“What terms, H'yemba?”
“Slavery for you and yours! Your son shall be my serf; your woman my chattel! Ha, that woman! She has already fought me, like one of these strange woods-beasts you have made us kill! See! My hair is burned and my flesh blistered with her fire-beating! But when I hold her in these hands then she shall pay for all, the vuedma!”
Stern's hand twitched, with the automatic gripped in the fingers, but the blacksmith cried a warning.
“Raise not that hand, slave!” he ordered. “You cannot shoot without the danger of killing this vile spawn of yours! And remember, too, the river lies far below, and very sharp are the waiting rocks!
“Fool that you are, that think yourself so wise! To leave this place with me! With me, skilled in all labors of metal and stone, strong to cut passage-ways--”
“You devil! You hewed a way into my house?”
H'yemba laughed brutally.
“Silently, steadily, I labored!” he boasted. “And behold the reward! Power for me; eternal slavery for you and all your blood--if any live!”
Insane with rage and hate, Allan nevertheless realized that now all depended on keeping his thought and nerve.
One single premature move and his son would inevitably be hurled over the parapet, down two hundred and fifty feet to the river-bed below. At all hazards, he must keep cool!
The smith, after all only a barbarian and of limited intelligence, had not even thought of the obvious command to make Stern drop his pistol on the floor.
Upon this oversight now hung all Allan's hopes.
Even though the man's retainers might rush the cave and slaughter all, yet in Allan's heart burned a clear and steady flame of hot desire to compass H'yemba's death.
And as the smith now loudly boasted, insulted, vilified, in the true manner of the savage, imperceptibly, inch by inch, Allan was turning his pistol-barrel upward.
Higher, higher, bit by bit it crept toward the horizontal. Unaccustomed to shoot from the hip, Allan realized that right before him lay a supreme test of nerve and marksmanship and skill.
To shoot and kill his boy--the thought was too hideous even to be considered. His father-heart yearned toward the frightened, crying child there in the traitor's grip.
The unconscious form of Beatrice fever-burned and panting on the bed, seemed calling aloud to him: “Aim true, Allan! Aim true!”
For one false shot inevitably sealed the child's death. To wound H'yemba and not kill him meant the catastrophe. If the bullet failed to enter brain or heart, H'yemba--though mortally hurt--would of a surety, with his last quiver of strength, sling the boy outward over the dizzying parapet.
Allan prayed; yet his prayer was wordless, formless and unconscious.
He dared not glance down at the automatic. His eyes must hold the smith's. And he must speak, must parley, at all hazards must still gain another moment's respite.
What Allan said in those last terrible, eternal seconds he could never afterward recall.
He only knew he was treating with the enemy, making terms, listening, answering--all with mechanical sub-consciousness.
His real personality, his true ego, was absolutely absorbed in the one vital, all-deciding problem of that stiffening pistol-hand.
Suddenly something seemed to cry in his ear:
“You have it now! Fire!”
His hand leaped back with the crashing discharge, loud-echoing in the cave.
H'yemba did not even yell. But at the second when he seemed to crumple all together, falling as an empty sack falls, some involuntary jerk of his finger sent a bullet zooming into the cave.
It shattered beyond Allan in a little shower of steel and lead fragments, mingled with rock-dust.
Before these had even fallen Allan was upon him.
Neglecting for an instant the bruised and screaming child, who lay there struggling on the terrace-path, Allan seized the still-twitching body of the monstrous traitor.
With passionate strength he dragged it to the parapet.
Below, down the path, he caught a swift glimpse of grouped Folk, wondering, staring, aghast.
To them he gave no heed.
He lifted the body, dripping bright blood.
Silent, indomitable, disheveled, he raised it on high.
Then, with a cry: “See, ye people, how I answer traitors!” he whirled it outward into the void.
Over and over it gyrated through vacant space. Then, with an echoing splash, the river took it, and the swift current, white-foaming, boisterous, wild, rolled it and tumbled it away, away forever, into the unknown.
With harsh cries and a wild spatter of bullets aimed high above them, Allan drove the cowed and beaten partizans of H'yemba jostling, fleeing, howling for mercy, down the terrace-path between the cliff and parapet.
Only then, when he knew victory was secure and his own dominance once more sealed on them, did he run swiftly back to his boy.
Snatching up the child, he retreated into the home cave again; and now for the first time he realized his wan and sunken cheeks were wet with tears.
CHAPTER XXVI. THE COMING OF THE HORDE
Now that, for an hour or two at least, he felt himself free and master of the situation, Allan devoted himself with energy to the immediate situation in Cliff Villa.
Though still weak and dazed, old Gesafam had now recovered strength and wit enough to soothe and care for the child.
Allan heard from her, in a few disjointed words, all she knew of the kidnapping. H'yemba, she said, had suddenly appeared to her, from the remote end of the cave, and had tried to snatch the child.
She had fought, but one blow of his ax had stunned her. Beyond this, she remembered nothing.
Allan sought and quickly found the aperture made by the smith through the limestone.
“Evidently he'd been planning this coup for a long time,” thought he. “The great catastrophe of the land-slide broke the last bonds of order and restraint, and gave him his opportunity. Well, it's his last villainy! I'll have this passageway cemented up. That's all the monument he'll ever get. It's more than he deserves!”
He returned to Beatrice. The girl still lay there, moaning a little in her fevered sleep. Allan watched her in anguish.
“Oh, if she should die--if she should die!” thought he, and felt the sweat start on his forehead. “She must not! She can't! I won't let her!”
A touch on his arm aroused him from his vigil. Turning, he saw Gesafam.
“The child, O Kromno, hungers. It is crying for food!” Allan thought. He saw at once the impossibility of letting the boy come near its mother. Some other arrangement must be made.
“Ah!” thought he. “I have it!”
He gestured toward the door.
“Go,” he commanded. “Go up the path, to the palisaded place. Take this rope. Bring back, with you a she-goat. Thus shall the child be fed!”
The old woman obeyed. In a quarter-hour she had returned, dragging a wild goat that bleated in terror.
Then, while she watched with amazement, Allan succeeded in milking the creature; though he had to lash securely all four feet and throw it to the cave-floor before it would submit.
He modified the milk with water and bade the old woman administer it by means of a bit of soft cloth. Allan, Junior, protested with yells, but had to make the best of hard necessity; and, after a long and painful process, was surfeited and dozed off. Gesafam put him to bed on the divan by the fire.
“A poor substitute,” thought Allan, “but it will sustain life. He's healthy; he can stand it--he's got to. Thank God for that goat! Without it he might easily have starved.”