He was right. Even though Holmes and I fell into some bushes which eased our descent, we were still bruised and, shaken up. We scrambled out, however, and made our way through the growth toward the supplies. The ship passed over us, sliding its great shadow like a cloak, and then it struck something. The whirring propellors were snapped off, the cars crumpled and came loose with a nerve-scraping sound, the ship lifted again with the weight of the cars gone, and it drifted out of sight. But its career was about over. A few minutes later, it exploded. Reich had left several time-bombs next to some gas cells.
The flames were very bright and very hot, outlining the dark skeleton of its framework. Birds flew up and around it. No doubt they and the beasts of the jungle were making a loud racket, but the roar of the flames drowned them out.
By their light we could see back down the hill, though not very far. We struggled through the heavy vegetation, hoping to get to the supplies before the others. We had agreed to take as much food and water as we could carry and set off by ourselves, if we got the chance. Surely, we reasoned, there must be some native village nearby, and once there we would ask for guidance to the nearest British post.
By pure luck, we came across a pile of food and some bottles of water. Holmes said, “Dame Fortune is with us, Watson!” but his chuckle died the next moment when Von Bork stepped out of the bushes. In his hand was a Luger automatic and in his one eye was the determination to use that before the others arrived. He could claim, of course, that we were fleeing or had attacked him and that he was forced to shoot us.
“Die, you pig-dogs!” he snarled, and he raised the gun. “Before you do, though, know that I have the formula on me and that I will get it to the Fatherland and it will doom you English swine and the French swine and the Italian swine. The bacilli can be adapted to eat Yorkshire pudding and snails and spaghetti, anything that is edible! The beauty of it is that it’s specific, and unless it’s mutated to eat sauerkraut, it will starve rather than do so!”
We drew ourselves up, prepared to die as British men should. Holmes muttered out of the corner of his mouth, “Jump to one side, Watson, and then we’ll rush him! You take his blind side! Perhaps one of us can get to him!”
This was a noble plan, though I didn’t know what I could do even if I got hold of Von Bork.
After all, he was a young man and had a splendid physique.
At that moment there was a crashing in the bushes, Reich’s loud voice commanding Von Bork not to shoot, and the commander, tears streaming from his face, stumbled into the little clearing. Behind him came others. Von Bork said, “I was merely holding them until you got here.”
Reich, I must add, was not weeping because of any danger to us. The fate of his airship had dealt him a terrible blow; he loved his vessel and to see it die was to him comparable to seeing his wife die. Perhaps it had even more impact, since, as I later found out, he was on the verge of a divorce.
Though he had saved us, he knew that we were ready to skip out at the first chance. He kept a close eye on us, though it was not as close as Von Bork’s. Nevertheless, he allowed us to retreat behind bushes to attend to our comforts. And so, three days later, we strolled on away.
“Well, Watson,” Holmes said, as we sat panting under a tree several hours later, “we have given them the slip. But we have no water and no food except these pieces of mouldy biscuit in our pockets. At this moment I would trade them for a handful of shag.”
We went to sleep finally and slept like the two old and exhausted men we were. I awoke several times, I think because of insects crawling over my face, but I always went back to sleep quickly. About eight in the morning, the light and the uproar of jungle life awoke us. I was the first to see the cobra slipping through the tall growths toward us. I got quickly, though unsteadily and painfully, to my feet. Holmes saw the reptile then and started to get up. The snake raised its upper part, its hood swelled, and it swayed as it turned its head this way and that.
“Steady, Watson!” Holmes said, though the advice would better have been given to himself. He was much closer to the cobra, within striking range, in fact, and he was shaking more violently than I. He could not be blamed for this, of course. He was in a more shakeable situation.
“I knew we should have brought along that flask of brandy,” I said. “We have absolutely nothing for snakebite.”
“No time for reproaches, you imbecile!” Holmes said. “Besides, what kind of medical man are you? It’s sheer superstitious nonsense that alcohol helps prevent the effects of venom.”
“Really, Holmes,” I said. He had been getting so irascible lately, so insulting. Part of this could be excused, since he became very nervous without the solace of tobacco. Even so, I thought...
The thought was never finished. The cobra struck, and Holmes and I both jumped, yelling at the same time.
Something hissed through the air. The cobra was knocked aside by the impact of a missile, and it writhed dying on the ground. An arrow transfixed it just back of the head.
“Steady, Watson!” Holmes said. “We are saved, but the savage who shot that may have preserved us only so he’ll have fresher meat for his pot!”
Suddenly, we leaped into the air again, uttering a frightened scream.
Seemingly out of the air, a man had appeared before us.
My heart was beating too hard and my breath was coming too swiftly for me to say anything for a moment.
Holmes recovered first.
He said, “Lord Greystoke, I presume?”
Seven
He seemed to be a giant, though actually he was only about three inches taller than Holmes. His bones were large, extraordinarily so, and though he was muscular, the muscles were not the knots of the professional strong man. Where a wrestler or weight lifter recalls a gorilla, he resembled a leopard. The face was handsome and striking. His hair was chopped off at the base of the neck, apparently by use of the huge hunting knife in the scabbard suspended by an antelope-skin belt just above the leopard-skin loincloth. The hair was as black as an Arab’s, as was the bronzed skin which was criss-crossed with scars. His eyes were large and dark grey and had about them something both feral and remote. His nose was straight, his upper lip was short, and his chin was square and clefted.
He held in one hand a short thick bow of some wood and carried on his back a quiver with a dozen more arrows.
So this is Lord Greystoke, I thought. Yes, his features are enough like those of the ten-year-old Lord Saltire we rescued in the adventure of the Priory School for him to be a twin. But this man radiates a frightening ferality, a savagery more savage than any possessed by the most primitive of men. This could not possibly be the scion of an ancient British stock, not by any stretch of the fancy the English gentleman that Saltire had been even at the age of ten. This man had been raised in a school that made the hazing of the Priory, Rugby, and Oxford seem like the child’s play that it was.
Of course, I thought, he may be mad. How otherwise account for the strange tales that floated about the clubs and the salons of our nobility and gentry?
However, I thought, he could be a product which the British occasionally turn out. Every once in a while, a son of our island, affected in some mystical way by the Orient or Africa, goes more native than the native. There was Sir Richard Francis Burton, more Arab than the Arab, and Lord John Roxton, who was said to be wilder than the Amazon Indians with whom he consorted.