Drome/Chapter 35
Chapter 35
A Scream and—Silence
I am afraid that no one slept very well after that.
It was about 7 o'clock when we left that place. And I confess that I was more uneasy, more troubled than I would have eared to acknowledge. For we were headed toward the spot—at any rate, in the direction—whence had come that frightful scream. What would we find there, or would we find anything?
We did.
We had gone about an eighth of a mile. The disposition of our little party was as it had been the day before—Rhodes and Narkus, that is, were in the lead, followed by Drorathusa, then came Delphis and Siris, whilst Thumbra and myself formed the rear-guard. Had my own wishes in the matter been followed, Rhodes and I would have been together. The formation assumed was, as I believe I have mentioned, the one that Drorathusa desired. The idea, of course, was to have the front and the rear protected each by one of the mysterious weapons of the mysterious strange-men—weapons undoubtedly far more formidable in the imagination of Drorathusa and her companions than they were in reality.
Certainly our revolvers were in every way excellent weapons, but I could not help wishing that they carried a more powerful bullet.
As has been said, we had proceeded about a furlong. The dense and tangled undergrowth had forced us away from the stream, to a distance of perhaps three hundred feet.
At the moment a sound had fetched me up and my exclamation had brought the party to a sudden halt.
"What is it?" Rhodes asked.
"We are being followed!"
He made no immediate response to that dire intelligence. We all stood listening, waiting; but a silence pervaded the forest as deep as though it had never, since the day of creation, been broken by the faintest pulsation of sound.
Then, after some moments, Rhodes asked: "Sure, Bill, that we are being followed?"
"Yes! I tell you that I know that we are!"
"Well," said he, turning slowly, "I don't see that we can do anything about it, save keep a sharp lookout; and so on we go."
Whereupon he and the others started. I had turned to follow when that sound, low and mysterious as before, stopped me in my tracks. And in that very instant came another—a sharp interjection from Rhodes, instantaneously followed by a scream, the short, piercing scream of a woman.
I should have explained that we were in a dense growth of fem, a growth some ten or twelve feet in height—a meet place indeed for an ambuscade. Overhead, too, the branches met and intertangled—affording an excellent place for a bald-headed cat or some other arboreal monster to lie in wait and drop or spring upon any human or brute passing below.
Now, as I whirled to that exclamation and scream—the danger there behind forgotten in what was so imminent before—it was to find, to my indescribable fear and horror, that my companions, every single one of them, had vanished.
And that horror and fear which chilled my heart were enhanced by the fact that before me, where Rhodes and the Dromans must be, there was no agitation amongst the ferns, not the slightest movement amongst them. I was alone, alone in that fearful place of dense, concealing vegetation, of silence and mystery. But no; they were there, my companions, right there before me. The ferns hid them, that was all. But why were they so still? What had happened? That exclamation, that scream—the silence that had fallen!
It has taken some space to set this down, but it must not be imagined that the space itself during which I stood there was a long one. It was, in fact, very brief; it was no more, I suppose, than five or six seconds. Then I was moving forward through the crushed ferns, as swiftly as was consistent with caution and, of course, with the revolver gripped ready for instant action.
I had covered perhaps three yards, had reached the point where the way crushed through the fem-growth turned sharp to the left to pass between two great tree-trunks; then it was that I heard it—a low, rustling sound and close at hand.
Something was moving there—moving toward me!