Page:Dumas - Tales of Strange adventure (Methuen, 1907).djvu/128

116 legs I was fast to his tail. He whisked round two or three times, which only gave me an opportunity of twisting his tail more firmly round my wrist. Then seeing that if only I held on tight in my present position, he could not touch me with his horns, I began to pluck up courage, while he on the contrary began to bellow with disappointed rage.

"'Wait a bit,' I cried; 'aha! my friend, so you bellow with rage; now I am going to make you bellow with pain.'

"So saying, I took my knife and drove it into his body. It seems I had hit upon a tender spot; he reared like a prancing horse and sprang forward so suddenly and violently that he nearly tore my arm from the socket. But I held on and let him drag me along, while again and again and yet again I stabbed him. It was an experience I trust you may never have to undergo! Look you, it lasted a quarter of an hour, and in that quarter of an hour I travelled more than two leagues, through brambles and bogs and brooks. I might as well have been tied on to the tail of a locomotive. But all the time I kept my knife going, shouting: 'Ah! you scoundrel, ah, you villain! ah, you ruffian! you want to kill me, do you? stop a bit, stop a bit.' He was more than angry, he was mad, so mad that, coming to the top of a precipice, he never looked, but sprang over. But I had seen what was coming, and let go. I pulled up at the very edge, while he fell crash to the bottom.

"I poked my head over and saw the beast stretched dead on the rocks below. As for me, I am bound to say I was in scarcely better case; I was battered, bruised, cut and bleeding, but there were no bones broken. I picked myself up, cut down a sapling to steady my tottering steps, and set out for a brook I could see sparkling through the trees a hundred yards off. Coming to the banks I knelt down and began to wash the blood from my face, when I heard a voice crying in French, 'Help, help, help! ' I turned in the direction from which the cries came, and saw a girl almost naked running towards me with arms outstretched and showing signs of the liveliest terror. She was pursued by a negro of sorts holding a stick in his hand and coming on with such agility that though he was a hundred yards from her when I first saw them, he had caught her up in a moment, seized her in his arms, and borne her away into the thickest of the forest.

"This sight, the agonised tones of her appeal, the brutality of the wretch who had swung her over his shoulder and was carrying her away into the depths of the wood, all combined to restore my strength. I forgot my fatigue and dashed oflf in pursuit crying, 'Stop! stop!'

"But seeing himself followed, the ravisher redoubled his efforts. The burden he carried seemed scarcely to check his speed. I could not understand how any human being could be endowed with such vigour, and I told myself under my breath that when we came face to face I might very likely regret having constituted myself the knight-errant of this distressed damsel.

"Meantime I was gaining on the fellow very slowly, and in spite of the sort of concentrated fury that filled me, I am not at all sure whether I should ever have overtaken him, if his unhappy victim had not seized the branch of a tree and clung to it with such tenacity that her ravisher stopped dead. Seizing her round the body, he used all his strength to make her let go, whilst she kept screaming: 'Help, help! Save me! In heaven's name do not desert me!'

"I was not more than twenty-five or thirty yards from her when suddenly the negro, seeing he was going to be attacked, determined, it would seem, to take the initiative, and letting go the woman, he advanced upon me, stick in air.

"In three bounds he was in front of me. I uttered a cry of amazement; what I had taken for a negro was an ape.

"Fortunately I had a stick, too; and as I knew well how to use it, I quickly assumed a posture of defence, for instead of attacking I was now to be attacked. As for the woman, directly she felt herself free, she had described a circle and come to seek shelter behind me, crying: 'Courage, courage, sir. Oh! save me from this monster! Oh! do not desert me!'

"While parrying his blows and hitting out at him in a way that evidently startled, but did not discourage him, I examined my opponent. He was a great stalwart ape, all hairy, and standing nearly six feet high, with a greyish beard. Nature had taught him to use his stick with an address and activity that came very near giving him the victory.