“Well, young buffalo hunter,” said the latter, as they sat down to an exceedingly frugal repast, “and how many of my bush-bucks have you accounted for to-day? We can’t provide record buffaloes for you here, you see. You must get back to the Addo or trek right up-country for that.”
Dick Selmes laughed; then, judging the moment opportune, he launched out into an account of Kleinbooi’s point-blank refusal to enter the forbidden kloof.
“He was quite right,” said the old man, decisively, and his face seemed to grow serious. “Yes, quite right. In fact, I told him not even to take you near it if possible, but I suppose he didn’t know he was doing so in the excitement of the hunt.”
Dick Selmes’ face lit up with eagerness. If this hardened old settler, who believed in little else, believed in this weird mystery, why, it would be worth hearing about. “Would you mind – er – spinning the yarn, Mr Hesketh?” he blurted out eagerly.
“Well, it’s a fact that for some years past not a man Jack who has gone into that kloof from this end – and you can’t get into it from anywhere else – has come out alive,” answered the old man. “When searched for and spoored down, they were found quite near the entrance, stone dead.”
“What killed them?”
“That’s what many of us would like to know. There was a mark, just where the neck joins the shoulder at the back, a tiny mark hardly bigger than a pin-point, a mere discoloration, and the bodies wore every appearance of death by snake-bite. That’s how the place got its name – Slaang – or Snake Kloof.”
“By Jove! And what sort of a snake was it?” said Dick.
“There was no snake. The most careful search revealed no trace of the spoor of anything of the kind. Besides, a snake-bite invariably contains two punctures. This was only one. Another strange thing is that the mark was always the same, and in the same place, where the neck joins the shoulder; and yet another – that the people, when found, had, in each case, fallen when facing the way out of the kloof, as if they’d been running away from something. What? How many have come to grief? Seven in all – one Hottentot and six Kafirs. They had gone in after strayed stock, or to take out a bees’ nest, or something of the kind. The Hottentot was the only one who was still conscious, and he knew absolutely nothing of what had happened to him or when it had. I nearly pulled him through by treating him for snake-bite, but it was too long after, and he kicked the bucket, like the rest. Have I been in since? No. I’m too old.”
“But what on earth is your theory of it, Mr Hesketh?” asked Dick Selmes, who was very much impressed by the story, and the old man’s way of telling it. “Is there some kind of tree snake that drops down and swings itself up again after biting them? That would account for lack of spoor, you know.”
“Quite right, young buffalo hunter,” nodded old Hesketh. “But we’ve got no snakes that do that. All the tree sorts are harmless. The thing stumps me but – there it is.”
“By Jingo, but I’d like to – ” And Dick stopped short. Old Hesketh turned on him a lack-lustre eye.
“To try and solve the mystery yourself?” he supplied. “M’yes. You’d better let it alone, young fellow. Keep your energies for another destroying buffalo, and you may come out of that with a whole skin. Eh, Greenoak?”
The latter, who had been a silent listener, nodded assent. Old Hesketh had – for him – taken an immense fancy to Dick since hearing of his shooting the buffalo bull in the Addo Bush, and that alone and with a single bullet. He was far too plucky a young fellow to be allowed to commit suicide in such an unsatisfactory cause as this, he decided.
“Don’t let him cut into any such foolishness, Greenoak,” he went on. “Keep your eye on him, Greenoak. Keep your eye on him.”
And Greenoak promised he would. Then he went to bed, and, contrary to his usual custom, did not go to sleep immediately, but lay awake thinking. And at the same time precisely the same thing was holding good of Dick Selmes.
Now, in the course of the next two or three days, while the latter seldom missed an opportunity of plying his host with questions regarding Slaang Kloof, Harley Greenoak never opened his mouth on the subject. He seemed to treat it as a mere incident: a strange incident, it was true, but still an incident, and he had come across too many such in the course of a life adventurous beyond most lives to deem one incident, more or less, worth making any fuss about. He seemed, in short, to have dismissed it from his mind.
Consequently, it is strange that a day or two later, Harley Greenoak might have been seen – were there say one to see him – standing before the entrance of Slaang Kloof alone.
His strong, bearded, sun-tanned face was set and thoughtful; his gnarled hands were closed round the barrels of a double gun, whose stock was grounded; and, slung round him, was a sort of bundle that bulged. The rifle barrel held a Martini cartridge, the smooth-bore a heavy charge of Treble A buckshot.
He stood gazing into the place of fear, as though reading every tree and bush in its sombre forest depths.
As a matter of fact, he was there to solve its secret. Old Hesketh, to whom his reputation was known as a clearer-up of many a dark and blood-fraught mystery of the veldt, and who was an old friend of his into the bargain, had sent for him with that express object, and, as it was an entirely out-of-the-way and new part of the country to show his charge, he had heartily welcomed the idea. But he had no notion whatever of counting his said charge into the adventure with him.
He looked at the two jutting rock spurs as though calculating the distance of one from the other. Then he walked steadily forward until well within the portals of the sinister and fatal valley.
Superficially it differed in no way from any round dozen of the wild bushy kloofs on any other part of the farm. There was the same vegetation, mimosa and other varieties of acacia, spongy spekboem, and spidery Kafir bean – the geranium and plumbago throwing out a confusion of scarlet and light mauve – here a row of euphorbia, there a patch of yellow-woods, from whose limbs depended a tangle of long, straight monkey-ropes. Here all was dim and cool and delightful, the sunshine completely shut off or but faintly networked in patches on the ground and tree trunks. But it was here that every instinctive faculty of grasp and perception implanted in the up-country man became keenly alert and awake. For, by a course of intuitive calculations, he had located this spot as the one where the fell and fatal terror had overtaken its victims.
The nerve and courage of Harley Greenoak were entirely beyond question, but that did not dull his imagination or render him dead to the fact that in this cool and peaceful forest retreat he walked in very great peril indeed, that if he would escape this hidden death which had overtaken others, awful in its mysterious suddenness, he would have to muster every faculty of quick observation, lightning-like decision of action, and untiring alertness which he possessed.
As he walked, apparently unconcerned, his ears were open to every sound, and, although he knew that it was from above the peril should come, he did not look up, at least not directly. Then, suddenly, and without apparent reason, he leaped nimbly about a yard to his left; for his trained ear had caught the faintest possible sound overhead, and, as he did so, there was a soft hiss past his ear. Harley Greenoak had escaped death that time.
Quick as thought he threw up his gun, but in the moment between that action and the roar of the piece he glimpsed the most hideous and revolting object imaginable. The simian face, staring in bestial