IX
IN SPITE of the fatigue resting like a dead weight upon him Northrup dozed more than slept that night, waking often. His destiny had brought to him a responsibility which he accepted unquestioningly.
The whole future life and happiness of an extremely unsophisticated girl was upon his shoulders and if he played the game fair he had her hand as well as his own to play. These thoughts alone were sufficient to restrain him from yielding to heavy sleep. And, allied with them, was the feeling that his new acquaintance, Tiyo, might not be averse to creeping up upon him and driving a knife into him.
Through the night he gained the impression that Yahoya had not gone to bed. Now and then a light moved across the door of her stone habitation; once or twice he thought that he heard her voice giving commands to her attendant maidens. Once he was certain that it was her laugh, as carefree as if she had never known a shadow of trouble or anxiety in her life, that woke him.
The moon had long passed the zenith and from bright silver had turned to a milky whiteness when he started up to a new sound. Since coming to this strange place he had heard no voice save his own and Yahoya's; she herself had told him that no one would dare speak until she had stood out upon the cliff's edge and sung the sacred song. But now from the stone house came not only her voice but the low rumble of a man's utterance. And the tone was hard, menacing, oddly unpleasant.
Northrup got to his feet, stretching his body to get the stiffness out of it. He took the gun out of its holster and examined it to be sure that the clip was full, that it might be relied upon in case of need. His first thought was that the voice was Strang's.
"It will be dawn in an hour," he thought. "I wonder what the new day is bringing for all of us?"
He went to the western edge of the cliffs and looked down. There was the headquarters of the tribe. He could see ledges and steps cut into the face of the precipice, could make out countless orifices, rudely circular, which no doubt led into intricate passageways and numerous small chambers.
He noted swiftly that the stairways and ledges seemed alive with figures of men, women and children, and that in long streams they were moving downward into the cañon below. Down there were many other figures, clustering in groups where their fires burned. Northrup saw with a frown what they were doing. Everywhere were great jugs, and from jug to jug the men were passing, drinking. He saw that many of them walked with the unsteady step of drunkenness. And all in silence—silence, absolute, unbroken by so much as a whisper; silence hovering over a drunken carousal!
"When they start things going," he muttered, "where is it going to end?"
Yahoya's face, the clear-eyed, frank, ingenuous face of a girl who should be wearing her first party gown, flushed with the triumph of her first season, rose before him. If she had only realized the horror of the position in which she stood it seemed to Northrup that the situation would have been a shade less terrible. But her calm serenity in the face of all that encompassed her, her dimpling assurance that she was the Goddess Yahoya, only to be adored and not to be harmed, made him feel toward her as he might have felt toward a child cooing its happiness over a new discovery as it crept toward a rattlesnake.
He shuddered at the thought and, turning away from the silent orgy below, went with guarded steps toward the stone building.
The low rumble of the man's voice, rasping impatiently now, was not Strang's voice. Northrup realized that before he had gone ten steps. He moved on quietly, coming to the door.
He looked into the one large room which constituted the greater part of the building's interior; saw that upon each side a smaller door led into what was apparently merely an anteroom of some sort; saw Yahoya, her two maidens and the man who was speaking swiftly. The man was Inaa, the old priest. His attitude was plainly one of dominance and threat now; Yahoya's eyes were filled with amazement. Northrup guessed quickly that never had a man spoken to her like this before.
So intent were the four upon what Inaa was saying that none of them noted the tall form in the shadow outside. Yahoya was seated upon some sort of chair over which a robe of white skins had been thrown.
For a long moment Northrup's eyes clung to her, wonderingly. Until now he had not been struck with the full measure of her beauty. Now was there excuse enough for superstitious minds to believe her what she believed herself.
There were a score of little lamps in the room, set in niches or upon squared stones, the cotton wicks soaked in oil shedding a bright, soft light. Northrup saw that the girl's eyes were not black but a deep, fathomless gray; that her hair was not the night-black hair of Nayangap and Tocha but a rich, sun-kissed brown.
The hair was arranged as the native brides wear it, in two great whorls, one at each ear, held back from the forehead by a broad band of gold above the brows. A great turquoise, catching many lights from the lamps, shone from the middle of the golden band.
The cotton gown of the early evening together with the broad blue sash had been discarded for the bridal gown. This was of some stuff which could not be but which looked the finest silk, snow-white, a clinging garment which fitted the tender form perfectly, which left the arms bare, which showed a glimpse of the whiteness of the young breast.
The band about her slim waist was a girdle of gold, beaten into little squares joined cunningly, each adorned with a pendent turquoise. Her feet, encased in snow-white buckskin moccasins, were crossed before her upon the loose folds of the white robe.
Nayangap and Tocha stood one at each side of their mistress, their black eyes wide and startled, their lips parted, a look of fear upon each face. Inaa's back was toward Northrup. The old man's form was tense, his voice vibrant with the emotion riding him.
"It is death to break silence during the Festival of Silence," Yahoya was saying now quite calmly, a little curl of contempt touching her mouth. "You will go down to the Skeleton House, Inaa, before the day is born and dies again!"
Inaa's grunt was eloquent of his defiance.
"Will you not let the maidens go, oh, Yahoya?" he demanded in a tone which told that the same demand before had met with her refusal. "The thing which I have to say, for which I have dared break silence before the time, is not for them to hear."
"I have told you," she answered him steadily, "that it is my will that my maidens stay with me. Surely with old age madness has come upon you! You are great among your people, Inaa, but do you forget that you are only an old man, soon to die? The Skeleton Old Man has one hand upon your beard now! Be careful what you say, how you speak to Yahoya!"
Again Inaa's grunt, making Northrup vaguely uneasy. The old man was unmoved by Yahoya's words, and his attitude was plainly untinged by respect.
"Let the maids stay," he said gruffly. "It matters not. If," and as he turned a little Northrup could see the evil glance he shot at them, making them cringe back from it, "if they speak later of what happens here tonight they will go at once and for all time to a lover who has cold arms and lies in darkness."
He paused a moment, staring from under his gathered brows at Yahoya. Then he spoke swiftly, his voice lowered, unspeakably stern.
"There is little time, for what I have to say must be finished before the first dawn comes. Yahoya, at dawn you will sing the sacred song?"
"Will the sun rise?" she mocked him.
"And afterward," he retorted, "you will wed?"
"Do you think," she answered, her tone filled with sarcasm, "that Yahoya can find a man among all these men who will wed with so ugly a mana?"
"You think that you will put out your hand and that the Man of Wisdom will come? You will wed him?"
"Oho!" she laughed, leaning a little forward, her mocking eyes upon the old priest's. "And are you jealous, Inaa? With madness has youth run back into your cold blood, making it hot again? Do you covet Yahoya!"
And again she flung her laughter at him, playing with him, finding vent for the anger which he had whipped up in her. Inaa lifted his hand as if to stop her. And Yahoya's laughter taunted him until she had done.
"It is my desire," he said angrily, "that you wed one of my own people. It is my desire, Yahoya, that you wed Tiyo, my son. It is also his desire. And," the words coming coldly, "it is my command!"
SLOWLY Yahoya's face went white. She did not move but seemed for a long moment a statue ready to be wakened into life but as yet cold marble.
Then the blood sprang back into her cheeks, racing hotly through her veins, a red tide of anger. Northrup drew a deep breath and stared at her fascinated, forgetful for the instant of Inaa. The girl stirred a little where she sat, then grew still, only her quick breathing and flashing eyes and the color in her cheeks hinting at the tumult in her breast.
"The others are drinking in the cañon," she said coolly. "Have you too drunk deeply, Inaa? Or are you eager to have the vengeance of Yahoya strike?"
"Fool!" snarled Inaa. "Must I, though an old man, be afraid of you, a soft-bodied girl? For the thing I have to tell you, Yahoya, is that you are a girl and no goddess; just a girl as Nayangap there and Tocha, but with the white body of the Bahana."
Northrup felt that he could have patted the old villain on the back for that. For, if anything were to be done for her, the sooner Yahoya got her ideas of her own divinity out of her head, the better.
"A girl, a girl with white skin, but just a girl," he gibed, mocking her as she had mocked him. "A girl I put where she is; a girl I can pull down and give to the village to play with when I wish. Would you like, oh, dainty Yahoya, to have the hard hands of many drunken men pull you this way and that? Or would you like to obey the command of Inaa and wed Tiyo—and so remain to the people what Inaa made you, a goddess? You must decide swiftly, for the dawn is coming and does not wait, Yahoya, because a white maid bids it to!"
Nayangap and Tocha gasped, turning their bewildered eyes from their mistress to the old priest, back to where Yahoya sat motionless.
Slowly now Yahoya stirred, her gaze going to Nayangap, then to Tocha.
"You have heard Inaa speak," she said very quietly. "You have seen one high in the thoughts of the gods stricken with madness. In a little those gods will gather him to them, Nayangap and Tocha. You will see; his death has left the underworld to bring him thither. And harken well—" her voice rising a little—"you maidens who have heard must forget that you have heard! I have commanded, I, Yahoya!"
Even yet she did not believe. Though two men had told her, first Northrup, who claimed her one of his own blood, next Inaa, who told her of his own trickery, Yahoya would not believe. Too deeply had the training of a lifetime sunken into her mind to be wiped out in an instant.
Inaa's rage, curbed until now, burst its bonds. With black, distorted face, with his hands thrown out like claws of a beast, he leaped at her.
"Goddess, are you, Yahoya?" he snarled at her. "Inaa will teach wisdom to a white-bodied fool! If you are goddess and no maid then may you fling an old man away with no effort."
Northrup, unprepared for the sudden attack, saw Yahoya dragged from her seat, dragged down so that she was upon her knees, the priest's hands at her throat. Yahoya struggled, but his strength in his rage was ten times the strength of a girl, and she could not so much as cry out. Her two maids stood transfixed with horror.
It was but an instant. Northrup, gathering his strength in a sudden flare of anger scarcely less than the frenzy of Inaa, threw himself upon the old man, gripped his wrists and ripped them away, flinging Inaa far from him so that he staggered across the room and struck the far wall.
"You infernal cur!" cried the white man.
He turned away from the blinking, evil eyes to where Yahoya, white-faced and panting, was staring at them like one rudely awaked from a nightmare.
"Why won't you believe?" he asked her sharply. "It is almost the dawn; your whole life is in your hands now for a few minutes. Why spoil it with an insane idea? Can't you see that you are just a girl, as he says? My God! Won't you see it?"
In the girl's eyes were so many emotions striving for mastery over her that Northrup could not guess what passed in her mind. She opened her lips but did not speak. He had felt a little spurt of anger at her, too, that she let her stubbornness lie in the way of her welfare. Now he felt only a deep pity for her. In a rude moment he and Inaa had tried to wrest from under her feet the whole belief of her life. Small wonder that she stared at them like that!
"Yahoya," he went on gently, "can't you understand it? And can't you see that it is a better thing to be a white girl after all than a goddess of these cursed Indians? Why, a world is open to you now that is as wonderful as the world of the gods which you have let yourself dream of. It will be like paradise for a girl at your age to come into the Twentieth Century outside! And—" again under the emotion upon him he broke into quick English—"if you'll just buck up I'll send you out of this mess if we have to shoot our way out!"
Yahoya, looking at him a moment curiously, turned and without a word went into the anteroom at the left, dropping a curtain after her. Northrup swung about, seeking Inaa. The old man had slipped away.