“Positively the only thing I can see to do is just to make sure both automatics are crammed full of cartridges, keep our wits about us, and plug the first man that comes in through that door with the notion of making sacrifices of us. I certainly don’t hanker after martyrdom of that sort, and, by God! the savage that lays hands on you, dies inside of one second by the stop-watch!”
“I know, boy; but against so many, what are two revolvers?”
“They’re everything! My guess is that a little target practice would put the fear of God into their hearts in a i most extraordinary manner!”
He tried to speak lightly and to cheer the girl, but in his breast his heart lay heavy as a lump of lead.
“Suppose they don’t come in, what then?” suddenly resumed Beatrice. “What if they leave us here till—”
“There, there, little girl! Don’t you go borrowing any trouble! We’ve got enough of the real article, without manufacturing any!”
Silence again, and a long, dark, interminable waiting. In the black cell the air grew close and frightfuly oppressive. Clad as they both were in fur garments suitable to outdoor life and to aeroplaning at great altitudes, they were suffering intensely from the heat.
Stern’s wrists and arms, moreover, still pained considerably, for they had been very cruelly bruised with the ropes, which the barbarians had drawn tight with a force that bespoke both skill and deftness. His need of some occupation forced him to assure himself, a dozen times over, that both revolvers were completely filled. Fortunately, the captors had not known enough to rob either Beatrice or him of the cartridge-belts they wore.
How long a time passed? One hour, two, three?
They could not tell.
But, overcome by the vitiated air and the great heat, Beatrice slept at last, her head in the man’s lap. He, utterly spent, leaned his back against the wall of black and polished stone, nodding with weariness and great exhaustion.
He, too, must have dropped off into a troubled sleep, for he did not hear the unbolting of the massive iron cell-door.
But all at once, with a quick start, he recovered consciousness. He found himself broad awake, with the girl clutching at his arm and pointing.
With dazzled eyes he stared—stared at a strange figure standing framed in a rectangle of blue and foggy light.
Even as he shouted: “Hold on, there! Get back out o’ that, you!” and jerked his ugly pistol at the old man’s breast—for very aged this man seemed, bent and feeble and trembling as he leaned upon an iron staff—a voice spoke dully through the half-gloom, saying:
“Peace, friends! Peace be unto you!”
Stern started up in wild amaze.
From his nerveless fingers the pistol dropped. And, as it clattered on the floor, he cried:
“English? You speak English? Who are you? English! English! Oh, my God!”
CHAPTER XXVII. DOOMED!
THE aged man stood for a moment as though tranced at sound of the engineer’s voice. Then, tapping feebly with his staff, he advanced a pace or two into the dungeon. And Stern and Beatrice—who now had sprung up, too, and was likewise staring at this singular apparition—heard once again the words:
“Peace, friends! Peace!”
Stern snatched up the revolver and leveled it.
“Stop there!” he shouted. “Another step and I—I—”
The old man hesitated, one hand holding the staff, the other groping out vacantly in front of him, as though to touch the prisoners. Behind him, the dull blue light cast its vague glow. Stern, seeing his bald and shaking head, lean, corded hand, and trembling body wrapped in its mantle of coarse brown stuff, could not finish the threat.
Instead, his pistol-hand dropped. He stood there for a moment as though paralyzed with utter astonishment. Outside, the chant had ceased. Through the doorway no living beings were visible—nothing but a thin and tenuous vapor, radiant in the gas-flare which droned its never-ending roar.
“In the name of Heaven, who—what—are you?” cried the engineer, at length. “A man who speaks English, here? Here?”
The aged one nodded slowly, and once again groped out toward Stern.
Then, in his strangely hollow voice, unreal and ghostly, and with uncertain hesitation, an accent that rendered the words all but unintelligible, he made answer:
“A man—yea, a living man. Not a ghost. A man! and I speak the English. Verily, I am ancient. Blind, I go unto my fathers soon. But not until I have had speech with you. Oh, this miracle—English speech with those to whom it still be a living tongue!”
He choked, and for a space could say no more. He trembled violently. Stern saw his frail body shake, heard sobs, and knew the ancient one was weeping.
“Well, great Scott! What d’you think of that?” exclaimed the engineer. “Say, Beatrice—am I dreaming? Do you see it, too?”
“Of course! He’s a survivor, don’t you understand?” she answered, with quicker intuition than his. “He’s one of an elder generation—he remembers more! Perhaps he can help us!” she added eagerly. And without more ado, running to the old man, she seized his hand and pressed it to her bosom.
“Oh, father!” cried she. “We are Americans in terrible distress! You understand us—you, alone, of all these people here. Save us, if you can!”
The patriarch shook his head, where still some sparse and feeble hairs clung, snowy-white.
“Alas!” he answered, intelligibly, yet still with that strange, hesitant accent of his—“alas, what can I do? I am sent to you, verily, on a different mission. They do not understand, my people. They have forgotten all. They have fallen back into the night of ignorance. I alone remember; I only know. They mock me. But they fear me, also.
“Oh, woman!”—and, dropping his staff a-clatter to the floor, he stretched out a quivering hand—“oh, woman! and oh, man from above—speak! Speak, that I may hear the English from living lips!”
Stern, blinking with astonishment there in the half-gloom, drew near.
“English?” he queried. “Haven’t you ever heard it spoken?”
“Never! Yet, all my life, here in this lost place, have I studied and dreamed of that ancient tongue. Our race once spoke it. Now it is lost. That magnificent language, so rich and pure, all lost, forever lost! And we—”
“But what do you speak down here?” exclaimed the engineer, with eager interest. “It seemed to me I could almost catch something of it; but when it came down to the real meaning, I couldn’t. If we could only talk with these people here, your people, they might give us some kind of a show! Tell me!”
“A—a show?” queried the blind man, shaking his head and laying his other hand on Stern’s shoulder. “Verily, I cannot comprehend. An entertainment, you mean? Alas, no, friends; they are not hospitable, my people. I fear me; I fear me greatly that—that—”
He did not finish, but stood there blinking his sightless eyes, as though with some vast effort of the will he might gain knowledge of their features. Then, very deftly, he ran his fingers over Stern’s bearded face. Upon the engineer’s lips his digits paused a second.
“Living English!” he breathed in an awed voice. “These lips speak it as a living language! Oh, tell me, friends, are there now men of your race—once our race—still living, up yonder? Is there such a place—is there a sky, a sun, moon, stars-verily such things now? Or is this all, as my people say, deriding me, only the babbling of old wives’ tales?”
A thousand swift, conflicting thoughts seemed struggling in Stern’s mind. Here, there, he seemed to catch a lucid bit; but for the moment he could analyze nothing of these swarming impressions.
He seemed to see in this strange ancient-of-days some last and lingering relic of a former generation of the Folk of the Abyss, a relic to whom perhaps had been handed down, through countless generations, some vague and wildly distorted traditions of the days before the cataclysm. A relic who still remembered a little English, archaic, formal, mispronounced, but who, with the tenacious memory of the very aged, still treasured a few hundred words of what to him was but a dead and forgotten tongue. A relic, still longing for knowledge of the outer world-still striving to keep alive in the degenerated people some spark of memory of all that once had been!