5

Cunningham flung himself down on the ground. His revolver came out instinctively, but he shouted, “We’re friends, you idiots! Friends!”

There was no answer, but the knives stopped their silent rush through the air. It seemed as if the hidden men in the forest were debating in whispers, and the stillness was deadly. Cunningham lay still, gradually worming his revolver around to a convenient position for firing. He was tingling all over, but he found himself thinking with a supreme irrelevance that he thought he had seen the girl whose picture crackled in his breast pocket as he moved. He was quite sure of it.

He stood up suddenly and began to dust himself off. It was taking a chance, but it was wise. A young man stepped out from among the trees near by.

“You are our friends?” the young man demanded skeptically. “We have no friends.”

His speech had but the faintest of slurs in it, a teasing soft unfamiliarity which pricked one’s curiosity but could never be identified in any one syllable, much less put down in print.

Cunningham felt an abrupt relief, and quite as abruptly wanted to swear. He knew that this was the end of the route to romance and that the girl, Maria, was peering out from the tangled underbrush. And he had dived head foremost into a patch of loam and looked most unromantic. Therefore he said wrathfully, “If we weren’t your friends, don’t you think we’d have plugged into you with our gats? We saw you. You know that!”

The young man stared at him and Cunningham tried to rub the dirt off his nose and look dignified at the same time, thinking of the girl behind the trees.

Then the young man said skeptically, “What is a gat?”

“A revolver. A pistol. A handgun,” snapped Cunningham. “We’d have wiped out the lot of you.”

The man searched his face unbelievingly. A murmur came from somewhere behind him.

“Show me,” he said. He came boldly out from the brushwood and faced Cunningham squarely.

He was no older than Cunningham, but Cunningham instantly envied him his build. He was magnificently made and splendidly muscled—as were all the Strangers, as Cunningham learned later. He met Cunningham’s eyes frankly, yet defiantly.

Cunningham turned to where Gray still lay sprawled out in a heap of brush. Imperturbable puffs of smoke rose in the still woodland air.

“Go ahead and charm them, Cunningham,” said Gray’s voice dryly. “I’m under cover and I’ll start shooting if they start anything.”

“Show me that you could have killed us,” repeated the young man, facing Cunningham. “Use this thing you have.”

Cunningham held out his revolver. The Stranger looked at it curiously but impassively. He seemed totally unfamiliar with its nature or use.

“Great guns!” demanded Cunningham in exasperation. “Don’t you know what it is?”

The young man hesitated and then shook his head.

“No. I do not know what it is.”

He waited defiantly as Cunningham gaped at him. People in these United States who had never seen a revolver! He grunted.

“All right, I’ll show you, then.”

He picked up a bit of weather-rotted rock and set it up for a target. He drew off ten paces and leveled his pistol. He fired, and half the rock flew to fragments. It was seamed and cracked by the freezings and thawings of many years.

The young man flinched at the sound.

“It is like a shotgun,” he observed calmly. “You can use it twice. And then?”

He tapped the hilt of his knife suggestively.

“Then this,” snapped Cunningham.

He fired again and again and again. The rock was splinters.

“And I’ve still two shots left,” he observed grimly. “My friend yonder has six more. If we were not your friends would we have waited for you to chuck rocks at us?”

The young man debated. He inspected Cunningham’s face again.

“N-no,” he admitted. “Perhaps not. But why did you come here?”

Cunningham reached into his pocket and flipped the torn-out pages of the magazine article to him.

“Look at the pictures. That’s why I came,” he said grimly. “And if you want to know more——”

The young man had cried out in astonishment. He turned and beckoned to the woods behind him. A second man appeared. Then a third. They stared at the pictures, fumbling them with their fingers.

The young man turned once more to Cunningham with a very pale face.

“Tell us,” he begged. “How did these come to be? Tell us! If you are our friends, tell us everything!”

For all his blank astonishment, Cunningham realized that he had made a bull’s-eye.

For ten minutes he talked to them, at first in commonplace speech, and as he realized that the most ordinary of technical terms meant nothing to them, he spoke as if to children. He watched their faces and explained until he saw comprehension dawn. And he became filled with a vast incredulity. These people spoke grammatical English, better than the native New Englanders. But they knew nothing of revolvers, though they had seen shotguns and rifles. They knew nothing of cameras, though they could read and write. And they were in a civilized state of a civilized nation! Only the most passionately preserved isolation and an incredible ignorance to begin with could account for it.

They listened intently. Now and again another figure crept out of the wood. They were sitting in a semicircle about him now, watching his face as he spoke. Old men, young men, but no sign of the girl. Presently the younger men began to comment to one another on what Cunningham was saying. Gray got up and sat down more comfortably with his back against a boulder. The comments of the younger men were low-voiced, and sometimes one or another of them smiled. Presently a little chuckle ran about the circle.

Cunningham stammered. He felt like a fool, explaining that he was here because of an article in a magazine, and then having to explain what a magazine was, what a camera was, and all the rest. It was when the feeling of folly was strongest upon him that the chuckle went around. And then he noted that the young men had been quietly retrieving the knives they had sent flickering through the air. Everyone now had his knife back in his belt and was fingering its hilt while he gazed smilingly at Cunningham.

The smiles were bland and friendly, but a feeling of horror came to him. They were playing with him! They were pretending to listen to him, but actually they were toying with him as a cat toys with a mouse. They ringed him about, now, thirty or more of them. From time to time they edged closer to him. And one of them would ask a question in that teasing soft unfamiliar dialect of theirs, which you could not put your finger on. And he would edge a little closer, and smile.

Sweat came out on Cunningham’s forehead. He felt as if he were in a nightmare. The smiles were terrifying. They masked a sinister purpose, a deadly and unspeakable purpose. Cunningham was remembering the dead man he had seen that morning. Some of these men had done him to death. Now they were edging closer to him, feigning to listen and feigning to smile.

He turned and found half a dozen of them very close to his back. He whirled back again and saw that they had edged closer while his back was turned. They sat upon the ground with their eyes fixed intently upon him, and smiled when he looked at them, and asked questions in their soft and unfamiliar accent. And always they moved closer....

Cunningham felt that his teeth would begin to chatter in an instant. And suddenly a look of intelligence passed from one to another. A signal!