Page:Weird Tales Volume 23 Issue 5 (1934 05).djvu/104

 prodded him onward. Now they reached the first of the awesome bamboo stumps, beside which the trunk lay moldering on the ground. The stump itself was a clean-cut thumb of bamboo, projecting from its roots, just to the height of a man's neck

A whimper burst from Landrigan. On further now there was a regular clearing, into which the moonlight poured. Here were scores, hundreds of the stumps, it seemed. The sacrificial spot of the Indios—probably of this madman behind him!

"Stop here!" Smith's voice was hoarse.

Landrigan obeyed, his knees shaking.

"Right across this clearing, straight ahead, you can see my home, Landrigan. That was where I brought Dick, my brother, when he was learning to walk again, after infantile paralysis. There was no one else to care for him, and I—I loved him, Landrigan.

"And just as surely as if you had cut his throat, you murdered him!"

"Oh, my God!" broke in the manager, almost hysterically. "You don't be-lieve——"

He got no further. Shifting the automatic to his left hand, clenching his right fist for a necessary part of the procedure. Smith took one step forward and struck Landrigan squarely upon the point of the chin. It was a merciful enough blow. The manager pitched forward, knocked cleanly into unconsciousness.

Not wasting so much as a glance on the fallen man. Smith strode across the moonlit glade to the bungalow. Though he never stepped here a single night any more, he kept certain supplies hidden handy in the little building—machetes, coir rope and the like

later, when Landrigan returned to uneasy knowledge of his surroundings, he felt strangely, terribly

restrained. He was held erect, though slumping loosely. Something was pulling painfully at the long, waved chestnut hair on his head—hair which the prideful manager always had combed straight back.

He tried to lift his arms to investigate, and could not wrench them free. His legs too were immovable. He came staring awake then, screaming.

He was bound to a new one of the execution bamboos, his head held back by a loop fastened around a long lock of his hair, so that his throat was arched and tense, the Adam's apple fully exposed. His arms were lashed behind the bole of the bamboo. His legs were bound to the stalk near the ground.

Directly before him, arms folded, gaunt face saturninely grim, stood Smith. In the man's right hand, clutched so that the thirty-inch blade slanted upward, was a silvery-keen Collins machete.

The man from the Mazaruni answered none of Landrigan's frantic questions and pleading, through one long minute. He allowed full and ominous realization of his position to sink into the manager. He did not move even a muscle of his lined countenance, as Landrigan went from yells and frantic pleading, to a half-hysterical shrieking, his nerve completely gone.

"Yell all you want," advised Smith coldly. "All will be over for you, long before Natheshire or anyone else can get here from the shando."

"But you—you will hang for this!" screamed Landrigan.

"No," said Smith unemotionally. "I won't hang, if that is any consolation to you. And besides"—here his voice took on a sudden hoarseness of undiluted savagery —"do you think, you yellow-bellied, treacherous snake, that I care now what happens to me?"