboreal acrobatics.

"Take my hand," he said to the shaken Lila.  "If we don't see a light
soon we'll go back."

"If we can," she gulped.

"If not we can just sit till daylight and wait for the others to catch
up with us."  He seemed quite pleased at the prospect.

"What if we're off the trail?  They say it is terribly easy to wander
round and round in a circle in the forest."

"Aren't you thinking of the desert?"

"No, I'm sure it was the forest.  That man at Kinshassa told me--Oh, my
God, what's that?"

A truly ghastly sound shuddered up on the darkness from behind them and
slightly to their left.  "Glug-glug-glug-uggle-uggle-swish," it went,
as if someone were holding an elephant's head under water till it
almost drowned, letting it up at the last moment to sigh and inhale.
That forlorn and utterly miserable succession of soul-destroying noises
was repeated three times.  With the third repetition Lila became limp
in Little Tom's arms, and his knees all but collapsed under the double
load.  He was too paralyzed with fright to get any pleasure out of his
sweet burden, or even to think.  What beast made a noise like that?
Whatever it was, it must be as big as a good-sized whale.  Flinging
Lila over his shoulder he faced about and started to blunder his way
back.

Their senses returned simultaneously.

"Put me down," she begged.  "You must think I'm an awful baby."

"I haven't been thinking about you or anything else," he confessed with
a forced, laugh.  "What was it?"

"I don't know.  I only hope it's dead by now."

"Look!" he exclaimed, unintentionally throwing her into another fit.

When she came to, Lila found herself flat on the ground.  One of Little
Tom's boots reassuringly caressed her cheek.  He was standing like a
sentinel by her head.

"Don't yell," he whispered.  "I see Swain's light."

He gave her a hand up and turned her round so that she could see the
light.  It was not a fire, but the flickering reflection thrown up from
a pit or hollow on the lower branches of a tree.

"Let us go back and report before Swain hears us," he said in a
whisper.  "Give me your hand and mind your step.  Don't make a noise."

The journey back was uneventful.  They found the party on the verge of
nervous prostration.

"Where the devil have you been all this time?" Big Tom demanded.

"Chasing butterflies, of course."

"You found them?" Colton asked eagerly.

"Why not?  Experienced trackers like Lila and me couldn't boggle a
simple little job like that."

"Then let two of us follow up at once.  The other two can stay here
till daylight and bring up the porters.  It can't be far, so we shall
have no chance to get out of touch with one another.  Miss Meredith,
I'm going to leave you here with Mr. Blake.  Little Tom and I will
spend the night on guard.  If you don't catch up with us by six in the
morning, fire a shot.  I'll fire one in reply to lead you to us.  Keep
it up till we do meet."

"But we shall only scare off Swain that way," Big Tom objected.

"No we shan't.  I don't intend letting him out of my sight from now on.
Hereafter we all travel together.  I've had enough of this Sherlock
Holmes business.  It's too risky by half in this blasted forest.  Go
ahead, Little Tom; I'm right on your heels."



THE two watchers had spent rather a miserable night.  Sleep was
impossible, even if they had wished to doze, on account of the army of
ticks which marched and countermarched over the bodies of the two men,
halting frequently for refreshments to strengthen them in their
maneuvers.  Dawn broke, misty, miasmatic and chilly.  Every bone in
their bodies ached as if it had been pounded with a steak mallet.

They breakfasted on quinine and stole back with the full daylight to
their post.  Swain's camp was just getting into action.

The thin smoke from their wood fire curled straight up through the
misty air with a maddening suggestion of warmth and breakfast.  Two of
Swain's blacks squatted before the fire, poking in sticks and fanning
up a blaze.  Presently they were joined by the remaining four.  The
newcomers carried a frying pan, a coffee pot and several ant-proof tins
of provisions.  Swain still slumbered in the bushes.

His camp was pitched by the side of a stream running almost noiselessly
over the polished rock of a deep ravine.  In this part of the forest
there was very little underbrush.  For a tropical forest the trees on
either bank of the ravine were almost suspiciously open-spaced.
Although there was no sign of the recent use of the axe, the whole
region had a suspiciously civilized appearance.  It looked as if it had
been cleared less than twenty years previously and kept free of scrub
ever since.  Yet there was no evidence of human habitations as far as
the two watchers could see.

All through this open forest frequent outcroppings of broken rock and
mounds of large boulders testified to the poverty of the soil.  Perhaps
it was this fact which accounted for the openness of the trees.

The stream slipping fast and silent over the rocky bottom of the ravine
was unlike any other that the party had seen in the forest.  The waters
of the others were a dark brown from the rotting vegetation which
fouled their courses; this stream was as clear and green as bottle
glass.

"That water comes from a spring," Colton remarked.  "See how clear it
is."

"Look around the bend--just above Swain's camp," Little Tom replied.
"There's where it comes out of the rock."

Colton followed the direction of Little Tom's finger and saw the
immediate source of the stream.  It was an almost circular opening,
about two feet in diameter, in the face of an unbroken cliff.  Through
this opening the clear water gushed in an even flow, to spread out
immediately over a natural spillway as beautifully curved as that of a
modern dam.  Nature had done a good job.  The steady flow followed the
curve of the spillway without a riffle and with scarcely a whisper.

Although neither of the men was a geologist, they could not help noting
the peculiar nature of the outcroppings of rock and boulders all
through the open forest.  The basic material appeared to be a
coarse-grained sandstone.  The remarkable feature was the curious black
pattern veined over several of the larger rocks and peppered haphazard
on some of the smaller.  The latter looked as if they had been plugged
full of rusty iron slugs and fragments of new nails from a shotgun
fired at close range.

Here and there an occasional lump the size of a grapefruit stood out
from the pile on which it lay, catching the eye immediately on account
of its uniform, shiny black texture.  These black lumps looked for all
the world like bungling attempts to manufacture small cannon balls.
Here nature had been less successful than with the spillway.  The mock
cannon balls were roughly round, but varied from almost perfect spheres
to crude ovoids like badly pressed cakes of soap.

Swain appeared just as the first enticing aroma of fried bacon took the
raw edge off the dank mist.  Colton and Little Tom could hardly contain
themselves.  They were on the point of sneaking back to their own
safari for breakfast when, with startling abruptness, the battle began.

A boulder the size of a man's body crashed down on the rocks not two
yards from Swain's campfire, shattered itself into a hundred fragments,
and splashed noisily into the glassy stream.  With a yell as of one man
Swain and his six blacks leaped to their feet and scattered.  Two of
the blacks had been struck by flying splinters of rock, as shown by the
blood streaming down their backs.

A second boulder shot down after the first.  This time the aim was
better.  One of the blacks flattened out on the smooth rock and the
boulder, rebounding from his mangled body, plunged into the stream.  By
this time Swain and the remaining blacks had found their firearms.  The
attack was evidently not unexpected, for Swain had an elephant gun and
the blacks either rifles or sawed off shotguns.  Seeking what shelter
they could find in the rocky bed of the stream, the attacked opened
fire at random on the trees on both banks of the ravine.  Colton and
Little Torn hastily crawled behind bigger trunks.  They were in little
danger, however, for it would have been almost impossible to hit either
of them from the rocks below.

The shooting was at its wildest when the enemy, about to retreat,
showed itself.  For barely a second a huge, dim gray shape appeared
from behind a tree on the opposite bank of the ravine.  Then instantly
it flitted away into the mists and was lost to sight.

Colton remembered his instructions to Big Tom and Lila.

"Those shots will bring up our crowd on the run.  I'll stay here and
keep watch while you go back and warn them.  Leave Erasmus in charge of
the porters, armed and ready to fight.  Bring back four rifles with
you."

"What about Lila?"

"She must stay with us.  The porters may bolt when they get scared.
Bring her back with you and Big Tom.  I'm going to see what happens
before I let Swain know we're here."



WHEN Little Tom returned, cautiously crawling up to Colton's hiding
place with Lila and his father, he brought with him not only a rifle
for the doctor but a good breakfast.

"Bless your soul," the doctor murmured fervently.  "I'll remember you
in my will for this."

"Bless Lila; she thought of it first."

"Good girl.  Better take your places behind trees before they smell us."

"Anything exciting happened?"

"No.  They chucked the dead black into the stream and ate their
breakfast."

Little Tom and Lila took their places within whispering distances of
one another, while Big Tom crouched down beside Colton.  For nearly an
hour nothing unusual happened.  The men below went about their routine
of cleaning up camp for the day as if the death of one of their party
were a trifle.  To the black man a corpse is a corpse and nothing more.
To Swain it seemed to be merely a useless cadaver.  Perhaps, after all,
their attitude was the sensible one, although it was a bit callous.
They made no attempt to remove the traces of the tragedy.

Having put the camp in order, Swain's men proceeded in a leisurely
fashion to the day's real business.  A small iron-bound box was lugged
out from the stores.  This box at once attracted the attention of the
watchers.  In addition to the two handles it had two bolted rings on
each of the six sides.  A long, thin steel cable, with steel handgrips
attached at one end, was next brought out and coiled.  This completed
the preparations, and the men sat down to rest.

The morning sun easily penetrated the sparser forest.  Soon the
atmosphere became like that of a Turkish bath, and a horde of
pestiferous insects buzzed forth to enjoy themselves.  The watchers
were in torment.  To slay the enemy with smart slaps was out of the
question; silence must be preserved even, at the cost of a skin
smarting from ankles to scalp.  Attempts at extermination by slow,
noiseless pressure proved futile.  The insects were quick on the wing
and as nimble on their feet as a bantam boxer.  The four investigators
squirmed and suffered.

Down below things went better.  One of the blacks was detailed to swat
the enemy while his companions slept.  The way of the transgressor is
said to be hard.  Swain, for the moment, had it pretty soft.  Colton
cursed under his breath and longed to execute a war dance with
hobnailed boots on the prostrate forms of the sleepers.

Shortly after three o'clock Lila had a recurrence of the heart failure
which had seized her in the dark.

"Uggle-uggle-uggle-glug-glug-swish," the hair-raising noise began with
inconsequential abruptness.  The eerie racket was even more awesome by
daylight than dark, for logically one would have expected to see the
beast responsible for the noise, whereas nothing but the uninhabited
trees was visible for a radius of a mile.  The strangling monster made
its second attempt to swallow a drink, and Lila all but collapsed.  At
the third and final repetition of the expiring agony she unashamedly
sought relief by burying her beautiful head in Little Tom's shirt
bosom.  It really was more than any normal girl should be expected to
stand.

Little Tom kept his nerve this time.  He found the noise quite
interesting, and Lila's warm head altogether delightful.  Colton and
Big Tom stared at one another with their eyes bulging and their jaws
dropped.  They were reassured by the nonchalance, with which Swain's
crowd took the uproar.  The blacks slowly sat up, stretched themselves,
and got to their feet.  Swain did likewise.

"They have a queer alarm clock, I must say," Big Tom whispered with a
silent chuckle.  "If they can stand it I guess we can.  Hullo!  What's
happened to the soda fountain?"

To their amazement they saw the green water in the stream dwindle in
its rocky channel and inch by inch cease to flow.  The supply had been
cut off at headquarters.  Glancing toward the circular orifice in the
rock wall they saw the last dribble trickling from its lip.  Presently
this too ceased, and the gaping hole yawned at them darkly, invitingly.
The simple, natural explanation for what they had heard and seen did
not immediately occur to them, for they were too busy watching Swain.
They simply accepted the fact as a fact, and postponed theorizing.

Swain was vigorously cuffing his five blacks into action.  One seized
the iron-bound box with the dozen bolted rings, another reached for the
coiled steel cable.  Swain went to his stores and procured a large
flashlight, which he handed to the fourth black, gave his rifle to the
fifth, and gave the signal to advance.

"They're going into that hole in the wall," Colton whispered.  "Where a
cat can go a mouse can follow."

"Surely, if the mouse is fool enough.  I vote we all stay here for the
present."

Colton said no more until the last of Swain's party had followed the
leader up over the spillway and through the circular opening in the
cliff.

"Miss Meredith," he ordered sharply, springing to his feet, "run back
to our safari and bring over our electric flashlights.  There should be
eight, if those thieving porters haven't absconded with some of them.
Better take your rifle."

"Where shall I find you when I come back?"

"Either here or down in the ravine.  We're going to inspect Swain's
outfit: There is no danger, I guess.  The enemy seems to be on the
other side of this ditch, and anyway he's quit for the day."

Lila hurried off at a smart run, holding her rifle at the balance.

"Now fellows," Colton began, "one of us must give the orders.  Who's
it?"

"Draw lots," Big Tom recommended.

The first draw eliminated Little Tom.

"I resign," Big Tom chuckled.  "You're the boss, doctor.  What's on?"

"First, just to avoid confusion if we get into a mix-up, you two must
obey orders.  Is that all right?"

They nodded.

"Then I'm going down to search Swain's baggage.  You two stay up here
and pot anyone who tries to interfere with my work."

They saluted with mock gravity and Colton scrambled down the
precipitous side of the ravine.  Presently they lost him behind the
clump of brush from which Swain had fetched his paraphernalia.

"I hope Lila's safe," Little Tom muttered after a tense ten minutes of
silence.

"Oh, she's all right," Big Tom replied uneasily.  "I wonder what the
dickens is keeping her?"

"Hadn't I better go and see?"

"No.  You have no orders to leave this post."

"That's so.  I guess I'm a buck private in the rear rank.  What's
happened to Colton?  Is he dead back there?"



THEY sat and fumed in nervous silence for another ten minutes.  Then
suddenly they started to their feet.  Two muffled shots in quick
succession reverberated and buffeted down the narrow ravine.

"Where was that?" Big Tom asked, trying to locate the source of the
sound.

"It wasn't from Colton.  Listen!"

They thought they heard a succession of short, savage yells.  Almost
instantly half a dozen shots, again muffled, rang out, and they placed
the noise.  Those shots were being fired in the cave into which Swain
and his five blacks had disappeared.

"They seem to be having a hot time of it in there," Little Tom remarked.

"I'll bet only one of the six comes out of there alive," his father
remarked grimly.

"And it won't be one of the blacks," Little Tom added.  "Where the
deuce is Colton?  Didn't he hear those shots?"

Colton had heard the shooting perfectly, but, being by nature
cool-headed, he resolutely refused to get excited.  He went steadily on
with his search of Swain's effects.  At last he found what he was
looking for.  Pocketing the splinter of meteoric iron which Swain had
stolen from Big Tom's workroom, the doctor made his way back to the bed
of the now extinct stream.

Things began to happen all at once.  The enemy, roused by the muffled
shots from the cave, had silently and invisibly advanced to the field
of battle.  Slipping from tree to tree, high up in the dense foliage
overhead, the attackers had easily escaped the attention of the Blakes,
whose vision was focused either on the channel or expectantly on the
tree trunks across the ravine.

The enemy fired the first shot, apparently from the sky, for neither of
the Blakes saw what had hurled down the huge boulder which crashed down
within three yards of Colton, just emerging from the scrub.

The doctor, being in command, kept his head.

"Behind you!" he shouted, ducking back under cover of the opposite bank.

The two defenders wheeled round, rifles raised, to face the enemy.
They saw nothing.

"Look up," Colton shouted from the comparative safety of his refuge.
"Every man for himself!" he yelled, as the splintering boulders began
to rain down on the rocky floor from his side of the ravine.  With
methodical regularity and steady nerves he started shooting.

The Blakes had no time to follow Colton's defense.  Their own engrossed
all of their attention.  Like a huge, hairy spider an enormous apelike
brute dropped from the branches above them and stood snarling not six
feet away.

"I'll get him," Big Tom shouted, raising his rifle and aiming at the
creature's right eye.  "Shoot the one to your left!"

The forest was alive with the huge gray brutes that, dropped by twos
and threes from every tree.  They were not gorillas, but some bigger,
stronger beast, all but covered with tufts and patches of coarse gray
hair like a Scotch shepherd dog's.  Between the patches of hair the
bare black skin, bathed in some sticky exudation, glistened in the
light.  The two men found themselves hemmed in by a hundred of the
seven foot brutes.  Without a sound the beasts slowly advanced upon the
pair, walking upright and easily like human beings, with the obvious
intention of forcing the men over the edge of the ravine.  Their
tactics were only too evidently directed by intelligence.

Big Tom got his the first shot, clean through the brain.  Before Blake
fired the creature instinctively shot up its right arm to protect its
eyes.  Did it know what firearms were?  With a nerve racking groan,
singularly like a man's dying agony, it lurched forward, collapsed,
kicked convulsively, and was dead.

"Help!" Little Tom shouted.

His shot struck the steadily advancing brute squarely on its massive
breast bone.  The giant coughed, spat, and came on.  Big Tom gauged his
son's chances at a glance, decided that he had two seconds to spare,
and shot the beast nearest him in the stomach.  Wheeling round to help
Little Tom he saw the gigantic brute attacking his son stoop and pick
up a large stone from the loose pile at its feet.

The missile, hurled with terrific force, knocked Little Tom's hat off
and broke an overhanging branch six inches thick clean off.  The
infuriated beast, keeping its rage-red eyes on its mark, stooped
sideways and groped with its huge left hand for a second stone.  The
palm and long, muscular fingers closed over one of the shiny black
natural cannon balls.

Then a strange thing happened.  The brute, not seeing what its hand had
clutched, because its eyes were riveted on Little Tom's head,
straightened up to hurl the stone.  The tremendous muscles of the arm
jerked the brute off its balance before the hand could release its
hold.  That black stone, no bigger than a grapefruit, probably saved
Little Tom's life.

For all the involuntary tugging of the straining muscles in the
creature's arm the black stone remained fixed.  Straightening up to
recover its balance, the brute raised its left arm to the level of its
shoulder.  That involuntary movement gave Big Tom his chance.  As
coolly as a sailor shooting clay pigeons in a gallery he aimed at the
exposed armpit and pulled the trigger.  The steel bullet, ranging
downward, severed the aorta, and with a sudden gush of blood from the
mouth the huge brute tumbled forward dead.



THEY were now in the thick of it.  Undeterred by their fellows' death
the rest of the horde continued its slow advance with machinelike
precision.  Another ten seconds and the two men must leap over the
rocky edge of the ravine or stand still and have their backs broken
like straws.  Their lucky shots were over.  They loaded and reloaded,
pumping the triggers with deadly regularity.  But still the gray horde
advanced.  The steel-nosed bullets either flattened on the bones of the
brutes, or tore harmlessly through huge muscles that seemed to feel no
pain.  An occasional shot to the stomach doubled one up, but it merely
coughed and came on, bleeding internally.  A machine gun would have
been useless against their brutal strength and more brutal courage.

Retreating an inch at a time the men fought their way back to the brink
of the ravine, desperately feeling for the least hazardous place to
jump.  They dared not look round, for fear of the inevitable rush which
would send them flying backward over the edge to the rocky floor below.

With a cry of despair Little Tom flung away his rifle and began hurling
stones.  The bolt had jammed, and he could no longer fill the magazine.
His father shouted to him to run and jump, but he held his ground.

A second rapid crack-crack-crack of a rifle joined Big Tom's.  It was
Lila, shooting at random into the gray horde from behind.

"Get out!" Big Tom yelled.  "We'll jump."

She emptied the shells from her rifle and reloaded.  Her frenzied
firing caused a momentary halt in the long gray lines.  It was the
men's chance, and they took it.  To stay with Lila was useless.  She
must run for the safari and make her stand there with the porters.
There were firearms enough for about a third of them.  Flinging his
rifle before him Big Tom darted for the easiest way down, dragging
Little Tom with him.  Simultaneously Lila's firing stopped.  She had
done what common sense dictated and bolted for the porters.

Bruised and bleeding the two picked themselves up at the bottom of the
ravine.  Where was Colton?  He had ceased firing.  Had he been crushed
by a boulder?  The opposite bank of the ravine was being patrolled by
the huge gray beasts, each hefting easily a jagged lump of rock the
size of a man's body.  They swung these chunks as lightly as if they
were sticks of firewood.

Cautiously the first of the silent brutes on their own side began to
feel its way down the cliff of the ravine.

"We're nicely caught," Little Tom remarked.  "If we run for the other
side those intelligent devils will drop half a ton of rock on us.
Shoot, while the shooting's good."

Big Tom raised his rifle and pulled the trigger.  It clicked smartly,
and that was all.  The hard fall when Blake had flung it down to the
rocky bottom of the ravine had jammed the mechanism, rendering it
useless.

"They've got us, I guess," Big Tom said quietly, clubbing his rifle for
the last, hopeless stand.

Hand over hand the scout of the beasts clambered down the steep bank.
It was about to let go and jump the remaining distance, its arms both
raised high above its head as it clung to the rocks, when a crack from
the left told that Colton was still alive and shooting.  It was a clean
shot.  The bullet found its way between the creature's exposed ribs to
its heart.  It kicked and somersaulted backward to the stone floor,
landing squarely on its head, with its arm stretched wide out and its
muscular legs kicking at the sky.

A shout from Colton appraised them of his refuge.  Just as the gray
hordes cast caution to the winds and swarmed down both sides of the
ravine, the two men bolted for the orifice in the cliff.  Shoving his
son before him Big Tom scrambled up the spillway.  Little Tom in turn
dragged his father up and shoved him through the opening.  By dint of
squeezing and squirming sideways Big Tom got safely in.  He and Colton
lugged Little Tom through by main force.

Like shock troops the gray horde advanced to the spillway.  As if by a
preconcerted plan they pyramided and let those in the rear climb over
their backs.  The first huge brute thrust one powerful arm into the
circular opening, groped for the men within and, failing to feel them,
put forth all of its enormous strength to force an entrance.

Colton did not shoot.  He could have blown the creature's face off
where he stood in the dark tunnel, but he wisely held his fire.  That
immense beast might as easily have passed its shoulders through the eye
of a needle as through the opening into the cave.  Having exhausted
every reasonable chance to enter, it showed remarkable intelligence.
It immediately withdrew, leaving the entrance clear.

"That brute must have a human brain in its head," Colton remarked.
"I'm going to see what they're doing."

He advanced cautiously and peered out.  The whole horde had withdrawn
to hold a council of war.  Their language seemed to consist solely of
signs and gestures.  Not one made the slightest sound.  Presently a
gigantic gray brute, its head and shoulders towering above the mob,
forced its way to the center of the crowd.  If they had a leader, this
must be he.  It was fully nine feet tall, and four feet across the
shoulders.  It could have broken the strongest gorilla's back with one
twist of its huge hands as easily as a man snaps a twig.

"Come and see their general," Colton invited.  "Here's the devil
himself come to direct the attack.  We're in for it, I suspect.  I vote
for a retreat.  We may break our necks in the dark, but there are worse
deaths."

"Lila is showing her usual good sense," Little Tom observed, pointing
to a dense pillar of smoke streaming up above the forest half a mile
away.  "These animals don't love fire, I imagine, any better than the
rest.  If Lila keeps that going all night she should be safe."

"Miss Meredith is no fool, for a girl," Colton admitted, and started to
feel his way back into the tunnel.




CHAPTER V

THE CAPTAIN

THE exploration of the tunnel was to be postponed.

"Hold on a minute," Little Tom advised, "those fellows are just going
to put on their show.  Tickets are free, gentlemen.  No crowding
please, step forward."

The three men hurriedly disposed themselves about the narrow circular
window so as to get the best view of the strange drama being enacted
below them in the ravine.  Over two hundred of the enormous
gorilla-like beasts were grouped in dozens and twenties about their
gigantic captain, the nine foot brute with the broadest shoulders and
most powerful chest of them all.  Except that they carried on their
deliberations by signs instead of oratory, the beasts were a fair
caricature of a political meeting just before the chairman's summons to
official business.

They might have been trying to decide on a dark horse for their next
presidential candidate.  It would be unfair to say which of the great
parties they most closely resembled; the similarity to each was about
evenly balanced.  The three spectators could not refrain from a
delighted grin.  The take-off might have been planned by the devil
himself.  It was too good in its unflattering realism to make anyone
but a confirmed leader of the people sore.

As in most conventions, so in this.  It was not long before the
brawling began.  Logic, if they had any, was dropped.  It is an
unpractical nuisance anyway.  The two hundred got down to fundamentals
in a hurry.  Logic and reason, even the most primitive, are tainted
with modernism.  Such, in short, appeared to be their theory.
Certainly it was their practice.

With a peevish outburst of truly human feeling the huge Captain began
the argument.  He opened it with his foot and closed it with his fist.
The creature with whom he disagreed evidently advised one plan of
attack on the obnoxious humans while the Captain favored another.  So
much was plain from the course of the discussion, which briefly was as
follows:

The Captain raised his tremendous right leg till the thigh bone rested
parallel with the ground and the lower part of the leg dangled
vertically.  This was point the first.  The second point was a sudden
straightening of the whole leg, till it stood out at right angles to
the body.  The third point was made simultaneously and emphatically
with the second; the Captain's right foot caught his opponent a
glancing blow of terrific force in the region of the spleen and spun
the obstinate creature smartly around.  The Captain now had his
opponent in the strategic position for his clinching and unanswerable
fourth point.

While the beast's back was toward him, and before it could face about
to see what was coming, the Captain's sledge hammer fist had shot out
like a battering ram, struck the skull just above the last vertebra,
and broken the neck with a sickening crack that echoed smartly against
the sides of the ravine.  On the whole it was a very pretty
demonstration of the primitive version of the well known political
maxim, that it is foolish to slap a man's face when it is just as easy
to stab him in the back.

The debate became general.  It was clear to the three men that they
were the subject of discussion.  From the gestures in their direction
it appeared that one faction of the legislature favored an immediate
attack, possibly by battering down the solid wall of the cliff with
stones until the circular orifice was sufficiently enlarged to admit a
storming party, while the more conservative faction advised a blockade
and a strict adherence to the time honored tactics of their
grandfathers.

So far as the men could make out, the conservatives wished to force
them into the open, perhaps by starvation, or perhaps by retiring and
letting the captives foolishly imagine that they were free to escape.
The excited gestures of this party, pointing to the tops of the cliffs
bordering the ravine, sufficiently indicated the further course of
their proposed campaign.  Once the men were out of the tunnel and
running for liberty, it would be a simple matter to drop boulders on
them from the edge of the ravine.

The radicals, on the other hand, by expressive pantomime, registered
their vote in favor of a siege, to begin at once with a battering down
of the wall around the circular opening.  Both plans had much in their
favor.  The factions were about evenly divided.  The conservatives,
however, had an undoubted advantage in that the Captain, like
ninety-nine leaders out of every hundred, was a staunch adherent of
their party.

So far the debate had been orderly and conducted in strict accordance
with parliamentary procedure.  Not a voice had been raised above the
usual conversational pitch, that is, figuratively.  But these were dumb
beasts, and their ordinary tone of expression vented itself in mild
pullings out of tufts of gray hair, gnashing of teeth, and luscious
bites in the fleshier parts of legs.

Realizing that no decision could be reached by such desultory gossip
the Captain, acting as chairman or speaker, called for a division, and
the two factions went into executive session.

The conservatives lined up on the right of the ravine, the radicals on
the left.  Personalities now were bandied freely from side to side of
the House.  One member disliked the color of an opponent's hair, always
had disliked it in fact, and proceeded to prove his assertion.  The
chairman, towering over the disorderly chamber, rapped smartly for
order.  His gavel, generously loaned by the radicals, was as effective
as it was unique.  No trumpery bauble of brass and ivory ever raised
such a cracking racket as did the monstrous gray brute swung by one
ankle round and round the Captain's head.  One after another the noisy
radicals were silenced by that efficient gavel, till a full score had
taken their seats never to rise and object again.

The speaker rather overdid his part.  Murmurings arose that he was
exceeding his lawful authority by cutting off legitimate debate.  The
radicals left the assembly in a body and took seats in the gallery.  It
was a dignified gesture of protest.



FOR perhaps a full minute these protestants squatted in dour silence on
the left bank of the ravine, looking down in disgust on their
victorious opponents.  Their rights had been trampled on and they were
as sore as boils.  An ultimatum was the proper liniment to ease their
bruised self-respect.

The ultimatum was a weighty document, replete with hard facts.  It
missed the Captain by two inches.  The half ton or so of its
unanswerable arguments shattered into a hundred flying chunks.  Four of
the obstinate conservatives were convinced on the spot.  The rest, mad
as wild bees, declared war.

The fight was on.  With its beginning a sudden change came over the
combatants.  They lost much of their human appearance and became three
parts pure beast.  Up till now they had walked erect, like men.  There
was a sudden lapse to the ambling gait of the gorilla, with frequent
tappings of the ground by the back of the hand to maintain balance as
they hobbled about in search of missiles.

"Look at that one," Colton said, pointing to a great gray beast on the
bank.  It was having difficulty in keeping its erect posture as it
lurched toward a huge boulder.  "Does its walk remind you of anything?"

"Swain," Big Tom replied, "when he came out of the cooler and collapsed
to all fours.  I wonder what he's doing now?"

"Exploring the cave behind us," Little Tom remarked.  "I hope he
doesn't sneak up on us in the dark.  He has a rifle, you know."

"So I heard this morning."

"His blacks may have shot him," Little Tom said hopefully.  "There was
quite a lot of shooting shortly after they came in here."

"I hope not," Colton replied.  "Swain may tell us a lot if we can get
him to talk.  Just look at those beasts going at it!"

The radicals on the bank had found the range.  Instead of trying to
drop half-ton masses of rock on the conservatives as they had at first
done, they now resorted to small ammunition, stones the size of a man's
head, and even smaller.  Curiously enough some of the smallest missiles
did the most damage.  The carnage was terrible.  After half an hour of
it two-thirds of those below were either dead or maimed and dying.  Why
did not the conservatives retreat up the ravine?  They could have
passed out of the firing zone in five minutes, yet they held their
hopeless position with ferocious tenacity and superb stupidity.

The Captain was everywhere.  His prodigious feats of strength seemed to
encourage his doomed followers to stick it out to the bitter and bloody
end.  Seizing the largest fragments of rock, and the heaviest boulders
which the radicals hurled down, he flung them wide and high with
terrific force at the gray figures on the bank.  He rarely missed, and
each hit was a kill.  Rapidly the ranks of the radicals thinned and
dwindled to half their original strength.

The crunching of bones, the almost human noises of pain emitted by the
mortally wounded, and the brutal, brainless ferocity of the whole
insane battle revolted the onlookers.  Would they never have enough?
Not till the last mangled body stopped twitching on the crimson floor
of the ravine.  The smell of blood, mounting to their brains, had
obliterated the last semblance of reason.  They were beasts now,
nothing more.

At last the Captain was hit.  A small black stone, no bigger than a
hen's egg struck him on the left forearm.  The men did not see which
gray beast had hurled the stone, but the Captain evidently had.  His
left arm was as badly broken--it was a compound fracture--as if it had
been struck with a forty pound sledge hammer.  The ferocious brute held
out the injured arm and looked at it, regardless of the missiles
crashing down all about him.  He could understand pain.

Stalking directly to the wall of the ravine he marked his enemy and
laboriously pulled himself up the precipitous rock with his uninjured
arm, his toes feeling for the precarious footholds.  Would he reach the
top?  Fragments of rock and small boulders rained about him, frequently
striking his thighs and shoulders, but he climbed steadily up to his
revenge.

The beasts on the bank for the first time showed terror.  For a moment
it seemed as if they were about to break and scatter.  Then their
brainless love of a fight restored their courage.  A dozen of them
leaped to a rock that must have weighed three tons, and, by the sheer
strength of all their knotted muscles, slowly tugged and shoved it
toward the bank, directly above the Captain.  He looked up and saw it.
Instantly he flattened himself against the wall.

The huge boulder toppled, seemed to hang suspended for a second, and
shot over the cliff in a graceful parabola.  Had those gray brutes
above known some elementary mechanics they could have foreseen that it
would be impossible to hit their target.  The curvature of the natural
path carried the projectile well clear of its mark, and the Captain
resumed his climb.  The shot, however, was fairly successful otherwise.
It smashed three of the conservatives gathered in a knot to view their
leader's progress.

Reaching the top the Captain swung his injured arm over the edge and
dug his feet into a convenient crevice.  Then with his sound arm he
reached for the leg nearest him.  He got it the first grab.  A quick
jerk, and the unfortunate radical was sprawling like a falling autumn
leaf in midair.  Having disposed of one the Captain reached for
another.  In this way he pitched clean over his head to their deaths
eight of the defenders.  After the eighth had broken his neck on the
rocks below it dawned on the rest that the red-eyed Captain meant
business.  They hastily fell back from the edge, giving the injured
Captain just the opportunity he needed.  In two seconds he was over the
top.

The radicals had not erred.  The Captain's fighting blood was up.  He
meant murder so long as he had an arm and two legs left.  With a leap
like an enraged tarantula's he was among them, striking out with feet
and fist.  Four of the great gray beasts sank to the ground, their
necks broken, in as many seconds.  Flashing round, the Captain, now
stark mad, sprang upon the five that had sought to attack him from the
rear.  With a furious rush he kicked and cuffed them over the edge of
the ravine.  Then he went after the panic stricken remnant.  There were
in all perhaps forty.  But they were without a leader and badly shaken.
Before the maddened Captain's systematic fury they were as helpless as
a lot of bed-ridden invalids attacked by a maniac.

One after another he took the bigger brutes by the scruffs of their
necks or by their legs and, not bothering to lug them to the edge,
pitched them high over his head so that they shot clear of the brink
and smashed like bottles on the rocky bottom.



WITH the more powerful brutes disposed of, the rest was easy.  The
Captain scorned to use his good right arm.  His feet were sufficient.
Either from fright or stupidity the doomed beasts seemed to have lost
the power of locomotion.  The Captain on the other hand had suddenly
acquired the agility of a Japanese acrobat.  He was as light on his
feet as a featherweight.  The terror of his victims no doubt was a
spiritual aid to his war of extermination.

All animals are instinctively afraid of a mad individual of their own
species, and the Captain was madder than any mad dog that ever cleaned
out its home village.  By fours and fives he rounded up the stragglers,
herded them to the edge--he seemed to keep in mind the steepest
falls--and kicked them over.  He never made the mistake of dumping a
fresh load on top of an old.  He would as soon have thought of waiting
till the radicals' friends, if they had any, hurried up with nets and
feather mattresses.  His madness was of the inspired kind that gets
quick, complete results.

While their leader was performing these prodigies of valor, his friends
below stood gaping up in motionless admiration.  Like all primitive,
strong, red-blooded races, they dearly loved a butchery.  The Roman
arena, the Spanish bullring, the white prize fight never, any one of
them, provided quite so gorgeous a spectacle as this.  In some respects
it beat even the Battle of the Marne or Verdun.  It was more
concentrated.

One did not have to piece together different scraps of the engagement
from inaccurate press accounts; here the whole show was visible at a
glance.  One can hardly censure those deluded survivors for stupidly
forgetting their safety in an orgy of esthetic enjoyment.  After all
they were dumb, with no thought of the morrow or even of the next half
hour.  They got their medals when the Captain had finished distributing
honors above.

Having mopped up the radicals the Captain rested for a minute from his
labors, and strolled along the edge of the ravine, his useless left arm
dangling at his side.  His body was idle, but his mind--if he had any
beyond the sum total of his rich behavior--was as busy as a stinging
bee.  Finally he found what he wanted, a large pile of loose stones,
most of which were plentifully peppered with the strange, shiny black
polka dots.  This was by no means the only such pile in that region of
the forest.  It elicited the Captain's involuntary admiration because
it happened to be lying precisely where he wanted it, namely, directly
opposite the narrowest part of the ravine.  Here lay the ammunition,
there, below him, the enemy.  For his bloodlust was now such that it
clouded his clear perceptions, and no longer permitted him to
distinguish between friend and foe, conservative and radical.

Killing had become a habit.  And on top of his recent bloody
experiences he was now undoubtedly mad.  It would be idle, therefore,
not to use to the limit the fifty devil power which pulsed and throbbed
through his veins like the steady drive of a turbine.  So he reasoned,
or rather, so he behaved.  Ammunition and gray bodies were surely made
for one another.

He stopped short by the pile of loose stones.  Theorizing was at an
end.  With incredible speed he sprang into action.  He became a brutal,
deadly machine of unerring accuracy.  The black peppered missiles,
fatal in some peculiar way not yet guessed by the three watchers of the
slaughter, flew like bullets from his flashing right hand.  The eye
could not follow the speed of that living machine.  He never missed.
It was useless for the terrified remnant to scramble at the walls, or
to seek safety by escaping from the trap.  The black missiles pinned
them for a moment to the rock walls before they collapsed, bored
through from back to chest, or cracked their skulls as they hunched
over and tried to dart through the narrows.

No expert marksman with a modern rifle was ever more certain of his
target.  He never broke a leg or an arm.  To have done so would have
wasted ammunition.  The supply of black stones was generous, but not
inexhaustible, and the machine had a brain that could count up to at
least a hundred.  His favorite target seemed to be the back of the
neck, just at the base of the skull.  A hit there meant instant death.

The last survivor, a large, dignified beast of strangely human aspect,
threw up its arms.  It might have been merely an accidental
coincidence, that familiar gesture of surrender.  And it may have been
nothing more significant than blind chance that for a second stayed the
arm of the slayer.  All races of men understand the meaning of the
hands raised high above the head.  Did the beasts?  Apparently not.  If
he did he decided to take no prisoner.  The missile found its mark
squarely in the center of the upturned chin and issued from the back of
the head.  The last shot must have had a terrific drive behind it to
shatter that massive skull.

The red rays of the setting sun streamed through the sparse trunks of
the forest, straight down the narrow ravine, lighting up the crimson
shambles like the floor of hell.  The solitary victor turned his back
on the scene of his triumph, shaded his eyes for a moment, and stumbled
off toward the setting sun.  That was the last the men saw of him on
that occasion, a bowed, shambling giant whose outline shone like a
fiery nimbus, shuffling toward the night.



"WHAT now?" Colton asked.  "Shall we go out and take a chance of
getting through to the safari?"

"All the beasts except the Captain seem to be dead," Big Tom remarked.
"So it should be safe enough.  The Captain looked as if he were going
home to bed."

"But what about Swain?" Little Tom objected.  "We came here to watch
his doings, didn't we?  What's the use of going back empty handed now
that we've wasted the whole day?"

"Very well," Colton said.  "Big Tom, go back to the safari and look
after Miss Meredith!  Little Tom and I will wait here till Swain comes
out."

Without a word Big Tom squeezed himself through the circular hole.
There remained just sufficient daylight to show him an easy way up the
side of the ravine.

"Expect us when you see us," Colton called after him.  "Tell Lila not
to worry about Little Tom.  I still have a perfectly good rifle and
plenty of shells, and this tunnel is as safe as a church."

So he thought.  The two, left to themselves, started to explore by the
aid of a box of wax matches.  The tunnel was about seven feet high.
The two foot opening evidently was the hole left by a small stone that
had weathered out centuries ago.  Since then the action of water had
enlarged it to its present diameter.

For forty feet the tunnel went straight back into the heart of the
rock.  This stretch was perfectly level.  The next began to slope up
very gradually, perhaps a one-foot rise in fifty feet.  They could only
judge the distance by the time it took them to walk.  When they had
traversed about a thousand yards the upward slope changed gently to a
level stretch of about a hundred yards.  This section of the tunnel was
only about five feet high.

Their matches were now running short.  Further exploration without
torches seemed foolhardy, as they heard, not far ahead, the steady
falling of water.  It sounded as if it were being poured into a vast
bowl.

Then they knew that they had blundered over a thousand yards up the
siphon of a huge intermittent spring which was about to "blow" and
discharge the day's accumulation of water from its vast bowl.

They broke into a run just as the first dribble of water trickled over
the level stretch of the siphon's highest point.  It would take time,
of course, for the rising water in the bowl to fill the tunnel of the
roof, but how much time they could not guess.

The dribble rapidly swelled to a streamlet ankle deep.  Their splashing
progress slackened at every step.  Soon they were wading in water up to
their knees.  The strengthening current on the long down slope all but
swept them off their feet.  It rose six inches.  They lost their
footing and together shot the last five hundred yards like a couple of
logs in a mountain flume.

With a horrible jar they managed to brake themselves just before they
smashed into the wall.  The siphon would be full to the roof in another
two minutes; water was already gushing in a six-inch stream from the
lip of the orifice.  Little Tom shoved Colton through.  Being of bigger
build than the doctor, he jammed.  Colton tugged, the rising water in
the siphon pushed.  Between them, the doctor and the water finally got
him out.  A generous douche of icy water sluiced them off the spillway
and sent them rolling downstream.  Jostled by the huge carcasses of the
gray beasts they fought their way to a landing.

Wet, bruised and miserable, they decided to call it a day and go home
to the cheery camp and its blazing fire.  There was no further point in
spending the night where they were.  Swain was safely bottled up till
the siphon had done its work and emptied the bowl and passageway.  They
judged from their collective experience that it would take about ten or
twelve hours for the bowl to empty.  There would be ample time to catch
Swain after tomorrow's breakfast.



AVOIDING the bodies they picked their way through the forest toward the
distant glow of the campfire.  No dark shape dropped from the trees to
inspect them.  The Captain had gone west; they were going slightly west
of south.

"What the devil is that?" Colton asked suddenly.  "There, to the right.
Don't you see it?"

Two elliptical patches of light were slowly advancing over the bare
ground between the trees.  Little Tom's heart skipped a beat.  Then he
guessed.

"The spotlights from a pair of electric torches, of course," he
answered in a matter of fact tone.  Then he shouted.

In answer Lila's clear treble inquired for Dr. Colton.

"He's here.  Is anybody hurt?  We're coming right in."

They hastened to meet her.

Planning to rise and breakfast early they turned in.  Each of the white
men was assigned his spell of sentry duty to keep a lookout and see
that the fire did not die down during the night.  Little Tom took the
first watch, his father the second, Colton the third, and Lila, because
she insisted on sharing the work, took the fourth.  Her wound was
completely healed.  The men knew now that they could trust her with
their lives if necessary.  She would not go to sleep while on duty.
None of the blacks could be similarly trusted.  African troops have
been known to fall fast asleep while charging the enemy in a night
attack.

As the night advanced the deadly, chill mists that make sleeping in the
African forests a misery enveloped the camp in a swirling pall.  For a
radius of twenty feet around the blazing logs the fog glowed and softly
changed color like a white opal; beyond the charmed sphere the
fever-laden mist loomed the vast forest, black and impenetrable.

Lila's watch was half over when she was put to the test.  She had just
added two dry logs to the fire when, about to pick up her rifle, she
glanced behind her to see exactly where she had laid it down.  The
crackling of the fire had drowned the stealthy tread of the cautiously
approaching beast, and it had crept into the light behind her back
while she mended the fire.  There it towered, as gray and as silent as
if it were a gigantic idol hewn from the icy mist.  The shock to her
nerves all but paralyzed her.  She could not cry out; she could not
make her fingers clutch the rifle beneath her hand; she could only
stare.

The huge thing stood motionless, as if to reassure her.  Slowly her
fingers closed on the barrel of the rifle.  The act was involuntary.
She had no consciousness of her actions.  The creature's eyes followed
the movements of her arm.  It understood.  Taking one step forward it
planted its enormous right foot squarely across the barrel.

Looking up in terror she saw an agonized, brutal face, covered with
coarse gray hair, beseeching her for mercy.  Dumb and suffering, it
pointed with its right hand to its mangled left forearm.  The broken
bones protruded through the congealed blood and torn flesh, the perfect
picture of pain.

Hypnotized by terror she stood erect and did what the creature seemed
to wish.  She touched the broken arm, not conscious of what she was
doing.  The contact brought back her senses with a rush.  Instantly and
fully she realized the situation.  She did not scream.  Her only
safety, and, the only safety of the sleeping men, lay in absolute
silence.  If the brute's hostility became aroused it could kill them
all before they were fully awake.  Her own rifle still lay under the
beast's right foot.

Knowing the risk she took she turned her back on it and crept over to
waken Colton.  She shook him gently by the shoulder, whispering at the
same time:

"Quiet.  Don't wake the others."

He was on his feet instantly.

"Its arm is hurt," she whispered, seeing his look of horror as he took
in the huge bulk of the silent brute.  "It wants help."

Was this a ghastly nightmare after the day's hell?  No, it was real.
Lila was asking him to do something.  Yes, he must go over to the beast
and look at its arm.  He had not yet realized that this gray giant was
the Captain.  Within a yard of it he knew.  The knowledge turned him
sick and dizzy.

Again the suffering creature pointed in silence to its injured arm.
Cotton's senses returned.  The thing was in agony.  He understood.  In
the pest-ridden forests of Africa it does not take many hours to set up
a raging infection in an open wound.  The beast was imploring human
help.  Well, he would help it to the best of his skill and knowledge.

"Get my instruments," he whispered to Lila.  "The surgical gauze is in
the smaller tin box.  Bring all the antiseptics."

Without a sound she stole away to find the necessary tools for the job
ahead of them.  Colton went fearlessly up to the gray giant and
examined the fracture as best he could in the flickering firelight.
Then he went back to the fire and picked up two stout charred sticks
for splints.

"Bring a tent rope and two flashlights," he ordered Lila when she
returned with the instruments.  "We can't do it here.  The others may
wake and frighten him.  Then we shall be done for.  Get the biggest
cooking pot.  There is water in the bags beside Blake's tent.  Boil a
potful and bring it to me.  I shall be about a hundred yards down the
trail--that way.  Be sure that the water boils."

She crept away to do her part of the job.  Colton took the giant by its
uninjured am and led it out of the light down the coal blackness of the
trail.



IN FIFTEEN minutes Lila followed.  The pot of boiling water engaged one
arm; under the other she carried the tent rope and the two electric
torches.  He heard her coming.

"Put down the water and turn on one of the torches.  Bring me the
other."

She carried out instructions to the letter.

The doctor led the gray giant back to the pot of water and began his
job.  While Lila held both torches so that their light fell full on the
frightful wound, Colton washed it out with hot water and antiseptics.
Although the almost boiling water must have caused the creature
excruciating pain it made no sound.  Through all the agony it stood
like a rock.

At length the doctor was ready for the surgery.  How he ever performed
that operation neither he nor Lila can recall.  The arm was so badly
fractured, and infection had already set in so deeply, that it was out
of the question to save it.  He amputated it six inches below the
elbow.  He had no ether, and no local anaesthetic.  Except for the
necessary sounds the operation was performed in dead silence.

Dawn turned the mist to gray pearl just as they tied the last bandage.
Haggard and exhausted from the terrible ordeal, Colton glanced up at
the creature's face.  There was something strangely familiar and yet
unfamiliar about the conformation of the bones and features.  Startled,
the doctor walked round the huge shape, examining the muscles and
feeling the bones.  He counted the ribs and such other bones as could
be felt through the leaner muscles.  Then he made the creature bend
down so that he could examine its cranium and its teeth.  Last he
examined the great toe on each foot.

"Good God," he gasped, "it's a human being!"

Realizing that his friends were through, the Captain reeled off through
the mist.

"Shall we tell the others?" Lila asked.

"I suppose we must, to protect his life.  It wouldn't do to shoot a
patient."

He sighed.  "That last drenching of cyanide of mercury should help.
Well, we must hope for the best.  If infection sets in we must do a
more thorough job next time, with properly sterilized instruments.  I
did not foresee that I should have to operate."

They found the camp still fast asleep.  The fire was practically out.
Putting on some dry wood and fanning it to a blaze Colton suggested
coffee.  Lila made it in a jiffy.  The steaming drink revived their
spirits.

"Will he come back?" she asked.

"I'll bet on it.  The very best we can hope for is a severe
inflammation.  I don't know how much pain he can stand.  If he were an
ordinary man he would have a very bad time after a siege like that.
But the Captain is no mollycoddle.  He put up a bear of a fight
yesterday, although I couldn't see what it was all about.  Well, any
time he wishes to consult me again I'm his man.  We shall be better
prepared the next time he drops in."

The Blakes awoke and found the two talking.

"You got up early, Doc," Little Tom remarked.  "Don't blame you; I felt
like sharing Lila's watch myself."

In a few sentences Colton told them what had happened.

After a hearty breakfast they left the peachy Erasmus in charge of the
safari and hurried back to the ravine.  When they reached it the water
was still gushing in full volume from the orifice.  They could have set
their watches by that natural water clock.  At precisely the same
minute as on the previous day the hole in the wall swallowed hard,
sighed, and stopped gushing.  They also sighed, for the wait beside
that shambles had not been pleasant as the day advanced and the
temperature rose.

Three hours after the water stopped flowing Swain appeared at the
circular hole.

"There's our bird," Big Tom whispered.  "What a lovely shot."

"If you hurt him," Colton snapped, "I'll hurt you in a way you won't
like.  That fellow is the one human being who can tell us what all this
means."

He nodded down to the thick strewn corpses.

Swain was standing in the opening roaring with laughter.  The sight of
those mangled bodies tickled his sense of humor.

"He would have burned that ape alive," Lila reminded them, "if we had
let him.  I don't see anything queer about his behavior.  Just what I
should have expected."

Swain abruptly disappeared.  In a moment he was back, climbing through
the hole.

"You don't see any of the five porters who went in with him, do you?"
Big Tom asked with a significant inflection.  "Ten to one in anything
you like they don't come out."

"I'll take you in dollars," Little Tom piped up, just as the first of
the black porters appeared at the hole.  Swain helped him through.  The
man glanced at the mangled bodies and went on indifferently with his
business.  To an African the dead are very dead indeed.  He stood by
and helped three of the remaining blacks to crawl through.  The fourth
handed out the rifles.  Then he disappeared for a second, to bob up
with the end of the steel cable in his hand.  It was the end with the
riveted handles.  Passing it out to the others he squeezed out of the
hole to join them.

"We were mistaken about those shots yesterday," Big Tom admitted,
"Swain may not be as black as the devil after all.  What have they at
the other end of that cable?  It must be heavy."

It was.  The six men grasped the handles of the steel cable and began
their tug of war.  The spectators understood now why it had taken Swain
and his men three hours to do the fifteen hundred yards or so from the
siphon bowl to the orifice.  Inch by inch they heaved and panted, to
drag out that dead weight at the other end of the cable.  Presently the
small ironbound box with the steel rings in its sides hove into view at
the lip of the orifice.  The cable had been woven in and out through
the rings, round and round the box to give it a firm grip.  Putting
forth all their strength the six tugged the box up and over the lip.
It fell, shattering the spillway where it landed, and sending great
cracks through the solid rock for a radius of ten feet.



"AH," said Big Tom, "now we're getting hot.  Swain knows where there's
a good supply of that interesting iron."

"Even at two and a half times the density of iron a box of the metal
the size of that one couldn't crack solid rock like that," Little Tom
objected.  "He has found something else."

Big Tom's mouth watered.  "Wait till I rob him tonight."

"You won't lug it very far.  Look at those fellows tugging."

The box scraped and ploughed its course half an inch at a time down the
spillway.  Its trail over the solid rock was marked by a band of deep,
parallel grooves where the cable and the rings cut into the granite.

"What's that?" Lila cried incautiously, pointing to a spot on the
opposite side of the ravine.  "There, in that big tree.  Don't you see?"

Following her finger they distinctly saw some white object flicker
behind the leaves and disappear.

"I've got it," said Colton.  "You ought to recognize your own
bandaging, Miss Meredith.  Our friend the Captain is over there in his
watchtower.  Presumably he sees us too."

Whether the huge Captain sighted them or not remained undisclosed.  He
gave no sign of having done so.  To the four watching it was difficult
to believe that the enormous, shaggy creature of arboreal habits hiding
in that tree was indeed a man.  Colton however was sure of his facts.
During the long wait for the stream to stop flowing he had spent hours
examining the bodies left on the bank by yesterday's conflict.  One and
all they were beyond the shadow of a doubt human beings.  Their stature
and muscular development, huger and more massive than that of the
strongest gorillas, far surpassed that of any known race of men, living
or extinct.

The brain capacity, from a superficial examination, appeared to be
high, at least on a par with that of the best native Africans.  Yet
they evidently had not yet developed speech, for yesterday's battle had
been a furiously silent exhibition of dumb hatred pursued to its red
end without a shout or a cry, and the huge Captain had endured tortures
in silence.  Their shaggy gray hair, patched and tufted all over their
bodies, was unlike that of the apes or gorillas.

Colton surmised that this irregular, mangy distribution of coarse fur
might be just that which would result if normal human beings were
afflicted with an abnormal growth of hair.  Their actions during the
battle, and all through the debate preceding it had been strangely
human, now that they were recalled in retrospect.

The apparent brutality of their rage was not without its human
parallels among the most enlightened races of western civilization.  It
had merely been on a more vigorous plan in keeping with the greater
size and superior strength of the combatants.  The devil only knows
what they might have done had they been sufficiently gifted with
sentimentality to use dialectic, ballots, blessings, gabble, diplomacy,
bombs, bullets and poison gases.

But it was no use carping; they had done remarkably well with the
limited emotions at their command.  Such was Colton's charitable
verdict.  As a medical man he had seen a good deal of human nature in
the raw.  Thinking things over he felt a shamefaced regard for the
gigantic Captain.  The direct way in which that just beast had settled
yesterday's argument, with impartiality to all, compared favorably with
the endless quibbling, shilly-shally and white-livered compromising of
some less virile statesmen whom he had formerly revered.  The shy
regard became downright admiration.

If it came to a question of bullets between Swain and the Captain,
Colton knew whose side he would favor.  His one interest in the
ex-missionary's welfare was the possible light which that engaging
renegade might shed on the Captain's career.  This interest however was
intellectual, purely academic.  His feelings toward the Captain on the
other hand were sympathetic and warmly human.  No sneak ever had a
human friend, and the same holds for bigots.  It is doubtful whether an
individual of either species was ever respected by a decent dog.

Colton's theory was soon to be put to a crucial test.  It was the
Captain himself who neatly presented the dilemma and forced the doctor
to choose his horn.

With a crash of breaking branches the gigantic Captain dropped from his
tree.  It was a clumsy performance.  The injured arm spoiled his style.
His legs, however, were still as active as a flea's, and his tremendous
right arm was in perfect shape.  In one bound he reached the edge of
the ravine and stood looking down on the six men straining at the steel
cable.  The iron clamped box was now well clear of the spillway.

Swain saw the enemy.  With a yell of terror he let go his hold of the
cable and ran for his rifle.  The Captain let him run.  Colton cocked
the trigger of his rifle and waited.

"If Swain tries to shoot the Captain," he said quietly, "I shall break
his arm."

The Captain was just going into action.  He selected one of the small
black stones from the pile at his feet, took careful aim at the
iron-bound box, and let fly with all his terrific strength.  The box
was smashed like an egg.  So far as the spectators could see from their
position on the edge the box was empty.  But they had no time for
surprise or speculation.  The Captain had already nailed the first of
the black porters.  Swain, out of sight behind a rock, was cracking
away, trying to get a line on the Captain.  The giant paid not the
slightest attention.  One after the other, with incredible speed and
accuracy he broke the necks of the four fleeing blacks.

The firing ceased.  Swain was maneuvering for a better position.  The
Captain stood looking down at the crushed box.  Presently he made up
his mind.  Like a huge gray spider descending a wall he climbed down
into the ravine.  Reaching the shattered box he kicked the fragments
aside.  Then he squatted and began a systematic search with his hand.



WHILE the Captain was thus engaged Swain broke cover, his rifle at the
shoulder.  He was about to pull the trigger when Lila, involuntarily,
screamed.  Colton's rifle was already covering Swain's arm.

Both the Captain and Swain glanced up.  Seeing Colton, Swain began to
curse.  The Captain went on with his search.

"Come out of there!" Colton yelled.  "Come on!  We'll protect you."

Swain's answer was a steelnosed bullet that zipped through the tree
above them, severing a small limb.

"Come on, you idiot, before he attacks you.  Can't you see he has only
one sound arm?  You can beat him to the top."

With a snarl of hatred Swain collapsed to all fours.  His rifle
clattered from his hands and he hopped like a toad toward the wall of
the ravine.  Interrupting his search for two seconds the Captain
reached round, picked up Swain's rifle by its muzzle, swung it once
round his head without rising from his squatting position, and smashed
it like a toy on the rocks.  He flung away the barrel and resumed his
search.

Swain, snarling like a mad ape, swarmed his way up the side of the
ravine.  Reaching the top he came bounding on all fours toward Colton.

"Shall we shoot?" Big Tom shouted.

"No!  Take him alive."

Then began a terrible battle.  Colton's rifle was snatched from his
hands, twisted into a steel knot, and pitched over the cliff.  Big
Tom's followed, and Little Tom, having missed his swing at the maniac's
head, involuntarily surrendered his weapon.  Lila fired, but missed.
Swain grasped her rifle by the muzzle, wrenched it from her hands; and
made a wild swipe at Colton.

"Run!" the doctor shouted.

It was their one chance.  Swain tried to rise erect to a human posture
but immediately collapsed to all fours.  Knuckling after them like an
ape, Swain pursued, slowly gaining.  They separated.  Swain followed
Colton.  The others rallied to distract the infuriated half-man's
attention, but Swain refused to be misled.  Dodging around trees,
behind rocks, in and out of the sparse scrub.  Colton kept just ahead.

Help arrived not a second too soon.  The Captain had found what he
sought among the fragments of the box.  Striding through the forest he
advanced to join the battle.  His right arm hung straight down by his
side.  The huge fist was tightly clenched as if carrying a great weight.

Swain saw him just as he emerged from behind a tree in his mad pursuit
of Colton.  The sudden shock brought him to his senses.  With a yell of
terror he straightened up and became a human being.  A look of amazed
pain flashed across his face; he had become a man.

"Save me!" he shrieked, and started to run.  "For God's sake shoot him!"

How could they?  Swain had pitched away their useless rifles.

"I am innocent!" the wretched man screamed as he tried in vain to climb
a tree.  "Save me!  Kill him!"

The Captain gently kicked him free of his frenzied hold on the tree.  A
second mild kick hurled him to the ground.  Colton and Lila, thinking
they could bend the giant's cold fury, sprang toward him.  He brushed
them aside and planted his foot on the writhing man.  Colton grasped
the arm which he had dressed, hoping to awaken memory and pity.  The
huge gray brute shook him off.  Then, raising his right arm with the
stupendous weight which it carried, he held his fist above Swain's
skull, taking careful aim before dropping the weight.

That small, infinitely hard lump of metal in his hand would shear
through bone and brain faster than any bullet, for it was the thing for
which the Captain had searched among the fragments of Swain's box.  Six
men had strained every muscle of their backs, legs and arms to drag
that lump, no bigger than a walnut, half an inch at a time over the
smooth rocks of the channel.



THE Captain's over-caution in aiming robbed him of his revenge.
Guessing instinctively that the writhing thing beneath the Captain's
foot would be slain when that huge hand opened, but how she could not
guess, Lila hurled herself upon the hand.  Her body came between the
unopened fist and Swain's head.  Looking down on the sunlit gold of her
hair, the gigantic Captain seemed to remember.  Did he reason?  If he
unclenched his fist this small creature who had helped to ease his
distress must be crushed and mangled if not killed outright.  Brushing
her off by a slight, quick movement of his arm he stepped back, swung
his arm once in a wide circle, and let drive.  The small nut of metal
sank like a slug from a high powered rifle into the trunk of a tree.
The Captain strode off, gray and gigantic, through the forest toward
the west.  He had let his enemy live.  Why?

Swain scrambled to his feet, looked about him, and started on a run for
the ravine.

"Stop him!" Colton shouted.

But the fugitive knew the easiest and quickest path down.  As they
reached the bottom they saw him disappearing into the circular hole.

"He's gone back for more," Big Tom guessed.

"Yes, and he has no light," Colton agreed.  "There's his torch, lying
over there by the wreckage of the box.  Lila, you and Little Tom go up
and bring down two of our torches.  He and I are going to follow Swain.
Big Tom will stay with you tonight."

When they returned with the torches, Colton gave them their last
instructions.

"The Captain's arm is badly swollen.  If he comes back for treatment,
soak off the bandages with hot water and wash the wound thoroughly with
antiseptics as I did last night.  See that your own hands are clean
before you touch his arm.  Keep a sharp lookout for him and head him
off before the natives catch sight of him.  Is everything clear?"

"Quite," she answered.

"Very well.  We shall try to be back in time to get out at the next
intermission of the spring after tonight's.  That will be sometime
tomorrow afternoon."

Colton and Little Tom hurried away to enter the long tunnel of the
siphon.  Big Tom and Lila climbed out of the shambles to return to camp.

"Why did the Captain spare Swain?" she asked.  "You say it is easy to
dissect motives.  Try that one."

Big Tom laughed.  "It is only human motives that are easy.  I haven't
grown accustomed yet to thinking of our big friend as a human being.
But I'm willing to try my hand on his case, just to keep it limber.

"First, he is not civilized.  Therefore he is direct, honest and
simple.  Being all these he will openly seek his own advantage without
pretense, decent or indecent.  That is the first point.  The background
for the second is that you helped Colton to doctor his broken arm.  You
pleased him by relieving pain.  Does a man in agony throw away the
opiate?  Does he risk smashing the bottle?  No.  The Captain regards
you as part of the opiate, or at least the label on the bottle.
Probably he does not reason, but only makes a train of vivid
associations.

"In your case the train runs like this: pain, yellow hair, less pain.
He watched you helping Colton.  There is probably another train in his
mind something like this: yellow hair, girl, man, pain, less pain.
Seeing you in danger and closely associated with a man, also in danger,
he sensed that to destroy both of you would be equivalent to making his
arm sore.  He may not have been sure about Swain, but he would take no
chance of breaking the magic chain of yellow hair, girl, man, pain,
less pain.  So both you and that rotten skunk escaped."

Lila was about to answer when a twig cracked behind them.  Wheeling
round they faced the gigantic Captain.  They were not afraid; he was
holding out his bandaged stump.  Lila laughed.

"Your theory is proved.  You are the 'man' of the chain this time.  As
Dr. Colton appointed me head surgeon in his absence, will you run to
camp and bring me the necessary things?  Bring the pot full of water.
We shall build a fire here."

"Aren't you afraid?"

"Why should I be?  The Captain wouldn't break the magic chain for all
the world.  I am as safe with him as a nurse with a paralytic."

"I believe you are right.  I shall be back in twelve minutes."

As he hurried away she walked coolly up to the Captain and began
removing the outer bandages.




CHAPTER VI

THEIR SLAVE

THE vast bowl of the intermittent spring was but half full when Colton
and Little Tom reached it.  There was no sign of Swain.  He could have
hidden in the pitch darkness within a yard of their spotlights without
fear of discovery if he held his breath.  Listening intently they heard
neither breathing nor footfall, only the steady, hollow drumming of the
water pouring into the bowl.

"Shall we go on?" Little Tom asked.  "The chances are that he will
return to the place where he got his metal or whatever it was."

"I'm not so sure of that.  If the stuff is rare and valuable he may try
to lead us astray.  He must have heard us coming up the siphon.  Still,
I see nothing else to do."

"Well, the trail is plain enough, any way," Little Tom returned, as he
led off, his spotlight following the deep grooves made in the rock by
the box which Swain and his men had dragged out.

The grooves led round a narrow shelf on the left of the bowl, slightly
above high water mark.  For about half a mile the two men walked
rapidly ahead, following the grooves.  They were now almost a quarter
of the way round the circumference of the bowl.  The water lay to their
left, a rock wall fissured and pitted by small, eroded caves to their
right.  The path rose slightly, taking them about twelve feet above the
rising level of the water.

"Look out!"

Colton's shout was too late.  Swain, crouched in one of the caves, had
leaped upon them from behind, snatched Coltons' torch, and knocked
Little Tom into the water.  The maniac extinguished the torch and
dived.  Little Tom rose first.

"Catch my torch," he gasped, flinging it up on the path.  It was a bad
shot.  In the dark it was impossible to judge a twelve-foot, vertical
throw with any accuracy.  The torch landed on the rock pathway, smashed
the lens and ricochetted with a splash into the icy water.

"I'll get the other," he spluttered.

Colton was helpless.  Then he remembered his matches.

"Come back!" he shouted.  "I'll find a landing place and give you a
light."

But Little Tom was well on his way, guided by the splashing of Swain.
Little Tom had the advantage of two free hands.  This however was not
as great as might appear.  Swain had lived for twenty years in the
Congo forest and knew its rivers as intimately as any black fisherman.
He swam like a rat.

Colton's matches showed him nothing, but a black wall of darkness and a
flashing ripple or two.  The next half hour was the worst in his life.
What would he tell the boy's father if he were drowned?  Rather than
face that task he would plunge into the water himself.

Little Tom overhauled Swain before they reached a landing.  His first
act was to seize the electric torch in Swain's left hand.  Then began a
terrific struggle in those black waters.  Fighting like the madman he
was, Swain tried to reach his adversary's throat with his right hand
while treading water to keep afloat.  They sank, both clinging to the
torch.  Breathless and clawing at each other they rose, to sink again.

Under water Little Tom tried for a knockout, and got it.  With his
doubled fist he hit Swain with all his strength full in the stomach.
The hand on the torch relaxed and the senseless body shot like a
bladder to the surface.  Little Tom swam up after it.  Reaching the
surface he had just sufficient strength left to grab Swain by the hair
and tread water.  By a supreme effort he managed to slip the torch into
his shirt as he and Swain sank.

Still clutching Swain's hair with one hand he swam up with the other
and his legs.  Once more on the surface he turned Swain face up and
swam with him toward what he judged was the direction of the wall.  In
the sheer darkness he could not know whether he was making progress or
swimming in a circle.

Far off to the left he spied a tiny yellow spark.  It was one of
Colton's matches.  The doctor had run round the path and found a
landing place.  The spark died.  Little Tom shouted.  Another spark
sprang into life, and he shouted again.  When, towing the deadweight of
Swain's body, he reached the landing, he had but about two more strokes
left in him.  Colton pulled them out.

"All right?" he asked.

"I am," Little Tom panted.  "The torch."  He took it from his shirt and
handed it to Colton.  "Is Swain dead?"

The doctor switched on the light and examined Swain.

"He's all right.  I'll roll him."

By rolling and artificial respiration they brought him to.

"Coming with us?" Colton asked when the dazed wretch finally understood
where he was.

His answer was a snarl.

"All right, then.  Stay here while we explore your interesting caves.
It's a good thing this torch was specially manufactured for the
tropics," he said, "or your foolishness with it in the water would have
put it strictly on the hog.  So you're not coming?  We'll pick you up
on the way back.  Don't try any of your monkey surprises on us next
time.  If you are not within ten feet of this spot when we return we
shall beat the life out of you.  Understand?  How about your clothes,
Little Tom?  Aren't you cold?"

"Of course I'm cold."

"Then take off your duds till they dry out a bit.  Come on, I'll set a
fast pace.  Shed your shirt as you go."

"It's shed," Little Tom announced presently.  "Five seconds halt for
the next act.  All right; go ahead.  Don't look back.  I'm modest, even
in the dark."

"We may be in a subterranean maze, for all I know," the doctor remarked
cheerfully.  "But don't get panicky.  We can't miss a trail like this.
I passed a dozen galleries on my way round the bowl.  This one is the
only one of the lot with the deep scratches on its floor.  They must
have dragged the box along this way."



THE gallery down which they were passing broadened rapidly into a vast
chamber.  The grooved scratches followed the left wall.  The spotlight,
dancing in a long ellipse over the floor before them, just grazed some
grayish white object lying slightly to the right of their path.

"Let's investigate," Little Tom suggested.  "We have lots of time.
That torch is good for fifty hours yet."

The grayish patch proved to be the ashes of a wood fire.  Round about
it lay the bones of several small animals, evidently the refuse of a
forgotten feast.

"I wish I knew more about snakes and things," Colton sighed, lovingly
reaching for one of the larger bones.  "Then I could say what the long
departed guests had for dinner that evening.  Hullo!  It must have been
longer ago than last week."

The bone crumbled to dust at his touch.

"This grows interesting.  I shan't wreck another specimen by my
clumsiness.  Let us see if the diners registered their names on the
walls of this hotel."

"By gum they did!" Colton exclaimed as his spotlight picked out the
first splash of color on the wall.  It was a lifelike outline drawing
in red and black of some horned animal at full gallop.

"Ever see a beast like that?"

"No, nor the picture of one.  Try another."

One by one the light revealed strangely alive pictures of animals in
action.  So far as either of the men knew--and they were fairly well
informed, both being educated in science--not one of those animals had
roamed the earth within the memory of man.  Either they were pure
fabrications of the dead and forgotten artist's imagination, or they
represented portraits from memory of beasts which the artist had
observed in life and motion.  The simplicity, quiet strength and
naturalness of the poses proclaimed the pictures as masterpieces of
fact, not of fancy.

"This is the greatest find yet of prehistoric art," Colton exclaimed.
"I'll let Swain dance jigs on me if he likes for getting us into this."

"I thought I saw the beginning of some more just outside the last patch
of light."

They moved on, following the wall with the spotlight.

"There are more," Colton announced in a tone of awe.  "This time the
artist let his imagination loose."

A dense, uniform wash of some blue pigment formed the background.
Against this was represented with startling skill a shower of meteors
in what looked like gold.  Five vivid splashes of red on a green band
below the blue represented the fall of five meteors either on a plain
or in a forest.  A sixth splash, redder and much larger than the
others, on a dazzling white ground, symbolized the fall of the main
mass either, on a desert or in a lake.

There could be no mistaking the intent of the picture.  It was a
masterpiece of simple, historical picture writing.  A small crescent of
silver or meteoric iron fastened by some invisible means to the stone
indicated the moon.  Eight small dots of the same metal, distributed
over the blue background in a perfect design, told the story that the
memorable shower of meteors had fallen in the night.  The whole picture
formed as complete and as graphic a record of a forgotten night of
splendor as any man or race of men has left to the world.

Although they searched carefully for further pictures they found only
one.  This was a huge, cloud-like mass of dense black.  There was
something inexpressibly sinister about this unformed, somberly
suggestive symbol.

"What was he trying to do here, do you suppose?" Colton muttered.  "I
don't like it.  It is like a madman's conception of a nightmare.  The
very outline of the thing is evil."

"Perhaps that's what he meant it to be," Little Tom said, laughing
uneasily, "a picture of evil.  If so, he hit it off to a T."

There had been not the slightest attempt anywhere to represent the
human figure.  Feeling a strange sense of fatigue the men continued
following Swain's trail.  Presently they came upon a huge block of
black stone.  The grooves in the floor curved round it and went further
on into the darkness.  Playing the light on the black mass, Colton
discovered half a dozen splashes of brighter metal, like steel.  They
were steel, in fact flattened rifle bullets.

"What in thunder was Swain trying to do here?" he puzzled.  "That lump
looks anything but lively."

"My guess is that he was trying to chip off a chunk," Little Tom
hazarded.  "That explains the shots we heard yesterday."



THEY examined the steel splattered over the rock.  So far as they could
judge the bullets had done no more damage than raindrops.  The dense
black surface was unflaked and without a scratch.

"That trick didn't work," Colton commented, "so they went on to find
some of the stuff lying about loose.  Well, we shall follow and see
where they got the pill in that heavy box of theirs.  Don't you find
walking difficult?"

"My feet won't come up.  I feel as if my shoes were full of lead."

"Mine too.  Want to go back?"

"No, let us keep on, now that we've come this far.  Besides, I think
the heavy feeling is getting better.  I walk a little easier now, don't
you?"

"Quite a bit.  What the devil--"  The doctor stopped short.  "I've lost
the heel Of my right shoe."

"That's nothing.  There goes the sole of my left.  Confound it!  That
was my watch that smashed just now.  There must be a hole in my pocket."

"Your watch was ruined, anyway," Colton comforted, "after your swim."

"Mind the torch!" Little Tom yelled, "you're going to drop it."

By a desperate juggling feat Colton retained his hold on the precious
torch.

"What's the matter with me, anyway?  I have no more strength than a
cat.  This thing seems to weigh a ton."

"Let me carry it a spell."  Colton handed over the torch.  Little Tom
all but dropped it.  "Why," he exclaimed, "it does weigh more than it
did."

"You're crazy.  We had better get out of here before we go clean off
our nuts."

"Nothing doing.  I've got a firm grip on the light.  Come on and see
what it's all about.  Swain's tracks still say straight ahead.  I'm as
good a man as he is."

"There goes my other heel," Colton snapped with considerable
irritation.  "Hang it!  I've lost the soles of both shoes too," he
announced as he stepped off and left the soles behind him.

"Same here," Little Tom replied genially.  "Now we're on a basis of
democratic equality.  Let's see what the cause of it is."

He picked up one of the discarded soles and examined it by the
spotlight.  All the nails had been as neatly drawn as if by a pair of
pincers.

"Any suggestions to offer?" Colton asked dryly.

"Plenty.  There may be a dense acid gas hanging about the floor."

"Sounds like gas to me."

"I didn't say there was, I said there might be.  As a matter of fact I
don't think there is."

"Then what do you think?"

"Why, the thing is easy.  Don't you see it?  We are walking over a
floor of solid magnetite--natural magnet, lodestone, you know--of
extraordinary magnetic in tensity.  Haven't you ever seen them lifting
tons of scrap iron with an electro-magnet?  Well, that is what is
happening to all the iron on us, only it is the other way about.  The
magnet below us is pulling the iron down instead of lifting it up."

"You needn't be so darned explicit," the doctor retorted.  "I'm not a
dumb idiot."'

"Don't get fresh.  Remember I have the light."

"Yes and I'll bet you drop it before long if you keep waving it about."

"Can't help wobbling it a bit.  This tremendous magnet under us keeps
pulling at the iron works of the thing."

"There is precious little iron in that flashlight.  Not more than eight
ounces, at the most."

"That shows how strong a magnetic field we are standing on.  This torch
here feels as if it weighed forty pounds."

"And where did this precious natural magnet of yours come from?"

"Heaven," Little Tom replied promptly.  "Fell out of the sky.  The
thing we are walking over is probably one of those meteors the artist
back there was trying to commemorate.  Lots of meteors are nearly a
hundred per cent pure metal, and most of it iron.  This one must have
been one of the biggest that ever hit our wandering earth."

"So that's your theory, is it?  Well, I'm going to disprove it while
you put on your clothes.  They should be fairly dry by now.  I happen
to have a small magnetic compass as a watchcharm at the end of my
chain.  Put down that torch before you drop it!"

Little Tom laid the torch flat and proceeded to dress.  Colton
carefully unfastened the small gold charm from his watch chain,
noticing incidentally that his patch pocket sagged as if it were full
of bricks.  The compass had only a very small needle, so he could not
be sure whether its apparently normal weight was a fact or a false
alarm.  Anyway, the whole compass seemed to weigh no more than it did
ordinarily.

"Now if your theory is right," he said, "and if this black stuff
beneath us really is a huge natural magnet, it should affect the needle
of this compass.  That's right, isn't it?"

"Your conclusion is sufficient but not necessary," Little Tom
disagreed.  "The needle will be affected if this is merely iron, and
not magnetized at all."

"You're crazy.  If this is a magnet it will have poles, and another
magnet, like this compass needle will tend to set in a definite
direction according to the position in which I hold it.  Now watch."

Colton held the compass in the light and slowly turned it into every
conceivable position.  The needle never budged from true north, with
not the slightest suspicion of dip.

"That knocks your theory on the head," he said.  "This is neither a
magnet nor iron beneath us.  Come through with a second theory."

Little Tom was crestfallen.  "I'll wait till I can perform some
experiments."

"And wait some more.  No, you won't explain this in a hurry."

"Even at that I've got nothing on you.  What about Swain and all those
human gorillas or whatever they are?  You're a doctor and an anatomist.
You ought to be able to explain at least Swain and our friend the
Captain."

"And I'm going to explain them," Colton retorted, "if I have to stand
the African continent on its head to do it.  Well, have you got your
pants on yet?"



THEY were nearly at the end of Swain's trail.  The rock floor began to
curve sharply up in a huge mound, for all the world like an enormous
boil.  Cracks and deep fissures radiating from the still invisible
crest of the mound gave it the appearance of a dead volcano, but this
was no volcano that they were ascending.  The irresistible conviction
gripped them that some growth, of tremendous power, was slowly forcing
its way up through the solid rock like a gigantic mushroom.

"Your meteor," Colton remarked, "seems to be coming up from the core of
the earth to have a look at what it hit."

They had reached the top.  The flashlight showed a huge nub of shiny
black metal protruding from the cracked rock, while all about it lay
coarse granules of the same mysterious metal.  These granules varied in
size from a grapefruit to a pea.  Swain and his men had dragged out one
of the walnut-sized lumps.  This size appeared to be the commonest.

"The main mass is slowly disintegrating as it forces its way up through
the rock," Little Tom observed.

He was probably right.  A close examination of the huge nub showed it
to be a dense, kidneylike structure of innumerable rounded bodies, not
unlike the formation of meerschaum.  Colton bent down and tried to pick
up one of the smallest granules of the metal.  He could not budge it.
That insignificant, shiny black pea stuck to its bed as if riveted to
the spot.  Strain and try as he would he could not budge it a
hairs-breadth.  Straightening up he absent-mindedly gave the obstinate
pea a terrific kick, to realize immediately that his shoes now had no
soles.  Hopping and swearing he voted for a return to a saner world.
Little Tom seconded the motion, and they limped back over the rock
floor to look for Swain.

They were not surprised to find that Swain had skipped out.  After a
short council of war they decided to work their way cautiously round
the edge of the bowl and ascertain whether it was yet full.  At the
head of the siphon they could wait until it drained.  The exploration
had taken much less time than they had anticipated.  There might yet be
a chance of beating the water to the circular hole.

They doused the light and felt their way around the rock path, guiding
by the feel of the wall.  They made no sound, as they were walking on
the bare soles of their feet.  It was somewhat risky passing the caves
and galleries branching off into the heart of the rock, for of
necessity they lost touch with the wall.  However, by bearing
constantly toward the side of the wall they avoided a plunge into the
bowl.  If Swain was in one of those caves he either did not hear the
soft fall of their feet above the steady drumming of the waterfall, or
he was waiting a better chance.

At the entrance to the siphon they, found the water already flowing
over the lip.  The rapidly rising stream was about six inches deep.  To
risk a race with it down the fifteen hundred yards or more to the
circular opening would be courting certain death.  From their previous
experience they knew that in a very few minutes the bowl would be
emptying its waters through the siphon like a city sewer in flood time.
They sat down to wait.  They had just missed their opportunity by a
matter of minutes.

"We stopped too long looking at those pictures," Colton growled.
"Serves us right.  Now--"

A snarling shape brushed past them in the dark and darted splashing
into the rapidly rising water.

"Come back, you fool!" they shouted.  "You can't beat it."

But the half crazed man did not hear them.  Or if he did he had other
plans.  Possibly he figured that it would be easier to destroy his
enemies at the other end of the siphon.  It would be so easy to knock
them on the head as they looked out of the circular hole.  He could get
the first one that way, and stand by till the next gushing of the
intermittent spring forced out or drowned the other like a rat in a
drain.  Either way he would be rid of both the spies.  Then he could
continue his researches or his deviltry undisturbed by prying fools.

His arithmetic was correct enough.  One dead fool plus another do make
precisely two dead fools.  But there was a radical defect in his higher
mathematics.  He had forgotten the rather abstruse laws of fluid
motion.  The two men shouted themselves hoarse.  All the answer they
got was a prodigious splashing as the fugitive wallowed his way along
the rapidly rising water in the tunnel.  If he had sense enough left to
lie down and swim, the siphon might vomit him out at the small end like
a fish.

The two composed themselves for their long dreary vigil in the dark.

"What's the matter with me, Doc?" Little Tom asked suddenly.  "I feel
half drunk."

"You've got me," the doctor replied thickly.  "Ever since we left that
lump of metal I've been feeling queer myself."

"How does it affect you?"

"Like a jag in its first stages."

"Same here.  Let's sing."

"I'll be damned if I do.  But I wouldn't mind going back and having
another look at that lump of metal.  What do you say?  Shall we try it?"

Little Tom kept his head.  He had tasted alcohol several times in his
life in one form or another, and was perfectly familiar with its
effects.  His present exhilaration was exactly like the sudden rise in
spirits induced by a good stiff cocktail or two.  But Little Tom was
one of those comparatively rare young men who can refuse a third drink
just when they are feeling happiest after a second.

"No," he said with a short laugh.  "I hate a headache.  Suppose we stay
here till we sober up."

"You're right," Colton muttered.  "There's something wrong with that
rotten metal.  I begin to understand Swain, poor devil.  The effect is
something like that of cocaine.  I have an absurd feeling of content
and general well being.  All is right with the world, ha, ha!  I am the
King of Siam!"

"You're drunk.  Shut up."

"No, I'm not.  Never was soberer in my life.  Did I ever tell you about
that operation for a tumor I did just after I got out of medical
college?  No?  You ought to hear it.  Listen!"

"I don't want to hear it!  Shut up."

"I'm bragging like a fool," Colton continued, "but I can't help myself.
Gee, I feel great!  Come on; let's go back and have another look at the
pictures."

"You stay here," Little Tom said firmly, making a sudden grab in the
dark for his hilarious friend.  "I'm crazy too, but I still have sense
enough to keep away from the bar.  Enough is enough, and that's all
there is to it.  Gosh, I hope this rotten stuff doesn't leave a
headache."

Colton struggled to get free.  In the mixup that followed Little Tom
had all that he could do to hold the other down.

"Cut it out or I'll knock you cold," he warned.  "I mean business."

And he did.  For greater safety he turned Colton face down and sat on
his back.  Presently the doctor began to snore.  In five minutes both
the men were fast asleep.

When Colton awoke, sobered and sore, he toppled Little Tom off his back
and painfully stood up.  The water had ceased flowing down the siphon.
Now was their chance to escape.  Giving Little Tom a vigorous shake he
ordered an advance.

"I feel as if I had been on a jamboree," Little Tom confessed.

"The same here.  Well, one good thing has come out of it all.  I
understand Swain better than I did before.  He must have been an addict
for years.  Poor devil, I shall be easier on him after this."

But it was too late.  Jammed fast against the ledge below the circular
window they found Swain's lifeless body.  He had tried to swim the
current, and failed.



IT was an awesome sight that met their eyes as they disengaged Swain's
body and stared out on the ravine.  It was mid afternoon.  Three huge
pyres of logs and brush crackled and roared toward the sky.  Along the
banks of the ravine the trees had been felled and toppled down onto the
rocks.  Thus fuel was obtained for the necessary task and the danger of
a forest fire obviated.

"Who did all that?" Little Tom asked in puzzled wonder.

"And how on earth did they get it done in so short a time?"

The "short time," they learned presently, was two days and nights.
They had slept longer than they guessed, drugged by a poison to which
their undegenerated bodies were new.  As they watched the mystery was
in part explained.  A gigantic, familiar figure came striding down the
ravine from the narrows, dragging something after it.  The Captain was
cleaning up.  With a single swing of his tremendous right arm he hurled
the gray body twenty feet straight into the reddest part of the pyre.
That was being done which was necessary.  No Greek hero could have
asked for a nobler funeral.

The Captain spied them as they descended the spillway.  For a second he
shaded his eyes with his hand.  Then like a walking colossus he strode
toward them, huge, gray and menacing.

"What now?" Colton muttered uneasily.  "Shall we bolt for the tunnel
again?"

"No chance.  Where are the others?  He can't have cut down those trees,
nor can he have lit the fires."

Like an executioner striding to the block the Captain advanced toward
them.  With horror they saw him bend down and pick up one of the small
black stones which had slain one of the gray beast men.

"I swear I won't tell," Colton said firmly.  "Good-by.  We've had a
good time together anyway while it lasted.  Sorry I got you into this."

Instinct got the better of Little Tom.  He turned and bolted for the
bank.  Colton caught the panic and followed.  A shrill scream from the
top announced the arrival of Lila.  A second later Big Tom shouted with
all his lungs at the Captain.  The stern giant glanced up, noted his
friends, and continued his pursuit.  The two men were clambering up the
side of the ravine with the agility of monkeys.  To the astonishment of
Lila and Big Tom the Captain stopped in his tracks, making no attempt
to follow the fugitives.  They saw something like curiosity or
speculation pass over the giant's face as he watched every movement of
the two men.  When they reached the top the Captain dropped his missile
and followed in a leisurely fashion.

"What shall we do now?" Colton panted.

"Stay here," Lila answered quietly.  "I can manage him."

She dived behind a tree and reappeared with a large bottle of carbolic
and a roll of surgical gauze.

"He always comes like a lamb for this," she explained.  "It is about
time anyway to change the outer dressings."

The Captain stalked toward the silent, apprehensive group.  Lila went
to meet him, making the most of her peace offering.  The gaunt gray
giant noted her offering, glanced at his bandaged arm, hesitated a
fraction of a second, and decided in the negative.  He was not going to
have his arm dressed just yet, although the idea appealed to him as
pleasant and sensible.  No; he had other, more immediate business in
hand.

Making a grab for Colton's shirt he ripped it off the doctor's back.
Then, after a vigorous shaking, he put one foot on the garment, and
with his hand tore it to shreds.

Although Lila and Big Tom pummelled his back and chest he continued
with his investigation.  The two were just a pair of annoying flies, to
be shaken off with a shrug if they became too persistent.  Little Tom
and the doctor added their protests, but unavailingly.  The Captain
made a careful search of every rag of Colton's shirt.

The next must be passed over lightly.  A quick grab, a sudden ripping
and rending, and the doctor was minus his trousers.  Lila fled.  Little
Tom was about to follow when he was sharply called back, leaving his
shirt in the giant's grasp.  Then he too was expeditiously peeled.
Their sorry shoes next received the Captain's attention.  With
remarkable dexterity the Captain ripped the laces with one powerful
finger and removed the remnants of what, not three days ago, were two
fine pairs of stout tramping boots.



WITH the spoils of war all his the Captain proceeded to examine his
trophies.  The electric torch, Little Tom's knife, his pipe and his
metal match safe came in for their share of attention, but were soon
cast aside.  The doctor's watch, long since stopped, was also
discarded.  So far the inspector had discovered no contraband.  Luckily
Colton had left the splinter of meteoric iron, which he had rifled from
Swain's effects, with his baggage at camp.  For it was beginning to
dawn on them what the Captain was seeking.  They thanked their stars
that they had brought back with them no souvenirs from the cave.  But
then they could not have carried any of the forbidden metal anyway.
Almost cheerfully they watched the Captain as he systematically tore
their garments to shreds and searched every rag.

At last he was satisfied.  Without further ceremony he departed in
search of Lila and her bottle.  He found her not far away behind a
tree.  Roaring with laughter Big Tom went to Lila's assistance.  The
two victims made their ignominious way back to camp for a complete
change of clothes.

That evening they learned the origin of the pyres.  For obvious reasons
Big Tom had decided that something must be done.  Rounding up the lazy
blacks under the nominal leadership of Erasmus, he began to fell trees
and cut them up into manageable firewood.  While they were engaged in
this, the Captain appeared on one of his periodical visits to have his
arm dressed.

The blacks naturally fled.  By a judicious display of firearms Lila and
Big Tom corralled them and, through the stammering Erasmus, introduced
them to the Captain.  While Lila attended to the Captain's arm, Big Tom
kept the blacks from bolting up the trees.  Seeing the white girl
fearlessly commercing with the gray giant, the porters lost some of
their fear, although they expressed through Erasmus their conviction
that the devil at last had got them.  Through the interpreter Big Tom
assured them that they were right, and that unless they immediately
resumed the work of cutting firewood, and really put their backs to it
this time, the devil would surely give them hell.  They fell to with a
will, easily breaking the African record, or the Scandinavian for that
matter, in felling trees.

Instead of disappearing into the forest immediately after his needs
were attended to, as had been his custom, the Captain hung about
watching the fun.  He soon got the drift of the game.  Presently he was
in it with both legs and his one good arm.  He tore the fallen trees to
pieces as if they were nothing tougher than bunches of celery.  Then,
running out of hewn trees, he nonchalantly stripped off branches from
the smaller trees yet standing, while the blacks dragged away the
litter and pitched it down into the ravine.  Seeing that they wanted a
clearance along the edges of the ravine he assisted by pushing over
such trees as he could master.  The rest had to be cut half through.

When it became necessary to collect dry wood as a base for the pyres,
he saw the point immediately and went in search of logs, dead branches
and the like along the bed of the stream.  The actual lighting of the
fires gave him a real thrill.  He followed Big Tom and Lila from place
to place watching in dumb fascination the tiny yellow flame of a match
grow like magic into a roaring red dragon.  As they lit the last pile
of tinder he held out his hand for the match box.  They let him have
it.  For perhaps three minutes he rattled it, stared at it, and turned
it over and over in his fingers, trying to think.  Lila gently took it
from him and showed him how it worked by striking a match.  He watched
her like a dying man staring at his soul.  But his memory, if he ever
had possessed one was dead beyond hope.

When the repulsive part of the necessary work came to be done it was
the Captain who performed it single handed after seeing from their
efforts what was required.  Colton and Little Tom had witnessed the
last of it.  The forest was now once more habitable.

"How is his arm coming along?" Colton asked.

"All right, I think," Lila answered.  "The swelling is all down.  You
can see for yourself tomorrow morning.  He always comes just before
daylight."

"Then he remembers the first time," Colton said.

"I don't think so, necessarily," Big Tom objected.  "The more I watch
him the less I believe in memory or in the mind.  He is simply a bundle
of behavior like the rest of us.  His coming here at fixed times is
merely the urge of similar circumstances--light, temperature, physical
feelings, and so on.  Probably he actually remembers nothing from one
day to the next."

"It all depends upon what you mean by 'memory,'" Colton argued.

"I mean anything rather than the bosh they used to teach us in
psychology.  But I won't argue with you, for I know you are just as
sound a mechanist as I am.  You also believe in behaviorism against
sentimentality."

"I believe in nothing whatever," the doctor asserted with some heat.
"Belief is for men like Swain."

"And do you believe," Little Tom asked, "that we shall ever get to the
bottom of all our wild doings?"

"I shan't stop till we do," Colton answered quietly.  "It may be
difficult now that Swain is dead.  Nevertheless I intend to do my
darnedest."

They fell silent, thinking of the wretched man whose strange passion
had wrecked his life.  How could they know what he had suffered?  They
had seen only his worst side, long after he had ceased to be
responsible for his actions.  What did they know of his fight against
temptation?  Or how did they know that he had been wholly to blame for
his downfall?  It is hard to hate the dead, or to despise them.

"Does anyone happen to have a prayer book or anything of the sort in
his kit?" Colton asked presently.

"I have one," Lila replied.  She rose to fetch it.

"I'll get a shovel," Little Tom said, "and have things ready."

"All right.  We may as well give the poor chap the sort of a burial he
would have asked twenty years ago."

Before leaving the lonely grave under the stars they fixed a crude
cross made of two sticks at its head.  Swain slept as he would have
wished to sleep before the madness made him what he was.  They walked
silently back to camp and went to bed.



THE next two weeks passed swiftly in a determined attack upon the many
apparently inexplicable mysteries of their surroundings.  Big Tom
unpacked his half ton of "junk" and set to work on a detailed
examination of the black-peppered stones which the Captain and others
had used in battle.

Beyond a doubt the substance responsible for the black spots was a
metal and, but for its most peculiar characteristic, common iron.  Its
weight, however, exceeded several times that of any iron known.  From
its structure it was not, like Swain's splinter, meteoric iron.  It was
flaked over and veined through the stone precisely as ordinary iron ore
rich in oxides of iron is veined and flaked.  Big Tom formed his first
theory: some unknown agency had converted all the common iron oxides in
the vicinity into a pure metal, not an oxide, practically identical
with iron except for its extraordinary density.

The most interested spectator of Big Tom's researches--if one omits the
sociable millions of winged stinging and biting insets--was the
gigantic Captain.  For hours he would stand or squat entranced while
Big Tom weighed, measured and X-rayed his mineral specimens.  All this
seemed to fascinate him and give him an intense esthetic pleasure.  The
fuming acids and more noisome chemicals which Big Tom brought into play
were less to his taste.  He would cough, sneeze and express his disgust
in a peculiar way, fitting but unmentionable.

Big Tom and the Captain struck up an intimate friendship with the most
cordial feelings of goodwill on both sides.  Although the Captain could
not talk, nevertheless he and Big Tom managed quite well to exchange
ideas.  The huge, shaggy giant seemed to follow the progress of the
experiments with genuine intelligence.  In one respect he proved
himself a most valuable aid.  Big Tom, although quite strong, was
wholly unable to move many of the black-peppered specimens which he
wished to analyze.  Their weight was too much for one man or for
twenty.  The Captain fished them up with his huge hand like nuts from a
bowl and deposited them as delicately as eggs on the hard, massive rock
which was his friend's work bench.  When Big Tom wished to have the
specimen turned the Captain performed the delicate operation with
mathematical precision.

If, as frequently happened, the experimenter wished to see what the
inside of a specimen looked like, the Captain would carry it away to
his own workshop, a large flat boulder of the black mineral surrounded
by several smaller stones peppered with black.  The flat one was his
anvil, the small ones his sledges.  It was a case of diamond cut
diamond.  Nothing less massive than a lump of the strange substance
could have fractured one of those black-peppered stones, and only the
Captain was powerful enough to lift one of the smaller lumps to drop it
on the specimen.

It was the Captain who flaked and ground a pea of the black metal to
powder so that Big Tom could analyze minute specks of the substances.
Anything bigger would have smashed his strongest apparatus by its sheer
weight.

Only once did the Captain show a spirt of obstructiveness.  Big Tom
remembered the nut of metal with which the Captain had intended
crushing Swain's skull when Lila changed his mind for him, and he
recalled that it had sunk deep into the trunk of a tree.  Meanwhile
Colton and Little Tom reported that it would be impossible to drag out
from the cave a similar lump of the mysterious metal, for a very good
reason: the Captain was always on hand to search them when they emerged
from the siphon.  He no longer stripped them or tore up their clothes
to satisfy himself that they had concealed no lump of the forbidden
metal.  They saved him the trouble by undressing before him and letting
him shake their garments after they had turned them inside out for his
inspection.

It was impossible to give him the slip.  The gurgling sigh of the
expiring spring was an unfailing signal to his wariness.  Wherever he
happened to be when the whistle blew he dropped everything and hastened
to his self-appointed job.  So strategy or, what is ultimately the same
thing, dirty dealing, was out of the question.  There remained then
only one possibility of examining the strange metal of the cave.  They
must cut down the tree and extract the lump which Swain and his five
blacks had dragged out with much sweating and perverse perseverance.

The theory was a hit, the practice missed fire.  They cut down the tree
easily enough, much to the Captain's delight.  He even helped by
pushing it over when it was but two-thirds cut through.  They then
proceeded to hack out the section containing Swain's nut of metal.  The
Captain stood by, watching the proceedings with great interest.  At
last the short log containing the nut rolled free.  The Captain sprang
into action.

Gently now--for him--kicking aside the laborers, he began trundling
away the log with all the strength of his massive legs.  Getting it to
the ravine, he rolled it over the edge.  As it struck the bottom the
log burst in two, sheared through by the sudden momentum of the metal
nut which it had taken six straining men to move, and the coveted nut
ploughed its way diagonally down through the solid rock.

Thereafter the Captain forbade any loitering near the spot.  Big Tom
had not even seen the nut for which he longed.  But he knew from the
minute descriptions of the main mass in the caves, which Little Tom and
Colton reported, that, whatever it might be, the strange metal
certainly was not iron.  He decided to investigate at first hand.



LEAVING their iron-nailed boots in the siphon, the three men lugged
about a hundred pounds of Big Tom's scientific apparatus into the main
cave.  They did not make the mistake of taking in any instruments
containing steel or iron in its construction.  To have done so would
have been equivalent to smashing it with a trip hammer.  For they had
now proved by an exhaustive series of experiments that iron and steel
when brought into the vicinity of the main mass of metal multiplied in
weight by at least a hundredfold.  It was in a sense a new physical
phenomenon.  In another sense, as they concluded later, it was as old
not only as the world but as the material universe.  Ernst Mach had
foreseen it, Albert Einstein had confirmed it by a wonderful chain of
mathematical analysis.

In this sense it was old.  But it was new in the sense that for the
first time in the history of science it was being actually observed on
an experimental scale, and on a scale that was all too big for
convenience.  But for the moment they had not grasped the unexpected
fact of an "induced mass," and merely ordered their attack in
accordance with the obstinate fact, deferring all attempts at an
explanation until later.  The only instruments they dared take into the
cave were made exclusively of brass, quartz, glass and nickel.

Even a superficial examination of the mushroom-like mass of metal
showed that it was not iron.  The dense, granular structure, kidneylike
in texture, showed it to be some different metal.

They were careful never to stay more than a few seconds at a time in
its vicinity.  The drunkenness, or feeling of false exhilaration which
Little Tom and Colton had experienced after their first visit, was an
indisputable effect of the metal.  Knowing now what to fear the men
steeled themselves against the evil attraction and put forth all their
will power to avoid lingering too long under its besotting influence.
But it required the best that was in them to resist "just one more
before we go back," as Little Tom phrased it.

Their brass and crystal told them nothing.  Then Little Tom had an
idea.  In his work he had specialized to a certain extent in spectrum
analysis--the art of deciding what a substance is by means of the light
emitted by its gas or white hot, glowing solid.  He had a clear visual
memory of the line structure of the spectra of all the metallic
elements--the bright yellow of sodium, the crimson of strontium, and so
on.  If this black, shiny metal was indeed a new element, its spectrum
would reveal the fact.  They had with them only a small pocket
spectroscope of brass and glass prisms.  Removing the four or five
steel screws which held the eyepiece to the tube, they inserted wooden
plugs and prepared for the experiment.

If the spectrum was only slightly different from that of one of the
known elements, or compound of elements, then the experiment would be a
failure, for it is impossible to carry in the memory the exact
appearance of about eighty different spectra given by the several known
elements.  But if the spectrum should prove to be as radically
different from any already known as is that of sodium from strontium,
then obviously the metal would be an easily detected new element, or a
compound containing at least one new element.

To prepare for the crucial experiment they pressed the blacks into
service.  For five days they collected all the knots of resinous,
pitchy wood within a mile's radius of their camp, and carried them into
the cave between spoutings of the intermittent spring.  At last the
huge bonfire was lit directly over the central mass of metal.  They
plied it with fuel till the red coals roared and glowed, cooking the
metal beneath.  At length a spot of the black mass turned slowly a
glowing cherry red, then an angry orange, and finally a bluish white.

"Here goes," said Big Tom.  "As senior partner of the firm I take first
look."

He peered through the small spectroscope at the glowing metal.  Without
a word he handed the instrument to Little Tom.

"Well?" they said simultaneously.

"I say it's new," Little Tom announced.  "Unmistakably.  There is
nothing like it anywhere in the whole range of known elements."

"That is what I say too.  Can you remember the lines?"

"Yes, but not in here.  Come on.  Let's get out before we go crazy."

Colton had preceded them to the exit.  The strange influence of the
metal affected him more strongly than it did either of the Blakes, and
he resented it.

"That's the last time you ever get me into that rotten hole," he
snapped as the two Toms joined him.  "I've had enough."

"So have we.  To go back again would be mere idle curiosity.  We have
found out all we can at this stage of the game."

"Is it a new element, as you suspected?"

"It is.  There's nothing like it in the whole range of chemistry or
physics," Little Tom declared emphatically.  "The extraordinary
complexity of its spectrum puts it in a class by itself."

"And here comes the Captain," Colton laughed, "to put us where we
belong.  Take off your shirts."

They passed the customs officer without unpleasantness.  The Captain
was feeling jovial.  He had brought a huge, hard nut of some sort with
him as a gift.  Having smashed it on the rocks he insisted that the men
share the juicy white meat.

"Tastes like fish," Big Tom remarked disgustedly.  "I hope the beastly
thing isn't poisonous."

"I admit it isn't appetizing," Colton agreed.  "But I'll bet it is
harmless and nourishing.  The Captain is incapable of a dirty,
civilized trick _ la_ Borgia.  Aren't you, old boy?" he concluded,
giving the huge gray giant a thumping punch in the ribs.

That gift was the precursor of others--tons of them.  Seeing what the
men ate in the way of fruits, the Captain scoured the forest to keep
their table supplied.  The lazy blacks were relieved of their duties.
They wallowed in bananas.

It was on a Sunday morning that the Captain decided it was time to
break camp and forage afield in pastures new.  His arm was doing
famously and he felt fine.  Kicking down the tents, playfully
footballing the pots and pans, he signified that they had dallied long
enough in that particular spot.  He was boisterous, but careful.  He
smashed nothing.  To clinch his argument he picked up Lila like a doll
and carried her a hundred yards into the forest.  The men were just
about to rescue her--or attempt the impossible--when he set her down,
feet up.  They saw the point.  He wished to show them the remaining
places of interest in that enchanted forest.  Packing up in a hurry
they followed him into the green twilight.




CHAPTER VII

THE IRON FACE

FOR twenty days the gray giant led them through the forest.  When they
came to a stream they forded it, or felled a tree if the water was deep
or swift, and passed over dry shod.  Their guide knew the ways around
the frequent swamps as if he were an expert topographer.  Evidently
every foot of that long journey was familiar to his feet, for he never
faltered.  How many times had he traveled it, and for what purpose?
Had he guided Swain?  They could only speculate.  Without misgiving
they followed where he led.  His intentions were clearly friendly.  He
had tried the men and found them necessary for his enjoyment of life.
Now, perhaps, he sought to detain them as long as his strange life
lasted.

Only the blacks of the party murmured at the excessive marches.  But
they could not turn back, for there was nowhere to go.  The forest
through which they passed was totally uninhabited, except by prowling
beasts.  They were never attacked.  The forest folk knew their master
when they saw him.

At night the Captain invariably disappeared.  They never learned where
he slept, but guessed that it was not far from their own quarters.  In
the mornings he would reappear, usually with an offering of fruit.
After he observed that they ate certain kinds of birds he began
bringing in poultry.  How he ever caught the birds remained a mystery.
Probably he plucked them from their low perches in the trees at night,
like a Negro robbing a henroost.  His own food consisted exclusively of
fruit and nuts.  When they saw him eating they were curiously and
painfully reminded of Swain.  They wished he would dine in private.
But he seemed to like their company at meals.

Although his arm was now practically healed and well past any danger of
infection, he still insisted on having it dressed twice a day.  It had
become a sort of religious ritual with him.  As their supply of
antiseptics was not inexhaustible they satisfied him by bathing the arm
in water slightly colored with coffee.  This simple and inexpensive
rite cemented the already close friendship between the Captain and the
whites.  He appeared to dislike the blacks.

At last, on the morning of the twenty-first day, they found the first
signs of intelligent life.  A deserted hovel of leaves and bark in a
straggling forest, a few arrow heads and the remnants of what might
have been a crude cane basket, marked the recent presence of human
beings.  Later the same day they discovered further evidence of human
habitation, but saw neither man nor woman.  The Captain seemed to
resent the presence of the hovels.  Whenever he spied one not well on
its way to ruin he kicked it over.

The forest in this region was of a stunted growth with few trees and
almost no scrub.  The ground too was remarkably level, suspiciously so,
in fact.

"This is more like a courtyard than a supposed wilderness," Big Tom
remarked.  "Where's the ruined temple with the golden idol of the ruby
eyes and emerald teeth?" he asked laughingly.

"They always do find those things in African forests," Lila sighed.
"At least in novels."

"This doesn't happen to be a novel," Little Tom observed.  "So you will
have to go without your rubies.  Try this nice scarlet pickle instead."

Lila fled with a real scream from the ugly red slug dangled before her
eyes.

"Put that down," Big Tom said testily.  "It may be poisonous.  You'll
get bitten or stung one of these days."  The rich fauna of the forest
had irritated him from the first.  No sooner had he recovered from the
fear of death by sleeping sickness than he fell a martyr to the
imaginary fangs of incredibly venomous reptiles in his blankets.  Even
the common flea, a donation from the hairy Captain apparently, for the
blacks proved not guilty, slew him in agony at least twice every night.

This phenomenon, by the way, greatly interested Colton.  The Captain,
he declared, was human even to his parasites.  The only thing in which
he fell short of the complete and perfect man was the godlike gift of
eloquence.  But he made up for the deficiency in other ways.  He had an
arm with a punch in it, an expressive kick, a dumb fidelity, and he
understood practical politics better than any Irishman ever born.
Witness his handling of the debate in the ravine.

Outcroppings of dressed stone, the pavement of some long forgotten
courtyard, began to appear.  The floor sloped gently up, and the men
were reminded of the mushroomlike growth of strange metal in the cave.

"We are coming to another of those meteors," Little Tom hazarded,
"drawn by the cave artist.  This must be the one that fell in a forest."

But he was wrong.  They were not to discover that fragment from the
heavens which the primitive artist had represented as falling in a
forest.  It was Colton who first threw doubt on Little Tom's guess.

"If the big mushroom in the cave was one of those meteors," he said,
"we can't be coming near another of the same batch now.  Otherwise we
should all feel drunk and beastly.  There is no appreciable mass of
that infernal metal within miles."

And so it proved.  The Captain led them out of the sparse scrub toward
a low mound about a hundred feet in circumference, of reddish rock.
Walking directly up it to the crest, he motioned for the others to
follow, and halted.  Was this the end of his pilgrimage?  And if so,
what was his object in bringing them a three weeks' arduous tramp
through the forest to see this supposed wonder of the world?

At first they perceived nothing more unusual than a large bump of dense
red rock, probably a rich iron ore.  But as they stared the ridges and
furrows took on a design.  From their position it was difficult to
appreciate the whole of that curious work of art.  The Captain offered
no help.  He had a generous faith in the intelligence of these whites
to whom pain was an obedient slave.  Gradually they deciphered the
meaning of those bold grooves and hollows scarring the mounded rock.
The whole mass had been carved to the semblance of a face staring at
the sky.



THEY moved from place to place, the better to obtain a connected view.
There was a rude, brutal strength about the execution of that massive
sculpture which repelled the beholders.  The face might have been
human.  If so it belonged to a primitive or degenerate race.

"Is it a man's face?" Lila asked.

"I think not," Colton replied.  "To me it looks like a halfway cross
between a baboon and a dog.  Still, there is something human about it
all."

"Too bad the Captain can't talk, and explain his picture gallery," Big
Tom remarked.

The Captain, seeing that they observed what was expected of them, did
the next best thing to talking.  He stamped on the image twice, then
pointed to his own face.  Colton looked from one to the other, the
stony, brutal face and the Captain's, barely human.  He shook his head,
puzzled.

"You're wrong, old boy," he said.  "This isn't your picture.  Just see
how the rains and wind have weathered it down.  There's not a trace of
the chisel, nor of any other cutting instrument.  And the surface is
all pocked like a lump of flint that has kicked about the river beds
for ages.  No, this must be at least as old as the last ice age."

"I don't think he means us to understand it as his portrait," Lila
objected.  She had been watching the Captain closely.  "There is a
resemblance, you must admit.  He and the image have the same expression
of 'lostness,' if you know what I mean.  They both look as if they had
once been human."

"But the Captain _is_ human," the doctor objected.  "He is no more of
an ape than I am."

"Still, that idea of 'lostness' is what the stone face expresses," Lila
persisted.

"Fallen angel?" Little Tom scoffed.  "If so I'll take a jumping devil."

"You'll take pills if you get too smart," Colton snapped.  He had been
thinking hard.  All during the long tramp through the forest he had
turned over theories to account for the Captain.  Not yet ready to
acknowledge even to himself the startling conclusions he had reached,
he resented the vaguest foreshadowing of his theory by another.  The
Captain was indeed "fallen," if the word meant anything at all.  But
that he had ever even remotely resembled an angel the doctor was far
from ready to admit.  Swain, he reflected, also had "fallen."  The
descent from manhood to brutehood is perhaps a greater fall than that
from angel to man.

"So you think our friend the Captain," he said jestingly to Lila, "'on
honey dew hath fed, and drunk the milk of Paradise'?"

"I am sure," she retorted, "he hasn't lived on the milk of cocoanuts
all his life."

"Perhaps he knew the taste of beer, or palm wine, in his youth?"

"Not unlikely."

"Miss Meredith, you are a most remarkable young woman.  Your
imagination does you credit."

"What about your own?  Why don't you tell us what you think?"

"Professional reasons"--lamely.

"Nonsense!  There isn't another doctor within a thousand miles to laugh
at you.  So you can make as many guesses as you like."

"Making mistaken guesses is a bad habit for a man of science.  I shall
wait until I have a chance to see inside the Captain's head."

"He will outlive you fifty years."

The doctor sighed.  "Probably.  Unless he gets appendicitis.  Then I
shall have to operate."

"You wouldn't dare!" she flashed.  "It would be murder."

"You are right, also dreadfully in earnest.  Hereafter I shall label my
jokes."

"Would an X-ray of his head tell you anything?" Big Tom offered.

"No.  I must see the structure of certain parts of the brain, in
particular the pituitary body.  I wish I had used one of the
conservatives back there in the ravine.  But I didn't think of it until
too late."

"One never does," Big Tom agreed mournfully.  "Just two days ago I
thought of a ridiculously simple experiment to try on those
black-peppered rocks."

"Why not go back?" Little Tom suggested.

"We may yet, although it would do Colton no good.  Not for the present,
however.  The Captain wants us to go on.  Where he leads we follow,
unless we prefer being chased.  Hold on a minute, old top, I want a
specimen of this rock."

While the others followed the impatient Captain, Big Tom snatched a
rifle and hastily shot off a fragment of the red rock.  It proved to be
almost pure magnetite--black iron ore--rusted on the surface by the
storms of unknown centuries.

That night was sleepless.  From dark till dawn they huddled
apprehensively about their fire, rifles cocked, listening to the soft
padding of strangely human footfalls passing to and fro just beyond the
limit of the firelight.  When the tension was at its greatest they
restrained themselves with difficulty from firing pointblank into the
darkness.  Only the feeling that attack would provoke counterattack
held them level: If that same feeling were more prevalent, and nerves
steadier, there would be less futile bloodshed.  They longed for the
Captain, but according to his custom he had disappeared at sundown.

With the bone-searching mists of dawn the sounds ceased.  Stiff and
miserable they made coffee and tried to cheer up.  The uneasy fears of
the night refused to be shaken off.  They grew apprehensive about the
Captain.  Had he been waylaid and overcome?

"He wouldn't pass out quietly," Little Tom said hopefully.  "If they
jumped on him within a mile of here we should have heard the racket.
Listen!"

They heard a cracking of small twigs and a steady swish of leaves as if
some heavy body were being dragged over the ground.  Slowly raising
their rifles they waited.  Through the mists a familiar figure stalked
toward them.  With a glad cry they dropped their rifles and ran to meet
him.  More than they guessed the huge, shaggy beast-man had become dear
to them.

It was not an offering of fruit or fowls that he dragged over the
leaves this cheerless morning.  Nonchalantly he pitched forward the
night's catch, a dead black covered with patches of gray hair.  There
was no doubt about this one.  It was a man.  The degeneracy toward the
apes had barely begun.  Only the abnormal growth of hair and an evident
thickening of the jawbone and skull distinguished this specimen from an
ordinary African native.  The body was powerfully built and of larger
proportions than the average Negro.  Possibly a rapid growth of the
whole frame was the second stage of the disorder from which the victim
suffered when the Captain, plucking him from his perch in the night,
arrested forever the progress of his disease!

With a gesture to the trees the Captain intimated that the foliage hid
others.  This was his substitute for speech.  The dead example of the
dangers about them was a more lively warning than ten minutes of
excited shouting.  They admitted that their guide had found an eloquent
substitute for speech.  Knowing his background it was impossible to be
shocked at his choice of words.  They breakfasted and went on.  Colton
looked at the specimen longingly; but the Captain signified somewhat
vigorously that it was time to leave.



THE Captain was in a hurry.  Warily avoiding the denser clumps of brush
and picking his way when possible well to one side of the larger trees,
he passed on at a killing pace through the forest.  The blacks began to
murmur, and not without cause, for their heavy loads, carried on the
head or slung over poles, caught in the overhanging branches or scrub
and doubled their labor.  They began to lag.  The Captain, a born
leader of men, got behind them and herded them with his feet.

"I don't like this," Big Tom muttered.  "The Captain evidently knows
more about this rotten forest than he cares to tell us."

The trail was easily followed.  Numerous feet, far too many of them,
kept this primitive highway through the forests and the jungles well
worn.  It was the long sure trail to an unholy shrine, older than
Mecca, older than the white race.  Pilgrims from the surrounding
forests for a thousand miles were drawn slowly toward it by secret
rumors on the outskirts, to hasten their progress as they approached
the region of certain reports, and run together from the four quarters
of the compass like drops of water running down the inside of a bowl.

A generation would pass in the distant glades without a single human
being setting out on the long journey.  Then, the tradition of a great
blessing that transformed human beings into a higher race, far in the
dim recesses of the unknown forest, would slowly gather authority in
some mysterious way, and a handful of the more adventurous young men of
a credulous tribe would set out to follow the rumor.  Perhaps one would
win through to the goal; more often none.  But always, in the course of
a century, there was a net gain in the steady advance of a few from
resting place to resting place, and the hopeful multitude about the
shrine increased.

The hollow booming of the drums taken from post to farther outlying
post, confirmed the rumor.  Here, in this mystic region of the
everlasting twilight, dwelt the god.  Here there were strength and
healing for whoever persevered through the perils of the march.  Here
the victors over poisonous vipers and deadlier fevers might drink deep
of the new life which would make them stronger than the unconquerable
beasts.

The sophisticated whites, wise in their generation, were now swiftly
approaching a more efficacious shrine of "healing" than any in France
or Italy.  The miracles performed at this oldest holy spot on earth
were indeed genuine and of an order to impress the most hardened
skeptic.  Colton, as a medical man, might have underrated the undoubted
cures at the European shrines; it was but the logical outcome of his
drastic scientific purging that he should question, not the good faith
of the cured, but their good sense.

The other men were neutral.  Mind might be able to overcome matter;
they did not know and were not particularly interested.  The whole
question savored of the Eighteenth Century with its absurd trials for
witchcraft.  To them the world had long since left all that sort of
thing far behind.  The properties of matter engrossed their attention.
To understand why iron was iron seemed to them a sufficient object of
Twentieth Century rational curiosity.  So, although the Captain's
peculiar personality baffled them, they did not expect a solution to
the riddle from supernatural sources.  Nature, they believed, is all
sufficient.  To get to the bottom of the mystery they had but to bide
their time and keep their eyes open.

The Captain was doing his best to strengthen this wise resolution.  By
frequent gesticulations he kept their attention on the lower branches
of the trees.  They saw nothing to cause them alarm.  The first
intimation of danger was a small wooden shaft that buried itself in the
bundle of bedding which one of the porters carried on his head.
Bringing up the rear the Captain saw the shot.  He also saw whence it
had been loosed.  Peering up in the tree he spied a venomous little
face--human--looking down into his own with an expression of the most
devilish hatred.  The others saw it too.  The next thing they saw was
the Captain's leap.  Quick as a cat he had picked the unhappy little
devil off its perch.  With one swing of his arm he sent it flying high
over the treetops.

That was the end of that one.  But there were more.  The trees were
full of the murderous little pygmies.  These were the pilgrims to the
mystic shrine, the seekers after godlike stature which would make them
masters of the hated and envied gorillas.  Flinging down their bales
and baggage the porters cowered for shelter from the storm of vicious
arrows that broke from all directions like a driving rain.  The whites,
shooting at random, sought cover behind trees, dodging from trunk to
trunk as the storm veered.  They hit nothing but the trees.  Yet their
salvos saved the day.  It was the first time those bloodthirsty little
devils had heard firearms.  The bows dropped from their paralyzed hands
and by dozens they tumbled after their weapons.

Although it was a matter of life and death the whites were for giving
quarter and letting the mean little wretches escape.  Not so the
Captain.  To him this was a holy war.  Although the men were not to
understand the reason for his cold, machine-like fury until months
later, they sensed that this indeed was the Captain's private feud and
that they had better stay out of it.

Never had he been so ruthlessly efficient.  Seizing the pygmies by the
neck, or leg or arm or whatever came handiest, he treated them as he
had treated the first, hurling them high over the tree-tops.  He had
not time to break their backs with his one hand.  Where ones or twos
still clung paralyzed with fear to the limbs of the trees he brought
them down with a well-aimed missile, which was one of their own kind.
After the first futile attempts to halt his fury the whites fled,
following the blacks into the forest where they could neither see nor
hear.  Had they but known it the Captain was performing an act of
mercy.  But mercy in action frequently is no pleasanter to witness than
is a surgical operation.  The Captain was indeed, as they learned
later, the savior of his people.  He was in fact a prohibition officer
of a rare and incorruptible kind.

It was over.  White and dazed they crept back, to find the Captain
rounding up the blacks.  He was still in a towering passion.  From his
expression it was all too evident that he was swearing in his own way.
At last the safari was ready to proceed.  Shaken by their terrible
experience, and ashamed of their own impotence to prevent it, they
trudged on.

That night the Captain did not follow his usual custom.  He not only
stayed with his friends, but shared their long watches, never sleeping.
Through the endless night he ripped branches from the trees and piled
them on the roaring fire that beat back the encircling mists.  They had
entered the danger zone.



NOON found them advancing rapidly over a rolling, rocky plain almost
wholly destitute of trees.  They had emerged from the forest with
startling suddenness, to find themselves in a universe of violent
colors and dazzling light that still half blinded their eyes.  From the
crest of a small hill they saw, miles away on the horizon, the long,
gray unbroken barrier of the forest.  This was merely a natural
clearing which they were traversing.  The sight of the blazing sun once
more, and the all but intolerable brilliance of the landscape, was like
a glimpse of heaven.  Human beings without the sunlight are a miserable
race.

Descending the little hill they marched after the Captain down a long
furrow in the plain, blocked at its farther end by a crossridge of
rock.  The only vegetation within sight was a sort of stunted thornbush
and the brown, ragged grass of last spring's rich carpet.  Bare rocks
showed where the temporary freshets of winter had coursed, but there
was no spring or waterhole or any vestige of water.  It would be
impossible to camp more than a day or two in such a place.  Their water
bags held only enough for a full day's march.  By rationing the supply
they might make it last three days.  So they urged the blacks to hurry
and did their best to keep up with the Captain.

Halfway to the rock barrier at the end of their furrow, the Captain
halted and held up his arm.  He had seen the enemy.  Looming up like
giants against the skyline four huge figures sprang into view on the
ridge, stood dead still for a few seconds regarding the travelers, and
then, stepping back, rapidly dwindled from sight.  They had run down
the farther slope to bring reinforcements.

The Captain knew enough about military tactics to climb out of the
hollow.  With all those loose stones lying about, the bottom of a ditch
was no place to put up a fight.  He was over the top in a jiffy.  The
whites followed, driving up the blacks.

When they reached the top they saw nothing.  The four huge scouts had
vanished in a farther hollow.  Should they go on, or wait where they
were to see what happened?  The Captain settled their doubts by setting
off along the ridge at a run.  When the Captain ran those who followed
could only hope to keep up with him by flying.  They did their best,
but it was pretty poor.  Soon the Captain was a good mile ahead of
them.  Then to their consternation they saw him gradually shorten and
finally disappear.  They had lost him in the next hollow.  There was no
doubt what to do this time.  Without his guidance they were lost.
While the others stayed with the safari, Little Tom ran forward as fast
as he could go to try and catch a glimpse of the Captain.  Presently he
too dwindled over the skyline and vanished.

"I vote we fortify the camp," Big Tom suggested, hastily setting to
work.  "We may be safe enough, but this is no place for a white man to
fight human gorillas.  I wish that fool kid would come back."  He was
referring to his son.

They piled their baggage into a round wall and feverishly reinforced
the outside with all the stones they could carry.  Half an hour passed
and still there was no sign of Little Tom or the Captain.  Still they
labored at the wall.  An indefinable feeling warned them that they
would need all the fortifications they could raise.

After the losses in the ravine there were only ten rifles left.  Six of
the porters were well trained and fairly good shots; the four whites
were learning by experience how to make their ammunition count.  If the
other side had no firearms the party felt confident that it could stand
a siege until thirst drove them out.  Once on the plain, fighting in
the open, it would be a gamble, depending for its outcome on the
courage of their opponents.

With a scream Lila dropped the stone she was carrying.  The men sprang
for their rifles, to see Little Tom racing over the ridge.  He
stumbled, all but done in, got to his feet, and came on, reeling.  He
had run too far, and now was fighting for his life.  Presently the huge
bulk of the Captain hove into sight.  They saw him bending down,
straightening up, turning around, bending down, with mechanical
regularity.  He was fighting, literally singlehanded, a rearguard
action.

The mob of pursuers leaped into view in a wide crescent with its horns
rapidly closing in toward the two fugitives.  Even at their distance
the frantic defenders could hear the thunderous jarring of the charge
as those hundreds of gigantic brutes raced after their quarry, hurling
stones as they came.

As coolly as soldiers on parade the three whites opened fire into the
advancing horde.  In the vast sunlight of that glaring plain the
cracking of their rifles sounded ridiculously thin and futile.  Little
Tom stumbled again, fell, and could not rise.  He began crawling on all
fours toward the camp.  The blacks now had found the range, and the
cracking of their rifles added to the din.  The first of the pursuers
pitched forward, hit in the stomach.  Two more dropped.  There was a
momentary slackening of the charge as the huge brutes tried to
understand why their fellows had fallen.  Then it came on again, faster
than ever.



THAT second's pause was the Captain's opportunity.  He abandoned his
rear guard action and ordered a retreat of all his forces.

"Save him!" Lila screamed, as if her voice could reach the racing
giant, or as if he could have understood had he heard.  But he needed
no orders.  Overtaking the crawling man he made a quick dive sideways,
scooped him up, tucked him under his arm, and came on.  The horns of
the crescent closed on him just as he leaped the wall and dropped
Little Tom.  The wall saved them, but not as they had planned.  While
they pumped steel slugs into the bellies of the yelling horde, the
Captain bounded back over the wall, and with his feet and fist made an
opening for himself in the disordered ranks pressing against the
stones.  Every hit, of fist or foot, was a kill.  Having made his
clearing, he lapsed once more into the living machine gun which had
cleared the ravine.

With incredible speed the massive arm shot back and forth, hurling
stones at the heads and shaggy faces of the enemy, never missing.
Within ten minutes he had brained fifty of them.  Then, seeing them
waver, he leaped into their midst, seized one by the arm, tossed him
high, and caught him by the ankle as he came down.  He was armed.  With
this still living club he lashed about him, mowing down the enemy like
ripe wheat.

As one club broke in his hand he tossed it up and seized another.
Tiring at last of arm exercise, he hurled away the club, killing two in
the act, and started kicking like a French boxer.  His feet were even
deadlier than his arm.  Terror at last penetrated the thickened skulls,
and the attackers broke, huddled together in their aimless flight like
sheep before a coyote.

The whites yelled to him to desist, but he was not to be called off.
Going into action again like a machine gun he pelted the rout with
whatever came to his hand, stones or carcasses.  Far over the ridge and
beyond it he herded the shrieking rabble, till their clamor died on the
rising breeze and became indistinct, like the memory of a nightmare.

"They attacked us," Colton croaked.  His mouth was dry.  "We are not to
blame."

"Self-defense," Big Tom muttered.  "Did you notice anything about those
gray brutes, or was I dreaming?"

"Yes, I noticed it," Colton replied.  "They yelled like savages."

"Still they looked like the others in the ravine."

"Not nearly so big.  Not so muscular by half.  And their heads were
different.  Not so much hair on their bodies."

"What do you make of it?" Little Tom asked.

"Don't ask me."  He groaned, "I've had about enough for a while."

"Hadn't we better try to overtake him?" Lila suggested.  "They may
rally and overpower him."

"He can take care of himself," Big Tom asserted.  "And of us, too.
Lord!  Did you ever see such a scrapper as that one?"

The doctor's nerves had recovered.

"We may as well go on, I suppose.  I'm not going to spend the night
here.  Those little devils in the woods are better than this."

An hour and a half later they encountered the Captain coming to meet
them from his Armageddon.  He had been hit in several places, but not
seriously.  Colton contented himself with washing the red bruises and
dusting them liberally with boric.  The Captain seemed amply rewarded
for all his exertions.

That night they camped on the highest ridge, about halfway across the
plain.  Lighting five huge fires of thornbrush they turned in for the
night, taking the usual watches in rotation.  The Captain again
disappeared in the dark, leaving them to protect themselves.  From this
they inferred that they were in no immediate danger of attack.

Toward morning Little Tom, then on sentry duty, made out three fires
far away on the edge of the forest.  He kept his knowledge till
breakfast time.

"If we have to go through a forest full of these hairy half beasts,"
Big Tom spluttered, "I'm going back."

"Through the pygmies' country?" Colton laughed.  "We put quite a few
out of business no doubt, but there must be more in the jungle.  You
will probably arrive in time for the funeral."

"My own, too," he admitted gloomily.  "What fool ever said anything
about 'the spell of the African forests'?  If ever I get home I'm not
going farther than the front door as long as I live."

"How is it, Lila," Colton asked suddenly, "that you never have
hysterics?"

"I do, all the time," she confessed.

"Where?"

"Inside."

"It isn't safe.  You should let them out once in a while, or you'll
burst."

But the worst of one kind at least, was over.  Their living enemies
henceforth were to be well within the Captain's capacity to handle.
Dead matter only stood in their path with any real threat.  The
ferocity of the last attack had left them stunned and resentful.  Why
were they the target of such unreasoning hatred?  They had done nothing
to draw down all this wrath on their heads.  If only the Captain could
talk they might learn the sinister politics behind the brutal practice.
But, like some soldiers, they remained always in total ignorance of
what went on in the star chambers of the devil.  Like them they never
knew why they were forced to fight until long after the peace
conference, and then only dimly.



AFTER a short council of war they decided to proceed, hoping to
overtake the Captain.  He was leading them, they knew, toward the
forest on the opposite side of the plain.  They would show their
intelligence by getting on their way unaided.  He had failed to appear
for breakfast, possibly because he lacked his usual offering of fruit
or fowls.

About ten o'clock they came upon unmistakable traces of his activity.
Either early that morning or late the preceding afternoon he had passed
that way, making their path through the wilderness straight and easy.
Not only half a dozen of the ferocious half-beasts that had attacked
them lay shattered on the rocks, but at least a score of undersized
pygmies.  The presence of these last bodies was an inexplicable
surprise.  What were the little devils doing off here, so far from
their happy forest hell?  Colton had an inspiration.

"The rest of you go ahead," he ordered, "while I stay here.  Steer for
that bay in the forest ahead.  I can't lose you if you keep straight in
line with it.  Erasmus will stay with me to carry my stuff."

Colton was in command.  His word was law.  Still they hesitated.  Did
he know what he was doing?  Lila guessed.

"Can't I stay to help?" she begged.

Colton considered.  "If you promise not to have hysterics," he conceded.

"Hadn't we better hang around?" Big Tom suggested.  "We don't know
where the Captain is this time."

"No.  Go ahead.  I'll overtake you inside of four hours.  If you get
there first, wait for us at the edge of the forest."

Orders were orders, and they marched off, leaving Colton to his work
with Lila and Erasmus.  The doctor felt that the key to one lock at
least of the riddle lay in his hand.  It would not take long to gather
what he wished.  Lila stood by, handing him the instruments.  From his
box of medical supplies he took out a flat-topped jar of grain alcohol
to receive the few specimens which he hoped to collect and preserve.
His theory was all but complete; he needed, however, the confirmation
of experiments, to be performed when he once more reached civilization
and laboratories.

Under the leadership of Big Tom the safari rapidly dwindled in the
distance and vanished from their sight.  Two hours later Colton had
finished.

"Come on," he said.  "See if we can overtake them before they reach the
forest.  It's up to you, Erasmus.  If you drop that box I'll break your
lily white neck.  See?  Forward, march!"

They overtook the safari half a mile from the edge of the forest.

"What luck?" Big Tom asked, visibly showing his relief at their safe
arrival.

"Fine," the doctor exclaimed.  "Those fellows with the gray hair are
just about halfway between the Captain or the others of the ravine, and
ordinary blacks.  The pygmies were barely started on the road to
degeneracy--if you care to call it that.  When I get back to chemicals
and a lab again I shall be able to piece out the whole story.  At least
I hope so.  Have you seen anything of our friend the Captain?"

"Not a hair.  Of course you saw his blazed trail all the way along?"

"Yes, he must have spent a busy night mopping up his enemies.  I would
give five years of my life to know the grounds of the quarrel between
him and the others."

"I wouldn't go that far," Little Tom demurred.  "Life just now is as
rich as condensed milk.  Still, I wish Swain had lingered a little
longer.  If that fellow had lived we might have known something."

They hesitated about entering the forest, although the trail was broad
and well-traveled.  Tiny huts, the handiwork of the pygmies, kicked
over like beehives, here and there in the trees, showed where the
Captain had preceded them.  After weighing all the possibilities they
decided to reconnoiter before venturing into the forest with the whole
safari.

This time Big Tom, Little Tom and two of the best shots from the blacks
were ordered forward.  They were to follow the trail for an hour, if
everything seemed safe, and turn back.  In the event of an attack the
sound of their firearms would be sufficient notice for the
reinforcements to hurry forward.  Boldly stepping out, with their eyes
well peeled, they entered the weird, straggling forest.

Signs of recent habitation were plentiful.  On both sides of the trail
the cap-sized beehives showed where the venomous little pygmies had but
lately been evicted.  The ashes of several fires were still warm.  But
everywhere there was evidence of confusion, flight, and swift
destruction.  Bodies were not numerous.  Those farther into the forest
had heard the cries of those on the border and fled before the attack.
Swift messengers, no doubt, returning from the outposts of yesterday's
battle had raced panting along the trail warning all of the wrath to
come.  Only the stupid or incurably skeptical tarried, to have their
necks broken or their heads cracked by the avenger.



AT THE edge of a marshy drinking hole they found the Captain's visiting
card in the shape of several huge footprints and a couple of sprawling
bodies.  The slain were of gigantic size, but flabby.  The massed flesh
had not yet hardened into firm muscles.  Like their cousins of the
ravine they were thickly pelted with patches of coarse gray, dog-like
hair.  Lumps like these could have caused the muscular Captain no
difficulty.  The men wondered why he had bothered to do them to death.
But they had not yet mastered their guide's philosophy.  This was no
war of aggression or flamboyant reprisal.  It was as legitimate a
crusade as any that ever devastated one population to rescue another
against its will.  And the Captain was as sure of himself as was King
Richard.  Moreover he was twice as efficient and a far better general.
He may not have been a genius, but at any rate he had sufficient brains
to avoid being crowned by a red-hot washing pot, as was his great
predecessor.

They were about to turn back to the safari when a distant cracking of
branches brought them to a halt with raised rifles.  The cracking
ceased.  There was a sharp squeal, a ripping of twigs and leaves, and a
gray shape catapulted through the trees before them, to crash sprawling
on the ground not five yards from where they stood.

"He's at it again," Little Tom remarked.  "I must say he's a sanitary
beggar.  When he cleans, he cleans."

It was the Captain's last shot.  The unfortunate gray straggler had
foolishly sought to elude the Captain's unerring eye by crouching under
a thicket.  Too great a love of his household god had proved his
undoing.  Now he was just a mess.  The men hurried from the spot.

Presently the Captain overtook them.  Planting himself in their path he
barred their further progress in no equivocal terms.

"Well, old boy," Big Tom remarked pleasantly, "are you going to send us
sailing over the treetops like a flock of spread-eagle bats?"

The Captain's reply was a quick grab for the two blacks, who seemed
anxious to get away.  They tarried, one under the Captain's right foot,
the other under his stump.  He was careful not to hurt either.  Then
all of a sudden he made up his mind, or what served him equally well in
place of a mind.  With a parting kick he sped the blacks on their way.
It was not one of his lethal kicks, but a gentle shove like a mule's.
They fled howling, leaving their rifles behind them.  In token of
surrender Big Tom laid his rifle flat on the ground.  Little Tom
followed suit.  To their surprise the gray giant picked up the
discarded toys and restored them to their owners.

"So diplomatic relations are not broken off, old boy?" Big Tom laughed.
"Is that it?"

The huge beast-man towered over them, struggling to make himself
understood.  One glance at his face would have convinced the most
chronic doubter on earth that the giant was struggling with every nerve
of his body to recall a lost gift.  The straining muscles of his face
all but brought back the frozen speech to his lips.  Almost, but not
quite.  He failed.  With something like a gesture of despair he hunched
down on a rock and sat brooding, chin in hand, the silent image of
frustrated endeavor.

"What he wants is obvious enough," Little Tom said confidently.  "He
stopped us from going back.  That means he wants us to go farther into
the forest."

"Maybe.  But I don't think it's all as simple as that.  My guess is
that he's trying to tell us why he has wiped out the population before
we go on to the next job, whatever that may be.  He didn't bring us all
this way just to see him having a Roman holiday.  There is design
behind everything he has done.  I tell you, that fellow has the power
of reason, whether he has a human brain or not.  Let's give your theory
a trial.  It is the first step, anyway."

Big Tom started off down the trail into the forest.

"Is this what you want?" he asked, looking back.

The gray giant followed him with his eyes.  He was still trying to
remember a lost art.  Presently he got to his feet.  Stalking down the
trail he overtook Big Tom, passed him, and glanced back to see if he
was being followed.  Big Tom shook his head, and sat down.

"You're all right in some ways, Captain, but your temper is not always
what it should be.  I'll wait here till the others join me.  Little
Tom, suppose you run back and tell the crowd."

"And leave you alone with him?  Nothing doing!  There's a quicker way."

He fired four shots in rapid succession.  The Captain understood at
once.  Stalking over to a convenient tree he leaned against it and
waited patiently with the two men till the safari arrived.

"Everything all right?" Colton panted as he ran up ahead of the others.

"Seems to be," Big Tom admitted.  "Is there any way, doctor, of
restoring the power of speech to a man who has lost it?"

"Has he been trying to speak?"

"Either that or he has a unique gift for making faces.  What about it?
Can you make him talk?"

"Sometimes it is done," Colton replied.  "But I never heard of a case
like this.  It is only successful, so far as I know, when pressure is
removed from certain parts of the brain.  The Captain's trouble is
different.  Unless my guess is utterly wrong it was not pressure on the
brain that destroyed his power of speech--if he ever had it."

"Then what did?"

"I don't know.  Some day I hope to find out."

"You think as I do, then, that he once was a normal human being?"

"It is quite possible."



"YOU are as cautious as all good doctors," Big Tom laughed.  "I'll go
you one better.  From watching his tricks I have come to the conclusion
that his skin was not always black."

"You think he may have been a white man?"

"I'll bet on it.  But how I'm ever going to collect my money on the bet
beats me.  If the Captain was not a white man he knew somebody who was.
Lots of his little habits are ours.  Did you ever see a black stand in
an attitude like that?"

"He may have caught his tricks from Swain," the doctor laughed
incredulously.  "They seem to have been old friends."

"You bet they were.  Do you remember the Captain's first call on him
there in the ravine?  But you didn't see it; I forgot.  Little Tom and
I did.  The Captain greeted him with all the enthusiasm of an
ex-convict hailing the judge who gave him thirty years.  I wish you
could make him talk."

"There is not one chance in millions that I, or any other doctor, could
restore his power of speech.  It is gone forever.  He is fundamentally
different from human beings, although he is still human in many ways,
and will be till he dies."

"Which will be many years yet, I hope," Little Tom remarked.  "He's a
good scout."

"I don't know if that's a kind wish," the doctor said slowly.  "If he
has any remnants of a memory he must be living in hell."

The rest of the party joined them.

"We're still alive," Little Tom called cheerfully, seeing Lila's white
and anxious face.  "We just were too lazy to walk all the way back.
The old boy wants us to follow him into the forest.  What about it?"

"I'm game," said Lila; "but it isn't up to me to give the orders."

"Wow!" said Little Tom.  "Right in the jaw.  All right, Miss Meredith,
I shall wait till Doctor Colton tells us what's what."

"The Captain has issued orders for me," Colton laughed.  "We follow him
into the forest."

The remainder of that journey was short.  Half an hour after starting
the Captain brushed aside a thorn bush and strode into a small
clearing.  In the center stood a great mass of grayish metal, the size
of a large automobile, and approximately rectangular at the top and
base.  It shone in the sunlight like a new kettle, for it had been kept
bright since the last ice age by the hands of thousands of worshipers.
This was the forest idol, the god of a degenerate sect.

There could be no doubt as to the Captain's feelings toward the god.
He was an iconoclast of the most violent type.  Stooping down he seized
the largest stone he could grasp in his one hand, and strode with it
toward the sinister mass of metal.  Within ten feet of it he let drive
with all his strength.  The missile shattered itself to fragments, but
the metal showed not a scar.  The Captain might have had better success
if he had aimed at one of the edges.  However, he had had his say, and
he had said it more eloquently, than any ten thousand reformers who
ever thundered against the idols of the heathen.  He disliked the god.

"I see," said Colton.  "You can't smash it yourself, so you want us to
have a try.  Big Tom, have you any suggestions?"

"A thousand tons of T.N.T. might put a dent in it.  But I doubt it.
That stuff is meteoric iron."

"The deuce it is!  Erasmus, bring me Mr. Blake's small tin box--the
yellow one."

"What do you see?" Big Tom asked.

"A scar on that edge.  It looks as if someone had taken a shot at it
with a high powered rifle."

The guess proved, right.  The splinter of meteoric iron which Swain had
stolen from Big Tom's work room on the day he disappeared, fitted the
scar exactly.

"We are getting hotter," Colton observed.




CHAPTER VIII

THE IDOL BREAKERS

"ALL right, old top," Big Tom reassured the Captain, "what you say
goes.  If you want this thing smashed to smithereens, Little Tom and I
will do our best to please you.  Doubtless you know more about it than
we do.  For myself I think it is rather a pity to destroy such a
magnificent meteor.  It's the biggest one I ever saw, or even read of."

The huge Captain had again registered his disapproval of the enormous
mass of meteoric iron.  There could be no mistaking his meaning.
Furiously he hurled stone after stone at the unyielding surface, with
an expression on his working face of the most diabolical hatred.  His
actions spoke louder than prophetic denunciations and bloodcurdling
curses.

"That's all very well," Colton agreed, "and I'm with you.  This metal
seems to be at the root of the trouble in some way we don't understand.
But how on earth are we to get rid of it?"

"Big Tom's junk," Little Tom announced oracularly.  "You are not the
only wise cuckoo round here who has been hatching theories.  Big Tom
and I have a mutual egg as big as a moa's.  Now, if you will command
Erasmus to unpack all of Big Tom's toys, we will get to work."

While Erasmus gingerly set out the shining apparatus, now somewhat the
worse for tropical heat and constant moisture, Colton questioned the
two Toms as to their plan.  At first he listened attentively, following
every detail of the simple project for destroying the meteor.  But, as
Big Tom began elaborating, he soon became restive and inattentive.
Finally, muttering an excuse, he rose and hurried over to the great
block of shining metal.  It seemed to have a sinister attraction for
him.

The Blakes and Lila watched him curiously.  She too was beginning to
feel strangely restless.  The two men were as yet unaffected.  Little
Tom had never told all that happened in the cave, so the others knew
nothing of Colton's sudden intoxication under the influence of the
black metal.

"What's he up to?" Big Tom whispered.  "You might think it was
something good to eat the way he snuffs around it."

"I'll go and see."  Little Tom rose and sauntered over to join the
doctor.

"Finding anything new and interesting?"

Colton turned on him with a smile that was almost an idiotic snarl.

"Mind your own business," he snapped.  "Go away and leave me alone."

"You needn't get nasty about it."  Little Tom lowered his voice.
"Remember what happened in the caves.  Better come away and let Big Tom
and me attend to this.  It doesn't seem to affect us so much."

"Go to the devil!"

"All right.  Just as you like."

Little Tom went over to the Captain, who had been an interested
spectator of Colton's doings.  Plucking the gray giant by the arm,
Little Tom led him to the block of metal.  Then, behind Colton's back,
he indulged in an expressive pantomime.  The Captain understood.  He
all but grinned.  Taking a step forward he gently tucked the doctor
under his arm and stalked off with him into the forest.  Colton's kicks
and yells availed him nothing.  The Captain tramped steadily ahead.
About a hundred yards away he put down his burden, took a seat on the
one spot that seemed fairly free of ants, and held the doctor close to
his shaggy side in a loving embrace.

Lila was outraged.

"I think you're horrid!" she flashed at Little Tom, and darted off to
solace her chief.

"Let her go," Little Tom grinned.  "She was beginning to get a jag on
herself.  Did you notice her eyes?"

"Couldn't help it.  I'm beginning to feel queer myself."

"Can you stick it out?"

"Don't know.  It makes me drunk."

"Same here.  But we've got to keep our heads."

"All right," Big Tom muttered.  "You go ahead and find the best place
to begin on it.  I'll keep steady if you give me a minute.  Look at
Lila!"

The enraged Lila was pummeling the stolid Captain's arms in a vain
effort to make him release her chief.  The Captain paid no attention.
Suddenly he released his hold on the doctor, and with a quick grab
caught his annoyer.  The next instant both Colton and Lila were nestled
to the giant's hairy side.



BY this time the baleful emanation from the metal was beginning to
affect the phlegmatic porters.  They followed Little Tom around the
meteor, their tongues protruding and their eyes rolling.  This was
better than beer, better even than the frothy palm wine.  Straightening
up in his search, Little Tom waved to the Captain.  The giant got the
point.  He came immediately, bringing with him his two prisoners under
his right arm.

As they saw what was in store for them the blacks retreated.  But they
were now intoxicated.  Things looked pretty serious.  In their excited
condition they cast prudence to the wind and leaped for the rifles.
The Captain halted with an inquiring look.  What was to be done?  If
Little Tom ordered an attack the porters would be killed at one kick
apiece of the Captain's terrible legs.  If he ordered a halt, the
porters might open fire.  Then the chances were that even if the
Captain carried off a few harmless slugs in his enormous muscles, Lila
or the doctor would be fatally injured.  What was he to do?  The blacks
were in an ugly mood.

It was the Captain who solved the puzzle.  Dropping Lila and Colton he
made one of his quick, spiderlike leaps and landed squarely in the
center of the blacks.  In two seconds they were a sprawling knot of
legs and arms, and the Captain was coolly collecting their rifles in
his enormous hand, two under his thumb and each finger.  Offering
Little Tom this bristling nosegay, he glanced round to see what had
become of his prisoners.  Big Tom was wrestling with Colton, while
Lila, like a vicious cat, clawed at Tom's hair.  The Captain was equal
to the emergency.  Having culled Lila, he stretched up to his full
height and gently deposited her on the limb of a tree.  Being a good
fourteen feet above a nice, hard, flat rock she was safely out of
mischief for the moment.  Letting Colton go, the Captain rounded up the
blacks and herded them under the tree.  His next engagement, while Big
Tom snatched a rifle and mounted guard over the porters, was with
Colton.  The doctor appeared to be clean out of his head.  His savage
attack on Little Tom had all the insensate fury of one of the gray
beast men of the ravine.  This time the Captain had to use force.  When
at last Colton was jerked free of Little Tom he was in a daze.  The
Captain had tapped him gently under the chin.

"How are we to keep an eye on all these maniacs while we do our work?"
Little Tom panted, rearranging his tattered shirt.

"Leave it to the Captain.  Fetch a tent rope for the blacks."

They tied the porters into a string by knotting their arms behind their
backs and linking each man to his two neighbors.  Colton they trussed
up hand and foot.  Then they laid him on a bare rock to be in a
strategic position for the ants.  It was the Captain's job to stamp on
any that got too inquisitive.  Giving him the free end of the rope to
hold, they went on with their work.  Lila, raging and in tears, was
safe enough so long as she sat fairly still.  If she tumbled from her
perch, just to show her spite, the Captain would probably catch her
before she hit bedrock.

"I've found the root of all the trouble," Little Tom announced.  "It's
here, just at the base of the metal."

He pointed out the upper segment of a black, circular mass about a yard
in diameter, showing on the south face of the meteor.

"There is evidently a considerable lump of that infernal black metal
imbedded in the meteoric iron.  This is only the top of the slug.  The
rest must slope downward and back into the main mass.  See the granular
structure of this black stuff?"

"Yes, it is exactly like that vile mushroom in the cave.  This meteor
must be enormous.  What we see is only its tip sticking up out of the
ground," Big Tom hazarded.

"How do you make that out?"

"With a chunk of the black metal that size in it, the whole thing must
weigh millions of tons.  If this were all there is to it, the whole
meteor would have sunk out of sight, clear through the solid rock by
its own sheer weight, thousands of years ago.  No, there must be a
tremendous mass of iron under this to buoy up all those millions of
tons of the black element.  It is just like an iceberg, or a mountain
range.  The rest of this meteor is probably hard rock mixed with iron.
It displaces an enormous mass of rocks, denser in the main than itself.
Consequently it floats, just as a high mountain floats in the crust of
the earth or like an iceberg in the ocean."

They set to work, laying out the necessary apparatus for an attack on
this strange enemy of mankind.

"What shall we do if our theory doesn't work?" Big Tom laughed.

"Get out of here before we all go crazy.  How does it affect you?"

"I want to shout, and dance, and sing, and brag like a drunken fool.
If I know anything about Zeus and the other rips of Olympus this must
be how they felt all the time the Trojan war was going on--drunk,
sadistic, swinish and bloodthirsty.  The best description is that I
feel exactly like a Greek god.  The filthy stuff has its attractions, I
admit.  If I hadn't seen the Captain and the fight in the ravine I
should have settled down here to end my days.  Now I know what it feels
like to be a drug fiend.  I don't blame Swain a bit.  In fact I think
he did the only thing a man of his antecedents could do under the
circumstances."

"It doesn't seem to affect the Captain."

"Why should it?  He's soaked to the eyes.  His system is full of the
stuff.  Whatever change it is that this emanation induces in the cells
of the body has gone to its limit in his case.  You can't make a
whiskey soak drunk on a couple of quarts.  The Captain is in a similar
fix.  To get a kick out of this he would have to swallow the whole of
that big black pill.  Have you got the generator ready?"

"In a moment.  I can't make my fingers take hold of things.  This is a
beastly sensation.  What you said about feeling like a Greek god hits
it exactly.  'Men like gods'--bah!  Why not 'men like dogs'?  See if
you can make this infernal connection.  The binding screw keeps
slipping back in my fingers.  If it wasn't for the fun of blowing this
thing to hell I'd sit here and soak till I rotted into a hairy ape or a
riotous Greek god."

Big Tom bungled with the easy connection.  To save his soul he could
not make it.  The childishly easy trick had become as impossible to his
brain and fingers as is a knot to a baboon.

"See if you can do it."



LITTLE TOM gritted his teeth and, like a drunkard threading a needle,
blundered through the ridiculously simple operation.

"It's a good thing the only metals in any of this junk are platinum,
copper, tungsten and tin," Little Tom remarked.  "A scrap of iron would
have crabbed the whole show."

Big Tom groaned.  "I forgot to take my watch out of my pocket.  It's
ruined."

"Serves you right, fathead.  After carefully taking off your shoes on
account of ten cents' worth of nails, you go and leave a fifty-dollar
watch, full of steel cogs and screws, in your pants' pocket."

"Well, you ruined yours in the cave, didn't you?"

"That was the first time.  Colton's petered out later, too.  Now we
shall have to depend on Lila's wrist watch."

They fussed about, taking four times as long as they would ordinarily
to do the simplest tasks.  The emanation from the shiny black metal
before them not only clouded their minds but changed their time span
and slowed down all their movements.

"This stuff is worse than hasheesh," Little Tom growled.  "Is the
electrical machine ready for business?  All right then, connect up the
coil with the rest of it and fix the tube so that the rays strike right
in the center of the black.  You do it; my fingers have struck."

Big Tom, with much puffing and muffled swearing, finally got everything
ready for sending the necessary voltage through the circuit.  The X-ray
tube was adjusted so that its pencil would impinge directly on the
densest spot of the black mass.

"We've got to run this rickety coffee mill by hand," he grumbled,
indicating the electrical machine.

"Of course.  It doesn't look much like a Tibetan prayer wheel, does it?
You take first turn, since you found out how it works."

Laboriously as an organ grinder turning out yard after yard of the
_Star Spangled Banner_, Big Tom began to turn out electricity.  The
target of the X-ray tube turned dull red, became shiny, and slowly
crept to white heat.

"It's your turn," Big Tom announced.  "Keep it shining like a beautiful
star.  My arm's paralyzed."

Little Tom took his turn to the tune of _It Ain't Goin' to Rain No
More_.  Determined to best his father's record he ground away for
forty-five minutes.

"There," he panted, relinquishing the handle, "see if you can beat that
run."

"I don't want to.  You can have the record.  I'm not jealous.  Keep
your eye on the black stuff and see if anything happens."

Night had overtaken them unawares.  Only the dazzling glow of the metal
in the X-ray tube, stabbing the darkness and lighting up their faces
with a bluish pallor, broke the ebony wall of the night.  From the
Captain's tree came a steady chorus of snores.  Colton and the porters
had dropped off.  An occasional bass rumble, like the beginning of a
thunderstorm, betrayed the nodding Captain.

"Better wake up the Captain," Big Tom advised, "and tell him to pull
Lila off her roost.  She'll break her beautiful coco if she pitches
head first on that rock."

The Captain started to attention with a guilty jerk of all his muscles.
Lighting a match Little Tom looked for Lila.  He saw only her eyes,
like a big cat's, gleaming down on him.  Lila had not dozed; she was
too angry.

"Want to come down by the fire, pussy?" he mocked.

"Yes."  She knew when humble pie was her proper portion.  Later she
would get even.

Little Tom struck another match and pointed to the indignant Lila.  The
Captain reached up, took hold of her as gingerly as if she were twenty
dollars' worth of fresh eggs, and deposited her without a single
breakage on the rock.

"Feeling less woozy?" Little Tom inquired sympathetically.

"No," she answered shortly.  "What do you want me to do?"

"First you had better keep as far away from us as you think safe.  As
that black metal gets really hot it may send out a stronger emanation.
I begin to feel a headier effect already.  Then, if you feel like it,
you might build a good fire to cheer us up."

"And make some coffee?"

"You're a saint!"

"You are sure I'm not a cat?"

"Lila! you know--"

"Your turn now," Big Tom called.  "I'll guard Lila with my unbroken
arm.  Whew!  Why didn't we bring some oil for that machine?"

Big Tom, being relieved, devoted himself to Lila.  Together they
collected firewood and searched for the coffeepot.  She proved herself
as adaptable as ever.  No sooner was she off with the old than she was
ready to take on a new.  Like an expert Japanese juggler she kept the
three men in the air and smiling.  Sometimes it was only a stage smile,
as was Little Tom's sour grin just now.  Nevertheless it was a smile.
With a good fire going, and the coffeepot steaming, they began to feel
better.  Big Tom stole over to inspect the Captain.  He found the gray
giant standing up with his back against the tree, fast asleep.  The
cord which bound the blacks was tightly wound round his arm.  Big Tom
gave him a gentle dig in the ribs.  The huge fellow was awake and on
his guard instantly.

"Lie down and take it easy," Big Tom suggested, unwinding the rope from
the giant's arm.  He secured the rope around the tree.  The Captain,
with a wistful glance at the fire, sank down, rested his back against
the tree, and dropped fast asleep.  The last two days had been
strenuous even for his tremendous energy.  He had done the work of a
regiment, and now he slept like an army.

"Your turn," Little Tom called, just as Lila began serving the coffee.

"Try the other arm while I drink this.  I won't be ten minutes."

"I'll guarantee you won't.  Doesn't this stuff from the metal begin to
get you?  My head is spinning like a top."

Big Tom hurried over, leaving his coffee untasted.

"All right, I'll take a spell.  Hullo!  The stuff is beginning to get
red hot at last.  Ten minutes now will decide whether our theory is
brilliant or just beautiful bosh.  Go and have some hot coffee to take
the taste of this stuff out of your mouth."

"Do you begin to taste something too?"

"A little bit.  What do you get?"

"A metallic taste, like what mercury vapor might be if you could
swallow it."

"Mine is more like iron.  So it isn't imagination then, if we both get
it.  I'll grind like a virtuoso and see if we can't liven up the tempo
a bit.  Four hours more of this is about all I can stand.  Go and get
your coffee."



ALL through the night they took the grueling task in relays, in a
stubborn endeavor to bring the tiny spot of the black new element to a
white heat.  Their simple and ingenious theory predicted that such must
be the effect of the X-rays impinging on the extraordinarily dense
black metal, but so far theory had failed to materialize into fact.
The white spot was but the first link in their predicted chain of
destruction.  But obviously without a first link there could be no
chain.

They began to despair.  Strong coffee kept them awake, but the
incessant labor used up their energy faster than the mild stimulant
could replenish it.  And to add to their misery they began having a
succession of terrible waking nightmares.  The emanation from the new
element was being loosed in prodigious quantities under the steady
action of the X-rays, and the effect on the men increased a hundredfold.

Long afterward Big Tom and Little Tom compared their waking dreams.
There was a curious similarity in these nightmares.  The emanation
evidently was a specific poison with a very definite action on human
tissue, particularly on the cells composing the glands and the central
nervous system.  Both men had inordinate visions of killing.  These
always took the form of vast butcheries of millions of men helpless
before their irresistible fury.  In these disordered imaginings they
never saw modern weapons--gas, bombs, shells, or firearms of any
description.  The most they visualized was a club of deadly
effectiveness.  Again, when they were not envisaging boundless plains
of slaughter, both men pictured deserts or wilderness over which roamed
vast numbers of nomadic apes or shaggy, primitive men.

In these visions the earth lived and spoke a familiar language.  Every
rock had its distinct personality, and every withered blade of grass
its sibilant message of fear.  The goings and comings of the multitudes
were always without purpose, aimless wanderings of half brutes from
nothing into nothing.  The stars in the skies of their vision were
clearer, bluer than men see them, and they moved across the heavens
visibly.

Of all their strange sensations the most distressing was an objectless
fear.  This came and went like a black cloud.  It fastened on nothing;
they could not fix its origin; it simply descended on them and brooded
like a huge, evil bat over their oppressed minds.  The like is known in
certain diseases, and it is one of the worst persecutions a human being
can suffer.  The fear of their visions, however, was different from the
other.  While they dreaded its approach they looked for its coming with
a feeling of intense spiritual hunger.

Fear was necessary to their existence.  Without fear in their blood
they could not breathe.  They longed for the fear as a drunkard longs
for his bottle or a derelict for his drug.  This, they knew later, was
the fatal attraction which drew the worshipers to their idol, and the
poison which had made Swain the slave of his degrading passion.

Lila felt it and became restless.  Muttering that she needed fresh air,
she left the fire and wandered off into the forest.  Too dazed to
realize her danger the men let her go.  Toward morning, while the spot
on the black metal still glowed an angry red, the Captain awoke.  The
baleful influence had tinged his dreams, too.  For the first time in
years he sensed the once familiar call of his vice.  The black devil
which had brought him down to the beasts was breaking from its iron
sleep, to rise refreshed and with the strength of ten thousand.

Towering over them the great gray beast-man filled his lungs with the
tainted air, now distinctly metallic in its flavor.  His nostrils
distended, and the lips curled back from his teeth in a vicious snarl.
Big Tom, resting at the time, saw their danger.  If the Captain went
berserk now he might smash them and their apparatus before they smashed
the evil god.  How was he to distract the giant's attention?  What
could he do to recall the fast vanishing intelligence?  Like an
inspiration from heaven he remembered the Captain's dazed wonder when
he had seen Lila light a match.  Big Tom opened his box, struck one,
and held it up before the giant's eyes.

Again that hopeless battle dawned in the great creature's eyes.  Memory
struggled with oblivion, and was extinguished.  The match went out.
Big Tom lit another.  This time the struggle to remember was fiercer.
The man's sick soul all but thrust up an arm from the blackness which
smothered it.  What was he trying to remember?  Or was he conscious of
memory at all?  Again the flood of darkness washed over him, drowning
him in ages of forgetfulness.

Between him and the most ancient fire-builder yawned a chasm of
millions of years.  Yet a spark no bigger than an atom had glowed for
an instant on the farther precipice, piercing his night.  He had not
remembered what he was.  He only saw back to the three pyres in the
ravine, and his purpose in leading these killers of pain to his
accursed god.  With a sudden gesture of despair he flung up his arm and
reeled off, crashing through the thorn bushes and blundering like a
drunkard into trees and rocks.  He had remembered that the fear must be
destroyed.

Dawn broke, cold and cheerless.  A log smouldered in the gray ashes,
making the lethal fog more hideous.  Presently through the motionless
miasma Lila reappeared.  She crept to the dead ashes and huddled over
the smoking log.

"Your turn," Little Tom said mechanically.  They were now operating in
five minute spells.

"All right," Big Tom assented.  "I'll do a double shift while you build
up the fire.  Lila's back."

Little Tom rose to make way for his father.  Then it happened.

"Look out!" he yelled.

A blinding flash of lightning burst from the black metal and struck the
tree under which Colton, still bound hand and foot, lay beside the
helpless porters.



AS IF it had been cleft by a gigantic axe the massive trunk of the tree
was split in two.  Already it was in flames as the halves slowly
separated and came crashing to the earth.  The blinding white fire
volleyed in deafening bursts of sheer flame from the disintegrating
rock, bewildering the frantic men who leaped to rescue their companions
from the withering bolts.  None so far had been struck; the crackling
trunk took the full salvo of the whirling fire.  At last Little Tom cut
the cord binding the porters and cuffed them to safety.  Looking round
he saw Lila dragging the helpless Colton into the forest.

Through the bushes the huge Captain tore his way, regardless of the
thorns lacerating his flesh at every step.  Seeing the dazzling inferno
he flung up his arm to shield his eyes and looked about for his
friends.  Big Tom lay stunned directly under the main shaft of flame
issuing like water from a hydraulic gun under high pressure.  The hard
rod of fire might flash downward at any instant and incinerate his body
in a flash.  The Captain marked him.  Big Tom had stumbled and fallen
in a daze as he sprang for the tree to rescue Colton.  The Captain was
on him in two strides.  Reaching his enormous arm under the withering
bolt he dragged out his friend.

The whole mass of metal was now a dull red.  Recovering his senses Big
Tom fell upon the camp supplies and began dragging them to safety.  The
bedding was already beginning to smoke.  The terrified blacks were
useless.  Moaning like cattle in a stable fire they stood and let
Little Tom rain blows on their paralyzed bodies.  They were unable to
move; he could not round them up to salvage the supplies.  But they
were not needed; the Captain's feet did in ten seconds the work it
would have taken their clumsy hands half an hour to perform.  The
outfit was saved.  All of the scientific apparatus had been destroyed
at the first blast.

Lila had now freed Colton.  Making himself heard with difficulty above
the roaring din he shouted to be told what had happened.

"God knows," Big Tom confessed.  "We started more than we bargained
for.  Get out of here immediately!  Don't you see the color of that
metal?"

The whole block, not only the core of the black new element, was now a
coruscating dazzle of purplish white flame, gleaming and scintillating
like a million stars.  Still the lightning flashed from the new element
as it broke down into less dense metals, and still the intolerable heat
increased.

With the Captain's aid they got the camp outfit into the forest and
rounded up the blacks.  In ten minutes they were fleeing before a fire
which raced after them, licking up the trees like dry grass.  The whole
forest behind them burst into crackling flame; the wind rose; the
crackling din became a steady roar as the winds from the plain rushed
yelling into the furnace.  Trees in their path wilted; their clothing
scorched.  At any instant the whole forest about them might burst into
flame.

Picking up Lila who was about to collapse, the Captain darted up a well
worn side trail through a sparser part of the forest.  Trusting his
judgment the others followed.  With a dull explosion the forest they
had just quitted became a seething inferno of red flames.  Too late
they realized their mistake.  In their excitement they had followed the
trail into the forest; they should have run for the open plain.

A sudden riot behind them told that they were on the right track.  The
Captain had taken the one chance to safety.  Like a spotted streak a
panther flashed past them; a rabble of horned monsters charged and
knocked them aside; a vast multitude of flying creatures tore down the
air before the racing flames, and an earth-shaking tread forewarned
them of the oncoming charge of the elephants.  Even the Captain stood
aside as the bewildered beasts thundered by.

There came a lull in the living panic.  Instantly they merged with the
stream of forest goats and creeping things, and fought their way
forward through the suffocating brown smoke.  A shrill trumpeting and a
prodigious splashing rose as the elephants plunged into the invisible
swamp.  All about them the rending of thorn brush and the ripping of
scrub added to the din as the terrified beasts fought their way to
safety.  The Captain halted in his tracks, and as the others came up,
sent them shooting down a steep declivity to the left.  The last six
feet of their descent was a sheer drop into shallow water.

When the last of the blacks had splashed with his load the Captain
followed and leaped clear of the wallowing men beneath him.  They could
not see him through the acrid smoke, but heard him swashing out to the
middle of the swampy lake.  Luckily the decaying vegetation at the edge
did not extend far.  The bottom of the shallow pond was solid-rock
farther out, or they must have been mired and drowned.

Having rounded up the porters and helped them to recover their loads,
the whites drove them after the Captain.  Their guide had proved that
he knew what he was about.



FOR four hours they stood in water up to their shoulders, deafened by
the terror of plunging beasts forced out of their depth, and the
incessant roar of the furnace all about them.  The smoke all but
strangled them, and they had to stand like piles and choke.  Through
the dim cloud an occasional sullen ember showed where a clump of
resinous trees burned with a fiercer flame.  All through that terrible
morning the Captain stood like a rock, except when he coughed.  He was
their comfort.

About eleven o'clock, just when the fire was at its height, a blinding
flash of lightning turned the brown pall to transparent red for an
instant.  It seemed directly overhead.  The first terrific volley of
thunder burst upon them, and for an hour they trembled in water that
shook like a jelly beneath the incessant concussions.  Then, without a
warning drop, the full deluge of the heavens fell upon them.  Before
they had struggled to the shore the torrents from the sky had sensibly
raised the water level.  But they had also quenched the conflagration
to a black, hissing wilderness of charred trunks.

The deluge smote them like a doubled fist.  Helpless and without
shelter they dragged themselves onto a steaming rock and waited for the
downpour to cease.  All through that unendurable storm the deafening
volleys of the thunder never let up for two consecutive seconds.

At last the center of disturbance seemed to move slowly over them to
the north.  With one last smash of its clenched fist the rain stopped
as suddenly as it had begun.  Dazed and thankful they got to their
feet.  This time they would make no mistake.  As fast as they could
stagger they made their way through the hissing wilderness to the open
plain.  The Captain offered no objection.  That way lay his pilgrimage
of destruction.

Nearing the scene of their labors they stopped in astonishment.  The
entire block of metal had vanished.  In its place was a gaping crater
spouting white fire in a thin shaft from its center like a geyser.
Cautiously they approached the edge and peered over.  A broad cone
gaped for a hundred yards sheer down.  At its funnel end five flaming
galleries branched off into the stone and metal core of the huge
meteor.  If Big Tom's theory was right that core must extend for miles
under the plain and far behind them into the forest.  The outcrop of
metal had been destroyed; the destructive fire was boring its swift
course through the metallic veins and roots of the stone berg.

"The experiment was a success," Little Tom remarked with a nervous
chuckle.

"Too much of a success," Colton commented testily.

"Oh, I don't know.  The Captain seems to enjoy the fireworks."

The huge avenger, of his own wrong and of countless others was standing
with his sound arm raised in a gesture of triumph.  At last he had
overcome the beast.  As a final offering to the dying god he leaped
back, seized a massive stone, and hurled it with all his strength down
into the hissing white fire.

"Quite dramatic, old boy," Big Tom nodded with approval.  "I know
exactly how you feel.  Last night I felt that way myself.  It's just
like signing the pledge; isn't it?"

"Signing now won't do him any good," Colton remarked.  "He was ruined
for life years ago.  I wish I understood the workings of his brain."

"So does he, probably.  I maintain he just acts--like all of us."

"Absurd!" Lila objected.  "Everything he does is in line with some
definitely thought-out plan."

"A three-day-old baby doesn't think," Colton replied.  "Yet it knows
where to find its dinner."

"The Captain is no baby.  Look at his muscles."

"We are all babies in the way I mean--just more or less complicated
machines that do certain things when we are wound up."

"Who winds us up?"  She was going to drive him into a corner.

"I'll tell you some other time.  Just now I'm going to dry out my
clothes."

They sat about in the heat till the white fire steamed them dry.

"That's the first useful thing that blessed idol has done since it fell
from the Pleiades," Big Tom declared with real gratitude.  "I'm almost
persuaded to become a worshiper of the new element."

"How did you start all this going?" Colton asked, while he rummaged
about for something to eat.

"I'll tell you if the thunder will let me.  What about it, old boy?
What do you see over there?"

The Captain was standing with his back toward them, following with his
eyes the black progress of the storm as it rolled and rumbled over the
sky toward the north.

"Is it going home?" Little Tom asked curiously.  "He seems to have
something on his mind besides a mere love of nature at her damnedest.
What is it, old fellow?"

They got up and joined him, trying to follow the direction of the
thought which he was powerless to express.  His whole face was a study
in anxiety.  The progress of the retreating storm held him with a
strange fascination, as if his life depended on the direction it should
take.  For the first time they heard him make a vocal sound.  Moaning
softly to himself he shaded his eyes and stared to the east of north,
as if looking there for the fulfillment of his hope.  For the moment he
had forgotten them.  He was living a fragment of a vanished life that
came and went before his eyes like the mirage of a dream.

"You said he could never speak," Lila whispered to Colton.

"That is not speech.  Any animal could make those sounds.  Still, it
shows that the brain still has some sort of control of the vocal cords.
He is laboring under some intense excitement.  Probably the ordinary
control of his central nervous system is in abeyance.  For the moment
he has lapsed into the shadow of something that he will never be again."

"A man?"

"He is a man.  At least he is human."

"But he is not a man in the sense that you or the Blakes are men."

"Of course not.  He is what the first man may have been like when he
learned to walk erect.  The Captain is a throwback to the most
primitive type of men."

"What threw him back?" she questioned.

"I did not mean it in that sense exactly.  It is too early for any such
theory."

"Do you know what I think?  He was once just an ordinary man like you.
Then he fell."

"On what?"

"That's what I thought you were trying to find out."

"Perhaps I am.  When I learn something definite I'll let you share it,
however unorthodox it may be."

"Thanks," she said softly.  "Ah! he looks happier."

The Captain had stopped moaning to himself.  Like a general gazing down
on his armies sweeping the field, he gazed out over the forest to the
northeast where the flashing storm wheeled and rumbled on in a fiery
whirlwind.  The destroyer had taken the road he wished it to take.
That it should do so was inevitable for purely physical reasons, but
the Captain knew nothing of modern physics, or of ancient.  His only
knowledge was instinct and the shadowy vision of a forgotten existence.

"Shall we go on?" Big Tom suggested.

"I'm ready," Colton assented.  "But which way?  The Captain seems to
have resigned his job as guide."

Big Tom went over to the Captain and punched him in the ribs.

"How about it, old boy?  Do you want to go on, or are we going to camp
here and watch this infernal fire?"

He pointed to the fire and then swept his arm round the horizon.  The
Captain took one farewell look at his rotting idol and started across
the plain, heading northeast.

"So we follow the storm, do we?" Colton muttered.  "I only hope it gets
whereever it is going before we do."



AS THEY followed along the edge of the burned forest, always trending
to the northeast, Colton quizzed the Blakes on their too successful
experiment.

"We were not altogether wrong in our prediction," Big Tom maintained
stoutly.  "The scale was bigger than we anticipated.  That's all."  He
glanced back over his shoulder at the white haze above the crater.
"That flame is really a sort of lightning.  It is more like an aurora
borealis than anything else in nature--just a dense stream of
electrons."

"And where do they come from?" Colton asked suspiciously.  He suspected
Big Tom of stringing him.

"Where shouldn't they come from?  That meteor is veined and streaked
with iron, to say nothing of the pockets here and there of the new
element.  We started the disintegration of the first pocket, and what
we started is simply burning itself out on every scrap of metal in the
meteor.  It is like setting off a stick of dynamite.  The explosion of
the fulminate cap starts a train of explosions through the dynamite,
and that's what does the damage.  That black lump was the cap.  We
touched it off--a little too successfully, it seems.  Now the whole of
the metal is exploding."

"It all started in the cave," Little Tom answered, "that night you and
I found the big mushroom.  You remember how the nails dropped out of
our shoes?  Well, that gave me the first idea.  Then you proved me
wrong by showing with your compass that the nails hadn't been pulled
out by a strong magnetic field.  At the time I said nothing because one
bad egg at a time is enough.  But I had thought of the true explanation
which Big Tom put into practice last night."

"You mean you did," his father corrected.  "None of this modest violet
stuff.  We proved by its spectrum that the black metal was a new
element.  And we found tons of proof that it was at least several
thousand times denser than any element known.  The rest was easy.

"You know how sticks on water bob up and down in the waves from a stone
thrown in, or from a passing boat.  If you make the waves big enough,
and frequent enough, the sticks get considerably excited, and may even
jump half out of the water.  Their vibrations are forced.  We planned
to speed up, to force, if you like, the natural rate of vibration of
the atoms in that extraordinarily dense metal.  We hoped even to be
able to make the nuclei of those atoms dance like the devil by sending
short enough waves into their happy gathering.  Well, we did it.  The
X-ray waves were short enough to start the atoms of that dense element
and their hard little cores jumping about to beat the band.

"Presently, like a boy working himself up in a swing, some of the
nuclei got a real sweep to their oscillations, and burst clean out of
their shells--the rings of electrons spinning about them like stars
round a sun or bees round a hive.  That started the fun.  One excited
nucleus knocked out another, the pair then knocked out two more; all
four knocked out four more.  At that rate it wasn't long before several
billion billions of them were fighting like mad.  Just about that time
Little Tom let out his historic yell, and we all hunted the timber."

"We're going to hunt it again in a second," Colton remarked sourly.
"Did you feel anything?"

The blacks did.  Shaking with terror they threw down their loads, flung
themselves kicking on the ground, and started bellowing like boobies.
There was a sharp, short earthquake, and once more peace.  The Captain
jerked the porters to their feet, helped them with their loads, and
gently sped them on their way with his caressing foot.

"That's nothing," Big Tom blustered, trying not to look scared.

"Then why are you so white around the eyes?" Colton retorted.

"I was up all last night."

"You say that meteor has its roots all under this plain?" the doctor
asked ominously.

"Probably.  But don't let that worry you.  It is at least half a mile
deep."

"Did you ever walk across a battlefield that you knew was mined?"

"No, and I don't want to."

"According to your theory we are doing just that very thing now."

"I prefer to think," Big Tom answered judiciously, "of a volcano."

"Then stop thinking!" the doctor snapped.  "You have thought altogether
too much already."

"You're just plain jealous.  Our experiment was a howling success.  All
the iron in the meteor is disintegrating beautifully into helium and
possibly some other gases.  What more could you want?" Big Tom asked.

"Nothing more.  A little less gas would be more to the point."

"If you mean that personally," Big Tom began, but very tactfully Lila
pacified him.

"The doctor was ill last night, and you worked too hard.  Better not
argue till you can keep your tempers."

Big Tom subsided, muttering.  They had done a good job, any way, he
growled.  If those nuclei of the new element had not been so
tremendously massive they never could have given them the proper swing
to start the disintegration of the whole mass.  They were just like so
many hair triggers imbedded in a too delicate balance of negative
electricity--swarms of electrons not steady enough to do their job of
keeping the whole atom at all times in stable equilibrium.

It was something like radium, he declared.  Only in radium the breaking
down goes on spontaneously.  They had been able to disintegrate the new
element artificially because of its extraordinary density--thousands of
times denser than the densest element known.  Its atomic weight must be
tens of thousands of times that of the next heaviest element at the end
of the known scale.

"And what do you propose to name this breeder of insanity?" Colton
asked, meaning by his uncomplimentary term the black metal whose
emanations had turned his head.

"Asterium."

"Sounds like a new quack medicine.  Why?"

"Because obviously, it came originally from a star.  There is nothing
whatsoever--"

Big Tom's lecture was rudely interrupted by the stupendous success of
his own experiment.  Like the explosion of a giant mine the ground
beneath their feet heaved up its back.  Then it burst not a hundred
yards away.




CHAPTER IX

THE SHINING CITY

"THERE'S your gas," the doctor snorted as he turned a somersault fully
expecting the words to be his last.

"It's helium, anyway," Big Tom exploded as the breath was bumped out of
him on landing.  "Noninflammable.  I told you so."

"Get us out of here, you idiot!" Colton snapped.  He seemed to blame
Big Tom for the whole rumpus.

"All right, go ahead.  Don't fall into the crater.  Look out--duck!"

What had gone up was following the law of universal gravitation and
coming down.  Great chunks of it skipped over the landscape like nimble
sandhoppers.  Being near the crater the party was comparatively safe.
Only the smaller trash rained down in their vicinity, and only the
Captain and two of the blacks were tickled up by the stinging pebbles.

They were too surfeited by their morning's experiences to be terrified
at the gorgeous spectacle now being staged for their benefit.
According to Big Tom's theory, the metal under them had disintegrated
into vast quantities of helium gas as the pulse of disintegration raced
through the metallic veins of the buried meteor and, finding no
adequate outlet underground, was bursting a way through the rocky floor
of the plain.  At first there was just a hissing rush of the gas from
the crater, like the escape of compressed air from a tank.  Soon a
faint light mingled with the gas, streaming upward in a fine spray.
This, by Big Tom's theory, was an aurora from the shattered elements, a
dense stream of free electrons.

As if to verify his theory the pure negative electricity, loosed in
vast volumes on the moisture-laden air, began to raise the very devil.
A lightning storm sprang into being before their very eyes.  As the
upward rushing ray broadened and took on the changing blues and greens
of the metals which it volatilized in its escape from the meteor, a
bounding cloud played upon its summit like a crystal ball in a fountain
jet, and from this whirling vapor the evil lightnings darted their
forked tongues like serpents.  The storm was local, for the time being.
But the huge, bellying black clouds that seemed to drop from all
quarters of the heavens warned them the deluge was coming.

Still the stream of fierce light hissed upward with increasing speed as
the clouds gathered, and the temperature rose to an oppressive pitch.
In ten minutes it was as dark as if the sun had gone out.  Only the
faint, flickering glow from the geyser of electrons lit the mounded
crater with a dead light.  They were as safe where they stood as
anywhere, yet the urge to break the intolerable spell and escape from
that dying world was irresistible.  Silent, and strangely small in the
visible darkness, they followed the Captain away from the hissing
fountain of light.

The landscape was the landscape of a dream.  None of them remembered
such a dream, yet each felt a curious sensation as if of trying to
revision something which had been forgotten before birth.  Its very
strangeness was familiar.  Yet they could not place the low hanging
clouds, the illimitable plain and the shimmering darkness in any
memory.  It was a page out of the world's forgotten history.

If the Captain was impressed he gave no sign.  Steadily forging ahead
he bore always a little to the east of north, as if seeking a direct
and well-known road to some desired goal.  He had traveled that way
before.  Not all the thunderclouds that ever threatened an expectant
earth could deter him now from following the road to his fate.  Were
not the breakers of idols with him?  And should they be allowed to
depart from this country without seeing the great stone, the origin of
all evil, the iron star?

He knew the road well, for the idle curiosity of youth had led him
along it not once, but many times.  Not all of his degenerate sect knew
where the star had fallen.  The most were content with the fragment in
the forest.  But the great star, the devil which had fallen in the
desert when men lived in caves and still held the less ferocious beasts
in esteem as equals, was a shrine known only to the few.  He was one of
the few.

And now, if he thought at all, he hoped that the killers of pain and
the blasters of idols would still have a bolt in their armory powerful
enough to smite the fallen star and reduce its iron and black metal to
less than air.  That their apparatus had been destroyed in the very act
of destruction would not have shaken his faith in their powers, even if
he could have understood the loss and what it implied.  He was in that
happy state of believing the impossible of his beloved.  These men were
the tried workers of miracles, and his friends.  Therefore he led them
with simple faith to look upon the fallen Lucifer.

It was lucky for the Captain that nature took a hand, otherwise his
faith might have gone the way of most baseless beliefs.  The men had
started the destruction.  They were powerless to prevent nature from
finishing it.  It was like throwing a stone; once hurled, the stone
must go its own way.  The man who throws a stone cannot call it back.
Their experiment had let loose a devil that must go its natural way and
do its inevitable work independently of them or of any living thing.
But the Captain could not know this.  Consequently his friends got
credit for more than they deserved.  He had exalted them to the role of
omnipotent destroyers.

In other words he confused the bomb with the idiot who sets a match to
its fuse.  It was a generous mistake, and a loyal one.  Nevertheless it
was a blunder.  Only natural law saved the men's faces and made them,
in the eyes of their worshiper, supernatural.  They were not the first
in history to profit by a like stupidity.

"Who said it wasn't going to rain any more?" Little Tom inquired in an
aggrieved tone.  "Here it comes again."

It came, filling the gullies and flattening the human mites crawling
over the plain.  The drumming thunder of the deluge, shooting straight
down in the windless air for league after league over the plain,
drowned the rumbling of the thunder overhead.  At its worst they felt
the ground jar under them, but heard no report.  A flash on the low
clouds far to the west marked another outburst of the exploding metal.

A second shock, more violent and more prolonged than the first,
followed by a terrific concussion and a blinding glare, drew their
startled eyes to the forest on the east.  The stark brilliance of that
unearthly light pierced even the iron curtains of the rain.  They saw
trees and rocks hurtling skyward like a shovelful of offal tossed into
a garbage wagon.  The sweepings fell, but so far away that the crash of
falling rock and splintering timbers died before it reached them.

That was the beginning.  One after another at first, like the opening
guns of a desultory bombardment, craters burst in the forest and on the
plain, and far in the forest of the iron face beyond the plain.  Then
half a dozen exploded together.  Thereafter the din became continuous.
It seemed impossible that the heavens could have dammed back so much
water since the world began.  At each new volley from the exploding
metals the downpour quickened.  The human beings gave up trying to walk
and huddled together, black and white, back to back with bowed heads.
As volley after volley rocked the plain, and pillar after pillar of
streaming light burst from the shattered rocks and reeling forests,
they became insensible to sights or sound, and slept.  It was the dead
sleep of utter exhaustion.  Even the Captain tented his arm over his
head and let the rain stun him into insensibility.



WHEN they awoke the cold stars were shining over a dreary expanse of
black water broken by frequent islands.  They were on one of the
islands, a ridge between two furrows of the plain.  All about them they
heard the dry rocks and parched soil sucking in the moisture, and over
this steady, creeping noise, the lapping of the floods being sluiced
off in the furrows.  Dotted over the plain faint patches of white
phosphorescence showed where the expiring craters still glowed.

They got to their feet and stamped to start the blood circulating, and
miserably crawled along their ridge looking for a drier.  Their
drenched clothes clung to their bodies, impeding progress and making
motion a misery.  They stopped and sat down.

"Oh, for a fire," Lila sighed.

"Sorry you came?" The doctor laughed.

"No!  That was a glorious storm."

"Carpet slippers, a bathrobe, and a pipe before a blazing-log fire for
mine," Big Tom muttered.  "Lila, the next time you want to view a
storm, please close the door behind you as you go out.  I'm getting too
old to enjoy a draught."

"I will," she laughed.  "And I'll take an umbrella."

"Can't one of you brilliant physicists make a fire to dry our clothes?"
Colton scoffed.

"A fire?" Little Tom retorted.  "What do you want?  Haven't you had
fires enough for one day?"

"Not a bad idea," Big Tom took him up.  "We can't sit still.  See if we
can make our way over to that electrical geyser to the right.  It can't
be more than half a mile away."

"Ill make it," Colton asserted through his clenched teeth, "if I have
to swim.  We can't get any wetter than we are."

"And I'll make you all some coffee when we get there," Lila promised.
"That is, if the porters can lug my tin kitchen box there."

"They'll get it there," Colton growled.  "Get up!  You lazy beggars!
What are you afraid of?  This water isn't more than five feet deep if
you keep in line with the next ridge.  Into it!  Put some speed into
them, Erasmus."

Seeing what was forward, the Captain shouldered the sodden tents and
the useless bedding and helped the reluctant blacks to make up their
minds.  An hour later they were gathered round the cheerful rim of the
expiring electrical geyser.

For a distance of about ten feet from the lip the rocks were still a
dull red.  The stunning heat was better than a camp fire, better even
than a whole burning forest.  Their clothes were dry in no time, and
the generous coffee cheered their vitals like a draught of new life.

For the first time in more than twenty-four hours they enjoyed a full
meal.  To celebrate the occasion they broached the emergency rations
and had a real feed.  Then, fed and comforted, they rolled over to
sleep as they were.  The last thing Colton heard was Little Tom's
remark that the physicists had not fallen down on the job.  They had
been asked in midocean to build a fire, and behold, here was the fire.

By morning the plain was easily traversible.  The water had disappeared
except for the lowest furrows, where it still shone in long spears of
light in the dazzling sun.  Only to the far northeast was there any
hint of yesterday's storm.  In that region of the sky they saw a fury
of forked lightnings darting incessantly in and out of the milky white
horizon.  Overhead the sky was as clear as glass, and bluer than the
sea.  The storm had passed on to its final assault.

The Captain refused breakfast for there was nothing in the rations that
he regarded as food.  The gods might eat strange yellow dust mixed with
water and boiled, or salty carrion, but he was a clean eater.
Contenting himself with a generous drink of water from a clean puddle,
he stood by while they ate, watching the war in the far northeast.
What subtle fascination did that distant play of the lightnings have
for him?  For almost an hour he stood motionless, his eyes fixed on the
distant war between earth and sky.  The battlefield was so far away
that no echo of the thunders reached them.

When they left the crater only the inner wall and a yard or two of the
surrounding rock still glowed.  The interior was a yellowish red,
except at the root of the cone, where it still shone dazzling white.
So far as they could judge the streaming jet of electrons from the
disintegrating metal had subsided.  The fire in that spot had burned
itself out.

"All this meteor underneath us, I imagine," Big Tom remarked, "is
pitted and pocketed with small deposits of asterium--our new element.
It is the explosion of these pockets, breaking down into iron first,
perhaps, and then from the sheer momentum of disintegration into helium
and other gases, that made all those interesting little volcanoes
yesterday."

"Little?" the doctor echoed.  "What do you call a big one?"

"Well, one or two over there in the forest were a fair size," Big Tom
admitted.  "But you can't see much in the way of craters unless you go
to the moon."

"Ever been there?" the doctor sniffed.  "Your pocket theory is all
right, except for one thing.  How did all these pockets explode?  They
were not connected with the fuse which you and your promising young son
lit yesterday morning like a pair of enthusiastic anarchists."

"Your question," Big Tom replied with mock pomposity, "is a good one.
It does you credit.  For the moment, however, I must decline to answer."

"Why?  Don't you know?"

"How abrupt you are!  Of course I know.  I'll tell you when we get back
to Chicago, in exchange for your theory of the Captain's decline and
fall."

"I don't think he has fallen," Lila submitted quietly.  "He's just as
good a man as any of you."

"Better," Little Tom agreed heartily.

"Don't overdo it," she said severely.

"I mean it.  Did you ever hear the Captain talking nonsense?  Well,
what man have you ever known with a record to beat that?"

"None, I suppose.  They must all come to it sooner or later, unless
they're born dumb."

"Precisely.  The supply of bosh is infinite.  Mankind is finite.  There
you have it, 'in tune with the infinite.'  A sort of many-one
correspondence between man and his oversoul.  And I'll go you one
better.  I don't believe the Captain would talk nonsense even if he
could.  Remember that debate in the ravine.  That was logic for you."



THE day was perhaps the happiest of all their long exploration.  The
sudden release from almost unendurable tension gave a new zest to life
and a heightened brilliance to every changing aspect of the plain.
Although the warring lightnings flashed all day over the far
battlefield to the northeast, they were too distant to be distressing.
Only the Captain watched them steadfastly; the others forgot them in
the sheer joy of living.  To him they were a beacon guiding him through
the paler light of day to a well-remembered and hated shrine.

Night found them on the edge of the forest.  They pitched camp on the
plain, and sent the blacks after wood.  By careful coaxing they started
a small blaze.  It was not long before the sodden logs were hissing and
popping as cheerfully as the first fire of autumn.  The Captain left
them by the fire, and entered the forest, presumably to search for
fruit.

Early the next morning he reappeared, bringing them a liberal supply of
fruit and several fine plump birds of brilliant plumage.  Having made
an excellent breakfast they broke camp and followed their guide into
the forest.

It was slow going while it lasted, but this was not the main forest,
and by noon they had traversed the long, narrow peninsula of vegetation
and were marching once more over open ground.

"Hold on," Colton ordered after they had gone half a mile.  "This looks
like the beginning of a long dry stretch.  The rain has all sunk into
this porous rock hours ago.  Big Tom, will you take the porters back to
the woods and get all our water carriers filled?  That was a fairly
clean pool we passed about a quarter of a mile from the edge."

With plenty of water for a long dry march they went on.  Night overtook
them in the middle of a somber wilderness of sand and lava.

"If the Captain hadn't shown us that he knows where he is going this
far," Colton growled, "I should vote for turning back.  How about it?
Shall we retreat tomorrow, or advance?"

"Advance," they cried.

"All right.  Don't blame me if you wish you hadn't."

"Everything seems peaceful," Big Tom remarked.  "That last storm on the
horizon died down just before sunset.  You don't see any signs of it
anywhere now, do you?"

They peered over the desert to the northeast, but saw nothing.  In the
pitch darkness of the clear desert air they could have seen a candle at
a distance of a mile.

"All serene," said Little Tom.  "Let's go to sleep."

"We shan't need a guard tonight," Colton decided.  "There are no
animals within ten miles, I'll bet, and we have no fire to attract
savages.  Besides, our friend the Captain has elected to stay with us.
I imagine he sleeps like a dog, with one eye half open."

They rolled into their blankets and in five minutes were sleeping like
logs.  It was still and black as Erebus as Colton started from his
sleep.  The Captain had gently kicked him.  The doctor was on his feet
instantly.

"What's up?" he asked involuntarily, forgetting that the Captain was
incapable of replying.

"Beg pardon, old top," he muttered.  "Just woke me for company?  Is
that it?  Well, I'm game."

He turned round to find a convenient place to sit.  Then he saw it.
Miles away over the black desert a mounded constellation of twinkling
lights flashed and scintillated like a city of ten million stars.  The
lights were festooned about the distant, invisible mountain in long
avenues and gracefully curved lines following the contours, like the
street lights of a great city.  Or so it seemed to Colton's half
wakened eyes, and the words came to his lips unbidden:

"The shining city!"

He quickly roused the others.  Spell-bound they stood gazing at the
wonder and beauty of that distant city, alone in the desert, without a
rival in the world.  Its only peer might have been a star cluster seen
from the Milky Way.

"'Like a net of fireflies tangled in a silver braid,'" Lila quoted
softly.  "What city can it be?"

"There is none in this part of Africa of such size," Colton replied.
"We, have discovered a new civilization."

"Some of those lights move," Big Tom announced presently.  "See!  They
start at the top and creep down.  Then they stop halfway."

The temptation to picture lighted vehicles descending the streets of
the shining city was irresistible.  But the longer they looked the less
simple it became.  The moving lights followed no regular paths down the
mountain, but started at random and stopped anywhere.

"That is no ordinary city," Little Tom remarked.  "Streets never ran
like that.  Are you sure it isn't an illusion?"

"And all of us having the same hallucination?" Colton scoffed.

"I don't mean that.  It is real, except for the regularities.  The
whole mountain is a hive of lights, but they are not arranged according
to any plan.  The streets we think we see are accidental--tricks of the
imagination."

He was interrupted by the Captain.  Gently he shoved them forward,
urging them to march on the city at once.

"You're the Captain," Colton laughed.  "Orders are orders.  Erasmus,
get your boys going."

"Oh, hurry," Lila cried, "before it fades!  It is the most beautiful
dream I ever had."



"AS long as I live I shall remember this night," Lila murmured, when
dawn broke and the Shining City melted into the sky.  Faint and shadowy
against the clear morning horizon loomed up the distant mountain, its
many stars paling with the night's.  As the sun rose over the desert
its hard, brilliant light extinguished the distant sparks and the
mountain became a broken cone of lapis, vast and solitary, in an
infinite desert.

In spite of the Captain's impatience they made camp and slept for four
hours before continuing to his objective, the distant peak in the
wilderness.  They rose refreshed and swallowed a ration and resumed
their march over the sands and broken lava.  By nightfall, when they
pitched camp, the mountain was appreciably nearer.  Tomorrow they would
be within striking distance of its base.

With the departure of the sun the city again shone, and with a clearer,
steadier brilliance.  In the still air of the desert it seemed almost
within an hour's walk.  They imagined they could hear the faint
rumbling of moving machinery as the occasional wandering lights
traveled slowly down the slope, but this of course was an illusion.

"Aren't there more of those moving lights than last night?" Little Tom
asked.

"I was thinking so when you spoke," Colton said.  "And they look
brighter."

"That may be merely because there is less air between us and the city
than yesterday.  We covered a good many miles."

"Tomorrow we shall be at its gates," Lila sighed.  "This is the city of
my dreams--a place of light alone on a great desert, with only the
stars and the winds to see its beauty.  Why can't other cities be like
this one?"

"Stockyards, for one thing," Big Tom suggested with barbarous brutality.

"You have no imagination," she retorted, taking his jest seriously.

"I'm glad you didn't say soul," he retorted.  "I can't get along
without that."

"The Captain has twice as much feeling as you have.  I'm sure his
sensibilities are keener."  She sniffed.  "He has stood there in
exactly that pose ever since we got here."

"Why shouldn't he?  Probably it is his old home town."

"I have been thinking the same all day," Colton said seriously.  "And I
don't believe he likes the thought of having to go back."

"Then why does he?  There's lots of room here.  Just look at all the
places he might go to instead of returning to his native village.  He's
not bound to go anywhere against his will."

"How do you know?  I'm beginning to believe he is.  He is being drawn
on in spite of himself."

"That's not the impression he gives me," said Lila.  "Does he really
want to go back?  I don't think so."

"Then why is he going?" Little Tom asked.

"A sense of duty."

Big Tom roared.  "I thought I cured you of the 'duty' idea before we
reached the Matadai--five hundred years ago.  Now you have gone and
converted the guileless Captain to a mania for duty without his
knowledge.  Colton will have to analyze his mind for him and solve a
few of his complexes.  No, if our hairy friend is going back to the old
town it is because he wants to go back, not because duty calls him.
The Captain is a simple soul.

"Where the bee sucks there sucks he.  You know what I mean--flowers and
fruits and broken backs, and all that sort of thing are the sum total
of his innocent existence.  He is just like Adam before Eve offered him
that bad apple."

"We shall never agree," she said a little stiffly.  "So why argue?"

"Because, sweet, stiff-necked little missionary, I am jealous of your
interest."

"How absurd you are."

"A woman's alibi.  I'm twice as jealous as before."

"Please let me sleep.  You are keeping everybody awake."

"Good night, and I hope you have a regular brute of a nightmare."



ALL the next day as they drew near the mysterious mountain, Lila and
Big Tom continued their debate over the Captain's motives, and indeed
it was a most interesting problem in semihuman psychology.  Big Tom
maintained that the Captain was just a beautiful machine with a
delicately complex system of behavior, like a clock, or a radio set.
Lila, on the other hand, while denying beauty to the Captain--not a
very stout denial, however--insisted that he had a conscious soul.

Big Tom finally reduced her to enraged silence by declaring that his
point of view and hers were identical.  It was a mere matter of words,
he asserted.  She preferred the humanistic way of saying things, he the
scientific.  After that she refused to listen.

That night they camped outside the City gates, as Lila expressed it.
Less than four miles away the vast bulk of the mountain rose abruptly
from the gently sloping rock in a towering mass of black ablaze with
incandescent patches of fire.  All that afternoon they had ascended the
gradual slope, following the lip of a deep fissure in the ancient rocks
of the desert floor.  As they advanced they saw other straight
crevasses radiating in all directions from the base of the mountain.
The impression that the whole tremendous mass of the mountain had
slowly forced its way up through the desert floor, like a gigantic
mushroom breaking the sod, became inescapable.  They could almost
follow in imagination the first emergence of the metal head through the
cracking rocks, and the gradual age-long rise of the mountain as it
heaved up the thick strata, rending them asunder as it rose.  A god
with a different time-span than theirs might have seen the whole drama
in a day, like the rise of an iceberg after its plunge into the ocean
from the parent glacier.

They had no means of judging how long that huge mushroom had been
forcing its way up from the basalts of the earth's inner crust, but
from the nature of the rocks which it shattered in its rise, they
judged that it must have been slowly floating up since the last ice cap
covered the tropics.  Since then the ice had advanced and retreated
many times from Europe.  The men who had seen the fail of this
tremendous meteor from the heavens must have been older than the most
ancient cave dwellers of France and Italy.  Probably the last of them
perished ages before the first European scratched the outlines of a
Buffalo on the walls of their caves.

Around the fire, watching, the massed furnaces of the "city," and
listening to the distant thunder of the incandescent rocks rolling down
the mountainside, the men recalled their experiences in the cave where
they had first found the new element.

"I think the meaning of that old artist's masterpiece is plain enough,"
Little Tom began.  "His tribe actually saw the bursting of what
probably was the biggest meteor that ever exploded in the earth's
atmosphere.  There is the hole left by one as it struck the earth
somewhere in Utah, a mile or so in diameter.  But that one was a mere
pill compared to this.  I don't believe the artist actually saw the
explosion in the sky himself.  My theory is that he drew that picture
from the traditions of his tribe.  Some previous generation had seen
the meteor burst and fall.  Naturally the whole race would remember,
and pass on the history to their children."

"What makes you think that?" Colton demanded critically.

"Well, we have seen the effect of the black metal--the new
element--upon human beings, haven't we?"

"I haven't," the doctor objected obstinately.

"The rest of us have.  Without indulging in any theories to account for
all the beast men," Little Tom replied, "we can take our own
experience.  Why did we have to tie you up before we could do our job?
You were feeling pretty gay, weren't you?  There's no use denying it.
And Lila had to be treed like a mad cat.  Big Tom and I felt pretty
woozy ourselves.  And back there in the cave, where we first found
asterium and proved it was a new element, we all went nutty.  Do you
concede the point?"

"No," the doctor growled.  "But go on."

"I'll have to go back first.  You remember how the artist represented
the fall of five fragments of the meteor either on a plain or in
forests.  And you recall how the sixth and much the biggest splash of
color on a white ground recorded the fall of the main mass, either on a
desert or in a lake.  It couldn't have fallen in a lake--unless this
desert used to be under water--for that's the big chunk of the meteor
we're looking at now.  I'm sure we shall find conclusive evidence of
this tomorrow.

"Now they didn't learn all this in a week, or in a year.  It probably
took them several generations to locate the holes where the meteor
shower of their traditions struck the earth.  Mind I say holes, and not
the meteors themselves.  This holds good for the six splashes depicted
by the artist.  He gave details only for the big and important
fragments.  Why he did this, I shall try to explain presently.

"But you remember, he had drawn a whole shower of golden sparks.  All
those sparks were meant to picture smaller fragments of the meteor
which burst in the sky--before it struck the earth.  From the number of
those smaller golden sparks drawn by the artist, the meteor shower of
his traditions must have been a deluge.  The sky must have been fairly
alive with balls and sparks of fire.  Something like it occurred over
England about eighteen-fifty--I forget the exact date."

"What became of all those millions of fragments?  Some must have fallen
in the forests where they were found soon afterwards by the tribe."

"Now picture to yourselves what would happen.  Those primitive men,
still new enough at the man business to be not quite sure of
themselves, and still democratic enough to treat the apes and monkeys
as cousins, if not as equals, these first men, I say, could not have
been extraordinarily intelligent.  So, seeing a lot of shining lumps of
stone and metal falling out of the sky right into their own forests,
they inferred that these marvelous celestial beings with the fiery hair
had descended to dwell with them.

"Probably they were not yet sufficiently advanced to give all the
separate chunks poetical names and call them gods.  But the effect, I
imagine, was about the same.  Every lump of stone and metal which they
found in their forests, half buried in the earth, was treated with
respect and fear.  In short it was worshiped."



"THESE were only the smaller chunks which became the tribal high gods.
They had not yet found the impressive holes in the ground left by
Jupiter, Mars, Venus, Apollo, and the rest in their sudden descent from
an unimagined Olympus to the bowels of the earth.  I doubt if even at
that time there was a single beast man of all their tribes who could
draw a straight line, much less a galloping animal.  Those early
finders of the smaller fragments were worshipers pure and simple.
Their records were easily remembered stories passed down from father to
son for generation after generation.

"Then came the distant descendants of these old-timers, who could draw
pictures.  They crystallized tradition and made it visible.  Some of
their work we saw on the walls of that cave.  My theory is that the
artist's masterpiece is much more than a record of traditions.  It is
both a history and a prophecy.

"Did you ever see a picture of the devil that gave you a real scare?
No?  Well, neither have I.  The horns and harpoon tail are funny, but
not effective.  They are just the sort of thing a halfwitted idiot
would imagine to frighten his disobedient, imbecile children.  But that
great artist of the cave really drew a picture of evil.  His shapeless
black cloud is infinitely more sinister in its lack of explicit horrors
than are all the thickheaded devils of the Chinese middle ages.  That
old fellow drew a picture of evil that makes your flesh creep.

"What was he trying to tell his people?  Why, it is obvious.  In the
hundreds of generations between the bursting of the meteor and the cave
pictures, the wretched beast men had slowly grasped the hard fact that
the heavens had handed them a bad egg.  Their forest gods were a rotten
lot.  They noted, after hundreds of years of the bitter experience,
that only those men and women of their tribes who abstained from
worshiping the black, shapeless idols, remained men and women and had
perfectly normal human children.

"The faithful worshipers, on the other hand, degenerated and became
beasts.  By this time those primitive men--such of them as were not
hopelessly besotted by their evil habit--had begun to look down on the
hairy apes and chattering monkeys as their distinct inferiors.  The
others saw no real difference.  If anything, they rather preferred
brutehood to intelligent manhood.  Being victims of a degrading vice
they elevated it to the sanctity of a cult.  It was this that the
artist recorded and, with the record, wrote a thundering declamation
against the besotting delight of the degenerates.

"How did he get his message to his divided people?  First he drew the
shower of meteors.  That was history.  Then, by the bigger splashes, he
recorded the traditional fall of six enormous chunks not yet
discovered.  I believe that by this time, however, the holes made by
the fall of at least one or two of these main fragments had been found.
They would be only deep, overgrown craters, but their significance
perhaps would strike the wiser members of the tribe.  Next, in his
black cloud, the artist recorded the history of the evil, degenerating
influence of the smaller fragments of the meteor, and warned his people
to have nothing to do with the bigger chunks if ever any of them
came--literally--to light.

"I would not go so far as to suggest that the artist foresaw the
mushroom-like rise of the main fragments from the bowels of the earth
where they had sunk.  He knew nothing of modern theories of floating
mountain ranges and waltzing continents.  But he had a lively
anticipation, I expect, of these once flaming devils of the air rising
from their long sleep and walking abroad through the forests.

"That old artist was a true leader of his race.  He showed his people
the fork in the great highway of evolution.  Those of his race who
followed the beasts into the forest and hung around the degrading idols
became beasts; those who kept away from the degenerating influence of
the strange metal fallen from heaven became men, and continued along
the main highway.

"He and his friends had long since decided that men are better than
apes.  So he left a warning to the enlightened to beware of Jupiter,
Mars, Venus and Company, whenever those distinguished voluptuaries of
despotism, war and wickedness should show their ugly heads above
ground."



"IF I were a Buddhist," Lila said softly, when Little Tom finished his
account of the forgotten painter of black evil, "I should say that the
Captain is a reincarnation of that old artist."

"Oh, my astral body!" Big Tom laughed irreverently.  "What next, sweet
mystic?"

"I knew you would laugh," she sniffed contemptuously.  "You scientists
have no poetry in your souls."

"You mean little prig!  As if Einstein's relativity weren't a grander
epic than anything Milton ever wrote!  You're hopeless.  I'm glad I
didn't propose to you on the boat."

"So am I.  But," she added, with charming feminine illogic, "you did."

Little Tom rallied to his father's rescue.  "This reincarnation theory
of yours interests me, Lila.  So you think the Captain has been guiding
us through the forests and this desert to destroy the devils he drew a
million years ago?"

"You know I meant nothing so absurd.  But I do think he has consciously
sought our help in destroying the evil that dragged him down."

"He's efficient, anyway," Big Tom remarked.  "What do you say if we
take him back to the States with us to enforce a few of our laws?"

"Don't be funny," she retorted.  "You never will understand some
things, in spite of all your physics."

"Granted," Big Tom sighed.  "You, for instance.  I doubt whether you
are material at all.  Just pure sentiment, aren't you?"

This was too much.  She descended on him suddenly and gave his hair an
excruciating dry massage.

"How's that for pure sentiment?  Will you be good?"

"All right!" he howled.  "I'm licked.  Woman triumphs."

"There is one thing that still puzzles me," Colton remarked when order
reigned once more.  "What was it that dragged the nails out of our
boots in the cave?"

"Induced mass," Big Tom replied promptly, if darkly.

"The deuce you say?"

"Not quite.  Any excessively massive body makes every particle of
matter in its neighborhood more massive.  If you could suddenly pile up
a million tons of iron in the neighborhood of a tack, the tack would
weigh more than it did before.  That's gospel; I'm not kidding you.
It's a simple mathematical consequence of relativity."

"Well, I'll be damned," the doctor commented.

"Undoubtedly.  There is one strange feature about what happened that I
haven't figured out yet.  The 'induced mass' seemed only to affect
iron.  Still we really know nothing yet about the details of this
effect.  When we get back to books and apparatus Little Tom and I must
investigate, while you are writing up your memoir on Swain."

"Let Swain go for a moment.  How do you account for this freak element
'asterium,' millions of times heavier than gold?"

"I don't," Big Tom confessed simply.  "I leave that nut to the
astronomers.  One of them cracked it just before we left Chicago.  He
was at the British Association meeting in Toronto.  Either he cracked
the nut or his own nut is cracked; I'm not yet sure which.  This famous
and eminent gentleman proved that in a very hot star the outer rings of
electrons get knocked off the atoms, the stripped atoms get squashed
together at the center of the star under enormous pressure, and more
massive 'elements' are formed there.  The density of some of those
gaseous stars he said--I didn't--is fifty thousand times that of water."

"Putting all things together, I guess that there may be dead stars of
solid metals and rocks containing pockets of asterium--our new
element--inconceivably denser than gold or platinum.  The meteor that
exploded over this desert was a wandering piece of such a star that got
knocked to bits when it collided with another.  Take it or leave it as
you like; the theory isn't mine, so I don't care.  In the meantime
there stands a very practical fact.  That mountain I am sure is one of
the main pieces of the meteor come up to have a look at what it hit
millions of years ago.  Tomorrow we shall have a look at it.  Hullo!
The Captain seems to be having one of his periodical fits of
prohibition."

The Captain had bent down and clutched a heavy stone.  Then,
straightening up to his full height, he hurled it with all his strength
toward the blazing mountain.

"You want us to smash that too, old boy?" Cotton asked, going up to him.

The great creature turned to him in the dark, pointed to the mountain
and stamped his foot.

"I understand.  You want us to put it back in the earth.  Rather a tall
order, I'm afraid.  Your confidence flatters us."

"Tell him it is unnecessary," Big Tom laughed.  "All the metal in it is
disintegrating as fast as it can.  Within a year or two it will be as
dead and as harmless as a heap of ashes.  That little storm we started
touched it off."

"Not by lightning alone," Little Tom added.  "The pulse of
disintegration followed its natural route to the next source of
attraction, just as a magnetic pole follows a line of force to the
north.  Nature did it; we didn't," he finished up.

"That's too deep for the Captain," Colton objected.  "He wants this
molehill flattened immediately."

"Then the poor chap is going to be disappointed.  We've shown all our
tricks."



"I'M going to be generous," Lila announced, "before we all go to sleep.
A striking confirmation of Little Tom's theory has just occurred to me.
Do you remember how the Captain stamped on that awful rusted iron face
he showed us in the forest?"

"Of course," they chorused.  Big Tom's "of course" had a jealous note,
lifting it above the others.

"At the time I remarked how the Captain meant us to understand that it
was like him, but in no sense a portrait.  Do you know who carved that
face in the iron?"

"No," Big Tom snorted.  "And neither do you."

"Oh, yes I do.  It was carved by the forest people after they realized
how evil the fallen metal was for all their race.  Wasn't it, Little
Tom?"

Eager to show his intelligence by believing in hers, and delighted at
the chance of flattering Lila into a belief in his good judgment,
Little Tom heartily agreed.

"You've hit it," he exclaimed enthusiastically.  "I don't believe it
was done by the same tribe, or even the same race who painted the cave
pictures.  The carving of that face in what must have been solid iron
at the time of the sculpture was a far harder job than painting flat
pictures on the wall of a cave.  It must have taken years of laborious
scraping with flints or splinters of meteoric iron to wear down the
grooves and shape the whole lump into a brutish human face.  Still,
they did it.  I think that must have happened thousands and thousands
of years after the painting of the cave pictures.  The race who
sculptured the iron was farther along the road to civilization than
those first prophets of the cave.  And my guess is that they had clean
forgotten the warning of the cave picture, to rediscover it for
themselves when they found their own people degenerating under the
influence of a habit-forming vice."

"When the sculptors of iron first traversed the forest the race of cave
artists had long since died or degenerated to the beasts.  The iron
gods had conquered them one way or the other.  The new race, more
civilized, soon found out what made their young men and women worthless
drunkards and half beasts.  Then they carved their warning in the iron
and passed on, leaving the contaminating forest behind them forever.
They left that half-human brutal face on the iron as a sign to warn off
whoever should follow them through the forest.  It is the symbol of
devolution, the picture of the descent of man backward to the brutes."

"The pygmies," Colton remarked dryly, "don't seem to have paid much
attention to the warning.  All those little devils who stung us like a
swarm, of hornets were on their way to the great metallic drunk."

"Then you admit," Big Tom took him up eagerly, "that the gray beast men
of the ravine were degenerated pygmies?"

"I admit nothing on such flimsy evidence.  And as for the beast men of
the ravine being degenerated, I don't see it.  As human beings they
were infinitely superior to those venomous little fiends in the trees.
The mere lack of the power of speech is no sign of degeneracy.  Quite
the contrary, in fact.  There are precious few orators who wouldn't be
better off dumb."

"The doctor is on my side," Lila triumphed.

"I'm not!" he countered hotly.  "Like any man of common sense I stand
squarely in the middle.  I refuse to take sides until all the evidence
is sifted.  And when it is all weighed and analyzed, I am just as
likely to go straight up in the air as to join forces with either of
you bands of overimaginative lunatics.  You are altogether too romantic
for a man of my plodding temperament."

"Just for that," Big Tom remarked vindictively, "I hope you hatch the
craziest theory of the lot of us when you finally analyze those pickled
glands and things you have in your bottle."

With that parting shot Big Tom rolled himself into his blanket and
dropped off to sleep.  Soon Colton and Little Tom followed, but Lila,
entranced by the strange wonder of her dream city, rose and joined the
Captain.

Hour after hour they stood together, a mite of a girl by the side of a
huge half-beast, half-man, silently watching a scene unequalled for its
sheer grandeur and mysterious beauty anywhere in the volcanoes of this
world.  In the absolute silence of the desert night they distinctly
heard the steady, rushing hiss of the disintegrating metals in the
burning mountain, like the discharge from an electrical machine or the
corona from a high voltage cable.  Every now and then a distant thunder
drowned the rustle of the fires, as an avalanche of rubble followed an
incandescent rock, released at last by the withering heat, down the
mountain side.  There was no wind; yet the myriads of incandescent
cliffs and candent promontories changed and glowed from instant to
instant with a soft, variable whiteness, as if fanned by the breath of
the invisible spirit of the night.



WHAT were the girl's thoughts as she watched through the night, till
the advent of dawn dulled the fierce brilliance of a million white
furnaces?  She could not have told, except that in some mysterious way
her thoughts were a part of the past, and a shadow of what once had
been the mind of the silent giant by her side.

He never moved, and seemed neither to appreciate nor to resent her
companionship through the long night.  Like a man newly risen from the
dead he stood there, staring at his grave, as it were, trying to
remember what had extinguished his mind and who had buried his body.
Speech was denied him through the long watches of the night, but with
the coming of the dawn he moaned, as if he remembered.

"What is it?" she whispered.  "Try to speak!  You can if you will.
Try, try, try!"

He turned and stared down on her head, golden in the rising sun.  For
perhaps the first time he was conscious of her presence.  He looked at
the stump of an arm which she had helped to heal, and then at her.  He
could remember that far back, but no farther, so far as his memory
linked with the minds of human beings.  Over his straining eyes the
shadow of a hopeless conflict passed and left no trace beyond the
momentary deepening of his distress.

"Try!" she cried.

Without a sound he turned his back on her and strode off to greet the
risen sun.  It was a primitive act, the natural religion of a man a
little higher than the apes finding its natural expression in
involuntary worship.  Here was the flaming ball of the heavens at last
dispelling the clinging cold of the cheerless night, and sending the
warm blood, coursing once more through sluggish veins and stiffened
muscles.

It was the natural, unreasoning reverence of the grateful animal
finding its inevitable expression.  His long shadow fell upon her,
brushed past her feet, and followed after the retreating giant.  With
the passing of his shadow she felt that she had failed no less than he,
and that he had turned his back forever on the world of men.

She sighed, and set about the simple routine of providing a coffeeless
breakfast in that wilderness where there was nothing but stones and
sand to burn.  To the jests of the men who rallied her on her early
rising she replied with a laugh.  Somehow she felt that they would not
understand her vigil.  She kept her secret and the Captain's.  Not till
long afterward did she confide her treasure to the one of them who was
still sympathetic beneath his shell of acquired skepticism.

After breakfast the Captain returned.

"What next, old top?" Colton inquired.  "You insist that we visit your
home town?  Very well, we're game.  But I give you fair warning we
haven't a single stick of dynamite with us.  If you want it blown up
you will have to wait till next time."

"Mind your step, old fellow," Big Tom cautioned, giving the gray giant
a friendly dig in the ribs.  "Don't lead us into any of those fiery
furnaces.  We're your men.  Lead on, brave Captain!"

He led them rapidly over the steeply rising ground to the very base of
the flaming mountain.  Constant trickles of small, crushed rocks
reminded them that the process of disintegration was still going on,
undermining the cliffs and overhanging precipices as the metals rotted
down to less than air.  Galleries burrowed in all directions, following
the exploded veins of metal to the core of the colossal meteor, and
ancient fissures in its sides testified to the age-long stress and
strain under which it had fought its slow way up to the light.

Along some of these galleries the rotting metals still fumed and shone
evilly.  Others were black, or faintly lit by a dying fire deep within
the heart of stone.  Recent vents and chaotic jumbles of shattered rock
marked the sudden craters that had burst out only a few days previously
when shallow pockets of the new element, their atoms vibrating to the
transmitted pulse of destruction from the southeast, exploded in fiery
clouds of white hot helium and tore asunder the solid rocks.

"Do you suppose all the asterium in this huge chunk has exploded?" Big
Tom asked his son.

"All that is not too deeply protected by a screening layer of dense
rocks.  But give them time enough, and the penetrating rays from this
disintegration will touch off the rest."

"How much time?" Colton demanded in alarm.

"I haven't the slightest idea.  It may take weeks, or months, or years,
or seconds."

"Then we may be blown sky-high at any instant?"

"Possibly."

"Why didn't you warn us?"

"You never asked anything about it.  Besides, Big Tom and I wanted to
see the fun at close quarters."

"You idiots!  Come on out of it!"

"Don't get excited.  The main pocket of asterium is probably five or
six hundred miles deep.  It will take a long time for the
disintegrating rays to pierce such a thickness as that.  It's something
like taking an X-ray picture of a fat man's bones through several feet
of wood.  You need a long exposure, don't you?"

He moved aside to let a white-hot boulder find its natural level.  A
small avalanche of red rubble followed.

"Come out of there!" Colton yelled to Big Tom.  The inquisitive
physicist had entered one of the cool galleries for purposes of
exploration.  At its end a faint light showed where a small pocket of
asterium was still burning itself out.

"Nothing doing," Big Tom shouted from his tunnel.  "This is a unique
chance to observe at first hand one of the grandest sights in the
universe.  There's not the slightest danger.  Come on, all of you, and
see something that is worth all your trip."

Only Little Tom followed.  Lila and Colton hung back with the porters,
while the Captain looked on with evident approval.  These idol breakers
who had destroyed the devil of the forest were about to destroy the
mountain, the colossal god known only to the unholy few, of whom he was
one.

"Come back, you fools!" Colton shouted.  "Come out of there or I'll
shoot.  Come--"

His voice was drowned in a dull rumble from above.  Looking up in
horror, he saw the whole mountainside in slow motion.  The Captain saw
it too.  With one leap he was in the alley leading to the gallery.  It
was too late to enter the gallery and drag out the rash men hurrying to
the entrance.  Too late they knew that they were fools.

The Captain acted instinctively.  Bracing himself in the alley he
pressed against its walls with all his strength, making a cross of his
body to break and hold up the fiery avalanche.  Not sparing his left
arm, although it must have been torture, he ground it into the wall to
balance the pressure of his sound right arm.

The first flaming boulder of the avalanche struck him squarely on the
shoulders.  For a second he held it up, while the men scrambled to pass
him.

"No more," he groaned, as the full avalanche buried him.  He had died
to save his friends.

Not the least of their grief was the full knowledge that their dead
friend had spoken.  Death had loosed his tongue.




CHAPTER X

THE SECRET OF THE METEOR

IN THE four months that had elapsed since their return to civilization
the members of the party had slowly regained their strength.  The
nightmare of their last marches across the nameless desert to the trade
routes was fast fading, and even their thirst seemed a thing of the
past and unreal.  Only two of the blacks had come through alive, but
Lila and the three men, made of less coarse but more resistant stuff,
survived unharmed.  To have retraced their route by the way the Captain
had led them would have been impossible.  Without his protection they
must have perished in the forests.  They chose the less certain
alternative, and set their faces to the East.

The desert traders who rescued them at the point of complete exhaustion
saw them safely to a seaport hundreds of miles north of the Congo.
Colton announced that he must return to Leopoldville to complete his
work on the sleeping sickness.  The others insisted upon accompanying
him, and together they worked like horses to make the labor short.
They had enough of Africa.  In six weeks they were aboard the steamer,
homeward bound.  And now, at last, they were feeling human again.  One
and all they realized that "there is no place like home" is more than
the outworn refrain of a too sentimental song.  Only armchair critics
who have enjoyed steam heat and electric fans all their lives scoff at
that profound sentiment.

Colton had moved to a cheery apartment overlooking the Midway.  The
knife-edge blasts of November had long since stripped the trees naked,
but he did not care.  As he felt now he hated the sight of a green
tree.  Bare black branches and brick walls beyond a sheet of sooty ice
were paradise enough for him after months of the tropical jungle with
its rotting vegetation, its fevers, and its insatiable insects.  A sine
qua non of his house-hunting had been an open fireplace.  Tonight,
snugly sheltered from the zero blizzard, he sat before a roaring log
fire awaiting his guests.  It was a special occasion, of the greatest
interest to each of the fellow travelers.

Lila was the first to arrive.  Colton had hoped she would come before
the others.

"I'm feeling old, Lila," he said as he helped her off with her wraps.

"Nonsense!  You look ten years younger than when we left Matadai."

"A man of my age shouldn't crave open fireplaces and padded dressing
gowns; I want to settle down and think.  That's a bad sign."

"Adventure has lost some of its charm for me too," she admitted,
sinking into a deep chair by the fireside.  "Anything further would
spoil the last.  That was the one experience of one lifetime among
millions.  Not many human beings," she said seriously, "can hope to see
what we saw."

"You mean the Captain?"

"Yes.  He knew that he was to die if the others lived."

"And I think he was not sorry when he knew.  Do you still believe he
actually spoke at the last?"

"Sometimes I seem to remember the sounds distinctly as words.  Then
again it echoes like nothing more than a groan.  I don't know."

"Nor do I.  For the moment I thought he had spoken involuntarily.  If
so, he is happier dead.  To remember, even dimly, in his condition,
would be an intolerable torment.  He could never have been re-made into
what he once was."

"Are you sure?"

"Positive.  Since analyzing the chemicals in those glands you and I
collected, I know that the beast men were hopelessly fallen from the
human state.  Swain's crazy theory seems to have a basis of truth.  The
emanations from the new element--asterium--broke down the slight but
essential traces of mineral matter in the bodies of the human beings
subjected to their influence, and the wretched addicts of a new
drunkenness became perverted beyond recovery into something not human.
The very structure of the tissues is changed.  The cells are affected,
as in certain diseases.  Particularly the thyroid, the pituitary body
and some of the less well known glands are changed beyond recognition.
Their excretions, controlling bodily growth and profoundly regulating
the higher faculties--speech, thought, behavior, and so on--have been
replaced by other chemical compounds.  The result is that the victims
of this new, attractive vice developed in some respects far beyond
normal human beings, and in others degenerated infinitely lower than
the lowest savages."

"But couldn't you have cured him after you found out the cause of his
disease?"

"That doesn't follow.  It is easier to break down than to build up.
The emanations from asterium breakdown the metallic elements into
other, lighter elements.  The whole chemistry of the body is changed,
and it is changed downward, that is, toward greater simplicity.  To
cure a case of this perverted degeneracy I should have to build up what
has been broken down.  Any physicist will tell you that this is
impossible in the present state of knowledge.  The physicists have
artificially broken down nearly a score of the elements; they have not
yet succeeded in putting together a single one.  So the Captain's case
was quite hopeless.  As I said, it is kinder to wish him as he is,
rather than still wandering through the forests looking for his lost
soul.  I feel now that he had occasional flashes--I won't say of
memory--of instinctive behavior impelling him to seek an existence
which he had forgotten.  He had been turned out of paradise, and he had
forgotten the road back.

"Only an occasional flash of a leaf, perhaps, awoke him to a strange
sense of familiarity which he could not fix.  Our coming must have been
like an elusive dream.  He knew us, and yet we were strangers.  Our
everyday rifles--matches, clothes, firearms perhaps--were keys to a
gate he had forgotten.  If he had lived after we left him he would have
been tormented for perhaps fifty futile years.  He is better as he is."

"I suppose so," she sighed.

The doorbell rang, and Colton rose.

"Before the Blakes come I want you to make me the happiest man on
earth."

"Aren't you happy?" she asked, looking up at him with innocent eyes.

"Not without you.  Will you?"

"Yes, if you really mean it, and are not asking me because I have no
job."

"Lila!  I swore to win you that night when the Captain first came to
us."

"You won me," she confessed.  "I shall never forget how kind you were
to our poor friend."

"Then you will?  Lila!  Damn that bell!  I'll have to go."



BIG TOM, hearing the happy news, looked as glum as an undertaker.

"I have nothing left to live for," he croaked.  "I wish you joy."

"Have some firewater," Colton laughed, "and cheer up."

Little Tom, strange to say, appeared quite relieved.  A new
stenographer in his father's office had taught him the wisdom of taking
a good long look before plunging.  He was not yet ready for the stormy
waters of matrimony.

"Did you get us out on a night like this just to see you two spooning
before a draughty fireplace?" Big Tom complained as he poured out a
second jolt.

"Would you like to hear the story of Swain's life?" Colton asked.

"Does it throw any light on asterium?" Big Tom demanded sourly.
"Nobody believes me when I tell them about it."

"Not much.  But it does clear up quite a bit of the mystery surrounding
our friend the Captain."

"Ah, that's different!  Anything about the Captain is good news.  That
chap was the whitest man I ever knew.  But I give you fair warning," he
added, "I won't believe a word Swain says about his character.  So
that's that."

"You have been putting a detective onto Swain's past?" Little Tom
hazarded.

"It wasn't necessary.  Swain's good opinion of himself has given us all
the information we need."  He took a fat letter from his pocket, and
stood weighing it in his fingers.  "I found this waiting for me at my
bank the day after we got back to Chicago.  It had been lying there
ever since we left, with instructions to the bank to deliver it to me
on my return from the Congo.  I have kept it all these weeks without
saying anything because I thought you would feel as I did when I first
read it.  To me the whole confession is inexpressibly painful, not for
its revelation of Swain's character, but for its betrayal of his
bigoted blindness.

"He never was able to see the Captain as a better man than himself.  If
Swain had not written this letter I should have kept a higher opinion
of him.  Probably you will feel the same.  Still, we should not judge
harshly.  We four all loved the Captain so warmly that it is impossible
for us to be fair.  I put off sharing this with you until the Captain's
death had been softened a little for us by time.  You had better hear
it, as in a way it is a fine testimonial to our instinctive feeling for
a decent man, even when that man is as shaggy as a bear and as dumb as
a stone."

He seated himself by the fire and began to read Swain's confession.


"'To Dr. J. B. Colton, Chicago.

"'Sir:

"'When you receive this I shall be far beyond reach of your irreverent
scoffing.  Although you examined me minutely as your patient you failed
to discover my secret.  I am the first American to live and preach the
Higher Manhood.  To your ignorant eyes, dulled by the scales of a
futile science, I appeared only as a man.  I am higher than man, for I
am from the next stage of evolution beyond the human.

"'Yes, the next step in evolution.  I employ, you notice, the essential
word of your degrading doctrine.  But my evolution is not that of the
deluded scientists who falsely assert than men came from monkeys.  Far
from it.  Mine is the new truth, which I have discovered.  The truth
that made me free.

"'Why should I trouble to convince you, a doubter and a hardened
scoffer?  I confess to a remnant of human frailty.  It will give me a
certain satisfaction to prove that you and all your bigoted fellow
scientists are an ignorant, superstitious, truth-hating sect.  You are
the true children of the devil.  To you is due all the misery and
suffering of mankind.  Your followers all are eternally lost.  It is my
sacred mission to lift the scales from your eyes and give you sight to
see yourselves as you are.'"

"There is more of the same," Colton remarked dryly, skipping half a
dozen pages.  "That's enough to show you his general attitude.  I'll
pass to the alleged facts--as he recites them."

"'After graduating at the head of my class, I emigrated to the Congo as
a medical missionary.  It was my ambition to overthrow the false
doctrine of evolution.  Consequently I applied for a station where I
could observe both the apes and men together.

"'In all of my earlier investigations my dear wife was a great help.
She followed me into the forests without complaint, often living for
months on the coarsest native food and such fruits as we could find.
Her belief in me was justified.  Before long I was to begin my great
campaign against the children of the devil.

"'After the birth of our daughter, Edith, my wife for some time was
unable to accompany me on my explorations.  To secure allies I made
friends with the men of several intelligent tribes.  These acted as
guides and helpers.

"'I had but little difficulty in convincing these clear thinkers,
uncontaminated by the sewer of modern science, of the truth and justice
of my mission.  They became my eager allies in a war as holy as any
that was ever waged in a righteous cause.  My observations had taught
me that the higher apes are practically identical with the lower races
of men, except for one defect.  The apes have no souls.  This is my
capital discovery.  And what, you ask, is the evidence for this great
truth?  Let me put it as briefly as I can.

"'With false shame I can say that I am a born orator, and one of the
most moving speakers of our generation.  After I had mastered the
native African languages I had no difficulty in leading those blind
savages to the light.  I opened their eyes.  Yes, though I say it
myself, it was my gift--for which I am humbly thankful--of silver
eloquence that made the blind see.  And what did they see when their
eyes were opened by the gold of my compelling tongue?  They saw that
they were naked.  And seeing that they were naked they covered their
eyes and fled to the forest.  They had found their souls.  In simple
and modest garments they clothed their indecency and returned to
beseech further blessings.

"'The natives had heard the call to their souls.  Did the apes respond?
Did the chimpanzee walk modestly through the forest, clad in the badge
of awakening?  No!  From limb to limb they swung in riotous nakedness.
Though I persuaded as no man yet has persuaded, they turned deaf ears
to my pleadings and continued before my very eyes their lawless way of
life.

"'Is it not conclusive proof, even to one of your narrow, prejudiced
kind, Dr. Colton?'"



"I REALLY can't answer that," Colton commented.  "You see I never had
the privilege of hearing Swain lecture.  The rest of this goes on with
further arguments, all proving that apes have none of the higher
faculties and no souls.  We can take it as read.  Swain next explains
how he proposed to set things right.  If he failed to make the monkeys
wear pants he nevertheless converted them--otherwise.

"'I had shown beyond all cavilling that man and ape are one but for the
divine spark, the soul, which illumines the body and mind of man.  But
the gross, natural eye of science would refuse to see the distinction.
This I knew.  And those disciples of the devil, the narrow, crass
scientists, would continue to preach false doctrine, defiling the minds
of the young.  To destroy their polluted arguments once and for all I
saw that I must annihilate--wipe out utterly--the lying evidence on
which their soul-destroying theory is founded.  As Cicero thundered in
the Roman senate "Carthage must be destroyed!" so thundered I in the
jungles of the Congo, "The Apes must be abolished!"

"'My humble friends, the black men of the rivers and the forests heard
my thunder.  By scores and by hundreds they rallied to my standard.  I
became a flaming torch at the head of a great and noble band of
crusaders sworn to pluck out, root and branch, the chattering apes, the
grimacing chimpanzees, the undisciplined orangoutangs and the strong,
blasphemous gorillas.  Do not misunderstand me.  We marched forth with
no banners fluttering on the breeze, nor with the blare of trumpets,
nor to the soul-stirring call of bugles.  Our war was secret, swift,
and silent.  Its battles were fought in the occult places of the
forest.  Our victories were bloodless, for I purified the children of
the devil with fire.

"'Here a devoted band of followers, safe from the prying eyes of
ignorant agents--all tools of the scientists, blind, miseducated
men--here in the holy green twilight of the forest gathered a
self-sacrificing band of truth lovers; far away, by the great river,
gathered another, and still farther many more, all sworn to cleanse
their land of the defilements of the devil.  We became a secret order,
as broad as the Congo, as deep, as swift and as relentless as its great
rivers, sweeping into the black waters of death all who gainsaid us.
Our drums spoke, and for hundreds of miles the faithful heard.  A
thousand sacred fires burst upon the night.'"

"We burst upon one and put it out," Big Tom remarked.  "I don't like
Swain any better than I did, even if he is decently buried."

"If you like," Colton replied, "I shall skip Swain's details of his
holy war.  It makes my blood run cold to think what one madman can
accomplish with an ignorant mob.  Some of this is worse than anything
the Middle Ages has to show.  And it is all done earnestly, piously, in
the sacred name of truth."

"Skip it," they said.

"He goes on next to an account of his witch doctoring.  Some unknown
black man deserves our thanks.  It appears that a rival witch doctor
all but killed Swain for his attempted sacrifice--in the usual way--of
an old ape beloved by the tribe.  I noticed when I examined him that
one of Swain's ribs had been broken at some time of his life.
According to his account here, it was the rival witch doctor who got
him alone in the forest and kicked in his slats.  Swain appears to have
been a man of almost zero physical courage.  For the time being he
called off his insane crusade against the apes.  And during his lay off
from bullishness he first met Campbell McKay."

"Our Captain?" Lila asked.

"Undoubtedly.  From what Swain tells of McKay's life, and from
information I have gathered here from the scientific societies, we can
piece together the essential facts of McKay's career up to the time of
his disappearance six years or more ago.  As Swain's description of
McKay's appearance when he first met him is interesting, I shall read
it."

"'The blasphemous geologist,' says Swain, referring to McKay, 'stood
six feet six, and was broad, muscular and profane in proportion.  Like
many of his race his besetting sin was the bottle.  He was a cynical
scoffer, with a contemptuous wit ready to his tongue and a sneering
jest to his lips.  When I first knew him he was not unhandsome, with a
rude, rugged attractiveness.  He had two boasts, his strength and his
hard-headedness.  I have seen him bend an inch steel bar in his hands,
and I have known him to remain perfectly sober after drinking two
quarts of whiskey during the course of a day.

"'It was his pride that no man in Africa could drink him down, and this
bestial superiority was, I believe, a fact.  I came to know him through
my profession.  He consulted me for what he called the "wee
jumpies"--the obvious penalty of his excessive drinking.  As he
obstinately refused to admit that alcohol was at the root of his just
punishment I could do nothing for him.  Our conferences invariably
ended in a torrent of sarcastic abuse from this favorite son of the
devil.'"



"SWAIN then indulges in some choice abuse of his own.  To me," Colton
remarked, "it is only too clear that Swain feared and hated this
outspoken Scotch geologist because he, Swain, instinctively felt that
he was the inferior both physically and morally of this strong lover of
strong drink.  Of course, if what Swain says is true, McKay did drink
too much.  But," and the doctor smiled, "I can find little to bear out
Swain's assertion that Scotch whiskey made McKay a Son of Satan.  On
the whole he seems to have been built on a big scale with a heart as
big as the rest of him.  In justice to McKay I shall skip Swain's
ranting and simply tell the main facts of this fine geologist's life as
I have learned them from the scientific records."

"Campbell McKay," Big Tom interrupted, "was quite a famous explorer
fifteen years ago.  Is this the same man?"

"I am sure of it.  The well-known McKay disappeared just about the same
time as Swain's big friend.  There are numerous clues that identify the
noted explorer and our Captain.

"Well," Colton continued, "I find that McKay graduated from the
University of Edinburgh with high honors in natural science,
particularly geology, and at once got a position with the Belgian
government, as an assistant in the geological and mining survey of the
Congo basin.  That job lasted five years.  The moment he was foot-free
McKay invested all of his savings in outfitting a private exploration
party.  He hired only blacks.  At the head of a considerable safari he
made his way northeast through the Congo forest, following, so far as I
can judge, practically the same route as ours, except that he
penetrated more deeply into the pygmy country.

"He was gone three years.  Most of his porters died or were killed in
the forest, and practically alone he fought his way out to a trading
post on the main river.  The results of this expedition made him
famous.  The popular account of his discoveries is summed up in his
remarkable book of travels, _The Oldest Race of Men_.  In this he
proves to the satisfaction of anthropologists that the new races of
pygmies discovered by him in the deepest forests of the Congo are
undoubtedly far more ancient than any other race, living or extinct, on
the African continent, and older, probably, than the cave dwellers of
Europe.  His book not only made a sensation at the time, but also a
considerable amount of money for its author.

"McKay's explorations were really remarkable.  Once he came within
range of the true wilderness he never followed the trails of previous
explorers.  With practically no protection he plunged recklessly into
unknown forests, or set out across unmapped deserts with barely a
week's supply of water.  One point is worth noting.  Again and again he
emphasizes in his books--he wrote several--that he never used force
with the native tribes, no matter how savage or how threatening they
were.  For instance, whilst traversing the forests of his new pygmy
races he forbade his blacks even to display firearms, much less use
them.  Every rifle in his outfit was packed away out of sight at the
first sign of human habitation.

"Since our return," the doctor continued, "I have carefully gone
through every line McKay ever printed, in the hope of discovering some
clue to his savage campaign against the beast men.  The best I could
find was this curious passage."

"'On the very edge of the pygmy forest I heard rumors of a powerful
"god" somewhere in the interior.  As I penetrated deeper into their
country, these rumors grew into a definite statement of fact --as
definite, that is, as any account of places and distances ever is when
given by a primitive people.  Becoming interested, I followed up this
living legend to its source.  Suffice it to say that I discovered the
god.  But, as Kipling would remark, "that's another story."

"'I only care to state here, reserving full discussion for a scientific
paper in the _Proceedings_ of the Royal African Society, that this god
of the pygmies is the dirtiest that any race of men ever set up, and
that its worship is vile and degrading beyond description.  It is my
hope to be able to smash this god and once for all break its evil
influence over my pugnacious and lovable little friends, the pygmies.

"'Although they are as vindictive as Dundee wasps they deserve a better
god than the rotten abomination they now have.  Nothing would give me
greater pleasure than the destruction of their horrible creed.  To this
I shall devote at least one expedition.  But, lest any of my readers
misunderstand me or my intention, I wish to state emphatically that I
am no missionary."

"The last sentence;" Colton remarked with a smile, "was hardly
necessary.  McKay's books are as virile as himself and as strong as the
whiskey he drank like water.

"Well, at this point I can go on with Swain's account, although I hate
to leave McKay's personal narrative.  There is adventure enough, and
sufficient observation of human character in McKay's journals to make a
dozen romances.  Swain's next is a curious combination.  It starts out
with a sermon--which I shall skip, of course--and ends with a
confession of petty larceny.  Listen to this."

"'After one of his outbursts of foul abuse of me and my mission, McKay
suddenly announced that I should never hear him curse again as he was
going to reform.  A holy joy filled my soul.  At last I had softened
that iron heart, and by the example of my zeal brought one more son of
Satan to the true fold.  He was giving up drink, too, he declared.

"'I all but wept, to think that it was my humble eloquence which had
shown him the sottish error of his ways.  All my medical arguments had
availed me nothing; McKay was afraid neither of jungle fever nor of
delirium tremens.  Indeed his resistance was most remarkable.  It was
my earnest pleading with his higher nature which had won him over.  So,
in my mistaken folly, I thought.  His repentance was a sham, a trick of
the devil laughing at me from behind McKay's back.  He was giving up
drink, he said, because he had found something stronger and infinitely
cheaper.  No Scotchman, he declared, could resist such an appeal to
change his life.

"'Shortly after this, McKay learned in some way which I have never been
able to trace, of my crusade against the apes.  I can only surmise that
some false convert in one of the lower tribes betrayed me.  McKay
called upon me to expostulate.  He was calm, although, son of a devil
that he was, he saw no evil in evolution.  He would have let the apes
live, to be a snare to the minds of the ignorant and the young.  He had
the presumption to call my crusade the stupidest cruelty in history.
As if that which saves the souls of millions can be cruel!  I disdained
argument, waiting for him to leave.

"'God, he said, might or might not "punish" me.  The punishment, he
declared, should be made to fit the crime.  But, he concluded with a
sneer, he was no angel from Heaven with a flaming sword in his hand to
prick me over the brink of hell.  He had simply dropped in, he said, to
invite me to come over to his "diggings" and see a remarkable mineral
specimen which he had brought back from the pygmy country.  Pleased at
the compliment of his offer of the olive branch, I gladly accepted.
Little did he guess what it was that he showed me!  It was the secret
key to the Higher Manhood!'"



"HERE Swain raves on for pages over this 'higher manhood,'" Colton
said.  "As you all saw plenty of it in the ravine--those shaggy
half-beasts were the new race of supermen--I can blow off all this
froth and get down to the beer.  He goes on to tell how McKay showed
him what looked like an ordinary steamer trunk for the tropics; how
this trunk, of great weight, when opened was found to be apparently
empty, and how McKay lifted one of the boards in the bottom of it,
disclosing the inner lining of sheet steel which gave the trunk its
great strength.  But, steel and all, the trunk could not have weighed
more than a hundred and fifty pounds--and this was an excessive
estimate.  Still, it taxed all of McKay's great strength to budge the
trunk.

"He goes on to tell of the small rivet, no bigger than a tack, of some
black, granular metal hammered into the sheet steel of the floor, and
asserted by McKay to be the source of all the extraordinary weight.
This tack, or rivet, was so placed that when the board was put back in
the bottom of the trunk, the top of the rivet fitted a small hole in
the board, and protruded like the head of a tack.  Upon this tack McKay
had fastened his visiting card, by cutting a small hole in the card to
fit exactly over the rivet head.  The effect was precisely that of a
card of identification tacked to the wooden floor of the trunk.

"McKay invited Swain to fill his lungs with the air inside the trunk.
Swain did so.  His description of the resulting drunkenness is minutely
exact.  As some of us have had the same experience I can skip
everything but his final comment:

"'McKay, in his brutal ignorance, had shown me the key to Paradise.
Did he know the treasure which was his?  I think not.  But I realized
instantly that here was the divine fire to purify the soul of man by
fear and elevate him to a station but little lower than that of the
happy angels.  McKay, whiskey-sodden drunkard that he was, could only
stand by with an idiotic leer on his face, asking me if it wasn't "a
gey great bogey feelin'" I got.  He referred, I presume, to the exalted
fear which purged my soul like a sweet fire.'

"McKay's game is all clear enough," Colton commented with a dry laugh.
"He knew by personal experience the deadly attractiveness of that
degrading emanation, and he guessed that Swain's character would not be
strong enough to resist a second 'drink' of it.  After the' fifteenth
or sixteenth drink, Swain would be a hopeless addict of the new vice.
In a year or so he would be well on his way to the brutes.  After that,
degenerated nature would take its inevitable course and make Swain
something a little lower than the helpless apes he delighted in
persecuting.

"McKay, we must remember, had seen what the emanations of asterium do
to human beings.  He had followed the course of the disease by
observation on his vicious little friends the pygmies.  So he knew,
therefore, what must become of Swain when that unfortunate man, with a
character no better than a yellow cur's--if as good--was fully exposed
to the temptation.  I shall not make any excuses for McKay.  But you
will agree, I think, that the punishment he prepared for Swain
certainly fitted the crime.  Swain, the flaming torch kindling the palm
leaves at the feet of helpless beasts, was himself to become a beast."

"He got no more than he deserved," was Little Tom's verdict.  "He saw
one of his intended victims, you must remember."

"Unfortunately Swain did not get all that was intended for him," Colton
replied.  "McKay's gun was a dandy, but his aim wobbled.  As usual the
innocent bystander got the worst of it.  McKay left, shortly afterward,
on a new expedition to the pygmies.  Before leaving, however, he took
special pains to tell Swain where he had stored the steamer trunk with
its tack of asterium.  He knew perfectly well that Swain was now so far
gone in his craving that he would steal the trunk at the first
opportunity.  He gave Swain every chance.  'Accidentally' he forgot to
lock the door of his house when he left on his expedition.  The same
night Swain was in possession of the trunk.  I shall omit his long,
rambling justification, based on the Higher Manhood, by which he
excuses the theft.

"It is here that the tragedy begins.  Swain's seventeen year old
daughter Edith, rummaging around in trunks and boxes for bits of
ribbon, raised the lid of the interesting looking steamer trunk and got
her lungs full of the emanation.  The effect varies, it appears,
according to the physical condition of the victim.  Edith was just
right for the fullest action of the degrading influence.  Without her
parents' knowledge she became a hopeless addict in less than a week.

"The discovery of his daughter's fall gave Swain a shock that brought
him, for a moment, to his senses.  For a time he saw himself as he was,
a spineless sot.  He did his best to break the habit and to cure his
daughter without her mother's knowledge.  He failed, for the simple
reason that he never could muster courage to dump the infernal trunk
into the river.  Mrs. Swain was no fool.  Her daughter's condition soon
became visible.  On investigation she easily found the cause.  Swain
and the girl were now so far gone that it was not difficult to catch
them at their mutual orgies.  They had become careless of consequences.

"Mrs. Swain was prostrated.  But not for long.  Under her husband's
evil influence she consented to 'try it just once'--to cheer her up.
To make a long story short, she too was a slave to the degenerating
vice within a month.

"A hideous struggle now began in that stricken family.  First one, then
another would swear never to indulge again, and exhort the others to
repent and be clean.  Mrs. Swain for almost a month actually abstained
totally.  Edith was the weakest.  The stuff took to her brain and body
like fire to tinder.  Swain himself, appalled at the wreckage of two
innocent lives, all but cured himself.  Then he fell, lower than ever,
only to awake again, like a soul in hell, to vain resolutions which he
kept for a month, or a week or a day.

"Not one of the three had the simple courage to throw the cursed stuff
away.  At last, in desperation, Swain fled with Edith into the forest,
leaving his wretched wife to fight her battle alone.  He had tried to
take her too, but she refused to leave.  Swain's idea was that he and
Edith might overtake McKay and beg him to tell them the cure.  Their
faith that he knew a cure was pathetic.  McKay had tempted Swain
deliberately with an insidious vice which he fully--and
correctly--believed to be incurable.

"Swain, we know, was an expert woodsman.  He undoubtedly was a far
greater natural explorer than McKay, and his knowledge of the native
languages was unique.  He tells how he and Edith soon got clues of
McKay's whereabouts, and at once followed.  All this time they were in
hell.  The girl's sufferings for the vice which she had abandoned in a
moment of exaltation drove her to the brink of insanity, possibly over
it."



"THEY found McKay's party in the pygmy country not far, I judge, from
the iron face.  Only Swain's skill as a woodsman had kept him and his
daughter alive and safe from the attacks of human beings and animals.
By this time, Swain had reasoned himself into a belief that the effect
of the emanation was good, not evil.  It gave him a feeling of godlike
exaltation, he recalled, when he indulged; therefore it must be good,
if not wholly godlike itself.  I can skip all his drunkard's logic
proving that he and Edith were not degenerating, but treading the
upward path to a higher humanity.

"This sort of thing is familiar enough to all physicians who have had
much to do with fairly well educated drug fiends.  By the time they had
found McKay, Swain was in no mood for reform.  He wanted more of his
drug, and he wanted it in a hurry.

"McKay, learning what his self-appointed role as avenger of the apes
had accomplished, was horror-stricken.  He himself was already on the
last steep road to hell, and he knew it.  Whiskey had been powerless to
'get' him; the new vice found him no stronger than a baby.  He was its
slave, body, mind and soul.  He had explored the cave and found the
mass of pure asterium which we first identified as a new element.

"His long exploration of the cave had put the mark of the beast not
only on him, but on his followers.  They one and all showed plainly the
unmistakable signs of degeneracy.  Several had already attained an
abnormal growth, and on at least five the coarse gray hair was well
started in patches all over their bodies.  McKay's speech had already
thickened, and he had difficulty in following a simple sentence.  But
his soul still lived.  In this respect he was less far gone than Swain.

"Remorse, as always, was futile.  He could not undo the evil he had
done.  Nor was his befuddled mind capable of refuting Swain's perverted
logic.  In a dumb way he seems to have grasped the utter depravity of
Swain's insane doctrine of a 'Higher Race,' for he awoke to a terrible
fury.  For an hour or more he became clear, far-seeing, coherent.  He
made Swain swear by everything that he held sacred to aid him in
destroying the evil which was destroying both of them.

"Swain confesses he agreed.  His motive, so far as I can judge, was one
which any physician who has had drug patients will understand.  To get
to the source of his vice, Swain would have promised anything.  The
wretched man swore to help McKay in his campaign of destruction, with
his life, if necessary.  But before he could help he must see the devil
which they were to destroy.

"McKay led him to the god of the pygmies.  He himself was on his way to
the shrine when Swain and Edith found him.  But he was going, not as a
breaker of idols, but as a worshipper of evil.  For the vice had now
got such a hold of him that he was powerless in its fiendish grip.

"They fought their way to the mass of metal.  The degenerating human
beings in its shadow at first strove to drive out the strange white
newcomers.  Soon however they accepted them as fellow worshipers.
There were no children in that besotted sect.  The youngest member,
according to Swain, must have been over twenty-five.  His guess as to
the cause is probably correct.  We saw no young, if you remember.  All
the degraded men and women were fully mature.  The degenerating
influence of the metal, according to Swain, sterilized its victims.

"Since returning I have found evidence from my specimens that bears out
Swain's theory.  His daughter therefore was the baby of the community.
She became the pet of such of the wretched victims as still retained
any human feelings.  To show their love, they made way for her at the
shrine, letting her saturate herself in the seductive vice which was
the one thing of value they had to offer.

"For six weeks the three whites wallowed in the new sin.  Swain seems
to have been naturally more resistant than either Edith or McKay.  His
daughter became practically a beast.  Five days before her death she
lost the power of speech.  But for the Captain's--McKay's--sudden and
brief recovery, all three might have sunk forever into brutehood
without leaving a trace on the tides of human affairs.  It was the
last, fierce flareup of a dying mind which precipitated the tragedy.

"One terrible morning McKay came to himself.  He saw clearly what he
was and what he might expect to become.  And he knew what Edith, the
young girl whom he had often seen and admired for her beauty less than
two years previously, he saw, I say, what she already was.  He looked
at the rapidly degenerating human beings--mostly the pygmies, his
former 'children'--pawing their fatal god with hands of bestial
reverence.

"Swain, he noted, had still kept his human shape.  For he, unfortunate
man, was the born addict, the natural drunkard who can sin for years in
secret until suddenly the devil he has nourished casually puts out a
hand and chokes the reason out of him.  But he was still a man, with
the reasoning faculties of a human being.  McKay looked again at Edith.
She was gone, gone forever from the world of human beings.  Then
suddenly he knew that he too was damned.  As surely as this girl had
fallen down to brutehood, so too must he fall.

"In the awful lucidity of that knowledge he swore to destroy the fiend
which had ruined him.  By himself he was powerless.  Long before he
could reach civilization he knew that he would have lost the power of
speech, and possibly also the gift of human reason.  While the last
fierce rays of absolute knowledge lit his dying mind, he implored Swain
to return to his human kind and guide men to the cave and the forest
god.

"He gave full and easy directions, and named half a dozen men who would
organize an expedition at once in response to his call.  These men were
to bring explosives to destroy the meteor, or, failing that, to bury it
under tons of stone and dirt, and block the entrance to the cave.
Swain was to tell everything, so that the destroyers should be
forewarned and, when they found the evil, spare nothing.  Swain
promised.  Why?

"The reason, as I see it, is rather complex.  Swain was moved by
remorse over his daughter's fate, fear of McKay, perverted theory that
the influence of the emanation was good, not bad, and an honest belief
that the black metal was indeed a sort of 'philosopher's stone'
transmuting base human nature into a higher state, and last, he was
urged to escape from this dangerous place to his own home where he
could indulge his vice in safety.  For he still had McKay's trunk,
unless, in his absence, his wretched wife had conquered her destroyer."



"McKAY, for his part, vowed that, man or beast, so long as he lived he
would wage incessant war against the evil.  Although he himself should
lose all reason, instinct, he declared, would yet survive to guide him
in preventing others from following in his footsteps to ruin.  He still
had his rifle and a few shells; the rest of his baggage had long since
been left in the forest by the porters who already were more than half
beast.  The rifle, he knew, would soon be useless; its simple mechanism
would become too complicated for his degenerating brain, and he would
lose it, or in a fit of insanity smash the futile encumbrance and hurl
it away.  While he yet had reason he swore to continue the fight for
good against evil.  We saw his fight.

"What was to be done with Edith?  To take her back to civilization was
out of the question; to leave her where she was would be inhuman.
Fate, kind for once, solved the insolvable difficulty.  McKay, it
seems, began his campaign against the degenerating beast men on the day
that Swain was to leave.  There was a violent struggle round the block
of metal.  Edith fought with the beast men.  In the confusion she was
accidentally shot and killed.  Swain fled, leaving McKay, stark mad, in
possession of the accursed 'idol.'

"Here Swain confesses to one trifling falsehood in what he told us.
His daughter was not drowned.  Nor was the flake of meteoric iron,
which later he stole from Big Tom, obtained by McKay on this occasion.
You remember he said that the geologist shot at him, mistaking him for
an ape, and chipped off the splinter.  It must have been on his first
discovery of the meteor that McKay got his specimen.  When Swain saw it
in Big Tom's possession he lied to excuse his theft later.  Probably he
thought the phenomenally heavy iron contained a fragment of asterium.

"When Swain reached home he found his wife a hopeless addict.  Her
condition, he declares, caused him to 'forget' his promise to McKay.
At any rate no help was sent the desperate man.  Shortly after
returning, Swain left Africa and took his wife to America.  You can
draw your own conclusions.  My own is that Swain, finding himself in
possession of a sufficient supply of asterium for his own vicious
habits, had no occasion for returning to the source of the metal.

"However that may be, and possibly I am too harsh on him, Swain fought
a losing battle.  His wife's degeneration deterred him from full
indulgence.  With her example daily before his eyes he feared to let
himself go as he really wished to go.  Between fits of weakness he
elaborated his theory, of the new evolution and the Higher Race toward
which his vice was leading him.

"All of this is a mere defense mechanism to excuse his lack of
character.  He was rotten, and he knew it, but he hated to admit it,
even to himself.  Poor fellow, he paid for his folly.  His visit to me
was part of his defense.  If I found him strong, physically, then it
was proved that he had indeed attained the boasted state of
super-manhood.

"The Captain's case is more difficult.  Was he punished beyond his
deserts?  Did he deserve any of it?  I shall not attempt to say."

"Whatever the Captain did," Lila said softly, "he has amply made good.
He kept his vow and destroyed the source of evil.  We must go back next
year and finish up in the cave."

"Yes," said Little Tom.  "As to the Captain, if anyone feels like
throwing the first stone, he has my permission.  I'm not competing."

"You are all rather lukewarm it seems to me," Big Tom remarked.
"Perhaps you are scared of giving yourselves away.  As the oldest here
let me say what you are all thinking.  I have no reputation to lose at
my age, so I can be truthful.  The Captain was a darned good fellow.
If 'gentleman' were not such a priggish word I should call him that."



_The End_






[End of The Iron Star, by John Taine]
