The Red One | Page 3

be hacked off and his
carcass started on the way of Sagawa's to the cooking fire. Twenty-four hours had made a
wreck of him--of mind as well as body. He had scarcely retained his wits at all, so
maddened was he by the tremendous inoculation of poison he had received. Several times
he fired his shot-gun with effect into the shadows that dogged him. Stinging day insects
and gnats added to his torment, while his bloody wounds attracted hosts of loathsome
flies that clung sluggishly to his flesh and had to be brushed off and crushed off.
Once, in that day, he heard again the wonderful sound, seemingly more distant, but rising
imperiously above the nearer war-drums in the bush. Right there was where he had made
his mistake. Thinking that he had passed beyond it and that, therefore, it was between
him and the beach of Ringmanu, he had worked back toward it when in reality he was
penetrating deeper and deeper into the mysterious heart of the unexplored island. That
night, crawling in among the twisted roots of a banyan tree, he had slept from exhaustion
while the mosquitoes had had their will of him.
Followed days and nights that were vague as nightmares in his memory. One clear vision
he remembered was of suddenly finding himself in the midst of a bush village and
watching the old men and children fleeing into the jungle. All had fled but one. From
close at hand and above him, a whimpering as of some animal in pain and terror had
startled him. And looking up he had seen her--a girl, or young woman rather, suspended
by one arm in the cooking sun. Perhaps for days she had so hung. Her swollen,
protruding tongue spoke as much. Still alive, she gazed at him with eyes of terror. Past
help, he decided, as he noted the swellings of her legs which advertised that the joints had
been crushed and the great bones broken. He resolved to shoot her, and there the vision
terminated. He could not remember whether he had or not, any more than could he
remember how he chanced to be in that village, or how he succeeded in getting away

from it.
Many pictures, unrelated, came and went in Bassett's mind as he reviewed that period of
his terrible wanderings. He remembered invading another village of a dozen houses and
driving all before him with his shot-gun save, for one old man, too feeble to flee, who
spat at him and whined and snarled as he dug open a ground-oven and from amid the hot
stones dragged forth a roasted pig that steamed its essence deliciously through its
green-leaf wrappings. It was at this place that a wantonness of savagery had seized upon
him. Having feasted, ready to depart with a hind-quarter of the pig in his hand, he
deliberately fired the grass thatch of a house with his burning glass.
But seared deepest of all in Bassett's brain, was the dank and noisome jungle. It actually
stank with evil, and it was always twilight. Rarely did a shaft of sunlight penetrate its
matted roof a hundred feet overhead. And beneath that roof was an aerial ooze of
vegetation, a monstrous, parasitic dripping of decadent life- forms that rooted in death
and lived on death. And through all this he drifted, ever pursued by the flitting shadows
of the anthropophagi, themselves ghosts of evil that dared not face him in battle but that
knew that, soon or late, they would feed on him. Bassett remembered that at the time, in
lucid moments, he had likened himself to a wounded bull pursued by plains' coyotes too
cowardly to battle with him for the meat of him, yet certain of the inevitable end of him
when they would be full gorged. As the bull's horns and stamping hoofs kept off the
coyotes, so his shot- gun kept off these Solomon Islanders, these twilight shades of
bushmen of the island of Guadalcanal.
Came the day of the grass lands. Abruptly, as if cloven by the sword of God in the hand
of God, the jungle terminated. The edge of it, perpendicular and as black as the infamy of
it, was a hundred feet up and down. And, beginning at the edge of it, grew the
grass--sweet, soft, tender, pasture grass that would have delighted the eyes and beasts of
any husbandman and that extended, on and on, for leagues and leagues of velvet verdure,
to the backbone of the great island, the towering mountain range flung up by some
ancient earth-cataclysm, serrated and gullied but not yet erased by the erosive tropic rains.
But the grass! He had crawled into it a dozen yards, buried his face in it, smelled it, and
broken