Hearts of Three 46

Hearts of Three 46

But the hound did not leap. Instead, playfully, with jaws widespread of

laughter, it sat down and extended its right paw in greeting. As he took

the paw in his hand and shook it, Torres almost collapsed in the

revulsion of relief. He laughed with exuberant shrillness that

advertised semi-hysteria, and continued to pump the hound’s leg up and

down, while the hound, with wide jaws and gentle eyes, laughed as

exuberantly back.

 

Pursuing the shelf, the hound contentedly at heel and occasionally

sniffing his calves, Torres found that the narrow track, paralleling the

river, after an ascent descended to it again. And then Torres saw two

things, one that made him pause and shudder, and one that made his heart

beat high with hope. The first was the underground river. Rushing

straight at the wall of rock, it plunged into it in a chaos of foam and

turbulence, with stiffly serrated and spitefully spitting waves that

advertised its swiftness and momentum. The second was an opening to one

side, through which streamed white daylight. Possibly fifteen feet in

diameter was this opening, but across it was stretched a spider web more

monstrous than any product of a madman’s fancy. Most ominous of all was

the debris of bones that lay beneath. The threads of the web were of

silver and of the thickness of a lead pencil. He shuddered as he touched

a thread with his hand. It clung to his flesh like glue, and only by an

effort that agitated the entire web did he succeed in freeing his hand.

Upon his clothes and upon the coat of the dog he rubbed off the

stickiness from his skin.

 

Between two of the lower guys of the great web he saw that there was

space for him to crawl through the opening to the day; but, ere he

attempted it, caution led him to test the opening by helping and shoving

the hound ahead of him. The white beast crawled and scrambled out of

sight, and Torres was about to follow when it returned. Such was the

panic haste of its return that it collided with him and both fell. But

the man managed to save himself by clinging with his hands to the rocks,

while the four-footed brute, not able so to check itself, fell into the

churning water. Even as Torres reached a hand out to try to save it, the

dog was carried under the rock.

 

Long Torres debated. That farther subterranean plunge of the river was

dreadful to contemplate. Above was the open way to the day, and the life

of him yearned towards the day as a bee or a flower toward the sun. Yet

what had the hound encountered to drive it back in such precipitate

retreat? As he pondered, he became aware that his hand was resting on a

rounded surface. He picked the object up, and gazed into the eyeless,

noseless features of a human skull. His frightened glances played over

the carpet of bones, and, beyond all doubt, he made out the ribs and

spinal columns and thigh bones of what had once been men. This inclined

him toward the water as the way out, but at sight of the foaming madness

of it plunging through solid rock he recoiled.

 

Drawing the Queen’s dagger, he crawled up between the web-guys with

infinite carefulness, saw what the hound had seen, and came back in such

vertigo of retreat that he, too, fell into the water, and, with but time

to fill his lungs with air, was drawn into the opening and into

darkness.

 

* * * * *

 

In the meanwhile, back at the lake dwelling of the Queen, events no less

portentous were occurring with no less equal rapidity. Just returned

from the ceremony at the Long House, the wedding party was in the action

of seating itself for what might be called the wedding breakfast, when

an arrow, penetrating an interstice in the bamboo wall, flashed between

the Queen and Francis and transfixed the opposite wall, where its

feathered shaft vibrated from the violence of its suddenly arrested

flight. A rush to the windows looking out upon the narrow bridge, showed

Henry and Francis the gravity of the situation. Even as they looked,

they saw the Queen’s spearman who guarded the approach to the bridge,

midway across it in flight, falling into the water with the shaft of an

arrow vibrating out of his back in similar fashion to the one in the

wall of the room. Beyond the bridge, on the shore, headed by their

priest and backed by their women and children, all the male Lost Souls

were arching the air full with feathered bolts from their bows.

 

A spearman of the Queen tottered into the apartment, his limbs spreading

vainly to support him, his eyes glazing, his lips beating a soundless

message which his fading life could not utter, as he fell prone, his

back bristling with arrow shafts like a porcupine. Henry sprang to the

door that gave entrance from the bridge, and, with his automatic, swept

it clear of the charging Lost Souls who could advance only in single

file and who fell as they advanced before his fire.

 

The siege of the frail house was brief. Though Francis, protected by

Henry’s automatic, destroyed the bridge, by no method could the besieged

put out the blazing thatch of roof ignited in a score of places by the

fire-arrows discharged under the Sun Priest’s directions.

 

“There is but one way to escape,” the Queen panted, on the platform

overlooking the whirl of waters, as she clasped one hand of Francis in

hers and threatened to precipitate herself clingingly into his arms. “It

wins to the world.” She pointed to the sucking heart of the whirlpool.

“No one has ever returned from that. In my Mirror I have beheld them

pass, dead always, and out to the wider world. Except for Torres, I have

never seen the living go. Only the dead. And they never returned. Nor

has Torres returned.”

 

All eyes looked to all eyes at sight of the dreadfulness of the way.

 

“There is no other way?” Henry demanded, as he drew Leoncia close to

him.

 

The Queen shook her head. About them already burning portions of the

thatch were falling, while their ears were deafened by the blood-lust

chantings of the Lost Souls on the lake-shore. The Queen disengaged her

hand from Francis’, with the evident intention of dashing into her

sleeping room, then caught his hand and led him in. As he stood

wonderingly beside her, she slammed down the lid on the chest of jewels

and fastened it. Next, she kicked aside the floor matting and lifted a

trap door that opened down to the water. At her indication, Francis

dragged over the chest and dropped it through.

 

“Even the Sun Priest does not know that hiding place,” she whispered,

ere she caught his hand again, and, running, led him back to the others

on the platform.

 

“It is now time to depart from this place,” she announced.

 

“Hold me in your arms, good Francis, husband of mine, and lift me and

leap with me,” she commanded. “We will lead the way.”

 

And so they leapt. As the roof was crashing down in a wrath of fire and

flying embers, Henry caught Leoncia to him, and sprang after into the

whirl of waters wherein Francis and the Queen had already disappeared.

 

* * * * *

 

Like Torres, the four fugitives escaped injury against the rocks and

were borne onward by the underground river to the daylight opening where

the great spider-web guarded the way. Henry had an easier time of it,

for Leoncia knew how to swim. But Francis’ swimming prowess enabled him

to keep the Queen up. She obeyed him implicitly, floating low in the

water, nor clutched at his arms nor acted as a drag on him in any way.

At the ledge, all four drew out of the water and rested. The two women

devoted themselves to wringing out their hair, which had been flung

adrift all about them by the swirling currents.

 

“It is not the first mountain I have been in the heart of with you two,”

Leoncia laughed to the Morgans, although more than for them was her

speech intended for the Queen.

 

“It is the first time I have been in the heart of a mountain with my

husband,” the Queen laughed back, and the barb of her dart sank deep

into Leoncia.

 

“Seems as though your wife, Francis, and my wife-to-be, aren’t going to

hit it off too well together,” Henry said, with the sharpness of censure

that man is wont to employ to conceal the embarrassment caused by his

womankind.

 

And, as inevitable result of such male men’s ways, all that Henry gained

was a silence more awkward and more embarrassing. The two women almost

enjoyed the situation. Francis cudgeled his brains vainly for some

remark that would ameliorate matters; while Henry, in desperation, arose

suddenly with the observation that he was going to “explore a bit,” and

invited, by his hand out to help her to her feet, the Queen to accompany

him. Francis and Leoncia sat on for a moment in stubborn silence. He was

the first to break it.

 

“For two cents I’d give you a thorough shaking, Leoncia.”

 

“And what have I done now?” she countered.

 

“As if you didn’t know. You’ve been behaving abominably.”

 

“It is you who have behaved abominably,” she half-sobbed, in spite of

her determination to betray no such feminine signs of weakness. “Who

asked you to marry her? You did not draw the short straw. Yet you must

volunteer, must rush in where even angels would fear to tread? Did I ask

you to? Almost did my heart stop beating when I heard you tell Henry you

would marry her. I thought I was going to faint. You had not even

consulted me; yet it was on my suggestion, in order to save you from

her, that the straws were drawn——yes, and I am not too little shameless

to admit that it was because I wanted to save you for myself. Henry does

not love me as you led me to believe you loved me. I never loved Henry

as I loved you, as I do love you even now, God forgive me.”

 

Francis was swept beyond himself. He caught her and pressed her to him

in a crushing embrace.

 

“And on your very wedding day,” she gasped reproachfully in the midmost

of his embrace.

 

His arm died away from about her.

 

“And this from you, Leoncia, at such a moment,” he murmured sadly.

 

“And why not?” she flared. “You loved me. You gave me to understand,

beyond all chance of misunderstanding, that you loved me; yet here,

to-day, you went out of your way, went eagerly and gladly, and married

yourself to the first woman with a white skin who presented herself.”

 

“You are jealous,” he charged, and knew a heart-throb of joy as she