When I board
the steamer that shall bear us from these shores, you will go into my
cabin in a large, well-ventilated trunk. You will know nothing of the
discomforts of the voyage. You will awake in Africa----"

He was fumbling in his shirt, necessarily releasing her with one
hand. With a frenzied scream and a desperate wrench, she tore loose
and sped out through the tunnel. John De Albor plunged after her,
bellowing. A red haze floated before McGrath's maddened eyes. The girl
would plunge to her death in the swamps, unless she remembered the
guide-marks--perhaps it was death she sought, in preference to the fate
planned for her by the fiendish negro. They had vanished from his sight, out of the tunnel; but suddenly
Constance screamed again, with a mew poignancy. To McGrath's ears
came an excited jabbering of negro gutturals. De Albor's accents were
lifted in angry protest. Constance was sobbing hysterically. The voices
were moving away. McGrath got a vague glimpse of a group of figures
through the masking vegetation as they moved across the line of the
tunnel mouth. He saw Constance being dragged along by half a dozen
giant blacks, typical pineland dwellers, and after them came John De
Albor, his hands eloquent in dissension. That glimpse only, through
the fronds, and then the tunnel mouth gaped empty and the sound of
splashing water faded away through the marsh. _4. The Black God's Hunger_


In the brooding silence of the cavern Bristol McGrath lay staring
blankly upward, his soul a seething hell. Fool, fool, to be taken in so
easily! Yet, how could he have known? He had never seen De Albor; he
had supposed he was a full-blooded negro. Ballville had called him a
black beast, but he must have been referring to his soul. De Albor, but
for the betraying murk of his eyes, might pass anywhere for a white man. The presence of those black men meant but one thing: they had followed
him and De Albor, had seized Constance as she rushed from the cave. De
Albor's evident fear bore a hideous implication; he had said the blacks
wanted to sacrifice Constance--now she was in their hands. "God!" The word burst from McGrath's lips, startling in the stillness,
startling to the speaker. He was electrified; a few moments before
he had been dumb. But now he discovered he could move his lips, his
tongue. Life was stealing back through his dead limbs; they stung as
if with returning circulation. Frantically he encouraged that sluggish
flow. Laboriously he worked his extremities, his fingers, hands, wrists
and finally, with a surge of wild triumph, his arms and legs. Perhaps
De Albor's hellish drug had lost some of its power through age. Perhaps
McGrath's unusual stamina threw off the effects as another man could
not have done. The tunnel door had not been closed, and McGrath knew why: they did not
want to shut out the insects which would soon dispose of a helpless
body; already the pests were streaming through the door, a noisome
horde. McGrath rose at last, staggering drunkenly, but with his vitality
surging more strongly each second. When he tottered from the cave, no
living thing met his glare. Hours had passed since the negroes had
departed with their prey. He strained his ears for the drum. It was
silent. The stillness rose like an invisible black mist around him. Stumblingly he splashed along the rock-trail that led to hard ground. Had the blacks taken their captive back to the death-haunted Manor, or
deeper into the pinelands? Their tracks were thick in the mud: half a dozen pairs of bare, splay
feet, the slender prints of Constance's shoes, the marks of De Albor's
Turkish slippers. He followed them with increasing difficulty as the
ground grew higher and harder. He would have missed the spot where they turned off the dim trail but
for the fluttering of a bit of silk in the faint breeze. Constance had
brushed against a tree-trunk there, and the rough bark had shredded
off a fragment of her dress. The band had been headed east, toward the
Manor. At the spot where the bit of cloth hung, they had turned sharply
southward. The matted pine needles showed no tracks, but disarranged
vines and branches bent aside marked their progress, until McGrath,
following these signs, came out upon another trail leading southward. Here and there were marshy spots, and these showed the prints of feet,
bare and shod. McGrath hastened along the trail, pistol in hand, in
full possession of his faculties at last. His face was grim and pale. De Albor had not had an opportunity to disarm him after striking that
treacherous blow. Both the octoroon and the blacks of the pinelands
believed him to be lying helpless back in Lost Cave. That, at least,
was to his advantage. He kept straining his ears in vain for the drum he had heard earlier in
the day. The silence did not reassure him. In a voodoo sacrifice drums
would be thundering, but he knew he was dealing with something even
more ancient and abhorrent than voodoo. Voodoo was comparatively a young religion, after all, born in the hills
of Haiti. Behind the froth of voodooism rose the grim religions of
Africa, like granite cliffs glimpsed through a mask of green fronds. Voodooism was a mewling infant beside the black, immemorial colossus
that had reared its terrible shape in the older land through uncounted
ages. Zambebwei! The very name sent a shudder through him, symbolic
of horror and fear. It was more than the name of a country and the
mysterious tribe that inhabited that country; it signified something
fearfully old and evil, something that had survived its natural
epoch--a religion of the Night, and a deity whose name was Death and
Horror. He had seen no negro cabins. He knew these were farther to the east
and south, most of them, huddling along the banks of the river and
the tributary creeks. It was the instinct of the black man to build
his habitation by a river, as he had built by the Congo, the Nile and
the Niger since Time's first gray dawn. Zambebwei! The word beat like
the throb of a tom-tom through the brain of Bristol McGrath. The soul
of the black man had not changed, through the slumberous centuries. Change might come in the clangor of city streets, in the raw rhythms of
Harlem; but the swamps of the Mississippi do not differ enough from the
swamps of the Congo to work any great transmutation in the spirit of a
race that was old before the first white king wove the thatch of his
wattled hut-palace. Following that winding path through the twilight dimness of the big
pines, McGrath did not find it in his soul to marvel that black slimy
tentacles from the depths of Africa had stretched across the world to
breed nightmares in an alien land. Certain natural conditions produce
certain effects, breed certain pestilences of body or mind, regardless
of their geographical situation. The river-haunted pinelands were as
abysmal in their way as were the reeking African jungles. The trend of the trail was away from the river.