Page:Artabanzanus (Ferrar, 1896).djvu/276

268 Obeltub gave me a vicious kick, and the Demon roared:

'Come and help us, you Ubertus; the balloon will be lost.'

But I flatly and positively refused to raise my hand against my friend and benefactor. If I could do nothing to save him, I certainly would not help them to destroy him. I called them fiends and wretches, and every other brutal epithet to which I could lay my tongue.

'If you don't help us,' roared the Demon, 'we'll pitch you out too!'

'Do your worst!' I roared in return; 'I am in your power; you cannot murder me more than once, and God will take care of my soul.'

While I was speaking, and groaning, and shouting with impotent rage and terror, the annihilation of the wretched Julius was completed. His murderers compelled him to relinquish his hold on the ropes and sides of the car, and he fell sheer into the awful space below us.

The balloon, relieved of his weight, now commenced to roll and plunge violently. The Demon began to haul on various ropes like a distraught sailor in a cyclone, and trumpeted out at the same time:

'Choke up the lightning, Obeltub—choke up, I say, or we shall go slap-dash into the blazing sun—steady, not too sharp—steady she goes, ease her off—warily, old girl, gently, bring her to—luff, luff, you son of a ——; round she comes, let it on now—half blast; you have not ballast enough; but who on earth would have thought of our being obliged to throw that son of perdition overboard?'

As for me, I was overwhelmed with horror and indignation. I lay down in the bottom of the car, and shed a torrent of tears. Alas! my poor friend Julius, to be taken from me thus, when I had so few friends left! Was this to be the cruel, the bitter end of your career?

Gradually recovering my self-possession and intellectual