Page:Anderson--Isle of seven moons.djvu/374

362 "Ay tank you ban tam fool. The whisky you always pack, she breed snakes like rabbits." After another whispered council, in which her ears, sharpened by fear, distinguished one question of Pete's,—"Why don't you leave 'er here, Cap, with the chest," and the reply: "No, they've captured the yacht, and we can't pack too much baggage, she's safer up there," the gambler and Phil left the camp, Pete and the Swede standing guard. Her mouth was swathed in the scarf again, and she was dispatched northward with the wicked old man as her guide. At first she was glad that it was not the gambler.

Up the mountain slope he drove her, through its forest-covered sides, past the haunted house, a glimpse of whose forlorn walls she caught as they toiled upwards, then among the ragged rocks and sulphurous saucers pocking the scarred face of the mountain below the crater, and boiling feverishly now. Thick murky scarfs of vapour swathed their yellowed lips, as that silken gag muffled her own, and wandered disconsolate over the whole area.

Over the divide they passed and zigzagged down to the brink of the gorge. Northward she could see the spars and masts of the North Star beautifully pencilled against the turquoise of the sky, and not far away, the graceful lines of the yacht, all like a cheerful painting in bright water colours.

Above, the black ostrich plume had expanded to four times the size when first she saw it, and near it, that black speck upon the blue sank and grew as it sank, like the evil thing of her dreams, until she could once more distinguish the wide stretched wings of the waiting buzzard.