The Man Who Rocked the Earth, Robert Williams Wood [the two towers ebook .TXT] 📗

this disclosure meant to him. Between puffs of his pipe he asked casual, careless questions of Nichicun. These Nascopees, for instance, how far off might their land be? And where did they assert this extraordinary serpent of iron to be? Were there rivers in the Nascopee country? Did white men ever go there? All these things the wounded Montagnais told him. It appeared, moreover, that the Rassini River was near the Nascopee territory, and that it flowed into the Moisie only seven miles above the camp. All that night the marionettes danced in Bennie's brain.

Next morning they propped Nichicun on his bed of moss, laid a rifle and a box of matches beside him, and bade him farewell. At the mouth of the Rassini River Prof. Bennie Hooker held up his hand and announced that he was going to the Nascopee country. The canoe halted abruptly. Old Edouard declared that they had been engaged only to go to the big cache, and that their present trip was merely by way of a little excursion to see the river. They had no supplies for such a journey, no proper amount of ammunition. No, they would deposit the professor on the nearest sandbar if he wished, but they were going back.

Bennie arose unsteadily in the canoe and dug into his pocket, producing a roll of gold coin. Two hundred and fifty dollars he promised them if they would take him to the nearest tribe of Nascopees; five hundred if they could find the Iron Serpent.

"Bien!" exclaimed both Indians without a moment's hesitation, and the canoe plunged forward up the Rassini.

Once more a dreamlike succession of brilliant, frosty days; once more the star-studded sky in which always the marionettes danced. And then at last the great falls of the Rassini, beyond which no white man had gone. They hid the canoe in the bushes and placed beneath it the iron stove and half their supply of food. Then they plunged into the brush, eastward. Bennie had never known such grueling work and heartbreaking fatigue; and the clouds of flies pursued them venomously and with unrelenting persistence. At first they had to cut their way through acres of brush, and then the land rose and they saw before them miles of swamp and barren land dotted with dwarf trees and lichen-grown rocks. Here it was easier and they made better time; but the professor's legs ached and his rifle wore a red bruise on his shoulder. And then after five days of torment they came upon the Iron Rail. It ran in almost a direct line from northwest to southwest, with hardly a waver, straight over the barrens and through the forests of scrub, with a five-foot clearing upon either side. At intervals it was elevated to a height of eight or ten inches upon insulated iron braces. Both Marc and Edouard stared at in wonder, while Bennie made them a little speech.

It was, he said, a thing called a "monorail," made by a man who possessed strange secrets concerning the earth and the properties of matter. That man lived over the Height of Land toward Ungava. He was a good man and would not harm other good men. But he was a great magician—if you believed in magic. On the rail undoubtedly he ran something called a gyroscopic engine, and carried his stores and machinery into the wilderness. The Nascopees were not such fools after all, for here was the something they feared to cross—the iron serpent that bit and killed. Let them watch while he made it bite. He allowed his rifle to fall against the rail, and instantly a shower of blue sparks flashed from it as the current leaped into the earth.

Bennie counted out twenty-five golden eagles and handed them to Edouard. If they followed the rail to its source he would, he promised, on their return to civilization give them as much again. Without more ado the Indians lifted their packs and swung off to the northwest along the line of the rail. The stock of Prof. Bennie Hooker had risen in their estimation. On they ploughed across the barrens, through swamps, over the quaking muskeg, into the patches of scrub growth where the short branches slapped their faces, but always they kept in sight of the rail.

The extraordinary announcement, transmitted from various European news agencies, that an attempt had been made by the general commanding the First Artillery Division of the German Army of the Meuse to violate the armistice, had caused a profound sensation, particularly as the attempt to destroy Paris had been prevented only by the sudden appearance of the same mysterious Flying Ring that had shortly before caused the destruction of the Atlas Mountains and the flooding of the Sahara Desert by the Mediterranean Sea.

The advent of the Flying Ring on this second occasion had been noted by several hundred thousand persons, both soldiers and non-combatants. At about the hour of midnight, as if to observe whether the warring nations intended sincerely to live up to their agreement and bring about an actual cessation of hostilities, the Ring had appeared out of the north and, floating through the sky, had followed the lines of the belligerents from Brussels to Verdun and southward. The blinding yellow light that it had projected toward the earth had roused the soldiers sleeping in their intrenchments and caused great consternation all along the line of fortifications, as it was universally supposed that the director of its flight intended to annihilate the combined armies of France, England, Germany, and Belgium. But the Ring had sailed peacefully along, three thousand feet aloft, deluging the countryside with its dazzling light, sending its beams into the casemates of the huge fortresses of the Rhine and the outer line of the French fortifications, searching the redoubts and trenches, but doing no harm to the sleeping armies that lay beneath it; until at last the silence of the night had been broken by the thunder of "Thanatos," and in the twinkling of an eye the Lavender Ray had descended, to turn the village of Champaubert into the smoking crater of a dying volcano. The entire division of artillery had been annihilated, with the exception of a few stragglers, and of the Relay Gun naught remained but a distorted puddle of steel and iron.

Long before the news of the horrible retribution visited by the master of the Ring upon Treitschke, the major-general of artillery, and the inventor, Von Heckmann, had reached the United States, Bill Hood, sitting in the wireless receiving station of the Naval Observatory at Georgetown, had received through the ether a message from his mysterious correspondent in the north that sent him hurrying to the White House. Pax had called the Naval Observatory and had transmitted the following ultimatum, repeating it, as was his custom, three times: