"Father! father! Where are you, father?"
It was Edith Herndon's voice, and the note of agony in the words
maddened me. I drove my teeth into Leith's left leg as he stood quiet
for a second near my head, and the brute used the sole of his right
boot to loosen my grip. There were no gentle ways about the devil. As
Edith's cry was repeated, he had administered a farewell kick to Holman
and me, and shouted an order in the same strange dialect which the
dancer had used in addressing me in the Cavern of the Skulls when the
robe of parrot feathers had saved my life. The three natives immediately
gripped us by the heels and we were dragged off into the bushes.
It seemed to me that Edith Herndon's cry was repeated again and again as
the natives dragged me at a jog trot through the undergrowth. There was
untold anguish in the cry. It was plain that Leith had taken the
unfortunate old Professor some distance from his daughters so that they
could not listen to the conversation, and the scientist's high-pitched
protests against our maltreatment had caused the terror-stricken girls
to think that Leith was ill-using their father.
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