Page:Weird Tales Volume 24 Number 06 (1934-12).djvu/34

688 WEIRD TALES

 Piet Jornado and Captain Daunt had combined their resources in a partnership for shipping tropic birds and animals to far distant museums and zoological gardens and they were hunting saladang in Sumatra with indifferent success. Three natives had been killed by the ferocious beasts without a single capture.

’’Perhaps a change will break our run of hard luck,’* agreed Daunt, and a few hours later they were navigating tortuous hill roads leading to the comfortable bungalow set deep in a well-kept garden of native flowering shrubs, overlooking a valley where thatched huts of a village surrounded an ornate temple with gaudy ornamentation and roof timbers curved like the horns of a carabao.

’’Welcome, my fellow countryman,” cried Lemft to Jornado. ’’Welcome, Cap¬ tain Daunt. I was overjoyed to see your car coming, and I can promise you cool schnapps dear to a Dutchman’s heart.” ”I’m Dutch enough,” admitted Jor¬ nado, ’’though I’ve never seen the Netherlands. But there is a solid business block of marble in Antwerp where my relatives rule virtually as small kings. The best I can do is take my trick of command on the schooner, and domineer over natives. But some day I hope to get an island of my own, and preside over it and the natives in the old feudal man¬ ner.” ’’You’ve got the proper figure for it,” said Daunt, smiling, ’’though the King of the Cannibal Island business never tempted me. Perhaps Herr Lemft could give you some pointers, Jornado. You Netherlander rule as if to the manor born.” Yet he saw in Herr Lemft, who lorded it over a vast expanse of country, the signs of disintegration of a once magnificent physique, the silver in his blond hair, the sagging of face muscles under the sunbum. Beside him Jornado, equally big and well built, suggested the air of a conqueror, with ruddy hair and the mahogany tint of skin that had made Daunt try tormenting him about his ancestry: ”If some Othello of the Spanish armies that plagued Holland to its own humilia¬ tion didn’t have a love affair with one of your golden-haired grandmothers, Jor¬ nado, I’ll eat my shirt,” he said. ’’Who knows?” was the careless re¬ sponse. ’’And who cares?” " |* was only afraid business would pre- A vent your coming,” Herr Lemft re¬ peated again and again as they sat im¬ bibing imported schnapps. ”How much longer I can endure the place, I do not know. The loneliness is frightful.” ’’But you’ve got a pretty place. And a pretty companion,” commented Jornado. ”1 could be content, situated like this.” ’’The girl is gone. I miss her.” And Lemft’s hand brushed his chin. Daunt noticed it shook in the gesture. ’’Some¬ thing happened.” Lemft seized his glass abruptly and spilled the liquor, nor did he take the trouble to wipe it from his silk shirt. Daunt covered his glass with his hand to prevent it being filled. In spite of the tropic heat, the flamboyant trees, the com¬ forts of the bungalow, he felt the con¬ tagious perturbation of Herr Lemft. His great bulk swayed into the chair when they were summoned to dinner and he sat staring at a dish of tropic fruits colorful as the jewel-hung trees of an Aladdin’s orchard. ’’You let the girl go?” asked Jornado, softly, persuasively. ’’She is gone.” Lemft breathed the ad¬ mission; then his body jerked from the slumped inertness. ’’That is, I think, I hope she is gone. I do not know. Strange things happen in this Sumatra. I was too W. T.—2