River-of-Perfumes-Chapter-05

“Mawng Shwé!”

That piercing silvery voice was no sampan man’s. It arrested them all. They glanced back at her. Nanya stood dragging at the dagger within her coolie robe. She was tensed to leap to his help. She had not jumped overboard. Her accents held extreme terror for the life of her love. The raiders grinned diabolically. They had them both now. The Prince would come to… Two faced her way; the rest crouched to close in on Barrett and finish him.

“Don’t! Keep away, Nanya!” He bared clenched teeth at her, then fired as rapidly as he could pull trigger. The rest was a confused hurly-burly of struggle in the darkness, the sulfurous flame and smoke of his revolver at close quarters, cuts, stabs, blows, men groaning and stumbling. He was conscious of her in the thick of it, active, swift-turning as any dancing girl, meeting their slashes with thrusts of her dagger, warding off with quick blow of her arm some fatal stab at him. And then it was over, and the bower smoldered with red patches of fire on its pillows and reeked with powder-smoke fumes.

Barrett, bleeding from gashes and sobbing for breath, flung his assailants hastily over the gunwale, one by one, back into the pirogue they had come from. Then he sat down and let the sampan drift on down the River of Perfumes. Nanya lay dead among the pillows. She had given her life to save his.

He watched the Prince’s pirogue drift away. Commotion now arose along shore over the shooting, but what did it matter? Her loss was too cruel to bear. To have a great love awakened in his heart after all these empty and cynical and unsatisfied years in the East, only to— He had seen that fatal stab at the last moment. On guard for herself, it would never have more than scratched… But there was one greasy knife-hand in his grip at that moment. A successful wrench, and it would have killed him.

Mechanically he slapped out with a wetted palm those patches of fire threatening to become flame too near her body. And then he rose and bent over her. By heaven, there was just a chance. They knew it was essential to take her alive. The Prince would execute, with exquisite tortures, the man who dared really harm her. A man can take the force out of his blow at the very last instant if his mind so directs. Barrett felt her again, a faint thread of hope lighting his gloom. His first examination had been hasty. Dead; he had been only too sure of it. But she was still warm. And after a long time, Barrett nodded and a throb of poignant joy flooded through him. Yes, her heart was still going—the faintest of beats at long intervals. That heart was his.

Frantically he set to work to do what had long been left undone. It would be a fight to save her. He had no stimulants, no laboratory, no aids of any kind save his own medical skill—and his own fierce will. He raged with the intensity of that and prayed fervently. “God! Have mercy! Give her back to me! … They shan’t have her! They shan’t!” His thoughts raved against the powers of darkness as he worked over her, alternately begging God and defying Death. He knew now the agony of losing a loved one; there is no greater. He sobbed uncontrollably as he bandaged.

And then he had done all he could. He went back to take the oar. The sampan had long since drifted past the excited crowds in the palace gardens; it now leaped ahead down the River of Perfumes, impelled by Barrett’s vigorous and stinging strokes. A quiet happiness suffused him as the boat entered the city area of Hué and passed lines of thatch-hooded pirogues moored side by side along both banks. There was still a chance. Reach a steamer and a medicine chest, and he could bring her around.