Page:Weird Tales Volume 4 Number 2 (1924-05-07).djvu/106

104 "At almost the same time there was a stinging pain, cold as ice, upon my right shoulder, and I ceased knowing. There was only the troubled consciousness of terrible pain.

"The scene that impressed itself on my sight when I opened my eyes made me shut them again, immediately. It was too horrible for words. I have seen dirty messes here and elsewhere, but this turned my stomach and made me ill. Nausea added itself to my troubles. In that glance I had seen the deck unpopulated by a standing being, but torn bodies lay about like chips on a woodpile.

"I judge, as I lay there with closed eyes; that my unconsciousness had lasted some time. I had no fear of death, nor did it occur to me that my wounds were fatal. In those days it did not enter my mind that I might ever die. I am warier now, and one of these days I may settle down on a fairy farm.

"I considered, as I say, that much had happened since I had fallen unconscious. I knew that the Hindu crusaders would lose no time in transferring the treasure to their own ship, and—valuable as it was—one boat could easily have carried it.

"It developed that I was right. In a moment I heard the crunching noise of feet walking upon the blood-sodden, prostrate bodies. My ears told me horrible work was going on. They were dispatching all signs of life that appeared among the men on the deck. I tore open my eyes and beheld such horror as turns a man gray. There were two of them who were armed with cruel, curly knives, and one who gave directions. The latter had rolled over the body of one of his own men with his foot and was pointing at the throat. The poor wretch who had been a comrade of the headsman a half-hour before pleaded with his eyes and with his choking voice. The scimitars flashed, and blood spurted The man without a scimitar was turning over another body with his foot. They were not sparing their own men. They were killing all the wounded!

"It was diabolical, uncanny; blood-freezing.

"They were near me, and I tried with my last ounce of strength to resist the fate that I knew was coming. I succeeded in dragging myself to my elbow, but I fell back again, powerless but awake, my eyes open.

"The movement attracted them to me, and two scimitars flashed upward before my eyes. But the man who bore no blade held up a retarding hand, and the knives remained poised. His throat was guttural with a coarse negative, and he pointed with a smile of obscene satisfaction to the open hatches.

"The rats were coming back. They poured out of the ship's interior and went daintily among the bloody corpses.

HE two executioners smiled and acquiesced with their eyes. The officer smiled into my eyes; he had seen my helplessness. Gentlemen, I might throw this table through yonder window with less effort than I exerted in an attempt to raise my hands, but they lay still on the deck beside me. The three Hindus were climbing over the rail. They were gone. There was the splash of oars, and I knew that we were deserted—such of us as were still alive—to the mercy of the rats.

"The horror of it turned me cold, and a clammy sweat mingled with the blood on my body.

"Over the fallen, mangled men came the rats, thicker than flies on a paper. They came and sat on my chest, the gray patriarch whom I had hated, and the hatred that existed between us was in his eyes as he leered into my face and minced his horrid mouth.

"I wished for the clean sweep of a blade, for the descent of a sudden bolt of lightning. The death that looked at me out of the eyes of that rat, and the death that surrounded me on all sides was too hideous to contemplate. But no mercy came.

"I turned my eyes in my aching skull to look for my Latvian. He lay beside me, and I thought he must be dead. But as if my gaze restored him, he became conscious, falling at once back into a stupor.

"How long I lay there in the grip of that cold, damp panic I cannot say. It had the qualities of a century and of a moment. There was nothing to break the nasty silence but the lapping of the waves, and the petulant squeaking of the rats.

"I became aware that my Latvian was conscious again, and I looked to him for understanding and sympathy. The gray rat still sat on my chest, biding his time. There is a language of the eyes, gentlemen. At the moment my Latvian turned his blood-spattered face in my direction, the gray rat stepped daintlydaintily [sic] upon my chin, and nuzzled my cheek with the nose of a connoisseur.

"The Latvian's face went chalky with horror when he saw what was to happen. With a grievous effort that contorted his face he turned on his side, and began crawling.

"A great disgust and a cold hatred for his ingratitude overcame me when I saw that he was crawling away from me. I wished that he might die before I died, that I might see the work of the rats upon him.

"He was going painfully, slowly, toward the rail. With a prodigious effort he grasped it, and with a strength that I have never seen equaled in the will of any man he dragged himself to a standing position, supporting himself by the rigging.

"Glancing toward me with a pride that hurt worse than my wounds, he twisted his face into an absurd gesture, and whistled. A sense of the incongruity of his action possessed me, and I wanted to laugh. The result was only a greater sickness.

"He whistled again, and the strain which issued from his pursed lips was eerie and miraculous. It carried me back suddenly to the little village at the edge of a long marsh in Kovno; to the priest of priests beneath the sacred tree, and the whispering of the oak. Dissimilar as they were, there was a cousinship between the whistling of the wounded Latvian at the rail and the whispering which had passed between the worshippers and the tree to which they prayed.

"Knowlton, you have lain under a tree on your back beside some peaceful brook in Ohio, and you have called up the bob-whites by imitating their whistle. You have heard men lure crows into ambuscade by croaking upon a reed. You have all seen the charmer call the hooded cobra harmless out of his basket. But you have never seen the like of what I saw. You have read it, perhaps, in the bad rhymes of a good poet, but you have never seen it. Nor had I, but while I watched with my heart thumping like the fist of the watch, I recalled certain cryptical things which my hostess in Kovno had said of the mysterious powers held by 'The Favorite Children.'

"For those rats lifted up their heads at the first sound of that whistle, and at the second bar they turned and walked, with gladness in the motion of their bodies, toward the whistling Latvian.

"From the far sides of the deck they came, hurrying to answer the call which he knew. It was such a strain of music as made magic in the heart, the strain he whistled, over and over. Belated rats came out of the hatches, and there was a scampering above and below of rats which were coming.

"Last of all there left my chest the gray old rat which I had hated, and which hated me. He went with many a