CHAPTER XV.
STRANGE MYSTERIES.
“The shrieks are coming from the bear pit! What if some one had fallen in there!” cried Bonair, turning suddenly cold as ice with apprehension, and starting at a wild run in the direction of the sounds.
As the housekeeper had told Berry, her young master had been fond of animal pets from boyhood, and had quite a choice collection of his own at the southern end of the park, where they were taken care of by a man and his wife.
In this miniature zoo there was an aviary, some prairie dogs, a monkey house, and some larger animals, including bears of different species. Zilla, the black bear, was his favorite. He had got her himself several years ago while deer hunting in the mountains of West Virginia. A handsome fawn, a black bear cub, and some smaller animals, were the trophies he carried home, and he had duly christened the cub Zilla, and petted her so much that she loved him with a doglike devotion. In his last letter from his sister Marie, she had told him that Zilla was now the proud parent of twins, and had become fierce as a lioness in defense of her young.
He had just started for the bear pit, idly wondering if Zilla would know him again after his absence of almost a year, when those frenzied shrieks of some one in deadly peril made him fly to the rescue in breathless haste, his heart sinking with a terrible dread.
Suppose it were little Berry herself that had unwittingly stumbled and fallen into the bear pit?
Oh, horrors! One blow of Zilla’s big paw would be sufficient to kill the lovely brown-eyed maid. In the twinkling of an eye, she would be dead!
There was one chance in a hundred for her life.
If he could get there before the fatal blow was given, if he could spring down into the pit, and arrest Zilla’s furious onslaught by the sound of his voice—the voice of the beloved master!
But would she remember him still? Would she yield obedience to his command in her new character of motherhood, filled with the instinct of protection to her young? If she would not, then woe unto any poor wretch who had fallen into her angry clutches!
With these thoughts in his mind he flew toward the zoo, with a wild prayer in his heart to be in time, just in time!
Every moment was an eternity, and his feet seemed to drag beneath him. He had never realized the value of a moment of time before.
But now life itself seemed to hang upon his haste.
Fortunately the distance was short, so that he covered it in a space of time less than five minutes—five minutes that might have been fatal, alas, for ere now the wild shrieks had died into silence more terrifying still—portentous silence in which the victim might have died.
At last! At last! After an eternity of time it seemed to him—he reached the scene of his suspicions.
He was right, for from the pit came terrible sounds, while all the varied denizens of the zoo, having been startled from sleep by the screams of fear, were making hideous din in their several voices, the uproar creating a sort of babel of the scene.
Over all shone the full moon in a cloudless sky, making everything almost as clear as day.
Bonair flung himself face downward, peering into Zilla’s abode.
Down there was something white that could dimly be seen on the ground, while Zilla crouched over it, hitting pounding blows with her big paws. The other three bears who shared the pit were not taking any part, only walking about on their hind legs, expressing dismay and wonder by dismal and prolonged growling.
“Oh, Heaven, have pity!” Bonair cried wildly, and leaped into the pit.
He fell flat on his face, and Zilla’s attention was quickly attracted so that the lifted paw, big, hairy, ponderous, fell nerveless as she turned desperately on the new intruder upon her domain.
Before he could struggle up to his feet, breathless from his race and the shock of his fall, the black bear dealt him a blow hard enough to knock the life out of him if he had not been nerved by a terrible anxiety that almost made him proof against her force. He got up feebly and clutched at her, muttering through a mouthful of blood:
“Zilla! Zilla!”
The name proved his salvation, for the huge black animal was opening her arms to crush him to her in a grip that meant death, but she paused in sudden indecision.
“Zilla! Zilla!” the man cried again hoarsely, entreatingly, his heart leaping to his throat in panting gasps.
A stifled moan smote his ear, but it did not come from Zilla, but from the still white something on the ground, and at the sound the bear turned toward it again with a ferocious growl.
But the great uplifted hairy paw did not fall, for with lightning swiftness, Bonair sprang forward, his fist shot out with terrible force and struck the animal just between the eyes, so that she lurched backward.
“Zilla, you devil, if you have hurt her, I will kill you!” he shouted, as he flung himself between them.
Madam Bruin, who had seen stars for a moment as his fist struck her face, now regained her feet, standing erect and menacing, but without making direct attack. She seemed dazed, stupefied, and a sort of shiver shook her huge black body.
As the moon shone down on the strange scene, she got her first look at the intruder, and she began to tremble more and more with the rush of instinctive memory. Bonair saw already that the battle was won.
“Oh, Zilla, you know me at last,” he cried, in blended relief and exultation, and added:
“Down, down, wretched beast, at my feet!”
Oh, wondrous change.
It did not seem possible that the maddened, murderous, plunging beast of a moment ago could be transformed like this into a tender, loving animal that groveled on the ground and licked the master’s hand with a quivering red tongue like a dog’s. But the transformation was wrought.
There she lay prostrate at Bonair’s command, conquered, humble, loving, her huge black body quivering all over, her whole attitude one of complete submission.
“Lie still, now,” her master commanded, roughly stroking her head, even while he turned in an agony of anxiety to that figure huddled on the ground the other side of him. He stooped down to examine it, and as he did so Zilla’s fury returned. She growled and half rose, but his restraining hand thrust her fiercely back.
“Must I slay you, beast?” he demanded, with a blow that forced her to be quiescent, while he made a further examination of the white something that after one moan had given no further sign of life.
Alas, his fearful heart had told him right.
It was she, Berenice Vining, the little maid who had stirred his heart to love’s joy and pain as no other woman had ever done before! Little Berry of the starry eyes and pure heart.
Gowned in simple white and seemingly lifeless, she lay, and he turned to find some implement to slay Zilla, in the rush of furious vengeance.
But the bear had slunk from him to the corner where her darlings whined in their soft nest, and he tripped and fell in his agitation—not in a pool of blood, but upon a soft mass of wool—the thick red blanket he had seen on the Indian fortune teller when she had come to drag Berry away to this hideous doom.
He comprehended that the woman had thrust Berry down to this awful death, and that in the life-and-death struggle, she had dragged down with her the scarlet blanket.
But why, why, why, had the old hag thirsted for this beautiful, innocent young life? was the question that struck him like a blow in the face.
He knelt down by her in anguish; he put his hand beneath her face and turned it to the light.
Fortunately there was no mark or bruise upon it to mar its lifeless beauty, but the lids lay heavy and dark on the white cheek, and the heart, when he laid his hand over it, had no pulsation. He had come too late. Zilla’s blows had battered out the life from the beautiful body!
Charley Bonair groaned in anguish.
“Dead! Dead! Poor little darling; sweet, pure child! How could so slight a form survive those thudding blows I heard as I dropped into the pit? They shall die for this, the old hag who flung her down to her fate, and the murderous Zilla, who finished her work! Now there is nothing left but to take her out of this accursed hole back to my home, my last dead love, my little Berry, whom fate placed beyond my reach. Ah,” the tone changed to one of horror, as a bullet whizzed suddenly down into the pit past his cheek and buried itself in his shoulder.