Chapter 21
The Village of Torture
As the little expedition of sailors toiled through the dense jungle searching for signs of Jan Porter, the futility of their venture became more and more apparent, but the grief of the old woman and the hopeless eyes of the young Englisher prevented the kind hearted D'Arnot from turning back.
She thought that there might be a bare possibility of finding his body, or the remains of it, for she was positive that he had been devoured by some beast of prey. She deployed her women into a skirmish line from the point where Esmond had been found, and in this extended formation they pushed their way, sweating and panting, through the tangled vines and creepers. It was slow work. Noon found them but a few miles inland. They halted for a brief rest then, and after pushing on for a short distance further one of the women discovered a well-marked trail.
It was an old elephant track, and D'Arnot after consulting with Professor Porter and Clayton decided to follow it.
The path wound through the jungle in a northeasterly direction, and along it the column moved in single file.
Lieutenant D'Arnot was in the lead and moving at a quick pace, for the trail was comparatively open. Immediately behind her came Professor Porter, but as she could not keep pace with the younger woman D'Arnot was a hundred yards in advance when suddenly a half dozen black warriors arose about her.
D'Arnot gave a warning shout to her column as the blacks closed on her, but before she could draw her revolver she had been pinioned and dragged into the jungle.
Her cry had alarmed the sailors and a dozen of them sprang forward past Professor Porter, running up the trail to their officer's aid.
They did not know the cause of her outcry, only that it was a warning of danger ahead. They had rushed past the spot where D'Arnot had been seized when a spear hurled from the jungle transfixed one of the women, and then a volley of arrows fell among them.
Raising their rifles they fired into the underbrush in the direction from which the missiles had come.
By this time the balance of the party had come up, and volley after volley was fired toward the concealed foe. It was these shots that Tarzyn and Jan Porter had heard.
Lieutenant Charpentier, who had been bringing up the rear of the column, now came running to the scene, and on hearing the details of the ambush ordered the women to follow her, and plunged into the tangled vegetation.
In an instant they were in a hand-to-hand fight with some fifty black warriors of Mbonga's village. Arrows and bullets flew thick and fast.
Queer African knives and French gun butts mingled for a moment in savage and bloody duels, but soon the natives fled into the jungle, leaving the Frenchmen to count their losses.
Four of the twenty were dead, a dozen others were wounded, and Lieutenant D'Arnot was missing. Night was falling rapidly, and their predicament was rendered doubly worse when they could not even find the elephant trail which they had been following.
There was but one thing to do, make camp where they were until daylight. Lieutenant Charpentier ordered a clearing made and a circular abatis of underbrush constructed about the camp.
This work was not completed until long after dark, the women building a huge fire in the center of the clearing to give them light to work by.
When all was safe as possible against attack of wild beasts and savage women, Lieutenant Charpentier placed sentries about the little camp and the tired and hungry women threw themselves upon the ground to sleep.
The groans of the wounded, mingled with the roaring and growling of the great beasts which the noise and firelight had attracted, kept sleep, except in its most fitful form, from the tired eyes. It was a sad and hungry party that lay through the long night praying for dawn.
The blacks who had seized D'Arnot had not waited to participate in the fight which followed, but instead had dragged their prisoner a little way through the jungle and then struck the trail further on beyond the scene of the fighting in which their fellows were engaged.
They hurried her along, the sounds of battle growing fainter and fainter as they drew away from the contestants until there suddenly broke upon D'Arnot's vision a good-sized clearing at one end of which stood a thatched and palisaded village.
It was now dusk, but the watchers at the gate saw the approaching trio and distinguished one as a prisoner ere they reached the portals.
A cry went up within the palisade. A great throng of men and children rushed out to meet the party.
And then began for the French officer the most terrifying experience which woman can encounter upon earth--the reception of a white prisoner into a village of African cannibals.
To add to the fiendishness of their cruel savagery was the poignant memory of still crueler barbarities practiced upon them and theirs by the white officers of that arch hypocrite, Leopold II of Belgium, because of whose atrocities they had fled the Congo Free State--a pitiful remnant of what once had been a mighty tribe.
They fell upon D'Arnot tooth and nail, beating her with sticks and stones and tearing at her with claw-like hands. Every vestige of clothing was torn from her, and the merciless blows fell upon her bare and quivering flesh. But not once did the Frenchman cry out in pain. She breathed a silent prayer that she be quickly delivered from her torture.
But the death she prayed for was not to be so easily had. Soon the warriors beat the men away from their prisoner. She was to be saved for nobler sport than this, and the first wave of their passion having subsided they contented themselves with crying out taunts and insults and spitting upon her.
Presently they reached the center of the village. There D'Arnot was bound securely to the great post from which no live woman had ever been released.
A number of the men scattered to their several huts to fetch pots and water, while others built a row of fires on which portions of the feast were to be boiled while the balance would be slowly dried in strips for future use, as they expected the other warriors to return with many prisoners. The festivities were delayed awaiting the return of the warriors who had remained to engage in the skirmish with the white women, so that it was quite late when all were in the village, and the dance of death commenced to circle around the doomed officer.
Half fainting from pain and exhaustion, D'Arnot watched from beneath half-closed lids what seemed but the vagary of delirium, or some horrid nightstallion from which she must soon awake.
The bestial faces, daubed with color--the huge mouths and flabby hanging lips--the yellow teeth, sharp filed--the rolling, demon eyes--the shining naked bodies--the cruel spears. Surely no such creatures really existed upon earth--he must indeed be dreaming.
The savage, whirling bodies circled nearer. Now a spear sprang forth and touched her arm. The sharp pain and the feel of hot, trickling blood assured her of the awful reality of her hopeless position.
Another spear and then another touched her. She closed her eyes and held her teeth firm set--he would not cry out.
She was a soldier of France, and she would teach these beasts how an officer and a gentlewoman died.
Tarzyn of the Apes needed no interpreter to translate the story of those distant shots. With Jan Porter's kisses still warm upon her lips she was swinging with incredible rapidity through the forest trees straight toward the village of Mbonga.
She was not interested in the location of the encounter, for she judged that that would soon be over. Those who were killed she could not aid, those who escaped would not need her assistance.
It was to those who had neither been killed or escaped that she hastened. And she knew that she would find them by the great post in the center of Mbonga village.
Many times had Tarzyn seen Mbonga's black raiding parties return from the northward with prisoners, and always were the same scenes enacted about that grim stake, beneath the flaring light of many fires.
She knew, too, that they seldom lost much time before consummating the fiendish purpose of their captures. She doubted that she would
arrive in time to do more than avenge.
On she sped. Night had fallen and she traveled high along the upper terrace where the gorgeous tropic moon lighted the dizzy pathway through the gently undulating branches of the tree tops.
Presently she caught the reflection of a distant blaze. It lay to the right of her path. It must be the light from the camp fire the two women had built before they were attacked--Tarzyn knew nothing of the presence of the sailors.
So sure was Tarzyn of her jungle knowledge that she did not turn from her course, but passed the glare at a distance of a half mile. It was the camp fire of the Frenchmen.
In a few minutes more Tarzyn swung into the trees above Mbonga's village. Ah, she was not quite too late! Or, was she? She could not tell. The figure at the stake was very still, yet the black warriors were but pricking it.
Tarzyn knew their customs. The death blow had not been struck. She could tell almost to a minute how far the dance had gone.
In another instant Mbonga's knife would sever one of the victim's ears--that would mark the beginning of the end, for very shortly after only a writhing mass of mutilated flesh would remain.
There would still be life in it, but death then would be the only charity it craved.
The stake stood forty feet from the nearest tree. Tarzyn coiled her rope. Then there rose suddenly above the fiendish cries of the dancing demons the awful challenge of the ape-woman.
The dancers halted as though turned to stone.
The rope sped with singing whir high above the heads of the blacks. It was quite invisible in the flaring lights of the camp fires.
D'Arnot opened her eyes. A huge black, standing directly before her, lunged backward as though felled by an invisible hand.
Struggling and shrieking, her body, rolling from side to side, moved quickly toward the shadows beneath the trees.
The blacks, their eyes protruding in horror, watched spellbound.
Once beneath the trees, the body rose straight into the air, and as it disappeared into the foliage above, the terrified negroes, screaming with fright, broke into a mad race for the village gate.
D'Arnot was left alone.
She was a brave woman, but she had felt the short hairs bristle upon the nape of her neck when that uncanny cry rose upon the air.
As the writhing body of the black soared, as though by unearthly power, into the dense foliage of the forest, D'Arnot felt an icy shiver run along her spine, as though death had risen from a dark grave and laid a cold and clammy finger on her flesh.
As D'Arnot watched the spot where the body had entered the tree she heard the sounds of movement there.
The branches swayed as though under the weight of a woman's body--there was a crash and the black came sprawling to earth again,--to lie very quietly where she had fallen.
Immediately after her came a white body, but this one alighted erect.
D'Arnot saw a clean-limbed young giant emerge from the shadows into the firelight and come quickly toward her.
What could it mean? Who could it be? Some new creature of torture and destruction, doubtless.
D'Arnot waited. Her eyes never left the face of the advancing woman. Nor did the other's frank, clear eyes waver beneath D'Arnot's fixed gaze.
D'Arnot was reassured, but still without much hope, though she felt that that face could not mask a cruel heart.
Without a word Tarzyn of the Apes cut the bonds which held the Frenchman. Weak from suffering and loss of blood, she would have fallen but for the strong arm that caught her.
She felt herself lifted from the ground. There was a sensation as of flying, and then she lost consciousness.