CHAPTER XIXA STARTLING INTERRUPTION
Wornout by the exciting adventures and fierce emotions of the day, Bomba fell asleep. When he awoke the chill gray of early dawn was stealing in at the window of the little room.
He was still on the floor beneath the picture. But he would not have sought the bed in any event. It represented to him something so strange that he would probably have been unable to sleep in it. The hard floor on which he now lay or the earth of the jungle or his own hammock was far more restful and sleep compelling.
At first, only half awake, Bomba had difficulty in remembering the events of the day before and why he was in the place where he found himself. He sprang to his feet, rubbed his eyes, and looked about him.
His eyes fell upon the picture of the beautiful lady, and memory returned to him.
That tender, sweet melody sung by Sobrinini! Bomba had never heard it till lately, as far as he could remember, and yet felt that he had known italways. He wondered at the power it had exercised over him. It had tugged at his heart as though it would pull it out by the roots.
Perhaps, he thought, this was the work of Sobrinini. Was she not a witch? Certainly, everything he had witnessed since his arrival at the island tended to that conclusion. The mortal fear in which her servitors stood of her would seem to indicate the possession of some supernatural power. Had she woven a spell about him, made him seem to remember things that had never happened?
Yet this spell, if spell it was, had not been a malignant one. It had made him strangely happy. The tears that had been forced from him were tears of joy in the main, and even the melancholy that attended them had been tender and sweet.
And this emotion had been so rare in the boy’s lonely life that it brought a rush of gratitude toward Sobrinini. He was not afraid of the weaver of spells and the charmer of serpents. He stood in awe of her, but the predominant feeling was of friendship and pity for her demented condition.
And there was something else that made a tie between them. She had known Bartow and Bartow’s wife and Bonny. How much that name sounded like Bomba!
In the dim light of the growing dawn, Bombacame close to the beautiful pictured face on the wall and studied it wistfully. He could see love in those eyes as they looked at him. He would ask Sobrinini for that picture. Perhaps she would give it to him.
He dwelt on it, until every feature was engraved on his memory. From that time on, he would always be able to see that face, even when his eyes were closed.
Reluctantly at last he turned away. He had work to do, and time was pressing. He must find out from Sobrinini what he had come to learn. And then he must hurry on in pursuit of the captives of Nascanora. He must be at hand when the party passed the point in the river where Ashati and Neram were still waiting for him.
He would seek out Sobrinini at once and demand from her an answer to the questions that tormented him. He would find out who Bartow was and why he, Bomba, had twice been taken for Bartow or Bartow’s ghost.
With these thoughts in mind and forgetful of the fact that he had had nothing to eat since the afternoon of the day before, Bomba strode into the passage and found his way back to the strange room with the chairs and platform where Sobrinini had sung to him.
The place looked changed to him now. It was not so weird nor mysterious now that the torcheshad flickered out and dawn had replaced the shadows of the night.
If Bomba had expected to find Sobrinini there, he was disappointed. The great bare hall was deserted, and though he stopped and listened intently, there was no sign of life anywhere.
Then suddenly there came to him from a distance the sound of singing. First Sobrinini’s voice—he could not be mistaken in it now—then other voices joining in a sort of weird chant that chilled the lad’s blood yet drew him irresistibly toward the point from which the sound was coming.
Slowly he emerged from the building and found himself enveloped in a swirling, gray mist.
Yet the sound of the chant served him as a guide, and he went on and on, now coming closer to the singers, then seeming to draw away from them as the voices receded.
At last, when he was beginning to think that Sobrinini had again laid a spell on him and that the voices were ghostly voices, to be heard by none but himself, he saw a dark form emerge from the mist and after it another and another.
Bomba stood still and watched. The natives were dancing, flinging their arms about wildly and intoning their weird chant, now harsh and loud, now soft like the sighing of the wind through the trees.
It was like a dance of ghosts, and it was notalone the chill damp of the air that struck cold to Bomba’s heart. He felt as though he were in some other world, and that an evil one. He had never longed for the warmth and brightness of the jungle sun as he did at that moment.
But as the natives danced on, as tireless apparently as the ghosts that Bomba half-thought them, the mist began to clear and the sun struck through, causing the moisture upon the dark bodies of the dancers to glisten.
Then, in the center of the ring, Bomba beheld Sobrinini, whirling wildly in a mad dance, long, gray locks streaming about her, and in each upflung hand the head of a great snake, while the bodies of the reptiles coiled about her arms and neck.
Bomba felt a sick faintness come upon him as he watched with repulsion the loathsome sight. He stepped back a pace or two with an impulse to shut the scene away from him. But at that moment Sobrinini beheld him and called to him.
She halted in her dance, and the snakes, uncoiling themselves from about her arms and neck, as though they knew that their part in the frenzied performance was over, slithered off quietly into the long marsh grass and sought their lairs.
Sobrinini darted through the ring of breathless natives, and before Bomba had guessed her purpose threw her skinny arms about the boy’s neck.
“Bartow! My Bartow!” she cried, in a loud,cracked voice. “Come and dance with Sobrinini. Come!”
But Bomba drew back, striving to disengage himself from the clinging arms of the witch woman. If one of her own loathsome snakes had coiled about his neck, he could hardly have felt a greater repulsion.
“Come! Come, dance with Sobrinini,” the woman said in a wheedling voice, as she untwined her shriveled arms to grasp him by the hand. “I will call back my snakes, and you shall fondle them to show you that they will not fill your veins with poison or crush your bones when Sobrinini is nigh. Come! Why do you draw back? What are you waiting for, Bartow?”
“But I am not Bartow,” blurted out Bomba in his desperation to be rid of her and learn the truth about himself. “Jojasta, the medicine man of the Moving Mountain, called me Bartow also. But I am not he. I am Bomba! Bomba, the jungle boy!”
Sobrinini paused, a look of bewilderment overspreading her sharp features.
“Not Bartow? Not Bartow?” she mumbled, coming close to peer into the lad’s face. “No, no, not Bartow, surely. But then you are Bartow’s ghost.”
“I am no ghost!” cried Bomba. “Bones are in my body. Blood runs through my veins. See—if you prick my flesh, it bleeds.”
In his eagerness to prove to the old crone that he was human and no ghostly visitor, Bomba drew forth his machete and thrust the sharp point of it into his brown, sinewy forearm. Blood welled up from the slight cut, red, pulsing blood.
“See—I am no ghost!” cried the lad again. “Ghosts do not have blood. Ghosts do not have bones. One can walk through ghosts as one walks through the mists of the early morning. Let anyone try to walk through me, Bomba, the jungle boy!”
The natives had stopped dancing and singing their wild invocation to the dawn. Now they stood in a half circle about Sobrinini and Bomba, looking on curiously.
At Bomba’s challenge, not one of them stirred. He looked exceedingly dangerous, standing in all his splendid strength with the sunlight glinting on the red point of his upraised machete. It would not be well to try to walk through him.
The puzzled expression had deepened upon the face of Sobrinini. She stood regarding Bomba with bewilderment and a dawning suspicion.
“Then if you are not Bartow and no ghost,” she demanded, “who are you?”
And suddenly all the lad’s long groping for the truth, his passionate eagerness to learn the facts concerning his parents, the many disappointments he had suffered and the realization of his desperateloneliness rushed over him in an overwhelming flood, and filled him with emotion that found vent in a headlong torrent of words.
“Who am I? If I could give you the answer to that question, Sobrinini, I would not be here. I know nothing about myself except that I am Bomba, a boy of the jungle, and have spent my life with Cody Casson on the edge of the swamp. Casson could not tell me who I am nor who my father and my mother were. He sent me to Jojasta, and Jojasta before he died said, ‘Go to Sobrinini, she will tell you!’ I have come, Sobrinini.”
He took a step toward her, hands outstretched.
At that instant there was a wild yell, and a native, panting, the sweat streaming from him, dashed toward them and flung himself at the feet of Sobrinini.
“The Great Spirit of the Jungle save us!” cried the frightened wretch, trembling as with the ague. “The headhunters have come! The great chief, Nascanora, is at hand!”