Part 32

“Bulan,” repeated the girl. “Bulan. Why that is a native name. You are either an Englishman or an American. What is your true name?”

“My name is Bulan,” he insisted doggedly.

Virginia Maxon thought that he must have some good reason of his own for wishing to conceal his identity. At first she wondered if he could be a fugitive from justice—the perpetrator of some horrid crime, who dared not divulge his true name even in the remote fastness of a Bornean wilderness; but a glance at his frank and noble countenance drove every vestige of the traitorous thought from her mind. Her woman’s intuition was sufficient guarantee of the nobility of his character.

“Then let me thank you, Mr. Bulan,” she said, “for the service that you have rendered a strange and helpless woman.”

He smiled.

“Just Bulan,” he said. “There is no need for Miss or Mister in the savage jungle, Virginia.”

The girl flushed at the sudden and unexpected use of her given name, and was surprised that she was not offended.

“How do you know my name?” she asked.

Bulan saw that he would get into deep water if he attempted to explain too much, and, as is ever the way, discovered that one deception had led him into another; so he determined to forestall future embarrassing queries by concocting a story immediately to explain his presence and his knowledge.

“I lived upon the island near your father’s camp,” he said. “I knew you all—by sight.”

“How long have you lived there?” asked the girl. “We thought the island uninhabited.”

“All my life,” replied Bulan truthfully.

“It is strange,” she mused. “I cannot understand it. But the monsters—how is it that they followed you and obeyed your commands?”

Bulan touched the bull whip that hung at his side.

“Von Horn taught them to obey this,” he said.

“He used that upon them?” cried the girl in horror.

“It was the only way,” said Bulan. “They were almost brainless—they could understand nothing else, for they could not reason.”

Virginia shuddered.

“Where are they now—the balance of them?” she asked.

“They are dead, poor things,” he replied, sadly. “Poor, hideous, unloved, unloving monsters—they gave up their lives for the daughter of the man who made them the awful, repulsive creatures that they were.”

“What do you mean?” cried the girl.

“I mean that all have been killed searching for you, and battling with your enemies. They were soulless creatures, but they loved the mean lives they gave up so bravely for you whose father was the author of their misery—you owe a great deal to them, Virginia.”

“Poor things,” murmured the girl, “but yet they are better off, for without brains or souls there could be no happiness in life for them. My father did them a hideous wrong, but it was an unintentional wrong. His mind was crazed with dwelling upon the wonderful discovery he had made, and if he wronged them he contemplated a still more terrible wrong to be inflicted upon me, his daughter.”

“I do not understand,” said Bulan.

“It was his intention to give me in marriage to one of his soulless monsters—to the one he called Number Thirteen. Oh, it is terrible even to think of the hideousness of it; but now they are all dead he cannot do it even though his poor mind, which seems well again, should suffer a relapse.”

“Why do you loathe them so?” asked Bulan. “Is it because they are hideous, or because they are soulless?”

“Either fact were enough to make them repulsive,” replied the girl, “but it is the fact that they were without souls that made them totally impossible—one easily overlooks physical deformity, but the moral depravity that must be inherent in a creature without a soul must forever cut him off from intercourse with human beings.”

“And you think that regardless of their physical appearance the fact that they were without souls would have been apparent?” asked Bulan.