He must, then, have been killed with the first shot.
Phil looked around, and suddenly recoiled with horror.
He had found the mark of those other bullets!
She was a slip of a girl, hardly more than nineteen or twenty, slim formed, delicate of limb, shapely of body. She, too, was attired in nothing save a loin cloth, and even in death the beauty of her figure was apparent. Sprawled as she was upon the leaves of the forest, her body disfigured by two bullet holes, she remained beautiful with that grace which is the property of youth alone.
She had been running, Phil decided, when the shots had brought her down. The first shot had dropped her, the second had finished the gruesome task.
Evidently she had been standing beside the man when he had been beating the drum. The first shot had killed the man, sent her into headlong flight. And Phil, reconstructing the scene, remembered the short interval between the first shot and the following shots, realized that she had covered quite a bit of space in that brief interval.
She had evidently flashed into flight with the speed and grace of a deer, only to be brought down as ruthlessly as though she had, in fact, been a fleeing denizen of the forest.
A sudden rage possessed Phil Bregg. Whether these people were hostile or not, the man who had fired those shots, be he native, American or European, was a coward and a murderer.
By picking the angles of the bullets from the positions of the bodies, Phil was able to determine almost exactly the spot from which the shots must have been fired.
It was a little ridge, some fifty yards away, to which there was a cleared path in the jungle. It was obvious that the man who did the shooting must have been on this ridge, equally obvious that he was not there any longer, or, if there, that he was making no display of hostility, since Phil had been in plain sight of the point when he had walked up to the body of the drummer.
Phil concluded the man had moved away, and he walked boldly along the cleared space, straight to the ridge. He found that he had been correct in his surmise. There was no one in sight when he arrived at the ridge, although there remained ample evidence that a man had been there.
There was a burned match, the glittering gleam of three empty rifle shells, lying where the ejector of the repeating rifle had thrown them. There was, on a closer inspection, a little pile of dark ash which smelled strongly of stale tobacco. The man evidently smoked a pipe, and had scraped out the bowl of its dead residue before refilling it with fresh tobacco.
Phil consulted the trail, and found the track of feet that were covered with shoes, made after the fashion of civilized footwear. He got to hands and knees and surveyed the ground. He found a few grains of fresh brown tobacco, still pleasantly fragrant and moist.
The man had evidently refilled his pipe after the shooting, and the burned match indicated that he had lit his pipe. Phil was armed only with a bow and arrow, a rude, home-made spear. He sensed that this man would be hostile, that he was a cold-blooded murderer. The deaths of the savages had shown his utter ruthlessness, the fact that he had filled and lit his pipe indicated some of the callousness of his nature.
But Phil knew that the island swarmed with savages, and he realized that he could expect short shrift should he fall into the hands of these savages. Undoubtedly the ruthless slaying of the man at the drum, and the young girl who had been with him, would stir the savages to a rage against all intruders upon their island, even had they been friendly in the first place. And Phil, reflecting upon the attitude of the man he had seen stalking him with such deadly ferocity, knew that there had been no opportunity for friendly relations.
There remained, then, his predicament, between the devil and the deep sea. There was a man somewhere ahead who was a murderer. But, at least, he might be prevailed upon to give shelter to his own kind, and he evidently possessed but little fear as to his own safety.
He had killed the natives and then moved away, doing the whole thing as casually as a hunter might shoot a rabbit.
Phil took up the trail, moving cautiously.
The ground was too hard to leave him any footprints other than an occasional heel mark. Apparently the man he sought had walked calmly and serenely straight down the trail.
Phil sniffed the air.
He thought he detected the odor of tobacco smoke, and pushed forward more rapidly. If his man was smoking it would be easy to tell when he was within some distance of Phil.
The odor of burning tobacco became stronger, held the unmistakable tang of a pipe about it. The trail Phil followed grew broader, another trail intersected it, and Phil became conscious of a blue cloud of smoke drifting through the branches of some trees a hundred yards away.
He moved cautiously, convinced himself the smoke came from pipe tobacco, burning fragrantly. Its very volume caused Phil some misgivings. But, he reflected, the man might well be smoking some gourd pipe which held an enormous quantity of tobacco.
He worked his way cautiously toward the eddies of smoke which filtered through the trees.
He left the trail, moved through the forest like a wild animal, keeping to the open spaces so as to avoid rustling branches or breaking twigs. He had learned the art of stalking from Indians, and had learned his lessons well. His progress through the forest was as that of a drifting shadow.
He pushed through a light tangle of bush, paused behind the trunk of a tree, saw that the poisoned arrow was on the string of the bow, and then slipped out into the open.
He noticed the eddying blue of the tobacco smoke, and knew at once that he had been trapped.
For the smoke eddied from no pipe held in the lips of a man, but came instead from a rock where a little pile of tobacco had been stacked so that the burning base sent wisps of smoke from the grains of tobacco that had been piled on top of the red-hot grains underneath.
The man he hunted had, then, cunningly arranged this trap, so that any one trailing would come sneaking up on the smoke. Phil knew the answer at once, even before a cracked laugh grated on his ears.
He looked up, in the direction of that laugh.
He saw gleaming eyes, loose lips, teeth that were stained, a face that was covered with stubble, the shoulders and left sleeve of a coat that had once been white, and the black muzzle of a rifle, the latter trained directly upon his heart.
“Well, well,” cackled the man, “look what walked into my little trap!”
Phil stepped forward, boldly.
“I hoped I’d find you. You seem to have means of taking care of yourself, and I seem to be on a hostile island.”
He determined that he would say nothing whatever about the presence of his companions. He felt that it would be far better if this man knew nothing of the fact that a young, attractive white woman was on the island.
The rifle covered him.
“I wouldn’t come no farther, and I think I’d drop that bow!” said the man.
Phil relaxed his grip, let the bow drop to the ground, shook the quiver from his shoulder, let it clatter to the ground, and then gave the man with the beady eyes his best grin.
“Captured it from a native,” said Phil, trying to speak easily, frankly, as though he had no question of the ultimate friendship between himself and this man. “The chap was stalking me, so I dropped down on his shoulders and took his weapons.”
The man with the rifle laughed.
“That tobacco sure smells good,” went on Phil, “got any more of it?”
And he took a step forward, making it a point to walk casually, as though he expected to be invited to sit down and join the other in a social pipe.
“That’s far enough,” rasped the voice. “Get back there! Get back there, damn you, or I’ll shoot you just as I would a native!”