<h3 class="newchapter2">THE TOLL OF THE GODS.</h3>
<p>Venner's order to heave the treasure-chests overboard was not given
without a pang of regret. It was scarcely obeyed without threats; for
the sailing master had been bitten by the treasure<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_160" id="Page_160">[Pg 160]</SPAN></span> fever before his
owner and guest came on board. Had they not appeared when they did, the
schooner had gone without them, and Peters had already seen a golden
vista ahead of him. He hesitated now, and Venner left the wheel vacant
to urge him.</p>
<p>"Over with it, I say! At once! Here, Pearse, lend a hand here, man,
before that witch's great eyes mesmerize us again. See, she smiles yet,
and comes nearer."</p>
<p>Reluctantly the seamen raised one iron-bound chest to the rail and
poised it there. From the water astern rang Dolores's throaty laugh,
even and full breathing, as if she had not swam a fraction of the
half-mile she had covered.</p>
<p>"Foolish Rupert!" she cried, never relaxing her stroke. "Why waste the
fruits of thy pains? Hast looked inside then? Nay, take me on board, and
let us look together. Thou wilt not see Dolores drown, I swear. Then
look once more into my eyes, my Rupert!"</p>
<p>She laughed again mockingly, alluringly, and Pearse turned away with a
shudder, not daring to cast a glance in the direction of Venner.</p>
<p>"Throw the stuff over, I say!" cried Venner hoarsely, and gave the chest
a push that sent it into the rippling sea with a thunderous splash. And
again that mocking laugh rang out astern; it was nearer, and Dolores's
beautiful face was turned up to them with triumph in every feature. She
had seen the struggle going on in her two intended victims; if she could
but gain to within whispering distance of either of them, surely she
would never let them escape her.</p>
<p>"Come, take me on board, my Rupert. I have a secret to tell thee, but
thee alone!" she cried, and spurted swiftly, gaining abreast of the
main-chains.</p>
<p>But the eyes of Venner and Pearse were fixed in astonishment upon the
tall cliff they had left; their eyes stared amazedly, and they stood
like statues, hearing none of her seductive words.</p>
<p>"What do ye see?" she demanded, frowning up at them.</p>
<p>A score of sharp splashes in the water around the schooner startled her.
She suspected they were hurling missiles at her, and one struck her
arm. She turned swiftly and her face darkened with fury. Then more small
objects fell about her, and one struck her arm. She turned swiftly on
her side to seek the source, and in her ears boomed the tremendous crash
of Stumpy's explosion, rolling far over the sea, reverberating from the
shores and making the air quiver like a solid thing.</p>
<p>A great mass of rock hurtled overhead, missed the schooner by scant
feet, and Venner shouted in horror:</p>
<p>"Throw her a line, Pearse! Here, quickly, before she is crushed by such
a rock as that one!"</p>
<p>The sea was shattered into foam for fathoms around, and every face on
the Feu Follette stared over the rail in helpless astonishment. But on
the face of Dolores glowed a smile of triumph. She feared nothing of
earth or heaven; among the flying rocks she swam on toward the schooner,
smiling up at them, waiting for the rope that meant victory to her.</p>
<p>And in the brief space before the rope hurtled out, down from the
heavens plunged a high-flung piece of granite fair upon Dolores. She
seemed to sense its shadow, and in the moment it struck her she half
sank, breaking its force. But it followed her down. The mass struck
between her gleaming shoulders, and she flung up her arms in despair,
turning over and over with the impact, then floating unconscious close
by the side of the white schooner that had been her goal.</p>
<p>"God! Get her aboard!" gasped Pearse. "She's done for. Yet we cannot
leave her there for the sharks, like a beast!"</p>
<p>Venner and Peters were already trying with boat-hooks to catch Dolores's
tunic. Pearse threw a line over the girl and drew her nearer and the
hooks took hold. They drew her up the side with a care that amounted to
reverence, for in her unconsciousness she was more beautiful than ever,
her fine features molded in dead white, traced with fine blue veins; the
grace of her form was that of a lovely sculpture now, lacking vitality,
but possessing every line of perfection. The blow that had overtaken her
had failed in its terrible threat to crush her.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_161" id="Page_161">[Pg 161]</SPAN></span>"Lay her in the companionway on the lounge," said Venner. He ran to the
saloon and brought up wine. He bathed her temples and wrists with the
liquor, and forced some between her blue lips. And Pearse chafed her
hands and patted them, gazing down at her in silent awe.</p>
<p>"Venner," he whispered, when her eyes refused to open, "we must let this
settle the score against her. It's a terrible end for such a creature."</p>
<p>"For my part, Pearse, I would give all I have just to see those great
violet eyes laugh at me again; to hear that mocking laugh from her
maddening lips. God, will she never awake?"</p>
<p>Astern of the schooner the sun was slowly descending to the western
sea-rim, and as the course was resumed after picking up Dolores, the
Point and the cliff gradually drew out across the path of the sun, until
the outlines of the rock and trees stood out black and sharp. On the
cliff-top a heavy pall of greasy smoke hung low about the shattered
pirates' camp; from fissures high up the frowning side spirals of smoke
testified to the wide-spread destruction that followed the blast.</p>
<p>They looked at the terrific devastation, and again at its nearer victim.
And as they gazed down at her, Dolores's lips trembled in a faint smile,
her great eyes opened wide, looking directly and fearlessly back at
them.</p>
<p>"I thank ye, my friends; I knew you would take me," she whispered, and
the two men turned away with a shudder. As she had lived, Dolores was
now meeting her inevitable end, bold and indomitable.</p>
<p>"Where are you hurt?" inquired Venner lamely. "Let me do something to
ease you."</p>
<p>"Ease?" she laughed as of old, but her teeth clenched upon her lower lip
immediately, with the pain it caused. "I shall ask ye to ease me
presently, good friends. Grim Death has me by the throat already. But
carry me outside. I am stifling in here. Let me see the ocean and the
sky at least in my passage. And I have something to tell ye also."</p>
<p>On the gratings around the stern, abaft the wheel, they laid her on soft
cushions. She drank greedily of the wine and water they offered her;
she quivered with eagerness to unburden her mind before her thirst was
quenched forever. She motioned them, to bend over her, and began to
speak in, husky whispers.</p>
<p>"That chest, thou cast it overboard. Dost know what was in it?"</p>
<p>Both shook their heads. None had seen inside the chests after they came
from the great chamber.</p>
<p>"I'll tell ye, then, for the peace of your souls and the tranquillity of
your voyage. Lest thy men be seized with a desire for treasure that
shall work ye mischief, have them open the other two chests. Quickly,
for I am faint."</p>
<p>Venner went to the chests himself and flung back the lids, which were
bolted on the outside and not locked. He stared for a moment,
unbelievingly, then nodded to Pearse. Pearse stared, too, in amazement,
and one after the other the sailors were called to see. They saw two
great strong-boxes filled to the brim with iron chains, broken cutlases,
rusty bilboes, and rock; a fool's treasure in truth.</p>
<p>"'Twas a trick to set my rascals at odds," Dolores told them when they
returned to her. "To thee, Pearse, I showed my treasure, and I fear that
blast has buried it beneath a mountain. Milo was to take it out. I
cannot believe it can have been taken away ere that powder blew it to
fragments. It was still in the powder store."</p>
<p>"Yes, I know," said Pearse quietly. "It was that which precipitated the
fight between us three that killed poor Tomlin."</p>
<p>"Well, if thou still art hungry for treasure, my friends, there is my
store buried where thou knowest, and I shrewdly fear but few of my
people are left. But I am slipping. Stand aside, that I may close my
eyes on the place I called home."</p>
<p>Dolores ceased speaking and lay, scarcely stirred by her faint
respiration, gazing over the schooner's stern at the sinking sun. The
golden disk was turning to red and across its darkened face the cliff
and Point stood out in sharp silhouette, which grew larger as the great
glowing sun was distorted and enlarged by the refraction near the
horizon.<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_162" id="Page_162">[Pg 162]</SPAN></span> The breeze had changed, and now blew with gentle strength out
of the west, a fair wind for their homeward course, and the strands of
Dolores's glorious hair blew about her face like tendrils about an
orchid of unearthly beauty.</p>
<p>Presently she stirred again, and now she summoned all her remaining
vitality to raise herself on an elbow. Pearse and Venner leaned closer,
sensing the end in the tremendous brilliancy of her wide, dry eyes.</p>
<p>She spoke softly, yet with a thrilling note of yearning that choked her
hearers with harsh sobs.</p>
<p>"Father, I come," she whispered. "If I have failed in obeying thy
commands, I ask forgiveness, for I am but a woman. A woman with
instincts and yearnings, born of the mother I never knew. Thy very
treasures that were to appease me put the yearning more strongly in my
brain. Thy teachings showed me a world of beasts and savagery; thy
treasures gave me dreams of a world peopled by such as I would be. My
mother's blood forced me to seek this other, better world; thy blood
forced me to seek it wrongfully."</p>
<p>She paused, and gathered her fleeting breath.</p>
<p>Then, sitting suddenly upright, she flung both arms out to the setting
sun now lipping the sea, and cried:</p>
<p>"Gods I know not. Yet must there be such, else had I never known the
devotion of a Milo! Wherever ye be, brave Milo, living or dead, commend
me to thy own gods and forgive me for my ingratitude." She seized Venner
and Pearse by the arms as she fell back, and whispered: "In pity,
friends, set my feet toward the west, and launch my poor body down the
sun path as it sinks into the blue Caribbean that was my only home."</p>
<p>She relaxed with a little shivering sigh, the glorious eyes closed with
a tired tremor, and the spirit of Dolores the beautiful, the wicked, the
tempestuous, winged its way down the mysterious paths of the dark
unknown.</p>
<p>"Come," said Venner, suddenly shaking off his abstraction, "time is all
too short if we are to render her this last small service."</p>
<p>"How shall we do it?" asked Pearse doubtfully.</p>
<p>"We shall send her down her chosen path in a boat. Peters will load the
dingey with ballast, while you and I will lay Dolores out as well as we
may. Bring me that grating, Pearse. We will speed her in the dress she
loved. Her soul would sicken at a suffocating winding sheet. Hurry, for
the sun is half gone!"</p>
<p>Swiftly they worked, these men who had cause to remember the departed
siren without great love, and they placed her, secured to a grating,
across the thwarts of the dingey, to which the grating was in turn
secured. Then, all prepared, Peters sprang into the boat, bored a score
of auger-holes in the bottom, and as the great red sun set fierce and
blazing behind the black profile of the cliff, the filling boat was set
adrift, straight down the path of the luminary, bound ever westward,
until the sea gods claimed it and its passenger for their own.</p>
<p>"Farewell, place of ill-luck!" cried Pearce, as the schooner bore away
before the rising evening breeze. "May I never set my eyes on such evil
shores again."</p>
<p>"Then you will not come back to seek the treasure?" asked Venner, with a
shadowy flicker of a smile.</p>
<p>"Not for a thousand times the treasure that lies there!" cried Pearse
vehemently. "And I have seen it! The horror of this will haunt me until
my dying day. I only hope God will look kindly upon that poor woman,
that's all."</p>
<p>"I hope so, too," rejoined Venner thoughtfully. "With a white woman's
opportunities, what a woman she could have been."</p>
<p>But the gods are inscrutable. Only the warm mantle of the setting sun
gave a hint that Dolores might be even now entering into a place of
eternal rest, where her sins of ignorance and untutored instincts would
not count too heavily against her. The sea is very benign to its elect;
a calm sea in the setting sun received Dolores in arms of infinite
benignity.</p>
<p style="margin-top: 1.25em; margin-bottom: 2.25em; font-weight: bold; text-align: center;">(The end.)</p>
<p style="margin-top: 2.25em;">[Transcriber's Note: The following typographical errors present in the
original edition have been corrected. In Chapter V, "inscrutaable" was
changed to "inscrutable"; in Chapter X, "Let me show thee they master"
was changed to "Let me show thee thy master"; in Chapter XVII, "could
not enchance your worth" was changed to "could not enhance your worth";
in Chapter XVIII, "shaking his first at Milo" was changed to "shaking
his fist at Milo"; and in Chapter XXI, "protruding a foot for Tomlin's
back" was changed to "protruding a foot from Tomlin's back".]</p>
<p style="margin-top: 2.25em;">[Transcriber's Note: The following summary originally appeared at the
beginning of the serial's second installment.]</p>
<div class="blockquot">
<p class="center">PRECEDING CHAPTERS BRIEFLY RETOLD</p>
<p>Within his mysterious stronghold, "The Cave of Terrible Things," on the
Maroon coast of Jamaica, washed by the waters of the Caribbean Sea, Red
Jabez, Sultan of Pirates, had just died.</p>
<p>Dolores, his daughter, "a splendidly lithe, glowing creature of beauty
and passion," "a royal woman conscious of mental and physical
perfection," succeeded her father as tyrant over the motley crew of
Spaniard and Briton, Creole and mulatto, Carib and octoroon, and
coal-black negroes.</p>
<p>Milo, the giant Abyssinian, who knew no fear and no law save the will of
this capricious creature, served Dolores as body-guard and chief.</p>
<p>Pascherette, "a gleaming, gold-tinted creature, a miniature model of
Aphrodite," beloved of Milo, was her maid and attendant.</p>
<p>Moved to mutiny by Rufe, the Spaniard, the pirates had risen in revolt
to loot the rich treasure of the dead Sultan's cave; but supported by
Milo, Dolores had cowed them, no less by her dagger than her threats.</p>
<p>But discontent rode the soul of the Sultana. She longed for other lands,
other people. With Milo's aid she determined to capture the first sail
that passed her shore, and escape.</p>
<p>When Rupert Venner and his guests, Craik Tomlin and John Pearce, aboard
the Venner yacht, Feu Follette, passed that way, they were easily
induced to go ashore.</p>
<p>In the midst of a reception accorded them by Dolores, the party beheld
Yellow Rufe and a band of mulattoes and blacks making for the schooner,
from whose rail shots crackled.</p>
<p>Venner raised a cry of treachery and called, "Come, fellows!" But the
woman held him as much by her eyes as by her promise: "I shall preserve
thy ship, and give thee back an eye for an eye, if thy men are harmed."</p>
<p>Then she sprang down the cliff like a deer.</p>
</div>
<p style="margin-top: 2.25em;">[Transcriber's Note: The following summary originally appeared at the
beginning of the serial's third installment. The summary at the
beginning of the serial's fourth installment, if one was present, was
not available when preparing this electronic edition.]</p>
<div class="blockquot">
<p class="center">PRECEDING CHAPTERS BRIEFLY RETOLD</p>
<p>On the death of Red Jabez, Dolores, "a glowing creature of beauty and
passion," took over her father's rule of the pirates of the Maroon coast
of Jamaica.</p>
<p>With the help of her faithful slave, Milo, the Abyssinian giant, she
crushed a rising insurrection among her riffraff subjects, whose
cupidity had been played upon by Rufe, the Spaniard.</p>
<p>But Dolores was herself the victim of discontent. Loathing her outlaw
subjects and the island, she determined to seize the first boat that
passed her way, and escape with her jewels and her gold.</p>
<p>When the pleasure yacht, Feu Follette, came that way, she sent Milo and
her maid, Pascherette, to decoy Rupert Venner and his guests, Craik
Tomlin and John Pearse, to the island.</p>
<p>In the midst of her reception to her captive-guests, she beheld Rufe and
a band of insurgent blacks and mulattoes attacking the crew of the
schooner, while Sancho, whom she had despatched to care for the vessel
while in the harbor, was joining in the attack.</p>
<p>Then she rushed over the cliff and into the water, and boarded the boat,
followed by her loyal Milo.</p>
<p>After a long and bloody struggle, the woman's ruse of firing the ship
with a keg of powder won the day, and Rufe and Sancho fled into the
wilderness, while from the schooner's topmast flew the Sultana's own
flag.</p>
<p>Demanding that the traitors, Rufe and Sancho, be rounded up, Dolores
threw her three guests into chains, while she accused Pascherette of
abetting the treason of Sancho.</p>
<p>Then Dolores turned to Venner with the offer of her love if he would
sail away with her, having first despatched his friends. When the man,
whose soul was racked with passion for the beautiful black panther,
recoiled from her condition, she left him in his chains.</p>
<p>Next she dealt with Sancho, whom Pascherette had lured back to the
woman's mercy; and Sancho emerged from Dolores's presence a driveling
imbecile.</p>
<p>When Milo beheld at this moment the fleeing form of Yellow Rufe, made
distinguishable by vivid lightning, Dolores determined to complete her
punishments.</p>
<p>The Spaniard was making good his escape when Milo took up the pursuit in
the little sailboat. Dolores and her crew would follow, by the light of
his flares, in the schooner.</p>
<p>With the untamed soul of a woman who had never known defeat, Dolores
drove her crew and defied the wind and the waves, and the Feu Follette
was liberated from the mud and swung to the gale as the cry rang out:
"There's the flare—and she's burnin' steady!"</p>
</div>
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