Jasper County Democrat, Volume 23, Number 2, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 3 April 1920 — WHITE MAN [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

WHITE MAN

By George Agnew Chamberlain

Author of “Home." “Through Stained Clmi," “John Bogardus.” etc.

CHAPTER IX.—Next day Andrea is seized with a violent attack of pernicious malaria and for three days White Man wages a desperate fight for her life. He .succeeds and the incident results in the discovery of their love for each other. e Andrea learns that her companion is Robert Oddman Trevor, once famous flyer, victim of nervous shock and incapacitated for work in the air. The trip to the coast, where he met Andrea, was undertaken through necessity, and he is afraid to risk her safety in another ‘ascent. CHAPTER X.—A dinner for which they had both dressed in European style Is interrupted by the sound of a chantey. White Man knew. Andrea suspected. Then when he sent her to her hut she knew that the “other man” was ap. proaching. From her hut Andrea hears the stranger (a tenor who had disappeared after a short career which had made him famous) sing the aria from “Faust," and his wonderful voice attracted her. Then seeing his horribly mutilated face she is overwhelmed with terror. He knocks her down and carries her to his boat and to his craal. It filled Andrea with a premonition and brought her a desperate courage. She took off her high-heeled slippers and climbed down several rungs of the ladder that led to her platform; then seating herself and getting a good 'knee-grip on the limb, she leaned down and gradually worked loose the cleat 'below her. After that she took the next -above and then the next, depositing each cleat as she removed it in her room. No sooner had she finished, leaving herself cut off from easy access to the outside world but in 'having established a substantial obstacle to sudden assault from below, than she was aware of the whispering, wheezy sound of heavy breathing. Immediately afterward came to her distended nostrils an overpowering odor of gin, nauseatingly sweet and sour at the same time. She looked down into the shadowy gloom and saw MacClos'ter’s bulk moving slowly upward, rung

iby rung, each movement as deliberate and repulsive as that of a giant sloth. Gripping one of the loosened cleats * in her right hand, she knelt on the •edge of the platform and watched "breathlessly his progress. When he came to the break in the ladder his hairy paws groped helplessly for a moment only; then they embraced the tree-trunk and he began to swarm up the easy slant. "Walting up for me, dearie?” he whispered. Andrea suppressed an instinctive Impulse to fly before his advance, all the more terrifying because it was so ■deliberate. Her face went white, her ■eyes narrowed, but her lips set in a straight line as she waited, trying her ■best to quiet her excited breathing lest it betray her pitiful agitation. She measured the distance between ( the edge of the platform and those slowly sliding hands. Onlf when they got so close that she could see the mist of fine yellow hair on them did she strike first at one and then at the other, and not with the edge of the cleat, but with the three jagged nails that protruded from its flat side. With a bellow of rage MacCloster snatched back his pierced hands, trusting to the grip of his knees.' Andrea clutched the cleat tightly, leaned forward and struck him across the side of the head with all her strength. He lost his balance and fell. She heard his body crashing from limb to limb until it landed with a terrific thud on some platform far below. Up from the depths came a liquid stream of curses; he could no longer bellow, he was whining with the rage that means to kill. Aadrea sank back and cowered in the corner of her hovel. She was .through; that last blow had drained her of all energy and courage, she was no longer conscious of a desire to live. Her head rang with incredible sounds. Hallucination tortured her and even brought tocher longing ears the faraway hum of Trevor’s airplane motor. So vivid was bar imagination that the hum grew louder and louder, as It would have done in reality, and finally attained a staccato roar. She smiled wistfully, her face Illumined by all the love of the White Man she had

hidden under a mask of flippancy but which, now that hope was dead, proclaimed Itself frankly and seemed to be trying to rock her to comfort and oblivion. Suddenly a terrific ripping crash above her head tore through her numbed senses and brought her staggering to her feet. The whole mobster structure of the caia swayed and bent as though it had been struck by a tornado. Strong limbs creaked and cracked with reports like pistol shots and a shower of leaves fell with a faint click-clicking that could be distinctly heard as if through the interstices of the general and grosser commotion. The roaring of the airplane that she had thought an hallucination suddenly ceased. Presently smoke, pearl-gray, began to seep through the thatch of the roof. Andrea came fully to her senses and called in a clear, high voice: “I’m here. White Man; I’m here, White Man." She repeated the cry steadily at short intervals until he shotw?d an answer. Following the sound of his voice, her eyes caught the gleam of his hunting knife, hacking a way through the

thatch and when, finally, his feet were thrust through the opening, she seized and guided them to a foothold. In another second he was standing before her. Even in the dim light she could see that his face was blackened, his eyebrows, eyelashes and mustache entirely singed, his hair burnt off to patches. “Oh! White Man!” she gasped, throwing out both hands toward him. “Drop It,” said Trevor shortly. “Which way to the ground?” She showed him. He slid down the branch until he struck the first cleat, and waited there to catch her. “Come on, now,” he said. “In thirty seconds whoever*s left in this hell-hole will be baked.”

From below them and outside the cala came the ulululng of a thousand panic-stricken voices, overlain but not dominated by the bellowing of MacCloster issuing drunken and impossible orders intermingled with horrible and obscene oaths. As Trevor and Andrea reached the platform at the main intersection of the treb's branches the pall of smoke that had been following close on their heels descended with a swirl and enveloped them. He turned, caught up her skirt and threw it over her head; then he seized her in his arms, burled his face against her breast and staggered blindly down the spiral stairway. Tn the van of the smoke, almost as though he were being propelled by it, he stumbled through the exit into the cool air of night and a glare that paled the face of the full moon. He dropped Andrea to the ground, stepped over her and stood face to face with the raving MacCloster. On the Instant the giant fell silent. He stared vacantly for the space of a second; then his ravaged face writhed into such an expression of sublimated hatred as no man lives to see twice. Marder wrote itself large across his features, slow murder with bare hands for this enemy who had sent up In smoke and flame the one beloved earthly possession of the wreck of a life. With a choking gulp that seemed to rend his throat he charged, head down, arms thrown wide, talons clutching in anticipation. His mouth twisted in a thin smile, Trevor shot from the hip. The bullet of the heavy service revolver caught MacCloster in the shoulder and spun him around three times. Trevor fired again. The giant’s body seemed to waver in the air, then crumpled and fell sprawling toward the gun, face down. "You’ve killed him,” sobbed Andrea, still on her hands and knees. “In a way,” said Trevor calmly and half to himself. “He really died years ago.”

CHAPTER XII.

The memory of that tragic moment, strangely enough, was not to live In Andrea’s mind by reason of the sight of the collapse of MacCloster*s bulk, but by what followed Immediately after. Never could -she forget the sudden stilling of the ulululng andthe

Instantaneous smile, broaden ifig to a grin, that dawned on the face of every native. The black throng backed step by step before the terrific heat of the flaming caia. Their scorching faces glistened with sweat, but their eyes hung greedily on the crumpled, sprawling mass that was all that was left of MacCloster. In the pleasurable surfeit of the moment they were careless of the fact that the doom of the entire craal was fixed. Trevor turned on them In a white rage and with a well-aimed bullet shot an assegai from between the legs of a great hulking brute whose mouth was slavering with revolting enjoyment of the scene. The black’s face went gray with fright; his eyes came back with a snap from their sensual feast. Many of his companions laughed aloud, but others only licked thick lips In bestial hunger for more slaughter. “You!” cried Trevor, pressing the muzzle of his revolver into the quivering naked stomach of the man he had frightened. “Get your crew together. Take me home.” Half an hour later Andrea found herself once more In MacCloster’s boat, but in spite of the fact that all its appointments and the crew were the same with the exception of the one black who had been killed, It seemed utterly strange to her eyes, now no longer glazed by misery. She turned to Trevor, who had not spoken to her since first he had joined her in tno caia. “The boat is quite different,” she said. “It’s as though I saw it for the first time.” He gave her no answer beyond a noncommittal grunt, nor did he look at her. His eyes were fastened far ahead on the river, tracing out the swirl of the current and deep water. A troubled look came into Andrea’s face; she glanced at him and her lips parted twice in the half-smile that precedes kindly speech. “You think I ought to thank you?” she asked. “I haven’t the words; If I tried my heart would choke nae." “Thank me?” said Trevor, casting her a casual look. “What for?” Andrea’s lips trembled. If only the fire hadn’t happened just when it did, she thought, If only it had given him time to find her, to take her in his arms I “For saving me,” she answered simply. “For saving nothing,” affirmed Trevor. “For saving the nothing that is left of your beauty and freshness and honor after the touch of that beast.” Overwhelming shame stained her cheeks; she felt all that was noble and generous within hqj shriveling into a strangling knot. She tried to speak, to protest against his hardness and injustice, but she could only gulp. For hours they sat in absolute silence, and gradually the cold that had struck her heart spread through all her body until her teeth began to chatter.

“Why are you doing that?” asked Trevor sharply. “It isn’t really cold.” ‘Tm d —d—d—doing it b—b —because I c —c —can’t help it,” chattered Andrea. “I am c c ■ -cold I” She pressed herself against his bedy, as though she begged for his arms around her. He drew away from her. She crouched back in her corner and turned upon him the accusing eyes of a child that has been cruelly wounded; then her womanhood came to the rescue. It reasoned with her, told her that the time for pride had passed, for if she lost this man she lost all men forever. No longer could she say "my world” and think of parties, Bond street, taxicabs and the smartest restaurants; her world was here beside her, to win or lose. When it came to describing her hours with MacCloster, she harped with supreme feminine intuition on a single fact. Again and again she gave him to understand that except for lugging her across his shoulder to the boat, MacCloster had not once so much as laid a finger on her. So careful was her narrative in its logical sequence of detail that It could not fall to carry conviction with It. Trevor gradually melted to the extent of filling bls pipe and lighting it. She told of her entering the court around the great caia with MacCloster, of his discovery that a case of gin had arrived with his freight and of the oily change that had come to his voice. At-this point in her story Trevor forgot to smoke. He clutched the hot bowl of his pipe in a grip that made his knuckles show white. She could feel him listening with his whole tense body. She hurried on to hfer climax; to the description of her strategy in removing the cleats and of MacCloster’s terrifying attack. She even repeated some of his wtffHs. “He said, •Walting up for me, dearie?’ and then I drove the nails into his hands and when he snatched them back, I hit him across the head and he fell. And then I heard you coming. I thought I had gone mad, that It was not with my ears but with the longing of my heart that I heard you coming. When I called and you answered I forgot that I had ever known fear; I knew that I was safe, forever and forever.”

“Good girl,” said Trevor huskily. He reached out and patted her hand but his thoughts were not altogether with her; they were lingering behind, hovering over the scene of her elemental battle with MacCloster as though he sought to steep his soul in that recollection in an effort to drown for once and all time the memory of twentyfour hours of torturing jealousy. “So you’re not jealous any more, are you?" pleaded Andrea. “Jealous!” exclaimed eternal man impatiently. “Who said anything abopt jealousy? It’s one rotten quality that, thank God, I don’t possess. It’s the canker-worm that eats into the heart of trust. A man that feels it, demeans the.WOmapheloves.”

"How extfhordlnary,” murmured Andrea, “because I don’t believe any woman In the world ever really loves an unjealous man. Of course,” she added thoughtfully, "we despise jealousy—but that doesn't keep us from adoring it in just one man.” Trevor was silent for a long time, pondering on this absurd and unanswerable argument. The sun arose and set to work at once to overheat the world; Andrea grew warm and then drowsy. She began to nod and tier body to incline. If it had drooped In a direction directly opposite to that In which it actually did, she would aave fallen into the river; as it happened, she fell against Trevor’s shouller. He first assured himself that she vas really asleep and then slipped his irm around her and held her close. He forgot his burns and bruises, his fatigue and hunger; he looked back with exultant pride upon the maelstrom of emotions that he had ridden to reach this haven of his soul's peace. The feverish haste with which he had dug out the airplane and patched it up, the white rage in which he had hurled himself with it into the air, the absolute and marvelous determination of the steady, unwavering flight that had carried hint straight to MacCloster’s craal, all became emblems to him of the power of that which is within us to rise eternally to superhuman heights on the wings of a little love. He glanced downward at the fair head jtressed so close to bls shoulder that the wide brim of his helmet shaded it as well as his own and let his eyes follow along the curled-up length of Andrea’s figure. She seemed

very small, very young, infinitely potent. For the first time in their intercourse he consciously remembered who she was and all his bravado In the face of false values, all his logical In-

difference to established forms. Yell from him. He trembled fer the things had done to, the murder he had coolly committed on, the person of the Honorable Andrea Pellor! She had said that she knew herself safe wUh him forever and forever and while he recognized the gentle mood that had so overburdened her tongue, he felt now an aching within him to guard, not the Honorable Andrea Pellor, but this much dearer creature of his own making, from the harming touch of tongues as well as hands. He threw up his head as though to n revivified and ennobled determination that was above fear and murmured a confirmation of the creed that had been born, full-fledged, from her “Whether you want me or mock me, the die Is forever cast; your truth and your untruth, your weakness and your strength, purity or taint; I shall take you all and taking you, take only myself; for love Is an Indivisible, an Integral possession I” (TO BE CONTINUED.)

Struck Him Across the Side of the Head With All Her Strength.

She Seemed Very Small, Very Young.