第 23 页

"Thus Zoraida knows what goes forward in her own house," said Zoraida, speaking for the first time. Kendric, struck with a new thought, looked about the room everywhere, seeking to locate the necessary opening in the wall through which came the reflections from mirrors in other places. But the great glasses covering three of the walls presented what appeared to be smooth, unbroken surfaces; where the fourth wall was tapestry-draped there was no sign of an opening; neither floor nor ceiling, places offering no detail but blurred with vague shadows, showed him what he sought.

"Watch closely!" said Zoraida.

Again it was the small room of the steel cage. The savage-looking man in the short tunic was there again. He looked watchful, tense, not altogether at his ease. In one hand was a heavy whip; in the other a pistol. Kendric thought of the animal trainers he had seen at circuses. The man's eyes were on the door through which he had come. So vivid were old images bred now of associations of ideas that Kendric had no doubt of what small head with fierce eyes would appear next; he could prevision the lithe puma, in its quick nervous movements, the lashing of the heavy tail and the glint of the teeth. And so when he saw what it was that entered, he sat back for a moment limp and the next sprang to his feet. It was Betty.

Betty clothed strangely and with a face dead white, with eyes to haunt a man. She wore a loose red robe, sleeveless, falling no lower than her ankles; her bare feet were in sandals. Her hair was down; about her brows was a black band that might have been ebony or velvet; into it was thrust a large white flower.

Betty was speaking. Kendric had dropped back into his chair, having lost sight of her when he stood. He saw that she was speaking swiftly, supplicatingly; her hands were clasped; all this he could see but no slightest sound came to him. He could not tell if she were near or far. He began to realize the exquisite torture which Zoraida might offer a man through her mirrors.

He saw the squat brute's wide grin that was as hideous as the puma's could be; all of the teeth he saw and they were glistening and sharp, unusually sharp for a human being. And then he saw Betty pushed forward though she shrank back at first with dragging feet and though then, suddenly galvanized, she fought wildly. But two big hands locked tight on her arms and as powerless as a child of six she was thrust into the steel cage, the door snapped after her. She stood looking wildly about her; her lips opened as she must have screamed; she dropped her face into her hands. Kendric saw the white flower fall.

Again the man looked to the door through which he and then Betty had entered. And now came the puma. It ran in, snarling; it was looking back over its shoulder as though someone had whipped it into the room. It saw another enemy armed with whip and pistol and sidled off with still greater show of dripping fangs. All this in dead silence so far as Kendric was concerned; never the faintest sound coming to him. The whip was flung out and snapped, and there was no sound; the puma's teeth clicked together on empty air, and no sound; Betty, looking up, shrieked, and no sound. They looked to be so close to Kendric that he felt as if with one stride he could hurl himself among them; and yet he knew that they might be shut off from him by innumerable walls and locked and barred doors. He saw Betty so plainly that until he reasoned with himself he felt that she must see him.

"A puma will not attack a human being." Kendric sought to speak as though merely contemptuous of Zoraida's entertainment. "They are cowardly brutes."

"The puma," said Zoraida, "is starving. Further, he has been driven mad by men who whipped and then appeared to run, frightened of him. Watch."

The man threatening the puma slipped out through the door behind him. The door closed. Betty and the animal were alone. The great cat lay down and looked at her with its hard, unwinking eyes, only its slow tail moving back and forth like a bit of mechanism clock-regulated. Presently the puma lifted its head and began a horrible sniffing; it lifted itself gradually from the floor; it drew a step nearer Betty's cage and sniffed again. Kendric could see Betty draw back the few inches made possible by the narrow confines of the cage, could see that again she screamed.

"A little fresh blood has been sprinkled on the floor of the cage," said Zoraida. "A little of it is on the gown she wears. It will not be overlong to watch. Are you growing impatient?"

"Are you mad?" he burst out. "Good God, do you mean to let this go on?"

"Am I mad?" Her eyes, slowly turned to his, looked it. "Perhaps. Who that is mad knows he is mad? And who, my friend, is sane? Do I mean to let this go on?" She laughed at him, and the sound was as hard as the tinkle of bits of jangling glass. "You have but to be patient to know."

The puma sniffed again, again drew closer. Betty was tight pressed against the far bars shutting her in, and even so had the great cat thrust a claw forward she could not withdraw beyond the reach of the ripping talons. The cat circled her. Always Betty turned with it, her eyes upon its eyes, her eyes that were large and fixed with terror.

"A puma is patient, more patient than a man," said Zoraida. "It may be an hour; it may be all night before it strikes. It may be a night and a day, and still another night and day. Its hunger does not diminish as time passes! Or," and she shrugged with a great showing of her indifference, "it may strike now, at any moment. That is one of the things that makes the moment tense for that white-faced little fool in there. Imagine when she is worn out, if it lasts that long; when sleep will no longer flee because of terror; and when I command that the light shall be extinguished where she is! You see, she must be thinking all those things."

The sweat broke out on Kendric's forehead, he felt as though ice ran in his veins. If he only knew where all this was going on! Was it above him or below, to right or left? Ten steps or a hundred yards away?

"By God——" he shouted. But only Zoraida's merciless laughter answered him.

"I had to choose between this and the ancient stone of sacrifice," she told him. "Have I not chosen well?"

The puma had been still. Now again it moved and its feet had quickened, it glided with ever-increasing swiftness, it came close to the steel bars, it showed more of its sharp, tearing, dripping teeth.

"Betty!" shouted Kendric. "I——"

He knew that Betty could not hear, that he could do nothing. Nothing? As the thought framed he leaped to his feet and in the grip of such a rage as even he had never known, hurled himself across the few paces between him and Zoraida.

"You have the way to stop this damned thing!" His hands, like claws, were thrust before her face. "You will stop it."

Even in his headlong rage there were cool cells in his brain. He saw the quick significant look Zoraida shot over his shoulder and turned; there behind him stood one of the squat brutes who did her bidding. Kendric saw something in the man's hand but did not reck whether it was gun or knife or club or something else. He whipped about and struck. As the man staggered under the unexpected blow, Kendric snatched up the heavy stool on which he had been sitting and struck again, so swift that the blow landed while the figure was yet staggering backward. The man fell, stunned, and then, as quick as light, before Zoraida could lift a hand, Kendric was upon her again.

"Call off your cat!" he shouted at her.

She lifted her head defiantly.

"Never has man dictated to me!" she cried angrily. "Here I dictate. If you dared put a hand on me——"

He saw her own hand creeping out toward the table. What it sought he did not know; a hidden bell, perhaps. Or a dagger. He remembered her swift attack upon Ortega. He seized her wrist, his fingers locked hard about it; she struggled and he held her back in her chair. Suddenly she relaxed and shrugged and laughed at him.

"You add to the entertainment!" she mocked him. "For, mind you, while you make large commands, the puma draws nearer and nearer. If you will, between your great commands, but glance into the mirror——"

"I say you can put a stop to that infernal torture," he said fiercely. "And you will!"

"Yes?" she sneered at him. "And you will make me, perhaps? You, a common adventurer will dictate to Zoraida!"

For the moment he felt powerless in face of her cold taunting. But there was too much at stake for him to yield now to a feeling of powerlessness. One hand was on her wrist; the gripping fingers of the other shut about the haft of the ancient obsidian knife. The old knife of sacrifice. His face was white and stern, his eyes no whit less deadly than Zoraida's.

"You threaten my life?" she gasped. "You?"

He made no answer. He was beyond speech. Slowly he lifted the great knife, slowly as in a dream he set the thin point against the soft flesh of Zoraida's throat. As a tremor shook his hand Zoraida whipped back.

"You would not dare! You would not dare!"

His hand was steady again. He held her still, and the point of the knife crept a hair's breadth closer to the life within her. A little more and it would have slipped into the skin it was pricking.

"You could not do it," she whispered.

Then he spoke.

"I can do it." His lips were dry, his voice very harsh. "You have said that you know me for a man of my word. Well, then, I swear to you that little by little I'll drive that knife in unless you set that girl free."

Still she sought to brave it out, sought to defy him; her eyes, on his, told him that his will was less than hers, and that this could never be. But Kendric knew otherwise. It was given him to know that if Betty died, he did not care to live. Like men of his stamp it was unthinkable to him that he should lift his hand against a woman. But woman for the moment Zoraida was not. Fiend, rather; reincarnated savage; a thing to stamp into the earth. What he had said he meant. He was giving her time because on her rested Betty's fate. He pressed the knife a little deeper. So steady was his hand, so stiff Zoraida's body, so gradual the increased pressure, that the knife point made in the white flesh a tiny, shadow-filled dimple.

Now came into Zoraida's eyes a swift change, a look which in all of her life had never been there until now. A look of terror, of realization of death, of frantic fear. She sought to speak, and words failed her. The knife pressed steadily. A piercing scream broke from her.

CHAPTER XVII

HOW ONE WHO HAS EVER COMMANDED MUST LEARN TO OBEY

Suddenly Zoraida had become as docile as a little frightened child. She shivered from head to foot. She put her two hands to her throat where just now the point of the knife had been.

"Quick!" said Kendric.

She rose in haste. A vertigo was upon her like that dizzy weakness of one very sick, seeking prematurely to rise from bed. She had experienced a shock from which she could rally only gradually; she looked broken. Her eyes appeared to see nothing about her but stared off into the distance through a veil of abstraction.

"We will have to go," she said tonelessly. "There is no other way."

They passed by the inert figure on the floor and out, Kendric with his left hand always on her arm. Again the knife was hidden under his coat, but his fingers did not release it.

"Quick," he said again.

So Zoraida, obedient in this strange new mood governing her, making no effort to shake off his hand having no thought to gainsay him, hastened. In perhaps five minutes they were unlocking the last door, and Kendric heard beyond the whining of the puma. Kendric had had time for thought during this brief interval which had seemed much longer; for the present both his safety and Betty's would undoubtedly depend upon his keeping Zoraida with him. So now, as he flung open the door, he carried Zoraida along into the room.

At first he did not see the cat lying close to the cage; he saw only Betty. A little color had come back into her cheeks; he saw the look in her eyes before it changed and knew that to Betty had come the time when hope is given up and when death is faced. She had passed beyond tears and pleading and crying out. It was given Kendric then to learn that when the crisis had come it found in the girl's heart a courage to sustain her. Her face was set, her attitude was no longer cringing. In such tender breasts as Betty's have beat the steady hearts of martyrs.

When she saw Jim Kendric and Zoraida standing before her she stared incredulously. She was in a daze. Her first wild thought, reflecting itself unmistakably in her wide eyes, was that they had come to taunt her, he and she side by side. Then her faltering gaze left Zoraida and ignored her and went, full of earnest questioning, to Jim's face. Suddenly, at what she saw there, the red blood of joyousness ran into Betty's cheeks. At moments like this it is with few words or none at all that perfect understanding comes. In a flash his look had told her all that it would require many fumbling spoken words to repeat one-half so eloquently.

The puma had sprung to its feet but stood its ground. The murderous eyes were everywhere at once, on Betty, on Jim, on Zoraida, most of all on Betty; the quivering nostrils widened and sniffed; the tawny throat shook with a series of low growls. Jim's foot stirred; the cat's teeth came together with a snap.

With little wish as Kendric had to create a disturbance just now, it was beyond his power to withhold his hand as he saw Betty draw back against the walls of her cage. In his pocket was Bruce's weapon. Kendric jerked it out, and before Zoraida's cry could burst from her lips and before her hand struck his arm, he drove a bullet into the puma's skull between the hard evil eyes. The animal dropped in its tracks, with never another whine.

As the puma went down, Zoraida winced as though in bodily pain, as though it had been her flesh instead of her cat's that had known the deep bite of hot lead. She looked from the twitching animal to Kendric like one aghast, like one stupefied by what she had seen, who could not altogether believe that an accomplished act had in reality taken place. There was horror in her look; she recalled to him vividly though fleetingly a South Sea island priest whom he had seen long ago when the savage's idol had been overthrown and cast down into a mud puddle under the palm trees. At that moment Zoraida might well have been sister to the idolater of the South Seas or some ancient Egyptian priestess stricken dumb at the sight of sacred cat violated.