LITMIR.BIZ

      CHAPTER II

      IMPRISONED

       Table of Contents

      When I had got my head sufficiently out of the ridiculous, heavy structure they had given me to serve as a hat the room was in confusion; I mean in even greater confusion than it had been. The six men were grouped about a girl, their eyes fixed on her. I felt that she regarded them as if they were so much dirt. She was a dainty example of her sex short, slender, well set up, carrying her head in a fashion which suggested that she looked upon the world with scorn. She was quite young; I doubt if she was more than twenty. She had an abundance of fair hair, which she wore gathered in a knot and parted on one side. Her attire was simple and in exquisite taste, and, I had a notion, cost money. She looked as if she had just stepped out of a drawing-room, wearing neither hat nor jacket. That there was a decent apartment, suitable for a lady's use, in that house, I could not imagine. In her elegant simplicity she looked singularly out of place in that company, in that unclean room. I had a notion that she might be thinking the same of me. Her big oval eyes were fixed upon my form as if she were wondering what I was doing there. She was addressing the others in the dissonant, guttural tongue, in which she seemed to be as much at home as they were somehow, coming from her lips, it sounded a little more musical. Obviously she was asking questions about who I was and how I came to be there. When she had obtained their answers she seemed suddenly to become possessed with excitement, which she seemed to impart to them. They glared at me in the unpromising fashion they had done at first. Certainly something like murder was in their eyes. Surely this slip of a girl could not be inciting them to commit further acts of violence. I appealed to her, taking advantage of a pause in her speech.

      "You speak English?" She answered neither yes nor no; but just stood with her head thrown back and looked at me. I felt sure she understood that she did speak English. "I appeal to you," I went on, "for protection. I have done nothing to incur the resentment of your" I hesitated, changing from one form of words to another "of these gentlemen. I merely knocked at the door to return something which had fallen on to my head from a window above. The instant I knocked they assailed me, dragged me in here, subjected me to all sorts of indignities, and now they have deprived me of my clothing and forced me to wear these disgusting things. I beg you to explain to them that I am an innocent and peaceable stranger, and that I desire to quarrel with no one. All I want them to do is to give me back my own clothes and let me go."

      "All you want them to do is to give you back your own clothes and let you go."

      The echo came from the red-faced man, who, leaning upon the table, kept his eyes fixed on my face. There was an ominous something about everything he said. Perhaps it was my imagination to me his simplest words seemed to convey a threat. I hated the man! English though he might be, I feared and disliked him more than any of the others. What seemed to be his sneering echo of my remark, whether she understood it or not, seemed to have upon the girl anything but a pacific effect. She said something in short, quick tones which seemed to move the men to anger. They moved towards me with in their hands the weapons which had appeared before. The short man had a knife whose blade, I should think, was sixteen or eighteen inches long an evil-looking thing. He raised it as if to strike at me. I thought he would strike. Such a blade would go right through me, spitting me like a lark on a skewer. I did not propose to let him do that if I could help it. I stepped back, picked up an old wooden chair, swung it over my shoulders, and brought it down upon that small gentleman. It was the only weapon of defence I could find. The tumult which ensued! I doubt if I did the little scoundrel with his horrible knife much harm he moved aside so swiftly that the side of the chair but grazed his shoulder. Judging by the behaviour of his friends and companions one might have thought that I had killed him, without the slightest provocation. They rushed at me with uplifted knives and pointed revolvers. The girl shouted half-a-dozen words which undoubtedly conveyed a command. Knives and revolvers were lowered in an instant. I still held the chair, prepared to defend myself with it somehow. Before I guessed his intention, the huge man wrenched it away, gripping my wrists in his two great hands. In spite of me he drew them behind my back and held them there. The fat fellow with a beard produced from somewhere what looked to me like a piece of clothes-line. While the monster squeezed my elbows so cruelly with his iron fingers all the sense seemed to go out of my arms with the clothesline his colleague tied my wrists together, so that I stood before them with my hands pinioned behind my back. It was nothing short of a cowardly outrage. I started to tell them so. I did not fear them; I began with the most perfect frankness to let them know it; but I had not uttered a dozen syllables before again the girl said something. The big man clapped his filthy hand across my mouth. The little man left the room, returning almost instantly with what looked to me like a dirty duster. He tore a strip off one side. Although I shouted and raved and did my best to stop them they forced the foul rag into my mouth and kept it in its place by passing the strip of material across the gag and tying it at the back of my head.

      Just as the knot was tied the door was opened and still another man came in an elderly man with a long black beard, and coarse black hair, which he wore in greasy ringlets. I had a feeling that his was the head of which I had caught a glimpse as it was being drawn back through the window of the upper room that probably he was the man who had dropped the canvas bag. The instant he entered he broke into what seemed to me to be noisy ejaculations. I had not a notion what he was talking about, but whatever it was its utterance seemed to fill his listeners with what looked very like panic fear. I thought that they were going to make a general stampede, but the girl stopped them. Acting, as I took it, upon her instructions, the big man and the fat man seized me on either side and ran me from the room, almost pitching me down a

Скачать книгу