FROM the opposite side of the gorge the brute, gnawing upon a leg bone of the monkey, watched the two below. He saw the fire kindled and it troubled him. He was afraid of fire. Muddily, in his undeveloped brain, it represented the personification of some malign power. The brute knew no god; but he knew that there were forces that brought pain, disaster, death, and that oftentimes these forces were invisible. The visible causes of such effects were the enemies he had met in the jungle in the form of men or of beasts; therefore, it was natural that he should endow the invisible causes of similar effects with the physical attributes of the enemies that he could see. He peopled the jungle accordingly with invisible men and invisible beasts that wrought pain, disaster, and death. These enemies he held in far greater fear than those that were visible to him. Fire, he knew, was the work of one of these dread creatures, and the very sight of it made him uncomfortable.
The brute was not hungry; he harboured no animosity for the two creatures he stalked; he was motivated by a more powerful urge than hunger or hate. He had seen the girl!
The fire annoyed him and kept him at bay; but time meant little to the brute. He saw that the two had made beds, and he guessed that they would sleep where they were during the night. On the morrow they would go out after food, and there would be no fire with them. The brute was content to wait until the morrow. He found some tall grass and, getting upon his hands and knees, turned about several times, as bedding dogs are wont to do, and then lay down. He had flattened the grasses so that they all lay in one direction, and when he turned upon his bed he always turned in that direction, so that the sharp ends of the grasses did not stick into his flesh. Perhaps he had learned this trick from the wild dogs, or perhaps the wild dogs first learned it from man. Who knows?
In the darkness Fou-tan and King sat upon their beds and talked. Fou-tan was full of questions. She wanted to know all about the strange country from which King came. Most of the things he told her she could not understand; but her questions were quite often directed upon subjects that were well within her ken—there are some matters that are eternal; time does not alter them.
“Are the women of your country beautiful?” she asked.
“Some of them,” replied the man.
“Have you a wife, Gordon King?” The question was voiced in a whisper.
“No, Fou-tan.”
“But you love someone,” she insisted, for love is so important to a woman that she cannot imagine a life devoid of love.
“I have been too busy to fall in love,” he replied good-naturedly.
“You are not very busy now,” suggested Fou-tan.
“I think I shall be a very busy man for the next few days trying to get you back to Pnom Dhek,” he assured her.
Fou-tan was silent. It was so dark that he could scarcely see her. But he could feel her presence near him, and it seemed to exert as strong an influence upon him as might have physical contact. He had recognised the power of that indefinable thing called personality when he had talked with people and looked into their eyes; but he never had had it reach out through the dark and lay hold of him as though with warm fingers of flesh and blood, and King found the sensation most disquieting.
They lay in silence upon their beds of dry grasses, each occupied with his own thoughts. The heat of the jungle day was rising slowly from the narrow gorge, and a damp chill was replacing it. The absolute darkness which surrounded them was slightly mitigated in their immediate vicinity by an occasional flame rising from the embers of their dying fire as some drying twigs of their fuel ignited. King was thinking of the girl at his side, of the responsibility which her presence entailed, and of the duty that he owed to her and to himself. He tried not to think about her, but that he found impossible, and the more that she was in his mind the stronger became the realisation of the hold that she had obtained upon him; that the sensation that she animated within him was love seemed incredibly preposterous. He tried to assure himself that it was but an infatuation engendered by her beauty and propinquity, and he girded himself to conquer his infatuation that he might perform the duty that had devolved upon him in so impersonal a way that there might be no regret.
In order to fortify this noble decision he cast Fou-tan from his mind entirely and occupied himself with thoughts of his friends in far-away America. In retrospect he laughed and danced again with Susan Anne Prentice; he listened to her pleasant cultured voice and enjoyed once more the sweet companionship of the girl who was to him all that a beloved sister might have been; and then a little sigh came from the bed of grasses at his side, and the vision of Susan Anne Prentice faded into oblivion.
Again there was a long silence, broken only by the murmur of the tumbling stream.
“Gordon King!” It was just a whisper.
“What is it, Fou-tan?”
“I am afraid, Gordon King,” said the girl. How like a little child in the dark she sounded. Before he could answer, there came the sound of a soft thud down the gorge and the rattle of loose earth falling from above.
“What was that?” asked Fou-tan in a frightened whisper. “Something is coming, Gordon King. Look!”
Silently the man rose to his feet, grasping his spear in readiness. Down the gorge he saw two blazing points of flame; and quickly stepping to their fire, he placed dry twigs upon the embers, blowing upon them gently until they burst into flame. At a little distance those two glowing spots burned out of the darkness.
King piled more wood upon the fire until it blazed up bravely, illuminating their little grotto and revealing Fou-tan sitting up upon her bed of grasses, gazing with wide horror-filled eyes at those two silent, ominous harbingers of death fixed so menacingly upon them. “My Lord the Tiger!” she whispered; and her low, tense tones were vibrant with all the inherent horror of the great beast that had been passed down to her by countless progenitors, for whom My Lord the Tiger had constituted life’s greatest menace.
Primitive creatures, constantly surrounded by lethal dangers, sleep lightly. The descent of the great cat into the gorge, followed by the sounds of the falling earth and stones it had dislodged, brought to his feet the sleeping brute upon the opposite summit. Thinking that the noise might have come from the quarry in the gorge below, the creature moved quickly to the edge of the cliff and looked down; and as the mounting blazes of King’s fire illuminated the scene, the brute saw the great tiger standing with upraised head, watching the man and the woman in their rocky retreat.
Here was an interloper that aroused the ire of the brute; here was a deadly enemy about to seize that which the brute had already marked as his own. The creature selected a heavy arrow, the heaviest arrow that he carried, and, fitting it to his bow, he bent the sturdy weapon until the point of the arrow touched the fingers of his bow-hand; then he let drive at a point just behind the shoulders of the tiger.
What happened thereafter happened very quickly. The arrow drove through to the great cat’s lungs; the shock, the surprise and the pain brought instant reaction. Not having sensed the presence of any other formidable creature than those before him, My Lord the Tiger must naturally have assumed that they were the authors of his hurt. This supposition, at least, seemed likely if judged by that which immediately occurred.
With a hideous roar, with blazing eyes, with wide distended jaws, revealing gleaming fangs, the great cat charged straight for King. Into the circle of firelight it bounded like a personification of some hideous force of destruction.
Little Fou-tan, on her feet beside King, seized a blazing brand from the fire and hurled it full into the face of the charging beast; but the tiger was too far gone in pain and rage longer to harbour fear of aught.
King’s spear-arm went back. Through his mind flashed the recollection of the other tiger that he had killed with a single spear cast. He had known then that he had been for the instant the favoured child of Fortune. The laws of chance would never countenance a repetition of that amazing stroke of luck; yet there was naught that he could do but try.
He held his nerves and muscles in absolute control, the servants of his iron will. Every faculty of mind and body was centred upon the accuracy and the power of his spear-arm. Had he given thought to what might follow, his nerves must necessarily have faltered, but he did not. Cool and collected, he waited until he knew that he could not miss nor wait another moment. Then the bronze skin of his spear-arm flashed in the light of the fire, and at the same instant he swept Fou-tan to him with his left arm and leaped to one side.
Not even My Lord the Tiger could have acted with greater celerity, calmness, and judgment. A low grunt of surprise and admiration burst from the lips of the brute watching from the summit of the opposite cliff.
The charge of the tiger carried it full into the fire, scattering the burning branches in all directions. The dry grasses of the beds burst into flame. Blinded and terrified, the tiger looked about futilely for his prey; but King had leaped quickly across the stream to the opposite side of the gorge, having learned by experience that a creature near the fire can see nothing in the outer darkness. The great cat, clawing and biting at the spear protruding from its chest, rent the air with its screams of pain and growls of rage. Suddenly it was quiet, standing like a yellow and black statue carved from gold and ebony; then it took a few steps forward, sagged, and slumped lifeless to the ground.
Gordon King felt very weak in the knees, so weak that he sat down quite suddenly. He had rung the bell twice in succession, but he could scarcely believe the evidence of his own eyes. Fou-tan came and sat down close beside him and rested her cheek against his arm. “My Gordon King!” she murmured softly.
Almost without volition he put his arm about her. “My Fou-tan!” he said. The girl snuggled close in his embrace.
For a time they sat watching the tiger, hesitating to approach lest there might remain a spark of life within the great form, each knowing that one little instant of life would be sufficient to destroy them both were they near the beast; but the great cat never moved again.
The dissipated fire was dying down, and realising more than ever now the necessity for keeping it up, King and Fou-tan arose and, crossing the stream, scraped together the remaining embers of their fire and rebuilt it with fresh wood.
From the cliff above the brute watched them, and once again grunted his admiration as he saw King withdraw his spear from the body of the fallen tiger. Placing one foot against the breast of the great beast, the American was forced to exert every ounce of his weight and strength to withdraw the weapon, so deeply was it embedded in the bone and sinew of its victim.
“I am afraid that we shall not get much sleep to-night, Fou-tan,” said King as he returned to the fire.
“I am not sleepy,” replied the girl; “I could not sleep, and then, too, it is commencing to get cold. I would rather sit here by the fire until morning. I would rather have my eyes open than closed in the night when My Lord the Tiger walks abroad.”
Once more they sat down side by side, their backs against the rocky wall that had been warmed by the heat of the nearby fire.
The brute, realising that they had settled themselves for the night, returned to his primitive bed and settled himself once more for sleep.
Fou-tan cuddled close to Gordon King; his arm was about her. He felt her soft hair against his cheek. He drew her closer to him. “Fou-tan!” he said.
“Yes, Gordon King, what is it?” she asked. He noted that her voice trembled.
“I love you,” said Gordon King.
A sigh that came in little gasps was his reply. He felt her heart pounding against his side.
A soft arm crept upward to encircle his neck, drawing him gently down to the sweet face turned toward his. Eyes, dimmed with unshed tears, gazed into his eyes. Trembling lips fluttered beneath his lips, and then he crushed her to him in the first kiss of love.
The flower-like beauty of the girl, her softness, her helplessness, combined with the exaltation of this, his first love, enveloped Fou-tan with an aura of sanctity that rendered her almost an object of veneration in the eyes of the man—a high priestess enshrined in the Holy of Holies of his heart. He marvelled that he had won the love of so glorious a creature. The little slave girl became an angel, and he her paladin. In this thought lay the secret of King’s attitude toward Fou-tan. He was glad that she was small and helpless, for he liked to think of himself as her champion and protector. He liked to feel that the safety of the girl he loved lay in his hands and that he was physically and morally competent to discharge the obligations that Fate had reposed within him.
Despite the fact that she was soft and small, Fou-tan was not without self-reliance and courage, as she had amply proved when she had run away from the palace of Lodivarman and risked the perils of the savage jungle; yet she was still so wholly feminine that she found her greatest happiness in the protection of the man she loved.
“I am very happy,” whispered Fou-tan.
“And so am I,” said King, “happier than I have ever been before in my life, but now we must make our plans all anew.”
“What do you mean?” she asked.
“We may not go to Pnom Dhek now. We must find our way out of the jungle so that I can take you to my own country.”
“Why?” she demanded.
“Before I answer you,” he replied, “there is one question that I have not asked but that you must answer before we make our plans for the future.”
“What is that?” she asked.
“Will you be my wife, Fou-tan?”
“Oh, Gordon King, I have answered that already, for I have told you that I love you. Fou-tan would not tell any man that whom she could not or would not take as her husband; but what has that to do with our returning to Pnom Dhek?”
“It was everything to do with it,” replied King, “because I will not take the woman who is to be my wife back into slavery.”
She looked up into his face, her eyes alight with a new happiness and understanding. “Now I may never doubt that you love me, Gordon King,” she said.
He looked at her questioningly. “I do not understand what you mean,” he said.
“Though you thought that I was born a slave, you asked me to be your wife,” she said.
“You told me from the first that you were a slave girl,” he reminded her.
“I was a slave girl in Lodidhapura,” she explained, “but in Pnom Dhek I am no slave. I must return there to my father’s house. It is my duty. When the King learns what a great warrior you are, he will give you a place in his guard. Then you will be able to take a wife, and, perhaps, my father will not object.”
“And if he does?” asked King.
“Let us not think of that,” replied Fou-tan.
As the night wore on, a slow rain commenced to fall, herald of the coming rainy season. King kept the fire replenished, and its heat warmed them as they sat and talked of their future, or spoke in half-awed whispers of the transcendent happiness that had come into their lives.
Before dawn the rain ceased and the skies cleared, and when the sun rose he looked upon a steaming jungle, where strange odours, long imprisoned by drought, filled the air as they wandered through the forest.
King rose and stretched himself. Near him the carcass of the great beast he had slain aroused within him regret that he must leave such a trophy to the carrion creatures or to decay.
From the tiger’s back protruded the feathered shaft of an arrow. King was puzzled. He tugged upon the missile and withdrew it. It was a crude thing—much more primitive than those made by Che. It created a mystery that appeared little likely of solution. The best that he could do was guess that the tiger had carried it for some time before he attacked them. Then, for the time, he forgot the matter, which later was to be recalled in poignant grief.
Across the gorge the brute bestirred himself. He had lain quietly throughout the rain, keeping the spot beneath him dry. Physical discomfort meant little to him; he was accustomed to it. He arose, and, like King, stretched himself. Then he crept to the edge of the gorge and looked down at the man and the woman.
Fou-tan, who had been dozing, awoke now and rose to her feet. With the undulating grace of youth and health and physical perfection she came and stood beside King. She leaned close against the man, who put an arm about her and, bending, kissed her upturned mouth. The brute moistened his thick lips with a red tongue.
“And now,” said King, “I am going up into the forest to get some more fruit. It will be a light breakfast, but better than none; and I do not dare build up the fire again by daylight.”
“While you are gone I shall bathe myself in the stream,” said Fou-tan; “it will refresh me.”
“I am afraid to leave you here alone,” said King.
“There is no danger,” replied Fou-tan. “The beasts are not hunting now, and there is little likelihood that the soldiers who are searching for us have broken camp so early. No, I shall remain here. Let me have my bath, Gordon King, and do not return too quickly.”
As King walked down the gorge to the place where he could ascend into the forest, the brute upon the opposite side watched his every move and then proceeded quickly up the farther bank of the gorge in the opposite direction from that taken by King. There was no trail in the jungle that the brute did not know, so that he was aware of a place where he might easily descend into the gorge a short distance above the spot where Fou-tan bathed.
The girl wore only two garments beside her sandals—a silken sampot and the makeshift sarong—so that scarcely was King out of sight before she was splashing in the cold waters of the stream. The temperature of the water that came down from the high hills, coupled with her fear that King might return too soon, prompted her to haste. Having no towel, she used one end of the sarong to dry herself, adjusted her sampot and wound the sarong about her lithe body. Then she stood looking down the gorge in the direction from which King would return. Her heart was filled with her new happiness, so that it was with difficulty that she restrained her lips from song.
From up the gorge, behind her, crept the brute. Even if he had approached noisily, the rushing waters would have drowned the sound, but it was not the way of the brute to move noisily. Like the other carnivores, stealth was habitual to him. The brute was the personification of the cunning and malignity of the tiger; but there the parallel ceased, for the tiger was beautiful and the brute was hideous.
It is remarkable that there should be so many more beautiful creatures in the world than man, which suggests a doubt of man’s boast that he is made in the image of God. There are those who believe that the image of God must transcend in its beauty the finite conceptions of man. If that be true and God chose to create any animal in His own likeness, man must have trailed at the far end of that celestial beauty contest.
The brute crept stealthily down upon the unsuspecting girl. He rounded the corner of a cliff and saw her standing with her back toward him. He moved swiftly now, crouched like a charging tiger, yet his naked feet gave forth no sound; while Fou-tan, with half-closed eyes and smiling lips, dreamed of the future that love held in store.
The brute sprang close behind her. A filthy, calloused paw was clapped across her mouth. A rough and powerful arm encircled her waist. She was whirled from her feet, her cries stifled in her throat, as the brute wheeled and ran swiftly up the gorge, bearing his prize.
King quickly found the fruit he sought, but he loitered in returning to give Fou-tan an opportunity to complete her toilet. As he idled slowly back to the gorge, his mind was occupied with plans for the future. He was considering the advisability of remaining in hiding where they were for several days on the chance that the soldiers of Lodivarman might in the meantime give up the search and return to Lodidhapura. He determined that they might explore the gorge further in the hope of finding a safer and more comfortable retreat, where they might be less at the mercy of night prowlers and even more securely hidden from searchers than they were at present. He was also moved by the prospect of a few idyllic days during which there would be no one in the world but himself and Fou-tan.
Filled with enthusiasm for his heaven-sent plan, King descended into the gorge and approached the now hallowed precincts of his greatest happiness; but as he rounded the last bend he saw that Fou-tan was not there. Perhaps she had gone farther up the stream to bathe. He called her name aloud, but there was no reply. Again he called, raising his voice, but still there was only silence. Now he became alarmed and, running quickly forward, searched about for some sign or clue to her whereabouts; nor had he long to search. In the soft earth, damp from the recent rain, he saw the imprints of a huge foot—the great bare foot of a man. He saw where the prints had stopped and turned, and it was easy to follow them up the gorge. Casting aside the fruit that he had gathered, he hastened along the well-marked trail, his mind a fiery furnace of fear and rage, his heart a cold clod in his leaden breast.
Now, quite suddenly, he recalled the arrow he had found embedded behind the shoulders of the tiger that he had killed. He recalled the beast’s sudden scream of rage and pain as it had charged so unexpectedly toward him, and quite accurately he reconstructed the whole scene—the man had been spying upon them from the top of the gorge; he had seen the tiger and had shot it to save his quarry to himself; then he had waited until King had left Fou-tan alone; the rest was plainly discernible in the footprints that he followed. He was confident that this was no soldier of Lodivarman; the crude arrow refuted that idea, as did the imprints of the great bare feet. But what sort of man was it and why had he stolen Fou-tan? The answer to that question goaded King to greater speed.
A short distance up the gorge King discovered where the tracks turned to the right, up the bed of a dry wash and thus to the level of the forest above. He gave thanks now for the providential rain that rendered the spoor easily followed. He knew that the abductor could not be far ahead, and he was sure that he could overtake him before harm could befall Fou-tan. However, as he hastened on, he was chilled by the thought that no matter how plain the spoor, the necessity for keeping it always in sight could but retard his speed; and his fear was that the slight delay might permit the man to outdistance him; and then he came to a patch of rocky ground where the trail, becoming immediately faint, suddenly disappeared entirely. Sick with apprehension, the American was forced to stop and search for a continuation of the tracks, and when, at last, he found them he knew that his quarry had gained greatly upon him during this enforced delay.
Again he sped along as rapidly as he could through a forest unusually devoid of underbrush. As he advanced he presently became aware of a new sound mingling with the subdued daylight noises of the jungle. It was a sound that he could not identify, but there was something ominous about it; and then, quite suddenly, he came upon the authors of it—great grey bulks looming among the boles of the trees directly in his path.
Under other circumstances he would have halted or, at least, changed his route; and had he reflected even for an instant, his better judgment now would have prompted him to do the latter; but uppermost in his mind and entirely dominating him was the great fear that he felt for Fou-tan’s safety; and when he saw this obstacle looming menacingly before him, his one thought was to override it by sheer effrontery that it might not even delay him, much less thwart him in the pursuit of his object.
Had he been vouchsafed from his insanity even a single brief moment of lucidity, he would have avoided those ominous bulks moving restlessly to and fro among the boles of the giant trees, for even at the best wild elephants are nervous and short-tempered; and these, obviously disconcerted and suspicious by reason of some recent occurrences, were in a particularly hysterical and ugly mood. There were young calves among them and, therefore, watchful and irritable mothers; while the great bulls, aroused and on guard, were in no mood to be further provoked.
A huge bull, his ears outspread, his tail erect, wheeled toward the advancing man. The forest trembled to his mad trumpeting, and in that instant King realised for the first time the deadly peril of his position and knew that it would serve Fou-tan nothing were he to rush headlong into that inevitable death.