第2章 THE RED ONE(2)

Then had begun the chase.He retreated up the pig-run before his hunters, who were between him and the beach.How many there were, he could not guess.There might have been one, or a hundred, for aught he saw of them.That some of them took to the trees and travelled along through the jungle roof he was certain; but at the most he never glimpsed more than an occasional flitting of shadows.No bow-strings twanged that he could hear; but every little while, whence discharged he knew not, tiny arrows whispered past him or struck tree-boles and fluttered to the ground beside him.They were bone-tipped and feather shafted, and the feathers, torn from the breasts of humming-birds, iridesced like jewels.

Once - and now, after the long lapse of time, he chuckled gleefully at the recollection - he had detected a shadow above him that came to instant rest as he turned his gaze upward.He could make out nothing, but, deciding to chance it, had fired at it a heavy charge of number five shot.Squalling like an infuriated cat, the shadow crashed down through tree- ferns and orchids and thudded upon the earth at his feet, and, still squalling its rage and pain, had sunk its human teeth into the ankle of hisstout tramping boot.He, on the other hand, was not idle, and with his free foot had done what reduced the squalling to silence.So inured to savagery has Bassett since become, that he chuckled again with the glee of the recollection.

What a night had followed! Small wonder that he had accumulated such a virulence and variety of fevers, he thought, as he recalled that sleepless night of torment, when the throb of his wounds was as nothing compared with the myriad stings of the mosquitoes.There had been no escaping them, and he had not dared to light a fire.They had literally pumped his body full of poison, so that, with the coming of day, eyes swollen almost shut, he had stumbled blindly on, not caring much when his head should be hacked off and his carcass started on the way of Sagawa's to the cooking fire.Twenty-four hours had made a wreck of him- of mind as well as body.He had scarcely retained his wits at all, so maddened was he by the tremendous inoculation of poison he had received.Several times he fired his shot-gun with effect into the shadows that dogged him.Stinging day insects and gnats added to his torment, while his bloody wounds attracted hosts of loathsome flies that clung sluggishly to his flesh and had to be brushed off and crushed off.

Once, in that day, he heard again the wonderful sound, seemingly more distant, but rising imperiously above the nearer war-drums in the bush.Right there was where he had made his mistake.Thinking that he had passed beyond it and that, therefore, it was between him and the beach of Ringmanu, he had worked back toward it when in reality he was penetrating deeper and deeper into the mysterious heart of the unexplored island.That night, crawling in among the twisted roots of a banyan tree, he had slept from exhaustion while the mosquitoes had had their will of him.

Followed days and nights that were vague as nightmares in his memory.One clear vision he remembered was of suddenly finding himself in the midst of a bush village and watching the old men and children fleeing into the jungle.All had fled but one.From close at hand and above him, a whimpering as of some animal in pain and terror had startled him.And looking up he had seen her - a girl, or youngwoman rather, suspended by one arm in the cooking sun.Perhaps for days she had so hung.Her swollen, protruding tongue spoke as much.Still alive, she gazed at him with eyes of terror.Past help, he decided, as he noted the swellings of her legs which advertised that the joints had been crushed and the great bones broken.He resolved to shoot her, and there the vision terminated.He could not remember whether he had or not, any more than could he remember how he chanced to be in that village, or how he succeeded in getting away from it.

Many pictures, unrelated, came and went in Bassett's mind as he reviewed that period of his terrible wanderings.He remembered invading another village of a dozen houses and driving all before him with his shot-gun save, for one old man, too feeble to flee, who spat at him and whined and snarled as he dug open a ground-oven and from amid the hot stones dragged forth a roasted pig that steamed its essence deliciously through its green-leaf wrappings.It was at this place that a wantonness of savagery had seized upon him.Having feasted, ready to depart with a hind-quarter of the pig in his hand, he deliberately fired the grass thatch of a house with his burning glass.

But seared deepest of all in Bassett's brain, was the dank and noisome jungle.It actually stank with evil, and it was always twilight.Rarely did a shaft of sunlight penetrate its matted roof a hundred feet overhead.And beneath that roof was an aerial ooze of vegetation, a monstrous, parasitic dripping of decadent life- forms that rooted in death and lived on death.And through all this he drifted, ever pursued by the flitting shadows of the anthropophagi, themselves ghosts of evil that dared not face him in battle but that knew that, soon or late, they would feed on him.Bassett remembered that at the time, in lucid moments, he had likened himself to a wounded bull pursued by plains' coyotes too cowardly to battle with him for the meat of him, yet certain of the inevitable end of him when they would be full gorged.As the bull's horns and stamping hoofs kept off the coyotes, so his shot- gun kept off these Solomon Islanders, these twilight shades of bushmen of the island of Guadalcanal.