Part 22 (2/2)

The man was about to be sacrificed!

But even as the red-robed men raised their knives in unison and were about to give them the downward lunge that would extinguish the life of their feeble victim--and as the other priests and the audience turning toward the setting sun, chanted louder and more vociferously--a startling interruption occurred.

”By the holy poker you're not going to kill that old man while I can prevent it.”

It was Billy Barnes; his face white and his lips set in a thin line of determination.

As he spoke utterly oblivious to the fact that not one of the men could understand him--Lathrop, pale-faced also, stepped forward by his side.

And there stood the two American boys while the auditors--at first dumb with amazement--began to buzz angrily like a nest of disturbed hornets.

One of the white-robed priests gave a sharp order and once more the red-garbed executors raised their knives.

Billy quietly, though his heart was beating almost to suffocation, slipped a cartridge from the recovered bag into his Arab rifle. He leveled it at the red-robed knife wielders.

”The first man that moves I'll shoot!”

Although the words were as unintelligible to the priests and the cliff-dwellers as any that had gone before, the gesture with which Billy raised the rifle to his shoulder and covered the group was eloquent enough. And as it happened, the delay saved the old man's life; for while they hesitated the sun rushed below the horizon and the swift African night fell. A loud groan from the crowd announced that the hour for the culmination of the sacrifice had pa.s.sed and that for the time being the intended victim's life was saved.

But for the boys the situation was serious enough. Powerless to resist such numbers they were seized by scores of the winged men and hustled into the pa.s.sage, which was lit up by blazing torches of the same resinous wood that their guide had used on the first night that they came there. They were hurried along, their feet hardly touching the ground, till they reached one of the diverging galleries. Down this their captors shoved them till they reached a small cubical cell--windowless and without ventilation. Into this they were thrust and a huge stone door that hinged on some contrivance the boys could not understand swung to upon them with a dull bang. But a few minutes later it reopened and another prisoner was thrust in.

It was the aged captive whose life Billy had saved!

This much they saw in the momentary glare of the torches and then as the door closed the darkness--so black that you could feel it--shut down again. But Billy's reportorial curiosity, even in this situation, was still predominant.

”Who are you?” he asked eagerly of the new arrival, whose face he could not see and whose presence he could only guess at by the temporary revelation of the torch-light.

The only answer was a groan; but a few seconds later a voice that sounded strange from long disuse or unaccustomedness to the use of the English language replied:

”I have not heard a white man speak for forty years.”

”What?” exclaimed the thunderstruck Billy.

”What I say is true and when you hear my name you will perhaps realize that fact. I am George Desmond the American explorer.”

”The George Desmond who was lost in 1870?” cried Billy, almost choking with excitement.

”The same,” was the reply in the same rusty voice, ”like the sound of a long disused door swinging on its hinges,” was the way Billy described it afterward in the article he wrote about the finding of George Desmond.

”But George Desmond was a man of thirty-five!” protested Billy, ”when he was lost.”

”And I am seventy-five,” went on the sad voice in the blackness, ”I was captured by the winged men in 1870. I have kept the record of the long years on a notched stick. I never expected to hear the sound of a fellow countryman's voice again.”

The poor tired voice broke down, and in the darkness through which they could not see the boys heard the old man weeping.

”Great cats!” groaned Billy to Lathrop, whose hand he held so that they could be near together in the awful blackness, ”forty years without seeing a white face--jumping horn-toads, what a fate!”

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