Beyond the Black River Read Online Free Page B

livid lips.
    Echoing the cry, the girl started up, staring wildly, her hands at her temples, her lambent hair rippling over her shoulders. To his dizzy gaze she seemed to float in an aureole of golden light.
    “Bristol! Bristol McGrath!” she echoed his call with a haunting, incredulous cry. Then she was in his arms, her white arms clutching him in a frantic embrace, as if she feared he was but a phantom that might vanish from her.
    For the moment the world ceased to exist for Bristol McGrath. He might have been blind, deaf and dumb to the universe at large. His dazed brain was cognizant only of the woman in his arms, his senses drunken with the softness and fragrance of her, his soul stunned with the overwhelming realization of a dream he had thought dead and vanished forever.
    When he could think consecutively again, he shook himself like a man coming out of a trance, and stared stupidly around him. He was in a wide chamber, cut in the solid rock. Like the tunnel, it was illumined from above, and the air was fresh and clean. There were chairs, tables and a hammock, carpets on the rocky floor, cans of food and a water cooler. Ballville had not failed to provide for his captive’s comfort. McGrath glanced around at the Arab, and saw him beyond the grille. Considerately he had not intruded upon their reunion.
    “Three years!” the girl was sobbing. “Three years I’ve waited. I knew you’d come! I knew it! But we must be careful, my darling. Richard will kill you if he finds you — kill us both!”
    “He’s beyond killing anyone,” answered McGrath. “But just the same, we’ve got to get out of here.”
    Her eyes flared with new terror.
    “Yes! John De Albor! Ballville was afraid of him. That’s why he locked me in here. He said he’d sent for you. I was afraid for you —”
    “Ali!” McGrath called. “Come in here. We’re getting out of here now, and we’d better take some water and food with us. We may have to hide in the swamps for —”
    Abruptly Constance shrieked, tore herself from her lover’s arms. And McGrath, frozen by the sudden, awful fear in her wide eyes, felt the dull jolting impact of a savage blow at the base of his skull. Consciousness did not leave him, but a strange paralysis gripped him. He dropped like an empty sack on the stone floor and lay there like a dead man, helplessly staring up at the scene which tinged his brain with madness — Constance struggling frenziedly in the grasp of the man he had known as Ali ibn Suleyman, now terribly transformed.
    The man had thrown off his turban and glasses. And in the murky whites of his eyes, McGrath read the truth with its grisly implications — the man was not an Arab. He was a negroid mixed breed. Yet some of his blood must have been Arab, for there was a slightly Semitic cast to his countenance, and this cast, together with his oriental garb and his perfect acting of his part, had made him seem genuine. But now all this was discarded and the negroid strain was uppermost; even his voice, which had enunciated the sonorous Arabic, was now the throaty gutturals of the Negro.
    “You’ve killed him!” the girl sobbed hysterically, striving vainly to break away from the cruel fingers that prisoned her white wrists.
    “He’s not dead yet,” laughed the octoroon. “The fool quaffed drugged brandy — a drug found only in the Zambebwei jungles. It lies inactive in the system until made effective by a sharp blow on a nerve center.”
    “Please do something for him!” she begged.
    The fellow laughed brutally.
    “Why should I? He has served his purpose. Let him lie there until the swamp insects have picked his bones. I should like to watch that — but we will be far away before nightfall.” His eyes blazed with the bestial gratification of possession. The sight of this white beauty struggling in his grasp seemed to rouse all the jungle lust in the man. McGrath’s wrath and agony found expression only in his bloodshot eyes. He could