Page:Amazing Stories v08n02 1933-05.djvu/10



WAS crossing the Plaza San Martin in Lima, Peru, when hurrying footsteps and a voice calling my name, caused me to turn. The man who "was approaching me looked as if he might just have escaped from the torture chambers of the Inquisition. He was clad in a strange mixture of ragged garments, patched with native Indian cloth and pieces of llama skin, and a worn and filthy poncho. On his feet were raw-hide sandals, and he wore a battered, disreputable felt hat jammed on his shock of long, unkempt hair. His face, covered with a straggling beard, was the color of leather and the parchment-like skin was drawn as tightly over the bones as the skin of an Incan mummy. His eyes, so deep set within their sockets that they seemed mere pin-points, burned with the unnatural fire of fever and his long, claw-like fingers were constantly moving, the hands opening, closing, as if striving forever to grasp some intangible something. “I’m Stirling !” he exclaimed as he reached my side. “I’m the sole survivor of the Matson expedition, I”

“You mean you’re Richard J. Stirling?” I demanded. “And that Matson and the others are”

“Dead! All dead! Oh, my God, yes!” he cried. “Yes, I’m Stirling—Richard J. No wonder you didn’t recognize me—” he laughed hoarsely, a terrible mockery of a laugh—“but that damned consul wouldn’t believe me. He wanted proofs—Proofs after two years wandering in the jungles! And he wouldn’t believe my story—said I was mad or that ’twas all imagination or hallucination due to fever. He was looking out the window when he saw you. “There’s Verrill,” he said. “Go tell him your yarn. He knows the interior and the Indians. Perhaps he’ll swallow such an impossible story. So I hurried after you. You will believe, won’t you? You know what incredible things occur in the bush, don’t you? You’ll know I must be telling the truth. Say you’ll believe me! My God, if someone doesn’t I’ll go mad I”

“Hold on!” I interrupted. “You’re all wrought up. Of course the consul wouldn’t believe anything. He doesn’t know any more about the country than any of the other young asses our government sends out. Yes, I’ll probably believe your story unless it deals with the scientifically impossible—with the supernatural or occult. Anything else, however improbable, might be true. But come over to the club. I’m on my way to lunch, and I’ll bet you’ll be glad to eat some real white man’s food and take the taste of roasted grubs and broiled monkeys out of your mouth by a good pisco cocktail.” “But—but I can’t go to the club like this,” he protested. “I’m a disgrace, a scarecrow. I’ll—”

GRASPED his arm. “Bother how you look!” I told him. “You’re my guest, and you’ve just come out of the bush. Food first, old man, and a good drink, and then for your story.”

“But, but I must tell you!” he cried, his hands working nervously again, “I’ll go really mad—I’ll go—Oh, God! I can hear it now, all the time, in my sleep—beating in my brain — the Death Drum! If I don’t tell you”

“Brace up!” I commanded him. “You’re nervous, wrought up—been through too much, Sterling. But you’re safe now. Everything will be all right. And you can tell the story much better after you’ve eaten and have calmed down.”

As I sat across the table from the weird being, who had gulped down his cocktail and was glancing about like some hunted animal or a jungle Indian, I could scarcely believe that the drawn, haggard, ragged, unkempt derelict was Dr. Richard J. Sterling, the dapper young ethnologist, who, two years before, had plunged into the Amazonian forests with the Matson