Page:Weird Tales Volume 14 Issue 2 (1929-08).djvu/60

most meekly subservient. And once in the silence as the mugger pondered something Tai Hoong had said, McTeague caught a moan. His head came up. The mugger's long black snoiu turned. The apes listened.

"Fetch ut he-ere," commanded the mugger, and an ape swung into the blackness beyond, then returned carrying something that mewed in agony, and laid it on the coral.

McTeague leaped to his feet. The hand of his guardian ape circled his throat and held him. Then he threw up an arm to shut out the sight of a girl who had once been pretty, skin bleached to color of gold ash, head like a feather duster, who had been staked down and was being flayed alive.

McTeague crowded back against the ape that held him, oblivious to the terrible proximity of the beast, and in one flood of rage that shut out all other fears, he turned on the rousing Brigham.

"Is this girl your work, Brigham?"

"Didn't have time to finish," muttered Brigham; "Klein and I just got started. Good taxidermist, Klein—lovely skin that girl{[bar|2}}"

"Tai Hoong," roared Captain McTeague, "you once gave me a hand—a hand of doom, of demon's doom, you said. Give me one sign that there is justice in this world, or power in man to rid the race of its brutal fiends aborted from human shape. Give Red Murphy what he wants, and Tricky Turner, and this other ape!"

And somehow the form of Captain McTeague in his torn shirt and bloody scratches of flesh took on majesty and height and the strange hand was uplifted in that gesture which ancient gods of the East make in stone and bronze and golden effigy.

And across the circle of firelight Tai Hoong rose and became stately and terrible, as his hands clasped each other and he bowed from the waist as before god-head.

Then, in the jungle formed a procession of dreadful import such as the world has not seen since the armored apes of the simian city of Hanuman pranced forth to savage music that abused the senses, and jangled towers upthrust against the burning sky.

McTeague stalked forth, followed by his captor whose claws were hooked in his belt. Tai Hoong followed with head carried high and eyes ablaze. And swinging along came the miserable humans jerked like rag dolls in the clutch of the gray apes. Along the river bank they went, so that the mugger could more readily keep pace, and from his throat roared the sonorous sounds that called to mind a black-plumed hearse and following charger with saddle and stirrups reversed; the Dead March from Saul.

Swinging through trees overhead were a company of orang-outangs carrying gourds of palm wine and other things which McTeague could not make out. It seemed to Captain McTeague that his body was detached, separate, insensate. One burning furnace of wrath roared behind his eyes. For alongside, as if designed to flaunt the wickedness which white men did to natives, came a she-ape carrying as lightly as a woman carries her baby, the half-flayed body of the hut-bleached girl, still moaning, although her eyes were glazed and Tai Hoong had muttered the only comforting thing his lips uttered in that hour, that she was beyond feeling pain.

Deep into the jungle they plunged, and Captain McTeague saw the beauty of that pre-Adam period when survival depended on brawn, on fang and claw and stupendous strength. They could not have made that journey in weeks of hacking through jungle growth or paddling the trackless, shoreless rivers webbed with mangroves that sprout their seeds on the trees and send down roots to web the water with entangling death snares. But in the arms of the great apes they were carried high, swiftly, safely, and always within sound of that booming