Quick! For the love of G.o.d, quick!"

I gripped his shoulders and he managed to stand upright. The dawn came with tropic suddenness at that moment, and I saw that he was bleeding from a nasty wound above the right temple, while he limped painfully as I helped him across a small cleared patch near the tree.

"I've hurt my leg," he cried, "but I'm going to get to the camp. If I fall, Verslun, I want you to lend me a hand. Promise to help me, will you? She--Miss Barbara, you know, old man. She is everything to me. Give me a hand if I tumble down."

"I promise," I answered, and he wrung my hand as we started off through the clawing, scratching vines that tripped us up as we tried to fight our way forward.

If we had thought on the night before that the quarter mile of country that lay between the camp and the rocky wall was a difficult stretch to negotiate, we were more than doubly certain of its impenetrable character now that daylight had come. How we had ever managed to get through it in the darkness was a mystery that we tried to solve as we attempted to make our way back. The place was a mad riot of th.o.r.n.y undergrowth, laced and bound with vines that were as strong as wire hawsers. The lianas appeared human to us; they la.s.soed our legs and flung us sprawling upon our faces whenever we tried to quicken our speed. Thorns of a strange fishhook variety drove their barbed points into us, and each yard of the tortuous path that we cut through the devilish vines was marked by a sc.r.a.p of our clothing, which the tormenting thorns seemed to wave aloft as an emblem of victory.

"He'll beat us!" gasped Holman. "I'm all in, Verslun; that fall has finished me."

"Keep at it!" I said. "We must be near the camp by now."

"We've walked three miles," muttered Holman. "We've lost our way."

"No, we haven't!" I cried. "We've struck a bad patch, but we'll get there soon."

The youngster clenched his teeth and endeavoured to forget the agony of his leg, but the effort taxed his courage.

"We'll do it," I said. "Don't let the brute beat us."

"I--I won't!" he stammered. "If it was anything but my leg! Verslun!"

He fell on his face, and I helped him up, but once again he collapsed.

The injured limb made it impossible for him to stand or even crawl.

"You get ahead," he cried hoa.r.s.ely. "Leave me, Verslun! Leave me here!"

"But I'd never find you again," I protested.

"Yes, you would! I'll crawl out after a few hours' rest. Run to the camp, and shoot--shoot the devil the moment you put your eyes on him!"

I took a quick glance at the matted walls of the green creepers that hedged us in on all sides. Holman was in the last stages of exhaustion, and I reasoned quickly. If I left him in the middle of the th.o.r.n.y tangle that encompa.s.sed us, it would be utterly impossible for me to find him again, and he would probably perish from thirst. If I rushed away I would be leaving him to certain death, and although our prospects of leaving the island alive did not look too bright at that moment, I considered that I would be making his demise a certainty by leaving him in the maze.

I stopped, gripped him round the waist, and with a great effort managed to lift him upon my shoulder. Holman's actions did not help me as I struggled beneath him. He kicked like a madman when he understood what I intended to do, but I held him in spite of his protests.

"Leave me here!" he screamed. "Go ahead by yourself, Verslun! What's the use of taking me?"

"You're coming, so you can stop kicking," I muttered. "Take your fingers out of my eyes."

But Holman's struggles ceased then, and his head fell backward. The pain of his leg had made the plucky youngster swoon away, and with a prayer upon my lips I sprang again at the bulwark of vicious creepers.

I have a very vague recollection of the remainder of that trip. In my subconscious mind I have memories of an insane struggle with a jungle that was alive, of a fight with th.o.r.n.y creepers that pursued us. I became convinced that those vines were alive, because the same thorns that we had pa.s.sed hours before rose up again in our path and waved the sc.r.a.ps of b.l.o.o.d.y clothing that they had torn from Holman and myself.

At last, half insane with anxiety for the safety of the girls and our own struggles, we staggered blindly into the patch of cleared land upon which the camp had been pitched on the previous evening. It was impossible to mistake the site. The embers of the big fire were still smoking and we stared with sweat-blinded eyes at the place where the girls' tent had been standing when we rushed off with Kaipi to investigate the light in the hills. But there was no trace of the girls or the Professor. Leith had got ahead of us, and the big brute had rushed the crazy scientist and his two daughters toward the hills that stood up black and defiant above the sea of green vegetation.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

CHAPTER XV

A DAY OF SKIRMISHING

We lay for a few moments upon the soft gra.s.s, then Holman crawled on hand and knees to the little spring of cold water and bathed the wound upon his temple and his injured leg. The water revived him, and after a brief rest he got to his feet and stared at the festooned trees that surrounded the spot.

"I'm ready, Verslun," he muttered. "Which way did they go?"

I pointed to the marks made in the soft ground by the shoes of the two girls, and Holman limped forward.

"But we can't follow this fashion," I protested.

"Why not?"

"We'll be shot down before we get within half a mile of them. Leith cannot know that we have escaped from the cavern or he would have left some one here to interview us."

"Well, we can't do any high-cla.s.s tracking in this country," said the youngster grimly. "If we stray six feet from the trail we are lost. We had better trust to fortune and go ahead."

It was impossible to do anything else. The route by which the carriers had marched from the camping ground was perfectly clear while we followed their footsteps, but if we diverged ever so slightly the thick veils of verdure hid the path from our eyes. To follow the party we would have to hold to the trail and take the chances of an ambush which Leith would certainly prepare for us the moment he knew we had escaped from the Cavern of Skulls. It would be easy for him to set his one-eyed white partner to shoot us down as we staggered along the trail which Soma or one of the carriers had blazed with an axe.

"They cannot have more than three hours' start of us," cried Holman.

"Give me your arm, Verslun. Now let us move as fast as we can."

"But this is puerile," I protested. "We'll be running our heads into the noose."

"I don't care if we do. I want to get near Leith."

"But we'll never get near by running after him in this fashion. If we could find some way to get in front of him and wait."

"But what will happen to the girls?"

"Will our death prevent it?" I snapped. "If we rush after him in the open we'll throw our chances away."

I am a sailor, absolutely ignorant of jungle knowledge, but I had sense enough to know that Leith would not leave his rear exposed for a moment after he had received word from the cave. I tried to recall stories of extraordinary trailing feats as we stumbled forward, but I became convinced that all the marvellous performances I had ever read of had been accomplished under conditions that were altogether different from those that confronted us upon the Isle of Tears. An open piece of country would have been a sight of joy to our eyes that were weary of the everlasting mesh of green which encompa.s.sed us like the tentacles of a malignant fate. The green, sweaty leaves, the fat, bloated pods, and the lengths of pythonesque runners produced a mental nausea. The vegetation appeared to us to be vicious. Its very luxuriance produced that fear of the wild which grips one in tropical countries but which is never felt in lands situated in the temperate zones.

We had not covered a hundred yards of the path when Holman pounced upon a strip of white bark that waved to us from the thorn of a lawyer-vine crossing the track. A few pencilled words covered the smooth side of the strip, and we absorbed them in a single glance.

"'We're prisoners now,' muttered Holman, reading the few words in a whisper. 'The brute has declared himself. Barbara.'"

The boy turned to me, his face all blood-smeared and haggard, and for a moment we stared at the strip of bark. There had been no doubt in our minds concerning Leith's intentions from the time that Kaipi brought us the message which Soma had dropped, but the knowledge that the brute had declared himself to the Professor and the two girls brought us a most horrible feeling. In my own case I had never experienced such a sensation. The strange rites connected with the "tivo" in the long cave had laid a foundation upon which my imagination piled skysc.r.a.pers of horror. If I could have fixed my mind upon a definite fate that would be theirs if they were not rescued from the big brute's clutches, I would have found relief, but my inability to do that left me a victim to thoughts that were enough to deprive one of his reason. We looked upon the island as the ceremonial place for rites that were stamped out in the groups where the missionary had pushed himself, and the message from Barbara Herndon became a mental piledriver to ram home a thousand doubts that had obtained a footing in our minds.

"Come on!" cried Holman. "If we don't catch up with him I'll go mad!"

He turned to hurry along the narrow path, but out of the silence behind us came a shout that caused us to dive promptly into the bushes. The whoop came from the direction of the camping ground, and we had hardly crouched in the undergrowth when a nude native crashed through the vines and raced past our hiding place. He was followed by two more, the three running at top speed, heads forward, and their chests heaving in a manner that suggested they had come some distance.

In the glimpse we caught of them as they dashed past we came to the conclusion that they were three of the "tivo" dancers, and as we watched their bare brown backs disappear in the creepers we observed something which our position on the previous evening had prevented us from seeing.

The backs of the three were tattooed, not with the common line tattooing, but with short scars that ran down the spine, making a ridged representation of a centipede, and as they pa.s.sed I remembered that the Professor, when taking a photograph of the stone table on the previous morning, had commented on the same peculiar pattern which he had discovered upon one of the huge supporting pillars.

"They've come to tell Leith that we have escaped," whispered Holman.