He had a store of rhyming patter which he was in the habit of using as a sort of oil, or slaver, or low-pitched humming accompaniment to this sub-human submission to fate. He would say, without the least flicker of protest, or of complaint, far less of indignation: “That’s the gear; I’ve got it clear: I’ve got to climb the bank up there. I’ve got to swish that river through. Under those bushes I’ve got to go, whether the danger’s from spear or bow. It may wipe me off; it may help me on. We be all born; but we bain’t all gone.”
At this particular moment for instance, while Colin was laughing with his hair, his eyes, his lips, his skin, his ribs, his hips, his shins, his ankles, and with the fluttering fingers of both his hands, what Clamp said was: “If them’s going to kill we, them’s going to kill we; and if us be going to kill they, that’s how t’will be; us’ll be alive and them’ll be stark staring. Jesus Holy will be Jesus Holy just the same; and Uncle Satan will be Uncle Satan just the same. Yes, frost will freeze and fire will burn and water will drown just the same, whether Roque eat up Towers or Towers eat up Roque. Freeze and burn and drown them will, whether a girt wave of the sea swallows all the bloody land in this blasted world, or whether the waves of every sea on the earth dry up and turn into the sands of the Desert of Sodom; just the same will it be for me, just the same will it be for thee, and just the same for this quiet old tree.”
Young John kept turning this torch that Colin had been carrying so carefully for him, and that he himself had so carefully lit, from one vista of the forest to another, and then to the trunk of the tree at their side, and then up to the misty sky. And he thought in his heart:
“How many moments like this have passed for how many men like me since the beginning of the world! Here I am with these two: one dancing and chuckling with glee simply because he doesn’t know whether we’re going to save the Friar’s Brazen Head or not, and the other already sick to death of the whole affair, and ready to be dead rather than make the effort to go on with it! And when I think how my Friar, who is, since Archimedes, the wisest sage and subtlest inventor in history, has created this Head and has given it enough brain to think and enough language to say what it thinks, and how this band of crazy miscreants is at this moment hunting for some heap of stones whereon and wherewith they may hammer it to fragments, I feel as if — as if—”
And at this point John indeed felt so much as if he were gazing into a bottomless garbage-pit of the whole creation that he concluded his thoughts with a lamentable sigh, a sigh so deep that Colin ceased to laugh upwards and Clamp ceased to groan downwards, while the six troubled apertures which those three persons called their eyes just stared at one another.
And then, without any warning at all, a startling hullabaloo rose widely into the air from the men they were following; and a wild medley of sounds made up of cries, shouts, screams, howls, appeals, threats, curses, surged tumultuously through the forest.
“Come on, for heaven’s sake!” gasped young John, brandishing his blazing torch in one hand and his grotesque axe at the end of a pole in the other, and rushing headlong towards the tumult. What they saw when they arrived was the towering figure of Peleg the Mongolian, swinging his terrifying mace with its orbicular head of iron spikes, but himself in evident danger of his life.
John shuddered when he saw what was threatening this strongest of all the supporters of his parents. For two of the Lost Towers men, each of them with one of his knees on the ground while on the other he balanced the end of his bow, were shooting arrow after arrow at him; and already the head-feathers of two arrows were sticking out of his left shoulder.
Luckily for Peleg he was wearing about his shoulders a thick leathery scarf, and so, though the points of the arrows entered his flesh and stuck there, they did not really seriously wound him. Of our three friends young John with his funny-looking weapon and his torch was in front, and queerly enough it was the humpty-dumpty figure of Clamp that was a close second, while Colin, the long-legged, flipperty-flappity antic, made a poor third. This happened, either because, in spite of all his zest for life, Colin was scared of facing the arrows of that dangerous pair, or because — but these secrets belong to those interior thoughts about which not even the boldest historian dares to be dogmatic — if he’d been in front of Clamp, he’d have missed the exquisitely comical sight of the heroic spurt in which that grim little stoic indulged himself at the final lap.
But suddenly, as young John had often in his short life noticed before, but had put it down to the spiritual atmosphere of that particular district, and had even interpreted it to his brother Tilton as the influence of some quite definite “genius loci,” the whole situation reversed itself in an instant, and in a contagious rush of wild and desperate panic, the gang of bandits, with those two competent arrow-shooters taking the lead, fled as fast as it was possible for active outlaws to flee, in the general direction of Lost Towers. It was now revealed to John that Peleg with his mace had not been alone when the three of them had heard this unnatural noise in the forest and had hunted it down.
And what made the whole lot of the bandits scoot off in terror was not Peleg’s giant size nor his mace, but the sudden apparition, just to the left of those two kneeling bowmen, of what struck the whole lot of them as a Supernatural Being, possibly the Mother of God Herself, come to put an end to their nonsense.
It was Ghosta. But her black robe, and her white head-covering, and also, though it was too dark to see her features, her formidable dignity of movement, evoked, at that time of night, a spasm of awe that must have resembled the bewildered panic which some prowling rascal, up to no good, would have experienced had he drifted and loafed, without knowing in the least where he was going, along a cemetery path leading to the particular tomb out of which, at the very moment he arrived, Lazarus was being called forth from the dead.
The terror produced by the appearance of Ghosta was of course accentuated by her own powerful spirit. Tough nerves and thick skins and simple minds are sometimes dominated quite unexpectedly by a particular type of formidable intelligence, an intelligence which may easily strike those affected by it as supernatural, whereas in reality it may only be the power of an inspired personality.
Young John himself was affected by the apparition of Ghosta. His heart glowed within him, as, panting for breath after his run and waving his torch in a vigorous boyish manner, he stood staring at the Brazen Head which itself at that moment in the torch-light looked quite as indifferent to all outward events as Clamp himself, whose eyes kept turning heavily from the arrows in Peleg’s shoulder to Ghosta’s black robe, as if both these noticeable things had only been door-handles needing professional attention.
At any rate when Ghosta, who held a small lantern in her hand, came forward and moved straight to her gigantic Mongolian friend, it was not only those two arrow-shooters, both of whom leapt to their feet in consternation, who bolted in desperate panic, but every man-jack of that whole Lost Towers crowd.
Down on the earth fell the Brazen Head along with the poles on which it was carried and the cords by which it was tied, and a strange and sudden silence fell on the whole forest. Ghosta must have already seen young John and his friends approaching, but she did not even look round as they drew near. She had gone straight up to Peleg; and by the time John was at their side she had pulled out both the arrows which indeed the young man had already surmised must have left only shallow flesh-wounds, and was already bandaging the bleeding places with strips of white linen.