Adventure Magazine, March 1916 — page 203: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

_ The Story of William Hyde softness of my abdomen, tight, terrifically tight, like the steel fingers of some powerful pincers. It was torture. You have seen the marks left on my body by his horrible hands. They are old ragged scars now, weathered by many suns; but still they are deeper than the pit of my umbilicus; and for years they were agoniz- ing wounds. It was torture, I tell you. Those fingers of him cut through my skin, through my flesh, as if my skin and flesh were the skin and flesh of a soft peach. I felt he was plucking my nerves right out of my middle, crunching my bones to- gether beneath his gripping fingers; slowly, relentlessly, disemboweling me—squeezing my entrails out through my torn belly as if my torn belly were the torn belly of a frog. It was torture unendurable. I screamed to heaven in unutterable agony. That scream must have shocked if it did not frighten him. For on the sudden he hurled me from him just as I myself would hurl a rag doll. His six-foot-long arms act- ing as two tremendous springs, bodily through the air he hurled me. And my right arm flapping about me like a broken reed, my torn middle downpouring blood over my legs and torso, twenty feet and more through the air I went, clutching space with my left hand, turning head over heels, twisting and screaming. Full upon my face upon the hard lava floor of that path I fell. And with that shat- tering of my head against the floor, that excruciating pain from my lacerated and bleeding middle, I went out. I went out; yet as I slipped into unconsciousness, a terrible joy was mine that the unspeakable torture of it all at last was ended. CHAPTER XXX OF WHAT HAPPENED OUTSIDE S bate steady drip-drip of water upon my upturned face drew me, at length and slowly, up, up out of the black abyss of death. How much later it was I know not. I was incredibly weak with loss of blood. I was too weak to move, too weak to open the heavy lids of my eyes, too weak even to roll my head out of that irritating drip- drip of water which fell from the moist foliage overhead. And yet as I lay there, and that steady 201 drip-drip of water slowly revived me, con- sciousness of certain things about me crept, in a sort of sequence, into my numbly throb- bing brains. I became aware, for one thing, that I no longer was lying upon the hardness of the lava floor of that sunken path. Be- neath me and about me I could feel the soft- ness, the wetness of lush. And breathing faintly into my ears was the constant whis- per of rustling foliage. I opened my eyes. But only the heavy upward roll of my lids, the conscious knowl- edge that I really had made the action, told me that I had opened my eyes. For near and far away all was blackness. I could see no scared-looking moon in the sky; I could see no sky, no thing that was about me, not even that broken arm which throbbed painfully at my torn and now slug- gishly bleeding side. It was as black about me as if a tropical storm were afoot. Still, for all that, I knew where I was. I had sensed where I was when I had felt no longer that hard lava path beneath me, - when first I had heard that rustle of the moisture-dripping foliage. I was no longer in the Jallan Batoe. I was on the jungled mountain-slope of the Jallan Batoe. I was outside! Yet how I had come there, why the Poonan had not killed me as I lay com- pletely at their mercy in that sunken lava path—these were marvels I could not ex- plain. And then came to my ears, as I lay there, a strange far-off murmur in the unseen sky. It neared; it rose into a hum; and, a tre- mendous squall, it tore through the over- growth of jungle. Trees shook their long arms, scraped them wildly together, and bent back and forward, almost sweeping the ground; and branches and long leaves, heavy coconuts and durian oranges, flayed from those trees, came thudding about me, went shotting on and on through space with such terrific velocity that, if they struck, they would brain a man. Thunder boomed through the world and, on the heels of it, came the lightning. It split open the black bowl of sky, ripped through the thick plash of foliage overhead and electrified that foliage with green and gold and black. I made out, in those zigzags of lightning, a gigantean tree, uprooted, lying flat upon the mountainside, and overgrown with noxious growths. ‘Somehow, on hands and knees, I crawled toward it. With my good Eomicboo “S co