Chapter XVIII

“_Ah me! we believe in evil,_ _Where once we believed in good._”

The first puff of cool afternoon wind came sighing up from the distant sea, stirring the creepers on Harding’s veranda. As the cool breeze moved the heated air there was a slight stir in a hammock slung across its shadiest corner. At the movement, a washed-out English nurse, sitting close at hand, glanced at her patient--a girl so thin and wasted that she appeared to leave no impression on the pillows supporting her.

Nearly a month had passed since Leslie had come, soaked and blood-splashed, to Harding’s bungalow.

The happenings of that night stood out like a ghastly nightmare--a chaos of blackness, wild wind, driving rain, mad laughter and blood. She had stumbled on, lost in the blinding darkness, battling against the raging storm in a maze of trees and thorns and mud, with the feeling of some Terror close behind her; so close that the fact froze out all thought of the elements she was battling against with the mad haste of a hunted thing.

Out of the black night and driving rain a voice had called her by name.

“Leslie, my darling, where are you? Oh God!” it had cried again and again.

The sound had made her rush into a deep stagnant pool, and stay there, crouched up to the neck in foul water, heedless of the swarm of great leeches that had fixed on her, screening her face with the blackness of her hair, lest its whiteness should betray her: in shivering, deadly terror lest the frantic thumping of her heart and her own sobbing, panting breath should be heard above the howl of the storm.

How long she crouched there listening as Lebrassa searched round she did not know. Then he had gone, still calling frantically, until his voice was lost in the night.

Creeping out from her refuge, she had gone on and on and on, her only desire to reach whiteness and light again.

She had found Molly’s house at last.

Light was reached. Then--!

Something must have snapped in her head, for she woke up in a strange bedroom with a shriveled, dried, grasshopper-looking little man sitting beside her.

In his patient, as well as shock and strain, Atherley had had to fight against malaria fever. Yet, with skilful nursing and in the care of a doctor who knew every turn of the treacherous tropical disease, Leslie was slowly creeping back to life.

Fletcher and his brother officers had scoured the country. However, they had found no trace of Lebrassa, and learned nothing of him except that the morning after the massacre in Cooper’s bungalow, a couple of Mohammedan traders had called at a medical mission about twenty-five miles away. The younger of the two, a giant of a man, had a broken right arm, the result, so he had said, of his companion’s revolver going off accidentally.

Beyond a doubt the man was the Hyena.

When Leslie returned to reason she had told all she knew of that night’s happenings, and there the matter ended.

On the river bank the Lebrassa & Cooper factory lay closed and silent. On the outskirts of the settlement the bungalow stood empty and lifeless, overgrown and entangled, its tragedy sleeping quietly in the embrace of black earth. And on the balcony of Harding’s house lay the girl who had escaped from that night of rapine and slaughter.

Presently the sound of men’s voices drifted along with the sighing wind. A couple of soldierly figures came up the balcony steps. Harding went on, round the corner to the shady spot where Leslie’s hammock was slung, but his companion remained at the head of the stairs, in a state of obvious fidgets.

When the Major appeared round the corner, a feeble smile greeted him.

By Leslie’s side, he came to a halt, patting her worn face tenderly.

“Well, how’s my little girl?” he asked. “Feeling equal to a visitor?”

Leslie guessed who the visitor was, and a faint tinge of color came to her white cheeks.

“If it’s Captain Fletcher, I’d like to see him,” she said faintly.

So far she had seen no one except the nurse, doctor, and her host.

Perhaps Fletcher had never felt so clumsy and nervous, or so speechless, as when, a few moments later, he sat by Leslie’s hammock bereft of the support of his friend and the nurse, who had withdrawn, leaving him alone with the patient.

He was not used to feminine society. Most of his adult life had been spent on the edge of one of the wildest parts of the Empire, where from year’s end to year’s end he never saw a white woman. Now, as he watched the girl among the pillows, he felt keenly the loss of the gift of free and easy conversation.

However, Leslie broke the silence before it grew strained.

“Captain Fletcher, I can never thank you enough for all you did--that night. I know you were wounded in saving me. I’m awfully sorry you’ve been hurt, because it… it was all my fault.”

Fletcher could answer remarks, even if he could not broach subjects of his own.

“Some one must have been exaggerating about my injuries,” he said. “I was out and running about the same day. So you see I couldn’t have been seriously damaged. And how do you make it out to be all your fault?”

“If I hadn’t told that--that dreadful man what I overheard you saying that night in the Harrogate hotel, all this would never have happened.”

No one knew better than Fletcher what had been lost by that piece of thoughtlessness, but he had always kept to himself the fact that Leslie had inadvertently told Lebrassa he was under suspicion. Now, his one idea was to soothe the girl, never to let her know the extent of her folly.

“You foolish child,” he said gently. “Lebrassa would have suspected the moment he saw me. What you said made no difference at all.”

Leslie cast a quick glance at the sun-bitten face beside her.

“It’s very kind of you to say so,” she said humbly.

“I mean it,” he replied emphatically. “He knows I’ve been on his trail for the last ten years. If you must know, that’s really my job. Sort of secret police business. Sleuthhounding round for any clue that may lead up to the catching of that villain.”

His words comforted Leslie a little.

“He took my letter,” she volunteered. “The one Molly never got, that made her marry Mr. Cooper. I can’t think why he did it.”

Fletcher agreed it was a mystery.

“He told me all about the Hyena,” she went on. “I’d no idea there really were people of that sort. So different from what they seemed… so absolutely dreadful.”

“Lebrassa has deceived most people, many of them men twice your age and used to dealing with all manner of villains. So it’s not very surprising if he succeeded in your case.”

“I thought you were not just, not fair,” Leslie confessed, “and all the time you were right. I shall never forgive myself for not listening to you from the first.”

The arrival of Atherley with “Time’s up, young man,” resulted in the routing of Fletcher.

However, he did not go very far away. Only round the corner to a spot where Harding was sitting.

Presently Atherley joined the two. Then over whiskey and soda, they listened to Fletcher’s plan for getting Leslie out of the country in such a way that Lebrassa would have no inkling of where she was.

The doctor, whose leave was about due, was to take her, and Fletcher insisted the financing of the affair was his concern alone.

The plan of campaign was as follows.

From Calabar River it was possible to get to another river, Rio del Rey, about forty miles away. At the trading stations there, steamers called at stated times. By one of these Atherley and his charge would proceed to the island of Fernando Po. An express German steamer was due there within the next fortnight. By it the two would proceed to Hamburg, and on by rail to some place on the Riviera until Leslie was fit to take up life again.

“And then?” Harding asked, as Fletcher finished.

“Then I expect she’ll go her own way,” the captain answered in a gloomy manner. “Because none of us has any legal claim or hold on her.”

“You great overgrown ass, why don’t you ask her to marry you?” Atherley put in.

For a moment it looked as though Fletcher would resent the question.

“I’ve no reason to believe she even likes me,” he replied stiffly. “To ask her now when she’s under an obligation to me would be taking a mean advantage. The child is absolutely penniless. She might feel bound to take my offer--no matter what her own feelings were--as the only possible way of paying off her debt.”

Harding’s voice eased the situation.

“I’ve a brother-in-law in the Portuguese wine trade. If I wrote to my sister and asked her to take Miss Graham as her companion, I know she would. Then at least we should know where the child was.”

“I say, that’s awfully decent of you,” Fletcher said, relieved.

During the next week the three men devoted a good deal of time to the mechanism and working of the doctor’s launch. Dispensing with the negro crew, the little craft took short runs in the cool of the afternoon with these three budding engineers and Leslie as passenger.

On the river bank the usual crowd of loafing negroes watched their exit and return.

One day the three Englishmen and their solitary passenger set off as usual. However, they failed to return at the customary hour. This fact appeared to interest a couple of the negroes, for they waited until darkness came.

Night fell, but there was no sign of the truant launch.

Presently, out of the dark forest, came the wild roll of a native drum with curious little intermittent taps. Another answered it. And still another, from farther and ever farther away, repeating the rhythm until it was lost in distance.

However, before the news of Leslie’s departure reached Lebrassa, she was lying under the awning of a steamer in Rio del Rey, waiting for the evening tide to bear her down the river and away from Africa.

By her side Fletcher was sitting.

Now that the actual parting had come he was more tongue-tied than ever. On Leslie, too, had fallen a cloak of silence.

Strained and anxious, she was watching the man at her side.

“Captain Fletcher,” she said presently in a nervous voice, “I can never thank you for all your kindness to me.”

“That’s nothing,” he said hastily. “If you’ll drop me a line occasionally I shall be more than repaid.”

“Of course I shall write to you.”

There was another pause, broken this time by the “All ashore” bell.

“Well, I must push off,” Fletcher said, getting to his feet.

Leslie got up also.

“You will keep out of the way of that dreadful Hyena, won’t you?” she asked anxiously.

He took the hand she was offering, holding it carefully.

“Don’t you worry about that,” he said cheerfully. “Lebrassa will make it his business to avoid me. Now, good-by, and take care of yourself. And… and may I come and see you during my next leave,” he stammered.

“If you think such a foolish person is… is worth keeping in touch with,” she said shyly.

“Worth keeping in touch with!” he echoed.

Then feeling himself on the edge of a proposal, hastily he shook the girl’s hand and turned quickly away.

Presently he was gazing longingly after a steamer that was disappearing round a bend of the river.

On its deck Leslie lay, wondering drearily if her folly had quite alienated Captain Fletcher. During the past week, although they had been quite a lot together, he had never shown the least sign of straying beyond the friendship stage. In her eyes, now, he was a hero, not the interfering busybody he had once seemed.

As she pondered on the problem she watched the sunset.

Great, black clouds, flecked with lurid red, loomed up over the land she was leaving, looking almost as if they were chasing her.

As she gazed at them a violent shiver ran through her. She would much rather have had one of the brilliant, rainbow-hued sunsets that had fallen to her lot many times during her brief tragic stay in Africa. Not this ominous banking of black and red. For it seemed to suggest that the blood and blackness could not be left behind so easily.