Unknown

The missionary_s daughter

CHAPTER ONE

Her father was a missionary stationed here in Senegal, and Julie gave her faith all the belief and obedience she could. Yet sometimes as she stared at the fringe of trees around the house in which they lived and tried to imagine how deep was the jungle beyond those trees, she could not help wondering about the strange Gods who inhabited the shadows there. Her father was busily preaching against something, and he referred to that something as the pagan Gods of the people, so there was something, all right, she reasoned. Yet the people to whom he preached never mentioned any names or rival deities. Daranje Kawat she had heard of, but that was the name of their king. Daranje Kawat her father said, was jealous of God and therefore, against the preaching the Reverend Davenport did. There were times when Julie Davenport entertained some very pagan suspicions, like the one that King Daranje Kawat really had a right to his kingdom and that maybe the Davenport's strange white God ought to stick to his own territory, but she supposed such thoughts emanated from the jungle, a way the mysterious pagan Gods had of fighting back.

So in a way, it was no surprise to Julie when one night a coarse snicker broke through the darkness of her room and a coarse hand covered her mouth. The pagan Gods had come. She was half asleep, which accounted for her superstitious thoughts. But she was also half awake, which accounted for the fact that her curiosity overcame her terror, at first. Her startled eyes stared into the face of a black man who looked vaguely familiar, but it was too dark in the bedroom to see well. He was not alone and easily spirited her out of the room, out of the house, and through the jungle before she could become aware that it was really happening. They gagged her mouth but seemed to know there was no point in blindfolding her. After all, if she did manage to escape from them, it would have been suicide to try to find her way back along paths with which they were apparently familiar, but which she certainly could never find.

After her first hazy reaction, Julie was, of course, terrified. Her body went utterly limp and she may have passed out. There was no way for her to tell. It was as dark when she was unconscious, if she was, as it was when she was awake. There was no seeing the stars from in the jungle. The branches and foliage and leaves were far too thick. Her captors moved with the stealth of big cats, and she couldn't even count them until suddenly they came upon a little clearing and a road she didn't recognize. Then as they bundled her into the oldest automobile she had ever seen in her life, she saw for the first time that there were four of them and that every last one of them was a member of her father's congregation!

"Dear God, please, oh please," she screamed at them when the one called Balloo took his hand from her mouth to shove her into the back seat of the car. Even in the dark, she could see Dawak peering stonelike through the opened door. He seemed to stare directly into her wide, terror stricken eyes for a long, long moment. His face was impassive and unchanged. And then, even as she struggled with the last of her waning strength, she watched in uncomprehending disbelief as the black face, still expressionless, slowly closed the door and switched off the flashlight.

Someone then grabbed Julie by the neck as they thrust her head first so that she fell face down across a lap. Then Balloo leaped on top of her, pulling the door closed behind him. Now everyone was inside and ail the doors were closed and the car roared off with a squeal of tires. Julie's eyes were wide with terror, and her mouth twisted with a soundless scream that was choked silent by fear somewhere deep in her throat.

"We got her! We got her!" a hot excited voice came from the driver's seat. It sounded like Kubby. He seemed to be shifting into another gear and roaring off on the bumpy dirt road.

"Take it easy!" Dawak shouted. "Thees thing break and then what?"

"You have to put it right," Kubby explained impatiently, now shifting into another gear to illustrate his expertise with the old automobile. Julie wanted to tell him he could slow down and stay in a lower gear. She kept cracking her head on someone's bony lap. But she could not speak.

Now she felt a thick muscular arm circle around her and another harsh callused hand press into her face and over her mouth until her lips ached back against her tightly clenched teeth. She could feel the black man's excited breathing as he pressed her closer to him to keep her from screaming. A pungent animal smell of sweat came from his clothes and seemed to permeate the whole of her own gasping breath. The odor was horrible. She recognized the smell of the gooey bark the natives were always chewing.

Tears of helpless frustration filled her eyes as suddenly the obscene orgies that the natives were said to indulge in crossed her helpless mind, and she sobbed a bit hysterically as the grim realization came that she too might soon be filled with the cruel hard flesh of one of these horrible rapists who had kidnapped her out of her own house.