Chapter XLI: Ferris Grows Desperate

The gay party of travelers whom Strangemore and Ferris had joined did not think they had gained much by the accession to their numbers.

Strangemore was gloomy, thoughtful, grave, and appeared to be totally wrapped up in some absorbing theme within himself.

Ferris was moody and boisterously gay by fits and starts. He was “everything by turns and nothing long.” The travelers decided among themselves that these two brilliant and accomplished men had something out of the common the matter with them. They looked like men with secrets on their minds, they seemed fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils.

If any one had told them the actual truth--that one of these men was a cruel murderer--that he had ruthlessly killed a beautiful woman because she had played with his heart like the foolish butterfly that she was--and that the other man had been so foolish and so weak that he had driven the fairest and most loving wife in the world to her death, they would not have wondered at their grave looks, they would have recoiled from them in horror and contempt and fear. But there was no one near to betray these vital secrets, and so Strangemore and Ferris remained with the party, each a silent vigilant spy upon the movements of the other, and sometimes a terrible, murderous gleam flashed into the gloomy cavernous orbs of Ferris that boded no good to the man who was tracking him down.

“If I could only find him alone in some distant lonely spot out of sight and sound of all the others, his soul should soon follow that of Sibyl St. Alban to Hades!” he would mutter vindictively.

He knew that Strangemore watched him unrelentingly, unremittingly, for some token of his hidden sin. He knew that when for very weariness he fell asleep beneath the Egyptian stars on the banks of “old Nilus” that his enemy listened breathlessly to the mutterings of his slumber, longing for him to betray himself in his feverish dreams of the past. A mad hatred for Talbot Strangemore grew within him. A thousand times he wished him dead.

“He is the only living being that suspects me, and in time he will track me down,” he thought, fearfully. “One or the other of us must die, and that soon.”

Yet he shuddered when he thought of imbruing his hands again in human blood.

“I do not want to kill him. I wish to heaven that he would go away and forsake his deadly purpose, so that I need not be compelled to destroy him to save myself,” he thought, shudderingly, while his brow was beaded with the cold dews of horror.

In the long, horror-haunted nights and days he cursed the memory of the fair coquette who had driven him mad with her sweet words and smiles until he had forgotten everything but his burning pain and his thirst for revenge.

“I loved her, but I killed her. Ah, how horrible it is to love with such madness that one slays the heartless fair one who has wrought him woe!” he thought.

He wearied of the idle dalliance of their life in Egypt. He longed to push on to Africa where the men talked of hunting lions and tigers.

“That will be the sport for me,” he said to himself. “In the keen ardor of such pursuits, I may forget myself and forget her whom in my madness I slew.”

But his comrades could not be induced to hasten their march into Africa. They had left one of their number sick in England and they could go no further without him.

“We promised to wait for him here,” they said, “and we cannot afford to leave him. He is a noted hunter. He has been in Africa before, and he knows the route.”

Strangemore and Ferris did not take much interest in the expected new-comer, until one day when they heard quite incidentally that he was an American.

“But he will never return to his native land,” they said. “He is a misanthrope and a woman-hater. His life has been blasted by the falsity of his once idolized wife, and he has forsworn his country forever,” and then the two listeners felt as if they held some kinship with the absent man.