BARBARA CAPTURED BY HEAD-HUNTERS
WHEN Barbara Harding, with Miller before and Swenson behind her, had taken up the march behind the loot-laden party seven dusky, noiseless shadows had emerged from the forest to follow close behind.
For half a mile the party moved along the narrow trail unmolested.Theriere had come back to exchange a half-dozen words with the girl and had again moved forward toward the head of the column.Miller was not more than twenty-five feet behind the first man ahead of him, and Miss Harding and Swenson followed at intervals of but three or four yards.
Suddenly, without warning, Swenson and Miller fell, pierced with savage spears, and at the same instant sinewy fingers gripped Barbara Harding, and a silencing hand was clapped over her mouth.There had been no sound above the muffled tread of the seamen.It had all been accomplished so quickly and so easily that the girl did not comprehend what had befallen her for several minutes.
In the darkness of the forest she could not clearly distinguish the forms or features of her abductors, though she reasoned, as was only natural, that Skipper Simms' party had become aware of the plot against them and had taken this means of thwarting a part of it; but when her captors turned directly into the mazes of the jungle, away from the coast, she began first to wonder and then to doubt, so that presently when a small clearing let the moonlight full upon them she was not surprised to discover that none of the members of the Halfmoon's company was among her guard.
Barbara Harding had not circled the globe half a dozen times for nothing.There were few races or nations with whose history, past and present, she was not fairly familiar, and so the sight that greeted her eyes was well suited to fill her with astonishment, for she found herself in the hands of what appeared to be a party of Japanese warriors of the fifteenth or sixteenth century.She recognized the medieval arms and armor, the ancient helmets, the hairdressing of the two-sworded men of old Japan.At the belts of two of her captors dangled grisly trophies of the hunt.In the moonlight she saw that they were the heads of Miller and Swenson.
The girl was horrified.She had thought her lot before as bad as it could be, but to be in the clutches of these strange, fierce warriors of a long-dead age was unthinkably worse.That she could ever have wished to be back upon the Halfmoon would have seemed, a few days since, incredible; yet that was precisely what she longed for now.
On through the night marched the little, brown men--grim and silent--until at last they came to a small village in a valley away from the coast--a valley that lay nestled high among lofty mountains.Here were cavelike dwellings burrowed half under ground, the upper walls and thatched roofs rising scarce four feet above the level.Granaries on stilts were dotted here and there among the dwellings.
Into one of the filthy dens Barbara Harding was dragged.
She found a single room in which several native and halfcaste women were sleeping, about them stretched and curled and perched a motley throng of dirty yellow children, dogs, pigs, and chickens.It was the palace of Daimio Oda Yorimoto, Lord of Yoka, as his ancestors had christened their new island home.
Once within the warren the two samurai who had guarded Barbara upon the march turned and withdrew--she was alone with Oda Yorimoto and his family.From the center of the room depended a swinging shelf upon which a great pile of grinning skulls rested.At the back of the room was a door which Barbara had not at first noticed--evidently there was another apartment to the dwelling.
The girl was given little opportunity to examine her new prison, for scarce had the guards withdrawn than Oda Yorimoto approached and grasped her by the arm.
"Come!" he said, in Japanese that was sufficiently similar to modern Nippon to be easily understood by Barbara Harding.
With the word he drew her toward a sleeping mat on a raised platform at one side of the room.
One of the women awoke at the sound of the man's voice.
She looked up at Barbara in sullen hatred--otherwise she gave no indication that she saw anything unusual transpiring.
It was as though an exquisite American belle were a daily visitor at the Oda Yorimoto home.
"What do you want of me?" cried the frightened girl, in Japanese.
Oda Yorimoto looked at her in astonishment.Where had this white girl learned to speak his tongue?
"I am the daimio, Oda Yorimoto," he said."These are my wives.Now you are one of them.Come!""Not yet--not here!" cried the girl clutching at a straw.
"Wait.Give me time to think.If you do not harm me my father will reward you fabulously.Ten thousand koku he would gladly give to have me returned to him safely."Oda Yorimoto but shook his head.
"Twenty thousand koku!" cried the girl.
Still the daimio shook his head negatively.
"A hundred thousand--name your own price, if you will but not harm me.""Silence!" growled the man."What are even a million koku to me who only know the word from the legends of my ancestors.We have no need for koku here, and had we, my hills are full of the yellow metal which measures its value.No!
you are my woman.Come!"
"Not here! Not here!" pleaded the girl."There is another room--away from all these women," and she turned her eyes toward the door at the opposite side of the chamber.
Oda Yorimoto shrugged his shoulders.That would be easier than a fight, he argued, and so he led the girl toward the doorway that she had indicated.Within the room all was dark, but the daimio moved as one accustomed to the place, and as he moved through the blackness the girl at his side felt with stealthy fingers at the man's belt.
At last Oda Yorimoto reached the far side of the long chamber.
"Here!" he said, and took her by the shoulders.
