Adventure Magazine, March 1916 — page 207: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

The Story of William Hyde with the Green, Green God; but all too late, too late. Ihe Poonan then were not in any mood to show her mercy. I know those Poonan, I tell you. I know what they did, those accursed Golden Rats! They snatched the god from her hands and in their anger, their fanatical hate, they tore her to pieces—she that had been their be- loved Queen! “Or perhaps not that. Perhaps they held her prisoner, and tortured her. beautiful body—slowly, remorselessly—tortured her until at last she died, sobbing her unshaken love for me. ‘The heart is clean gone out of me. I am haunted day and night by those two visions. But there is a vision more horrible than either of those two visions; a vision that repeatedly I have seen in the dark nights— a horrible vision that sends me screaming out of my sleep, and leaves me shivering and cold with icy sweat. For I see her aban- doned and forsaken, and yet living on—liv- ing on among those Poonan who hate and torture her—and living on, and suffering pain and anguish of soul each hour of the day and night, while I, Willyum Hyde, whom she loves and for whom she waits, can not return to her.” For a long time after that Hyde remained bowed and silent. Fitzhamon said nothing; I said nothing; and William Hyde looked not at us, but only beyond us into his own sweet and bitter memories. We held sa- cred the moment, and did not break in upon his thoughts. And then after a while the shell-and-pea man pulled himself together, shaking his shoulders, with the parrot thereupon, like a man that wakes from a dream. Only by a slight working of the lips, as he strove for self-control, and a strained timbre of the voice, did he give any sign now of his in- ward suffering. He spoke on as if there had been no interruption at all, and we had not been shown, naked and quivering, his de- feated, despairing soul: “Pm going back now, and I’m going back alone. The dark, hot ‘places of the earth are hard on a man alone, but I’m going back into the Borneo jungle without com- panions; for this is my last try, and, some way, somehow, this last try, I’m going to win into the Jallan Batoe, or die trekking about on the outer slopes. On such a for- lorn, desperate hope, I know, no man will . ZO with me; so I’ll go back alone this time 205 —alone, yes, except for the parrot.” He lifted, with the words, the green bird off his shoulder; and Mogul, startled from his sleep, blinked his red eyes excitedly, and clung, quite desperately, with one foot, to Hyde’s extended index finger. “Yes; he’s going with me when I go ‘in’— Mogul, the parrot, my old faithful bunkie. The Poonan never have seen a live parrot, remember. No; nor a cockatoo, parrakeet, red lory, nor any other species of parrot. There is no kind of parrot in the Jallan Batoe, as I once said, save and excepting only that dead shimmering stone of an ac- cursed Emerald Parrot. And Mogul here ais just like on Emerald Parrot—all green, jungle gree “Into the Jallan Batoe I'll come with Mogul upon my shoulder. He'll strike terror into the Poonan, that old beach- comber of a bird. They’ll think he’s the twin brother of the Green, Green God, and maybe, a more powerful bird, a more dread- ful god. Sight of him perched upon my shoulder may fill them with that old-time awe of me; they’ll bow down to me; and all once again may be as it was. And upon the Nine-Times-Nine Throne, as King and Queen of the Poonan, we'll sit once more, perhaps—Belun-M ea Poa-Poa and Willyum Hyde!” Hyde placed the parrot back upon his shoulder, the while I got up upon the edge of the bunk and turned out the light in that swing slush-lamp overhead. Outside the peeping sun already was tinging with crimson the gray swale of the dawn; and inside, in the fo’c’s’le, a single hesitant shaft was stealing through the hatchway above the ladder. And noticing that, Hyde said, as I stepped down: “T think I’ll go above and watch the sun break through the silver of the sky. I al- ways watch the coming of the sun. Some- times I’ve seen her there, in all that silver and gold; and she seems to have her arms out for me, and she seems not so very far away, only a few steps across the water.” And he went above, up the ladder, to watch the sunrise and to think his thoughts. Fitzhamon and [I talked after that for a full half-hour; we talked of William Hyde. And then, much against Fitzhamon’s ad- vice, I went above to offer to go sa Hyde into the. Jallan Batoe. But on the deck above there was no Wil- liam Hyde. Some time before he had com cS {e JOO (E@) yeti NRA oS ep ae