Dragons Blood | Page 8

wrinkled face eloquent of fear, his gesture
eloquent of excuse. Round him, as round a conjurer, scores of little
shadowy things moved in a huddling dance, fitfully hopping like
sparrows over spilt grain. Where the light fell brightest these became
plainer, their eyes shone in jeweled points of color.
"By Jove, Gilly, they are rats!" said Heywood, in a voice curiously
forced and matter-of-fact. "Flounce killed several this afternoon, so
my--"

No one heeded him; all stared. The rats, like beings of incantation, stole
about with an absence of fear, a disregard of man's presence, that was
odious and alarming.
"Earthquake?" The elder Englishman spoke as though afraid of
disturbing some one.
The French doctor shook his head.
"No," he answered in the same tone. "Look."
The rats, in all their weaving confusion, displayed one common
impulse. They sprang upward continually, with short, agonized leaps,
like drowning creatures struggling to keep afloat above some invisible
flood. The action, repeated multitudinously into the obscure
background, exaggerated in the foreground by magnified shadows
tossing and falling on the white walls, suggested the influence of some
evil stratum, some vapor subtle and diabolic, crawling poisonously
along the ground.
Heywood stamped angrily, without effect. Wutzler stood abject, a
magician impotent against his swarm of familiars. Gradually the rats,
silent and leaping, passed away into the darkness, as though they heard
the summons of a Pied Piper.
"It doesn't attack Europeans." Heywood still used that curious
inflection.
"Then my brother Julien is still alive," retorted Doctor Chantel, bitterly.
"What do you think, Gilly?" persisted Heywood.
His compatriot nodded in a meaningless way.
"The doctor's right, of course," he answered. "I wish my wife weren't
coming back."
"Dey are a remember," ventured Wutzler, timidly. "A warnung."

The others, as though it had been a point of custom, ignored him. All
stared down, musing, at the vacant stones.
"Then the concert's off to-morrow night," mocked Heywood, with an
unpleasant laugh.
"On the contrary." Gilly caught him up, prompt and decided. "We shall
need all possible amusements; also to meet and plan our campaign.
Meantime,--what do you say, Doctor?--chloride of lime in pots?"
"That, evidently," smiled the handsome man. "Yes, and charcoal burnt
in braziers, perhaps, as Pere Fenouil advises. Fumigate."--Satirical and
debonair, he shrugged his shoulders.--"What use, among these
thousands of yellow pigs?"
"I wish she weren't coming," repeated Gilly.
Rudolph, left outside this conference, could bear the uncertainty no
longer.
"I am a new arrival," he confided to his young host. "I do not
understand. What is it?"
"The plague, old chap," replied Heywood, curtly. "These playful little
animals get first notice. You're not the only arrival to-night."
CHAPTER III
UNDER FIRE
The desert was sometimes Gobi, sometimes Sahara, but always an
infinite stretch of sand that floated up and up in a stifling layer, like the
tide. Rudolph, desperately choked, continued leaping upward against
an insufferable power of gravity, or straining to run against the force of
paralysis. The desert rang with phantom voices,--Chinese voices that
mocked him, chanting of pestilence, intoning abhorrently in French.
He woke to find a knot of bed-clothes smothering him. To his first

unspeakable relief succeeded the astonishment of hearing the voices
continue in shrill chorus, the tones Chinese, the words, in louder
fragments, unmistakably French. They sounded close at hand,
discordant matins sung by a mob of angry children. Once or twice a
weary, fretful voice scolded feebly: "Un-peu-de-s'lence!
Un-peu-de-s'lence!" Rudolph rose to peep through the heavy jalousies,
but saw nothing more than sullen daylight, a flood of vertical rain, and
thin rivulets coursing down a tiled roof below. The morning was
dismally cold.
"Jolivet's kids wake you?" Heywood, in a blue kimono, nodded from
the doorway. "Public nuisance, that school. Quite needless, too. Some
bally French theory, you know, sphere of influence, and that rot. Game
played out up here, long ago, but they keep hanging on.--Bath's ready,
when you like." He broke out laughing. "Did you climb into the
water-jar, yesterday, before dinner? Boy reports it upset. You'll find the
dipper more handy.--How did you ever manage? One leg at a time?"
Echoes of glee followed his disappearance. Rudolph, blushing,
prepared to descend into the gloomy vault of ablution. Charcoal fumes,
however, and the glow of a brazier on the dark floor below, not only
revived all his old terror, but at the stair-head halted him with a new.
"Is the water safe?" he called.
Heywood answered impatiently from his bedroom.
"Nothing safe in this world, Mr. Hackh. User's risk." An inaudible
mutter ended with, "Keep clean, anyway."
At breakfast, though the acrid smoke was an enveloping reminder, he
made the only reference to their situation.
"Rain at last: too late, though, to flush out the gutters. We needed it a
month ago.--I say, Hackh, if you don't mind, you