After eating, we boarded the launch and continued up the river. For two days we passed through a primeval wilderness. In the afternoon of the second day we landed upon the west bank of the river, and, leaving Snider and Thirty-six to guard Victory and the launch, Delcarte, Taylor, and I set out after game.
We tramped away from the river for upwards of an hour before discovering anything, and then only a small red deer, which Taylor brought down with a neat shot of two hundred yards. It was getting too late to proceed farther, so we rigged a sling, and the two men carried the deer back toward the launch while I walked a hundred yards ahead, in the hope of bagging something further for our larder.
We had covered about half the distance to the river, when I suddenly came face to face with a man. He was as primitive and uncouth in appearance as the Grabritins—a shaggy, unkempt savage, clothed in a shirt of skin cured with the head on, the latter surmounting his own head to form a bonnet, and giving to him a most fearful and ferocious aspect.
The fellow was armed with a long spear and a club, the latter dangling down his back from a leathern thong about his neck. His feet were encased in hide sandals.
At sight of me, he halted for an instant, then turned and dove into the forest, and, though I called reassuringly to him in English he did not return nor did I again see him.
The sight of the wild man raised my hopes once more that elsewhere we might find men in a higher state of civilization—it was the society of civilized man that I craved—and so, with a lighter heart, I continued on toward the river and the launch.
I was still some distance ahead of Delcarte and Taylor, when I came in sight of the Rhine again. But I came to the water’s edge before I noticed that anything was amiss with the party we had left there a few hours before.
My first intimation of disaster was the absence of the launch from its former moorings. And then, a moment later—I discovered the body of a man lying upon the bank. Running toward it, I saw that it was Thirty-six, and as I stopped and raised the Grabritin’s head in my arms, I heard a faint moan break from his lips. He was not dead, but that he was badly injured was all too evident.
Delcarte and Taylor came up a moment later, and the three of us worked over the fellow, hoping to revive him that he might tell us what had happened, and what had become of the others. My first thought was prompted by the sight I had recently had of the savage native. The little party had evidently been surprised, and in the attack Thirty-six had been wounded and the others taken prisoners. The thought was almost like a physical blow in the face—it stunned me. Victory in the hands of these abysmal brutes! It was frightful. I almost shook poor Thirty-six in my efforts to revive him.
I explained my theory to the others, and then Delcarte shattered it by a single movement of the hand. He drew aside the lion’s skin that covered half of the Grabritin’s breast, revealing a neat, round hole in Thirty-six’s chest—a hole that could have been made by no other weapon than a rifle.
“Snider!” I exclaimed. Delcarte nodded. At about the same time the eyelids of the wounded man fluttered, and raised. He looked up at us, and very slowly the light of consciousness returned to his eyes.
“What happened, Thirty-six?” I asked him.
He tried to reply, but the effort caused him to cough, bringing about a hemorrhage of the lungs and again he fell back exhausted. For several long minutes he lay as one dead, then in an almost inaudible whisper he spoke.
“Snider—” He paused, tried to speak again, raised a hand, and pointed downriver. “They—went—back,” and then he shuddered convulsively and died.
None of us voiced his belief. But I think they were all alike: Victory and Snider had stolen the launch, and deserted us.
VII
We stood there, grouped about the body of the dead Grabritin, looking futilely down the river to where it made an abrupt curve to the west, a quarter of a mile below us, and was lost to sight, as though we expected to see the truant returning to us with our precious launch—the thing that meant life or death to us in this unfriendly, savage world.
I felt, rather than saw, Taylor turn his eyes slowly toward my profile, and, as mine swung to meet them, the expression upon his face recalled me to my duty and responsibility as an officer.
The utter hopelessness that was reflected in his face must have been the counterpart of what I myself felt, but in that brief instant I determined to hide my own misgivings that I might bolster up the courage of the others.
“We are lost!” was written as plainly upon Taylor’s face as though his features were the printed words upon an open book. He was thinking of the launch, and of the launch alone. Was I? I tried to think that I was. But a greater grief than the loss of the launch could have engendered in me, filled my heart—a sullen, gnawing misery which I tried to deny—which I refused to admit—but which persisted in obsessing me until my heart rose and filled my throat, and I could not speak when I would have uttered words of reassurance to my companions.
And then rage came to my relief—rage against the vile traitor who had deserted three of his fellow countrymen in so frightful a position. I tried to feel an equal rage
