Red Shadows, Robert E. Howard [best ebook reader for chromebook TXT] 📗

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Caucasian.

 

“You speak my language—how is that?”

 

The black man grinned.

 

“I slave—long time, me boy. Me, N’Longa, ju-ju man, me, great

fetish. No black man like me! You white man, you hunt brother?”

 

Kane snarled. “I! Brother! I seek a man, yes.”

 

The Negro nodded. “Maybe so you find um, eh?”

 

“He dies!”

 

Again the Negro grinned. “Me pow’rful ju-ju man,” he announced

apropos of nothing. He bent closer. “White man you hunt, eyes like a

leopard, eh? Yes? Ha! ha! ha! ha! Listen, white man: man-with-eyes-of-a-leopard, he and Chief Songa make pow’rful palaver; they blood

brothers now. Say nothing, I help you; you help me, eh?”

 

“Why should you help me?” asked Kane suspiciously.

 

The ju-ju man bent closer and whispered, “White man Songa’s right-hand man; Songa more pow’rful than N’Longa. White man mighty ju-ju!

N’Longa’s white brother kill man—with-eyes-of-a-leopard, be blood

brother to N’Longa, N’Longa be more pow’rful than Songa; palaver set.”

 

And like a dusky ghost he floated out of the hut so swiftly that

Kane was not sure but that the whole affair was a dream.

 

Without, Kane could see the flare of fires. The drums were still

booming, but close at hand the tones merged and mingled, and the

impulse-producing vibrations were lost. All seemed a barbaric clamor

without rhyme or reason, yet there was an undertone of mockery there,

savage and gloating. “Lies,” thought Kane, his mind still swimming,

“jungle lies like jungle women that lure a man to his doom.”

 

Two warriors entered the hut—black giants, hideous with paint and

armed with crude spears. They lifted the white man and carried him out

of the hut. They bore him across an open space, leaned him upright

against a post and bound him there. About him, behind him and to the

side, a great semicircle of black faces leered and faded in the

firelight as the flames leaped and sank. There in front of him loomed

a shape hideous and obscene—a black, formless thing, a grotesque

parody of the human. Still, brooding, bloodstained, like the formless

soul of Africa, the horror, the Black God.

 

And in front and to each side, upon roughly carven thrones of

teakwood, sat two men. He who sat upon the right was a black man,

huge, ungainly, a gigantic and unlovely mass of dusky flesh and

muscles. Small, hoglike eyes blinked out over sin-marked cheeks; huge,

flabby red lips pursed in fleshly haughtiness.

 

The other—

 

“Ah, Monsieur, we meet again.” The speaker was far from being

the debonair villain who had taunted Kane in the cavern among the

mountains. His clothes were rags; there were more lines in his face;

he had sunk lower in the years that had passed. Yet his eyes still

gleamed and danced with their old recklessness and his voice held the

same mocking timbre.

 

“The last time I heard that accursed voice,” said Kane calmly,

“was in a cave, in darkness, whence you fled like a hunted rat.”

 

“Aye, under different conditions,” answered Le Loup imperturbably.

“What did you do after blundering about like an elephant in the dark?”

 

Kane hesitated, then: “I left the mountain—”

 

“By the front entrance? Yes? I might have known you were too

stupid to find the secret door. Hoofs of the Devil, had you thrust

against the chest with the golden lock, which stood against the wall,

the door had opened to you and revealed the secret passageway through

which I went.”

 

“I traced you to the nearest port and there took ship and followed

you to Italy, where I found you had gone.”

 

“Aye, by the saints, you nearly cornered me in Florence. Ho! ho!

ho! I was climbing through a back window while Monsieur Galahad was

battering down the front door of the tavern. And had your horse not

gone lame, you would have caught up with me on the road to Rome.

Again, the ship on which I left Spain had barely put out to sea when

Monsieur Galahad rides up to the wharfs. Why have you followed me

like this? I do not understand.”

 

“Because you are a rogue whom it is my destiny to kill,” answered

Kane coldly. He did not understand. All his life he had roamed about

the world aiding the weak and fighting oppression, he neither knew nor

questioned why. That was his obsession, his driving force of life.

Cruelty and tyranny to the weak sent a red blaze of fury, fierce and

lasting, through his soul. When the full flame of his hatred was

wakened and loosed, there was no rest for him until his vengeance had

been fulfilled to the uttermost. If he thought of it at all, he

considered himself a fulfiller of God’s judgment, a vessel of wrath to

be emptied upon the souls of the unrighteous. Yet in the full sense of

the word Solomon Kane was not wholly a Puritan, though he thought of

himself as such.

 

Le Loup shrugged his shoulders. “I could understand had I wronged

you personally. Mon Dieu! I, too, would follow an enemy across the

world, but, though I would have joyfully slain and robbed you, I never

heard of you until you declared war on me.”

 

Kane was silent, his still fury overcoming him. Though he did not

realize it, the Wolf was more than merely an enemy to him; the bandit

symbolized, to Kane, all the things against which the Puritan had

fought all his life: cruelty, outrage, oppression and tyranny.

 

Le Loup broke in on his vengeful meditations. “What did you do

with the treasure, which—gods of Hades!—took me years to accumulate?

Devil take it, I had time only to snatch a handful of coins and

trinkets as I ran.”

 

“I took such as I needed to hunt you down. The rest I gave to the

villages which you had looted.”

 

“Saints and the devil!” swore Le Loup. “Monsieur, you are the

greatest fool I have yet met. To throw that vast treasure—by Satan, I

rage to think of it in the hands of base peasants, vile villagers!

Yet, ho! ho! ho! ho! they will steal, and kill each other for it! That

is human nature.”

 

“Yes, damn you!” flamed Kane suddenly, showing that his conscience

had not been at rest. “Doubtless they will, being fools. Yet what

could I do? Had I left it there, people might have starved and gone

naked for lack of it. More, it would have been found, and theft and

slaughter would have followed anyway. You are to blame, for had this

treasure been left with its rightful owners, no such trouble would

have ensued.”

 

The Wolf grinned without reply. Kane not being a profane man, his

rare curses had double effect and always startled his hearers, no

matter how vicious or hardened they might be.

 

It was Kane who spoke next. “Why have you fled from me across the

world? You do not really fear me.”

 

“No, you are right. Really I do not know; perhaps flight is a

habit which is difficult to break. I made my mistake when I did not

kill you that night in the mountains. I am sure I could kill you in a

fair fight, yet I have never even, ere now, sought to ambush you.

Somehow I have not had a liking to meet you, Monsieur—a whim of

mine, a mere whim. Then—_mon Dieu!_—mayhap I have enjoyed a new

sensation—and I had thought that I had exhausted the thrills of life.

And then, a man must either be the hunter or the hunted. Until now,

Monsieur, I was the hunted, but I grew weary of the role—I thought

I had thrown you off the trail.”

 

“A Negro slave, brought from this vicinity, told a Portugal ship

captain of a white man who landed from a Spanish ship and went into

the jungle. I heard of it and hired the ship, paying the captain to

bring me here.”

 

“Monsieur, I admire you for your attempt, but you must admire

me, too! Alone I came into this village, and alone among savages and

cannibals I—with some slight knowledge of the language learned from a

slave aboard ship—I gained the confidence of King Songa and

supplanted that mummer, N’Longa. I am a braver man than you,

Monsieur, for I had no ship to retreat to, and a ship is waiting for

you.”

 

“I admire your courage,” said Kane, “but you are content to rule

amongst cannibals—you the blackest soul of them all. I intend to

return to my own people when I have slain you.”

 

“Your confidence would be admirable were it not amusing. Ho,

Gulka!”

 

A giant Negro stalked into the space between them. He was the

hugest man that Kane had ever seen, though he moved with catlike ease

and suppleness. His arms and legs were like trees, and the great,

sinuous muscles rippled with each motion. His apelike head was set

squarely between gigantic shoulders. His great, dusky hands were like

the talons of an ape, and his brow slanted back from above bestial

eyes. Flat nose and great, thick red lips completed this picture of

primitive, lustful savagery.

 

“That is Gulka, the gorilla-slayer,” said Le Loup. “He it was who

lay in wait beside the trail and smote you down. You are like a wolf,

yourself, Monsieur Kane, but since your ship hove in sight you have

been watched by many eyes, and had you had all the powers of a

leopard, you had not seen Gulka nor heard him. He hunts the most

terrible and crafty of all beasts, in their native forests, far to the

north, the beasts-who-walk-like-men—as that one, whom he slew some

days since.”

 

Kane, following Le Loup’s fingers, made out a curious, manlike

thing, dangling from a roof-pole of a hut. A jagged end thrust through

the thing’s body held it there. Kane could scarcely distinguish its

characteristics by the firelight, but there was a weird, humanlike

semblance about the hideous, hairy thing.

 

“A female gorilla that Gulka slew and brought to the village,”

said Le Loup.

 

The giant black slouched close to Kane and stared into the white

man’s eyes. Kane returned his gaze somberly, and presently the Negro’s

eyes dropped sullenly and he slouched back a few paces. The look in

the Puritan’s grim eyes had pierced the primitive hazes of the

gorilla-slayer’s soul, and for the first time in his life he felt

fear. To throw this off, he tossed a challenging look about; then,

with unexpected animalness, he struck his huge chest resoundingly,

grinned cavernously and flexed his mighty arms. No one spoke.

Primordial bestiality had the stage, and the more highly developed

types looked on with various feelings of amusement, tolerance or

contempt.

 

Gulka glanced furtively at Kane to see if the white man was

watching him, then with a sudden beastly roar, plunged forward and

dragged a man from the semicircle. While the trembling victim

screeched for mercy, the giant hurled him upon the crude altar before

the shadowy idol. A spear rose and flashed, and the screeching ceased.

The Black God looked on, his monstrous features seeming to leer in the

flickering firelight. He had drunk; was the Black God pleased with the

draft—with the sacrifice?

 

Gulka stalked back, and stopping before Kane, flourished the

bloody spear before the white man’s face.

 

Le Loup laughed. Then suddenly N’Longa appeared. He came from

nowhere in particular; suddenly he was standing there, beside the post

to which Kane was bound. A lifetime of study of the art of illusion

had given the ju-ju man a highly technical knowledge of appearing and

disappearing—which after all, consisted only