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CHAPTER X. BARBARA CAPTURED BY HEAD-HUNTERS

WHEN Barbara Harding, with Miller before and Swenson behind her, had taken

up the march behind the loot-laden party seven dusky, noiseless shadows had

emerged from the forest to follow close behind.

For half a mile the party moved along the narrow trail unmolested. Theriere had

come back to exchange a half-dozen words with the girl and had again moved

forward toward the head of the column. Miller was not more than twenty-five feet

behind the first man ahead of him, and Miss Harding and Swenson followed at

intervals of but three or four yards.

Suddenly, without warning, Swenson and Miller fell, pierced with savage spears,

and at the same instant sinewy fingers gripped Barbara Harding, and a silencing

hand was clapped over her mouth. There had been no sound above the muffled

tread of the seamen. It had all been accomplished so quickly and so easily that

the girl did not comprehend what had befallen her for several minutes.

In the darkness of the forest she could not clearly distinguish the forms or

features of her abductors, though she reasoned, as was only natural, that

Skipper Simms' party had become aware of the plot against them and had taken

this means of thwarting a part of it; but when her captors turned directly into the

mazes of the jungle, away from the coast, she began first to wonder and then to

doubt, so that presently when a small clearing let the moonlight full upon them

she was not surprised to discover that none of the members of the Halfmoon's

company was among her guard.

Barbara Harding had not circled the globe half a dozen times for nothing. There

were few races or nations with whose history, past and present, she was not fairly

familiar, and so the sight that greeted her eyes was well suited to fill her with

astonishment, for she found herself in the hands of what appeared to be a party

of Japanese warriors of the fifteenth or sixteenth century. She recognized the

medieval arms and armor, the ancient helmets, the hairdressing of the two-

sworded men of old Japan. At the belts of two of her captors dangled grisly

trophies of the hunt. In the moonlight she saw that they were the heads of Miller

and Swenson.

The girl was horrified. She had thought her lot before as bad as it could be, but to

be in the clutches of these strange, fierce warriors of a long-dead age was

unthinkably worse. That she could ever have wished to be back upon the

Halfmoon would have seemed, a few days since, incredible; yet that was precisely

what she longed for now.

The Mucker