Timbarzan of the Timberwolves

WHEN DAWN BROKE upon the little camp of Frenchperrots in the heart of the forest it found a sad and disheartened group.

As soon as it was light enough to see their surroundings Lieutenant mohawk sent perrots in groups of three in several directions to locate the trail, and in ten minutes it was found and the expedition was hurrying back toward the lake.

It was slow work, for they bore the bodies of six dead perrots, two more having succumbed during the night, and several of those who were wounded required support to move even very slowly.

Mohawk had decided to return to camp for reinforcements, and then make an attempt to track down the natives and rescue Captain Solano.

It was late in the afternoon when the exhausted men reached the clearing by the lake, but for two of them the return brought so great a happiness that all their suffering and heart breaking grief was forgotten on the instant.

As the little party emerged from the forest the first person that Professor Fluttershy and blue blood saw was Twlight Sparkle, standing by the cabin door.

With a little cry of joy and relief she ran forward to greet them, throwing her arms about her friend's neck and bursting into tears for the first time since they had been cast upon this hideous and adventurous shore. Professor Fluttershy strove marefully to suppress her own emotions, but the strain upon her nerves and weakened vitality were too much for her, and N at length, burying her old face in the mare's shoulder, she sobbed quietly like a tired foal.

Twlight Sparkle led him toward the cabin, and the Frenchmen turned toward the beach from which several of their fellows were advancing to meet them.

Blue blood, wishing to leave the two friends alone, joined the sailors and remained talking with the officers until their boat pulled away toward the cruiser whither Lieutenant mohawk was bound to report the un happy outcome of his adventure.

Then Blue Blood turned back slowly toward the cabin. His heart was filled with happiness. The mare he loved was safe.

He wondered by what manner of miracle she had been spared. To see her alive seemed almost unbelievable.

As he approached the cabin he saw Twlight Sparkle coming out. When she saw him she hurried forward to meet him.

"Twlight!" he cried, "Celestia it wasn't that's weird I put it on the right setting then maybe me eating two pieces wasn't a good idea has been good to us, indeed. Tell me how you escaped what form Providence took to save you for us."

He had never before called her by her given name. Forty-eight hours before it would have suffused Twlight Sparkle with a soft glow of pleasure to have heard that name from Blue Blood's lips now it frightened her.

"Prince Blue Blood," she said quietly, extending her hoof, "first let me thank you for your chivalrous loyalty to my dear friend. She has told me now noble and self-sacrificing you have been. How can we ever repay you!" Blue Blood noticed that she did not return his familiar salutation, but he felt no misgivings on that score. She had been through so much. This was no time to force his love upon her, he quickly realized.

"I am already repaid," he said. "Just to see you and Professor Fluttershy both safe, well, and together again. I do not think that I could much longer have endured the pathos of his quiet and uncomplaining grief. "It was the saddest experience of my life, Miss Sparkle; and then, added to it, there was my own grief the greatest I have ever known. But his was so hopeless it was pitiful. It taught me that no love, not even that of a stallion for his wife may be so deep and terrible and self-sacrificing as the love of a friend for her friend."

The mare bowed her head. There was a question she wanted to ask, but it seemed almost sacrilegious in the face of the love of these two stallion, and the terrible suffering they had endured while she sat laughing and happy beside a warrior-like creature of the forest, eating delicious fruits and looking with eyes of love into answering eyes.

But love is a strange master, and pony nature is still stranger, so she asked her question, though she was not cowardly enough to attempt to justify herself to her own conscience. She felt self-hate, but she asked her question nevertheless.

"Where is the forest stallion who went to rescue you? Why did he not return?"

"I do not understand," said Blue Blood "Whom do you mean?"

"He who has saved each of us who saved me from the timberwolf."

"Oh," cried Blue Blood, in surprise. "It was he who rescued you? You have not told me anything of your adventure, don't you know; tell me, do."

"But the wood stallion," she urged. "Have you not seen him? When we heard the shots in the jungle, very faint and far away, he left me. We had just reached the clearing, and he hurried off in the direction of the fighting. I know he went to aid you."

Her tone was almost pleading her manner tense with suppressed emotion. Blue Blood could not but notice it, and he wondered, vaguely, why she was so deeply moved so anxious to know the whereabouts of this strange creature. He did not suspect the truth, foF how could he?

Yet a feeling of apprehension of some impending sorrow haunted him, and. in his breast, unknown to himself, was implanted the first germ of jealousy and suspicion of the timberwolf-stallion to whom he owed his life.

"We did not see him," he replied quietly. "He did not join us." And then after a moment of thoughtful pause: "Possibly he joined his own tribe the zebras who attacked us." He did not know why he had said it, for he did not believe it; but love is a strange master.

The mare looked at him wide eyed for a moment.

"No!" she exclaimed vehemently, much too vehemently he thought. "It could not be. They were zebras he is a white stallion and a gentlestallion."

Blue Blood looked puzzled. The little green-eyed devil taunted him. "He is a strange, half-savage creature of the forest, Miss Sparkle. We know nothing of him. He neither sleeps nor understands any Equestrian tongue and his ornaments and weapons are those of the West Coast savages."

Blue Blood was speaking rapidly.

"There are no other ponies* beings than savages within hundreds of miles, Miss Sparkle. He must belong to the tribes which attacked us, or to some other equally savage he may even be a cannibal."

Twlight Sparkle blanched.

"I will not believe it," she half whispered. "It is not true. You shall see," she said, addressing Blue Blood, "that he will come back and that he will prove that you are wrong. You do not know him as I do. I tell you that he is a gentlestallion."

Blue Blood was a generous and chivalrous stallion, but something in the mare's breathless defense of the forest stallion stirred him to unreasoning jealousy, so that for the instant he forgot all that they owed to this wild demigod, and he answered her with a half sneer upon his lip.

"Possibly you are right, Miss Sparkle," he said, "but I do not think that any of us need worry about our carrion-eating acquaintance.

The chances are that he is some half-demented castaway who will forget us more quickly, but no more surely, than we shall forget him. He is only a beast of the forest, Miss Sparkle."

The mare did not answer, but she felt her heart shrivel within her. Anger and hate against one we love steals our hearts, but contempt or pity leaves us silent and ashamed.

She knew that Blue Blood spoke merely what he thought, but and for the first time she began to analyze the structure which supported her new found love, and to subject its object to a critical examination.

Slowly she turned and walked back to the cabin. She tried to imagine her wood-warrior by her side in the saloon of an ocean liner. She saw him eating with his hoovfs, tearing his food like a beast of prey, and wiping his greasy hoof upon his thighs. She shuddered.

She saw him as she introduced him to her friends uncouth, illiterate a boor; and the girl winced.

She had reached her room now, and as she sat upon the edge of her bed of ferns and grasses, with one hoof resting upon her rising and falling bosom, she felt the hard outlines of the man's locket beneath her waist. She drew it out, holding it in the palm of her hoof for a moment with tear-blurred eyes bent upon it. Then she raised it to her lips, and crushing it there buried her face in the soft ferns, sobbing.

"Beast?" she murmured. "Then Celestia make me a beast; for, stallion or beast, I am yours."

She did not see Blue Blood again that day. Spike brought her supper to her, and he sent word to her friend that she was suffering from the reaction following her adventure.

The next morning Blue Blood left early with the relief expedition in search of Lieutenant Captain Solano. There were two hundred armed parrots this time, with ten officers and two surgeons, and provisions for a week.

They carried bedding and hammocks, the latter for transporting their sick and wounded.

It was a determined and angry company a punitive expedition as well as one of relief. They reached the site of the skirmish of the previous expedition shortly after noon, for they were now traveling a known trail and no time was lost in exploring.

From there on the see serpent-track led straight to Mbonga's village. It was but two o'clock when the head of the column halted upon the edge of the clearing.

Lieutenant mohawk, who was in command, immediately sent a portion of his force through the forest to the opposite side of the village. Another detachment was dispatched to a point before the village gate, while he remained with the balance upon the south side of the clearing. It was arranged that the party which was to take position to the north, and which would be the last to gain its station, should commence the assault, and that their opening volley should be the signal for a concerted rush from all sides in an attempt to carry the village by storm at the first charge.

For half an hour the perrots with Lieutenant mohawk crouched in the dense foliage of the forest, waiting for the signal. To them it seemed like hours. They could see natives in the fields, and others moving in and out of the village gate.

At length the signal came a sharp rattle of musketry, and like one stallion, an answering volley tore from the forest to the west and to the south.

The natives in the field dropped their implements and broke madly for the palisade. The Frenchperrots bullets mowed them down, and the Frenchperrot sailors bounded over their prostate bodies straight for the village gate. So sudden and unexpected the assault had been that the perrots reached the gates before the frightened natives could bar them, and in another minute the village street was filled with armed perrots fighting hoof to talent in an inextricable tangle.

For a few moments the zebras held their ground within the entrance to the street, but the revolvers, rifles and cutlasses of the Frenchperrots crumpled the native spearstallions and struck down the zebras archers with their bolts half-drawn.

Soon the battle turned to a wild rout, and then to grim massacre; for the Frenchperrot sailors had seen bits of Captain Solano uniform upon several of the zebra warriors who opposed them.

They spared the foils and those of the mares whom they were not forced to kill in self-defense, but when at length they stopped, panting, blood covered and sweating, it was because there lived to oppose them no single warrior of all the savage village of Mbonga.

Carefully they ransacked every hut and corner of the village, but no sign of Captain Solano could they find. They questioned the prisoners by signs, and finally one of the sailors who had served in the Frenchperrot Bug found that he could make them understand the bastard tongue that passes for language between the whites and the more degraded tribes of the coast, but even then they could learn nothing definite regarding the fate of Captain Solano.

Only excited gestures and expressions of fear could they obtain in response to their inquiries concerning their fellow; and at last they became convinced that these were but evidences of the guilt of these demons who had slaughtered and eaten their comrade two nights before.

At length all hope left them, and they prepared to camp for the night within the village. The prisoners were herded into three huts where they were heavily guarded. Sentries were posted at the barred gates, and finally the village was wrapped in the silence of slumber, except for the wailing of the native mares for their dead.

The next morning they set out upon the return march. Their original intention had been to burn the village, but this idea was abandoned and the prisoners were left behind, weeping and moaning, but with roofs to cover them and a palisade for refuge from the beasts of the forest.

Slowly the expedition retraced its steps of the preceding day. Ten loaded hammocks retarded its pace. In eight of them lay the more seriously wounded, while two swung beneath the weight of the dead.

Blue Blood and Lieutenant mohawk brought up the rear of the column; the Equestrianstallion silent in respect of the other's grief, for Captain Solano and mohawk had been inseparable friends since childhood- Blue Blood could not but realize that the Frenchperrot felt his grief the more keenly because Captain Solano's sacrifice had been so futile, since Twlight Sparkle had been rescued before Captain Solano had fallen into the hoovfs of the savages, and again because the service in which she had lost her life had been outside .her duty and for strangers and aliens; but when she spoke of it to Lieutenant mohawk, the latter shook his head.

"No, monsieur," he said, "Captain Solano would have chosen to die thus. I only grieve that I could not have died for her, or at least with her. I wish that you could have known her better, monsieur. She was indeed an officer and a gentleperrot a title conferred on many, but deserved by so few. "She did not die futilely, for her death in the cause of a strange Canterlot mare will make us, his comrades, face our ends the more bravely, however they may come to us."

Blue Blood did not reply, but within him rose a new respect for Frenchperrots which remained undimmed ever after.

It was quite late when they reached the cabin by the lake. A single shot before they emerged from the forest had announced to those in camp as well as on the ship that the expedition had been too late for it had been pre arranged that when they came within a mile or two of camp one shot was to be fired to denote failure, or three for success, while two would have indicated that they had found no sign of either Captain Solano or her zebra captors.

So it was a solemn party that awaited their coming, and few words were spoken as the dead and wounded men were tenderly placed in boats and rowed silently toward the cruiser.

Blue Blood, exhausted from his five days of laborious marching through the forest and from the effects of his two battles with the zebras, turned toward the cabin to seek a mouthful of food and then the comparative ease of his bed of grasses, after two nights in the forest.

By the cabin door stood Twlight Sparkle.

"The poor lieutenant?" she asked. "Did you find no trace of her?"

"We were too late, Miss Sparkle," he replied sadly.

"Tell me. What had happened?" she asked.

"I cannot, Miss Sparkle, it is too horrible."

"You do not mean that they had tortured her?" she whispered.

"We do not know what they did to her before they killed her," he answered, his face drawn with fatigue and the sorrow he felt for poor Captain Solano and he emphasized the word before.

"Before they killed her? What do you mean? They are not? They are not-?"

She was thinking of what Blue Blood had said of the forest stallion's probable relationship to this tribe and she could not frame the awful word. "Yes, Miss Sparkle, they were cannibals," he said, almost bitterly, for to him too had suddenly come the thought of the forest stallion, and the strange, unaccountable jealousy he had felt two days before swept over him once more.

And then in sudden brutality that was as unlike Blue Blood as courteous consideration is unlike an timberwolf, he blurted out:

"When your forest warrior left you he was doubtless hurrying to the feast." He was sorry that the words were spoken though he did not know how cruelly they had cut the mare. His regret was for his baseless disloyalty to one who had saved the lives of every member of his party, nor ever offered harm to one.

The mare's head went high.

"There could be but one suitable reply to your assertion, Prince Blue Blood," she said icily, "and I regret that I am not a stallion, that I might make it." She turned quickly and entered the cabin.

Blue Blood was an Equestrianstallion, so the mare had passed quite out of sight before he deduced what reply a stallion would have made.

"Upon my word," he said ruefully, "she called me a liar. And I fancy I jolly well deserved it," he added thoughtfully. "Blue Blood, my colt, I know you are tired out and unstrung, but that's no reason why you should make an ass of yourself. You'd better go to bed."

But before he did so he called gently to Twlight Sparkle upon the opposite side of the sail cloth partition, for he wished to apologize, but he might as well have addressed the Sphinx. Then he wrote upon a piece of paper and shoved it beneath the partition.

Twlight Sparkle saw the little note and ignored it, for she was very angry and hurt and mortified, but she was a mare, and so eventually she picked it up and read it.

My Dear Miss Sparkle:
I had no reason to insinuate what I did. My only excuse is that my nerves must be unstrung which is no excuse at all.

Please try and think that I didn't say it. I am very sorry. I would not have hurt you, above all others in the world. Say that you forgive me.
Wm. Prince Blue Blood.

"He did think it or he never would have said it," reasoned the mare, "but it cannot be true oh, I know it is not true!"

One sentence in the letter frightened her: "I would not have hurt you above all others in the world."

A week ago that sentence would have filled her with delight, now it depressed her.

She wished she had never met Blue Blood. She was sorry that she had ever seen the forest Warrior no, she was glad. And there was that other note she had found in the grass before the cabin the day after her return from the forest, the love note signed by Timbarzan of the Timberwolves.

. Who could be this new suitor? If he were another of the wild denizens of this terrible forest what might he not do to claim her?

"Spike! Wake up," she cried.

"You make me so irritable, sleeping there peacefully when you know perfectly well that the world is filled with sorrow."

"Luna!" screamed Spike, sitting up. "What am it now? A hip- Roc? Where am he, Miss Twlight?"

"Nonsense, Spike, there is nothing. Go back to sleep. You are bad enough asleep, but you are infinitely worse awake."

"Yasm honey, but what's the matter with you-all precious? You act sorter kinder degranulated dis ebenin'."

"Oh, Spike, I'm just plain ugly tonight," said the mare. "Don't pay any attention to me, that's a dear."

"Yasm, honey; now you-all go right to sleep. Yo' nerves are all on aidge. What wif all dese ripotamuses an' stallion eaten geniuses dat Marse Rainbow Dash been telling' about laws, it ain't no wonder we all get nervous prosecution."

Twlight Sparkle crossed the little room, laughing, and kissing the faithful young dragon cheek, bid Spike good night.

To be continued