“And then,” he thought, “what am I to do with this box of pearls? There are men enough in this wild land who would split my head open for much less than this. They must not know.”
As he made his way through the underbrush, now listening to the distant bark of a crocodile and now catching the puh-puh-puh of a jaguar, he pondered the problem of concealing the treasure and of bringing it safely to the outside world.
At last he hit upon what seemed a brilliant idea. The box was the shape of a brick of chicle, only smaller. When he got to camp he would stuff the box with dried palm leaves so it would not rattle, then he would wrap it round and round with other palm leaves.
Having done this, he would remove one of the two bricks of chicle in a gunnysack beneath the storing shed and put in its place the beaten silver box.
“I will mark that sack with a bit of green thread woven in and out of the rough fibre. It will be safe enough until I can decide what to do with it. Does it belong to me, or to the old Don? Guess I better talk it over with my grandfather. He will know what is right.”
When he arrived at camp he found everyone asleep but one Carib watchman. As soon as he made himself known to the watchman, he inquired for his grandfather only to learn that at present his grandfather was away, but was expected back in the morning.
When, an hour later, he lay down to rest, the beaten silver box with its priceless contents lay in a coarse gunnysack beside a brick of chicle worth fifty cents a pound. And about it, above, below, on every side were other sacks of chicle.
“I must not let it get out of my sight,” he told himself. “I must—” At that he fell asleep.
The journey of the day had been long, his curious experience exhausting. He slept well; too well. When he awoke, the sunlight sifting down through the palm leaves shone upon his face.
His first waking thought was of the beaten silver box. Hurrying into his clothes, he fairly raced to the storing shed. There his eyes fell upon that which left him standing motionless, speechless, struck dumb, paralyzed with fear.
“Gone!” he whispered feebly at last. “The whole pile of chicle at that end is gone, and the silver box with it!”
“The chicle is gone!” he exclaimed to his grandfather a moment later when that old gentleman came into the shed.
“Yes,” his grandfather smiled. “Monago and his band of Caribs came in with me at dawn from the north corner of the tract for some supplies. I sent them with four pit-pan loads of chicle down the river. They will bring up supplies. The chicle will be shipped at once. I received word yesterday that the chicle supply was short and that ours should be rushed through to meet the demand.”
“Gone!” the boy whispered as he crept away for a few moments of quiet thought.
The end of the storm that had trapped Johnny and Madge Kennedy in the heart of a great banana plantation came suddenly. Clouds went racing. The wind fell. The moon shone again in all its golden glory. It looked down upon a scene of unmatched destruction.
Creeping from their place of refuge which had all but become a pool, they allowed their eyes to sweep the devastated fields.
“It’s the end; no doubt of it,” said Johnny.
“Looks like the end of the world.” There was quiet humor in the girl’s tone.
Strange and weird indeed was the scene that confronted them. A palm, its tough stem wrung and twisted by the storm, stood with its fronds hanging down like a nun in prayer. The broken trunks of massive dead trees reared themselves toward the sky. Everywhere the banana plants, which but a few hours before had stood so proudly aloft, now lay flat.
“A hundred thousand bunches,” the boy murmured. “And now all gone. What a loss!”
“All gone. I wonder,” he murmured as he lifted the topmost plant from off a heap of its fellows. The bunch he cut away with his machete was ready for shipment, and perfect.
“Not a bruise,” he said aloud. “Not a banana missing. The plants beneath it formed a pad to ease it down. There must be others, hundreds, thousands, perhaps twenty thousand.”
“Here we have bananas!” he exclaimed, turning to Madge Kennedy.
“But they are not ours.”
“May as well be. We should be able to buy them. The Fruit Company’s boat will not dock for ten days or two weeks. By that time they will be worthless. Come on, let’s hurry back to the port.”
“Diaz won’t let you take them.”
“That’s right,” he admitted in sudden despondency. “Of course he won’t.”
“And yet, I wonder if he’d dare refuse?” he said to himself. “He would not be serving the best interests of his master if he did not sell them to us at a salvage price.”
He thought of the wary Spaniard’s visit to Kennedy’s home, and of his offer to buy the grapefruit orchard; thought too of the prosperous-looking American he had seen at the foot of the Porte Zelaya dock.
“Wonder if I will ever see that short, stout American again?” he thought. “They say he left yesterday morning.”
The answer to this last question, though he could not know it yet, was a decided yes. He was to meet that mysterious American again under very unusual circumstances. A strange break of fate had predestined them to be thrown together for many days.
As he followed the unerring guidance of the Carib Indian through the maze of fallen trees and destroyed banana plants back toward the port, his thoughts were gloomy indeed. The glory of the tropical moonlight seemed to mock him. Every black mass of twisted banana plants seemed a funeral pile on which his dead hopes were to be burned.
“Fate treats one strangely at times,” he told himself.
So it seemed. He had been endeavoring to assist a very worthy, aged and needy man, one who had given all his life to others. This man had fought for his country, fearlessly at the front of his command, yet he refused the honor of being called “Captain.”
The World War was not the only one in which he had fought. Time and again the need of his humble fellow countrymen, the black Caribs whose fathers and mothers had been Indians and negro slaves, had called him to his duty, and he had gone.
On one occasion, during the terrible yellow-fever plague, he had toiled days without end, burying the Carib dead and caring for the stricken ones until the hand of the dread enemy was stayed.
“Not a native in all Stann Creek district but knows and loves him,” Johnny told himself. “And now, in his old age, when he truly needs a lift and we try to help him, see how things come out! We are blocked by a scheming Spaniard who never fought for any country, nor for the good of any person beside himself. He probably never had an unselfish thought in the whole of his life.”
His thoughts were gloomy enough. But, after climbing over many obstructions and wading numerous small, swollen streams, he began to reason with himself. What was this “Fate” he was always thinking of? Was it the great Creator, or was it some other being?
As he looked away at the golden moon, a line of poetry came to him.
“God’s in His Heaven,All’s right with the world.”
“God’s in His Heaven,
All’s right with the world.”
“I wonder?” he thought. Then, “How absurd! Of course it’s true. Somehow there must still be a way.”
His first visible justification of this faith came to him the moment he stepped inside the dock office. There, snugly sleeping on a couch in the corner, was a slender, dark-skinned child whose black eyelashes were long and lovely. And there, pacing the floor before her, was her father, the great plantation owner.
“Don del Valle!” the boy exclaimed. He could scarcely believe his eyes.
“Yes, Senor Johnny Thompson.” The man’s tone seemed austere.
“I—I am truly sorry that your crop has been ruined,” said the boy.
“And I, sir, am disappointed in you, disappointed that you should have taken advantage of my endeavor to deal generously with you.”
“How—how—I—” the boy stammered.
“Excuses are unnecessary. You told me you had a ship. Where is that ship? You said you would take twenty thousand bunches. Where are they? Are they on the ship? They are there.” He waved his hand toward the devastated plantation.
Johnny’s head whirled. What was this—more treachery?
“Our boat,” he said in as quiet a tone as he could command, “was at your dock three days. In such a storm you could not expect her to hold to her moorings. Where is she now? Who knows? Perhaps at the bottom of the sea. The reason she left without a cargo was that your manager, Senor Diaz, would not supply it.”
“Is this true?” The dark eyes of the Honduran capitalist bored him through and through.
“Ask any workman on the dock or in the village. If he has not been corrupted by a scoundrel, he will tell you it is true.”
Whirling about, the man shot a few sharp questioning words in Spanish to a boy who sat half asleep in the corner.
Starting up, the boy answered rapidly.
“He says,” Don del Valle turned slowly about, “that all you have told me is the truth. It is my honor to beg your most humble pardon. You have been badly treated. Ask me some favor and I will grant it.”
Johnny’s heart beat fast. His mind worked like some speeding mechanism.
“Shall I?” he asked himself. “I will.”
“In the name of one who deserves much, our friend Donald Kennedy, I shall ask one favor.”
“Ask it.”
“That you sell me the crop of bananas on this plantation.”
“They are worthless. The storm has ruined them.”
“Not all. There is still a ship load of good ones.”
“How can I grant such a request? I am under contract to deliver these bananas to the Fruit Company.”
“No contract,” Johnny’s voice vibrated with earnestness, “stands before an act of God. The storm was an act of God. No Fruit Company’s ship will be here within ten days. By that time it will be too late.”
“You are right. Your request is granted. To-morrow I will send my men into the field.”
“By your leave,” said Johnny quickly, “I will buy them as they are in the field. I will gather and load them myself.”
The owner gave him a piercing look, then having recalled Johnny’s past experience, he said slowly:
“Very well. This also is granted. You may use my equipment. Ten cents a bunch in the field, a salvage price.”
There was a slight move at the door. Together they turned to look. There stood Diaz. His white face showed that he had heard much, understood all.
Don del Valle pointed a finger of accusation and scorn at him.
He vanished into the dark. His plotting was not at an end, however. He went directly to a long shed where many men, beachcombers, longshoremen, chicleros and banana gatherers, were sleeping. There he began to sow the seeds of a hasty revolution and a wild demonstration against the hated white men, which was destined once more to threaten disaster to Johnny Thompson’s plans.
Early that morning one might have found Johnny alone at the edge of the banana plantation. To one unaccustomed to Johnny’s ways, his actions might have seemed strange. Was he taking his daily dozen? Perhaps, but surely they were a queer dozen.
If you know Johnny at all you are aware of the fact that he is a skillful boxer. But down there in the tropics bare hands avail little. Johnny was not shadow boxing. The thing he was doing was quite different. He was keeping fit all the same.
A stout young mahogany tree had sprung up in the midst of the banana field. From a tough limb of this tree Johnny had suspended a large bunch of bananas. The top of the bunch was a little higher than Johnny’s shoulders, the tip a foot from the ground.
Seizing one of two machetes, great long bladed knives like swords, that lay on the ground, the boy began circling the swinging bunch of bananas as one might a mortal enemy. Brandishing his machete, he circled this imaginary enemy three times. Then, as if an opening had appeared, he made a sudden onslaught that sent green bananas thudding to earth and set the bunch spinning wildly.
Then he parried and thrust as an imaginary blade sang close to his head. Once more, with a lightning-like swing, he sprang in. This time he split a single banana from end to end and sent the severed halves soaring high.
He sprang back. No true blade could have inspired greater skill than the boy displayed before an empty world and without a real adversary.
The battle ended when with one swift stroke he severed the stem in the middle and with a sweeping twirl sent it thudding down.
“Cut his head off!” he chuckled, throwing himself upon the ground to mop the perspiration from his brow.
“It’s like boxing,” he thought, “this great Central American sport of machete fighting, only—it’s different. You feel as if only half of you were in it.”
As a boxer Johnny was neither right nor left handed. He was ambidextrous. Therein lay much of his power. How few of us ever learn to use both hands well. Yet what an advantage comes to those who do.
“That’s the trouble with this machete business,” he now thought to himself. “Only one hand, that’s all you use. And yet, why not?”
He sprang to his feet, selected a second bunch of bananas, hung it on high, then prepared as before to attack it. This time, however, he wielded a machete in each hand.
At first he found it awkward. Once he barely missed cutting his own wrist. By the time he had demolished three other bunches he felt that he was making progress and that an ambidextrous fighter with two knives would have a decided advantage over one who fought with a single blade.
Johnny, as you may have guessed, was preparing for that moment which he felt must come sooner or later, when he and Diaz would stand face to face ready to fight their battle out with the great Central American blade.
“And when that time comes,” he told himself, “it must not find me unprepared.”
It was night, such a night as only the tropics knows. Night, dead calm, hot, and no moon. Motionless clouds hanging low, and dark. Such a darkness as Pant had never before known hung over all.
Ten feet below him was the sea. He sensed rather than saw it, felt the long rolling lift of its swells as the Carib sailing boat gently rose and fell.
They were a mile out to sea, becalmed. There should be no one near them. There had been no craft near when darkness fell. In such a calm no boat could sail, and who would care to row on such a hot, oppressive night? Yet, strange as it may seem, from time to time he imagined that some faint sound came drifting in from the black void that engulfed them.
“It can’t be,” he told himself. “There was no one near at sunset. There is no one now. That silver box of pearls has gotten on my nerves. I will go to sleep and forget it all.”
He did not sleep at once. His mind was filled with many things. His pursuit of the pit-pan loads of chicle which his grandfather had sent down the river had been a strenuous one. A pit-pan, the seventy foot dugout of the Carib country, when manned by a score of expert boatmen, is a swift river craft. Without giving his grandfather any definite reason for his sudden departure, he had hired a twelve foot dugout from a native bushman and had set out in pursuit of the chicle sack that contained his treasure of pearls in a beaten silver box. For long hours, eating little, scarcely sleeping at all, he had held on in pursuit. At the end of the second day his frail craft had shot boldly out into the ocean. There he met the pit-pans on their return trip.
For the moment he counted all lost. When they told him that the chicle had been stowed away aboard a Carib sailing vessel manned by his grandfather’s men and bound for Belize, his spirits rose. An hour later found him aboard that boat, munching dry casaba bread and talking to the Caribs between bites.
He had not told them why he had come, but gave them to understand that he was to sail to Belize with them.
“In Belize,” he told himself, “before the chicle is brought aboard the steamer, I will claim my precious bag. It will be time enough to decide then what the next move shall be.
“And now here we are becalmed,” he thought to himself with a low shudder.
Strange and terrible things had happened in these waters. They had been the hunting grounds of buccaneers. As he closed his eyes he seemed to hear the creaking of windlasses, the heavy breathing of men in the dark, the boom of cannon, the rattle of muskets, the ring thud of steel.
“Those days are gone,” he told himself, shaking himself free from the illusion. But were they? Only the year before four black men, who had engaged to carry two rich traders across the bay, had murdered their passengers and sailed to some unknown haven with their spoils.
“Always a little danger down here,” he thought. “Revolutions and all that.”
He rose suddenly on an elbow, to listen intently. Sure as he was a rational human being, out of that darkness had come a sound.
With a hand that trembled slightly, he touched a dark form close beside him. Something there stirred; otherwise there was not a sound.
“Hist!” His whisper was low and tense. “Not a word! There is some one.”
“Who? Where?” came back still in a whisper.
“Who knows, Tuan? You listen. Your ears are better than mine.”
“Tish!” came the black-brown man’s low expression of appreciation, then all was silence once more.
Tuan was one of those Caribs who, somewhere back in the dim distance, had a black slave for an ancestor. A great gaunt man, he was endowed with the strength of the black race and the endurance of the red man. A lifetime in the bush had given him the ear of a jaguar.
“Tish!” he whispered a moment later. “Truly there came a sound. But who can it be? Our other schooner is near. They may have put off a dory.”
“But why?”
“There is no reason.”
Silence once more. A swell larger than those that went before lifted the boat high, tilted her to a rakish angle, then let her fall. The boom rattled, the lazy sail flapped. After that the silence was greater than before.
To Pant the situation was a trying one. He found himself only a passenger on a boat chartered by his grandfather. He had no authority here. If he had, would he awaken the crew? He hardly knew. One does not suspect a single sound. In the tropics not all who come near are rascals.
And yet, aboard that schooner, or its mate lying close alongside, was the gunnysack with the green thread running through it—a rude container for a rich treasure.
“If I should lose it now!” His breath came short at the thought. He had risked his life for a treasure which he somehow felt did not belong to him, but which, nevertheless, he was now morally bound to preserve.
Suddenly his thoughts broke short off.
“There! There!” he whispered hoarsely.
But Tuan was on his feet. He was striking out at something in the dark. His eyesight was quite as remarkable as his hearing.
There came a loud splash. Tuan had not gone overboard, but some one had.
“We are being boarded,” was the thought that shot through the boy’s mind as he struggled to his feet.
But what was this? There came a second splash, another, and yet another.
“The chicle!” he exclaimed out loud, unthinking. “They are throwing it overboard!” The deck was piled high with gunnysacks filled with chicle. Was the sack of the green thread among them? He had come aboard too late to know. Were these boarding ruffians Diaz’s men, or were they of another sort? Had they somehow learned of the treasure? Were they after that?
“How could they know?” he asked himself.
His head whirled. What was to be done? He took a step forward and instantly collided with some bulky object.
At once he found himself grappling with the oily body of a native. Over and over they rolled on the deck. They bumped first into a heap of chicle, then into the gunwale. This last appeared to stun his opponent. Seizing the opportunity, he grasped him by an arm and leg to send him overboard.
He caught the call of Tuan, heard the Caribs swarming up from below, listened for a second to blows that fell all about him; then, finding himself within a circle of sudden light, staggered backward to fall clumsily, and to at last pitch backward into the sea.
He struck out in the direction he hoped was right for the ship. The sea was warm as dish water. Sharks and crocodiles lurked everywhere. He must get aboard.
“And then what?” he asked himself.
About him sounded cries, calls, blows, signs of wild confusion. Then came the creak of oarlocks.
“A dory! Our dory from the other boat. Reinforcements!” Hope arose.
His hand touched something hard.
“A bag of chicle,” he thought. “Supposing it was the bag of the green thread.”
The thing was buoyant. Dragging himself upon it, he took time to look about him. A light flared here, then went out. A torch flamed, shot upward, circled down, hissed in the water and went out. The circle of a flashlight revealed four men in deadly embrace.
“Got to get back. They need me.” Having found the direction of the boat, he swam quickly to it. There, having made his way cautiously about it, and coming into contact with a dugout that most certainly was not their own, he capsized and sunk it.
A little further on his hand gripped a rope. A moment later he was aboard the schooner again.
Suddenly a bright light streamed out. Some one had lighted a gas lantern and hung it high on the mast.
“That will end it,” he thought.
It did, for him. An iron belaying pin, hurled square at him, took him in the temple. After that, for several hours, he knew no more.
At dawn of the day after the hurricane, Don del Valle and his beautiful black-eyed daughter hastened away in his high powered motor boat. That he might determine the amount of damage done by the storm, it was necessary for him to leave for his other plantation at once. Johnny Thompson went to the wireless station to begin a search in air for theNorth Starand her courageous captain.
“If she has been wrecked, or if she has been carried far by storm, and the skipper refuses to return, we are lost,” he said to Madge Kennedy.
For an hour he sent out messages. Each moment he became more depressed. What if the ship had been lost?
“One more evil happening to be charged against my too impetuous desire to be of service,” he groaned.
“Let us hope it has not happened,” said the girl. “Captain Jorgensen has sailed these seas for many years. He is hardly the man to lose his vessel.”
“Good news!” Johnny exclaimed a moment later when he was brought a message. “TheNorth Staris anchored behind Mutineer’s Island, all safe and sound. I will get off a message instructing them to pull away for our own dock at once. There we will pick up your crates of grapefruit and a hundred or so of your Caribs. We will bring them here to gather and load the bananas. They can be trusted. I put no faith in the half-castes that swarm about this dock. We have been defeated by them once. Once is enough for me.
“Oh, I tell you!” he exclaimed, seizing the girl by the hand and doing a wild Indian dance across the floor, “we’ll win yet!”
“You forget,” said the girl soberly, “that the great, all-powerful organization, the Fruit Company, may block your sales after you arrive in New York.”
But Johnny could not be disheartened. The ship was his. The bananas were his also. He had men to gather and load them. New York and the day of their arrival were far away.
“‘Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof,’” he quoted, then hurried to get off a message to Kennedy. With Kennedy on the job, the grapefruit would be ready to load, and the Caribs prepared to steam away with them to the dock here at Porte Zelaya.
Johnny was soon enough to know that this day’s evil was indeed sufficient unto itself. He had not left the wireless room before bad news arrived. The giant Carib, who had come in a motor boat to Porte Zelaya, and who had been with Johnny and Madge in the storm, had been loafing about the dock with his ears open. Those ears had caught snatches of terrible things. He told Madge of all this in his native tongue.
“What is it?” Johnny asked as he saw the look of terror creep into her eyes.
“A plot!” She said the words through white, set lips. “That rascal Diaz, who was discharged from his position as foreman, is plotting to destroy your plans, and you with them.”
“How? How could he?”
“He is stirring up a revolution. He is telling the ignorant half-castes that the white men rule their country, that they have been paid very little for much hard work, and that now they are to be deprived of that work altogether, that you are to bring a ship load of Caribs from Stann Creek to do the work which is rightfully their own.”
“That in part is true,” said Johnny. “I wonder if, after all, I am wrong? Would they do the work if I were to offer it?”
Madge consulted the Carib. He shook his head and waved his hands in wild gestures.
“He says they would not work,” interpreted the girl, “that their blood is hot, that they lust for battle and that they will meet us at the dock with clubs and machetes—a hundred, two hundred, perhaps three hundred strong. They want a fight.”
“Very well.” Johnny’s tone was deep and strong. “They shall have a fight, if fight there must be. We are within our rights.”
He stepped back to the wireless to send one more message. The message which went to Kennedy, ran;
“Have every able-bodied Carib at Stann Creek at the dock, every man armed.”
Ten minutes later their motor boat was popping, and the dock and low sheds of Porte Zelaya were fading in the distance.
When Johnny and Madge, riding on the prow of the motor boat with the giant Carib at the wheel, rounded a point of land and came in sight of the dock at Stann Creek, they were given the thrill of their young lives. The dock was one moving mass of men.
“The Caribs!” A lump came to the girl’s throat.
“They came,” said Johnny.
“I knew they would. They would do anything for grandfather.”
It was true. The instant Johnny’s word from the air had arrived, messengers had been sent helter-skelter, here, there, everywhere. The train on the narrow gauge railroad had gone into the bush to return groaning and creaking with such a load of black and brown humanity as had never before been seen on the backwaters of Central America.
Every grown Carib within twenty miles of the dock was there. The instant theNorth Starcame alongside they swarmed upon the deck.
The loading of the grapefruit with the aid of so many strong and willing hands was but the work of a few hours. Then, with a load of humanity greater than her load of fruit, the ship cast off her moorings and headed straight for the dock at Porte Zelaya where, Johnny felt sure, there awaited them a great and terrible battle.
As the boy walked the deck his eyes shone with joy. Whoever commanded a stronger, braver, more loyal army than the black throng that, swarming up the hatches, perched themselves on mast and rigging, forecastle, after deck and anchor, until there was scarcely space left to move?
As his eyes swept the deck they lighted with a sudden new joy. They had fallen upon a figure garbed in a dress of gorgeous golden yellow. The one white girl of the company, the queen of all the Stann Creek region, had not deserted them. There, on a coil of rope beside her patriarchal grandfather, sat Madge Kennedy, smiling her very best.
“It’s great! Great!” Johnny murmured. “And yet—”
His brow clouded. There was to be a fight. The thing seemed inevitable. It would be a bloody battle. He knew well enough what these battles between Caribs and half-castes meant. Once, on the far reaches of the Rio Hondo, he had witnessed such a battle. It had been a rather terrible affair. As he closed his eyes now he heard the thwack of mahogany clubs on unprotected heads, caught the swish of great swinging knives, saw the agony of hatred and fear on dark faces where blood ran free.
“I said then I hoped I’d never see another such battle,” he told himself, “and yet here we are driving straight on toward one that promises to be quite as terrible.”
Before him, sitting astride the rail, was a Carib youth. “Can’t be over eighteen,” Johnny mused.
He had never in his life seen a more cheerful, smiling face. To look at him, to catch the glint of his eye, the gleam of his white teeth, to see the rollicking movement of his face, was like viewing a wonderful waterfall against a glorious sunset.
Could it be that before this day was done that glorious face might be still in death?
For a moment Johnny felt like turning back. What was success, even success in a righteous cause, when it must be purchased at such a cost?
“And yet,” he reasoned, “we cannot turn back. The right must be defended. It must always be so. Perhaps there is a way to avert it, but come what may, we must go on.”
Having arrived at this conclusion, he walked quietly down the deck to take his place beside Donald Kennedy and his granddaughter.
For some time they talked in low tones, the man and the boy, and the girl listened. Little wonder that they talked earnestly. Much was at stake.
“It might work,” said Johnny at last. “Anyway, we’ll try it. You can talk to them in Spanish.”
That was the end of conversation. After that they sat there looking and listening. From somewhere forward there came the rattle of a banjo, the tom-tom-tom of a snake-head drum. Aft, the chant of a weird song rose and fell with the boat.
“They don’t realize they are going to war,” said Johnny.
“That’s the pity. They never do,” said the girl, shading her eyes to gaze away at the perfect blue of the lovely Caribbean Sea.
All too soon the thrum of the banjo ceased, the tom-tom of the drum became muffled and low. Land, the point of Porte Zelaya, had been sighted.
Rising, the girl and the old man made their way along the deck. As they moved along they spoke in low tones to the men and the men, as if moved by some magic spell, rose slowly to go shuffling forward or aft, and to disappear down the hatchways, leaving the decks almost deserted.
When theNorth Starcame within hailing distance of the dock, which was swarming with half-castes drawn up in battle array, a little group of some fifty black Caribs were gathered on the forward deck of theNorth Star. That was all. Not a pike pole nor machete was in sight. They seemed only a small group of laborers prepared for a day’s work of gathering and loading bananas.
A breathless expectancy hung over all the ship as it came in close, reversed her engines, dropped anchor and stood off the wharf for further orders.
The great man of the jungle, Donald Kennedy, tall, stately of bearing, yet humble, stepped forward to the rail and began to speak in quiet tones to the throng on the deck.
At once there arose a terrific shout.
“Down with the white man! Death to the intruder!”
These words were shouted in Spanish, but Johnny knew their meaning well enough. He thrilled and shuddered. Pike poles were tossed in air above the dock, great knives flashed in the sun, a pistol exploded. What was to be the end of it all?
Again came comparative silence. Again the aged man spoke. Patiently, as if speaking to children, he began.
Again he was interrupted by cries of;
“Death! Destruction! Down with the white man!”
Four times, with steady patience, the great man attempted to make himself heard.
At last, realizing the futility of it all, he turned and shouted three words in the Carib tongue.
Instantly there came from the black men forward a shout to answer that of the half-castes on the dock. At the same time, pike-poles and machetes flashed and four streams of humanity, black and menacing, began pouring up the hatchways.
Johnny Thompson thrilled and grew deathly cold at sight of them. They swarmed up the masts, they filled the deck, they straddled the rail and crowded the roofs of the cabins. Everywhere weapons gleamed. From every corner rang the defiant shout of Caribs ready to defend with their lives the rights of Kennedy, whom they had come to think of as a loyal friend.
No pirate ship that sailed these waters in days that are gone ever witnessed a more tremendous and startling demonstration.
Before it, awed into silence, the mob on the dock fell back, then began slipping away. One by one they slunk off into the bush. In ten minutes time not a man was left. A bloodless victory had been won. The field was theirs.
When Pant awoke from many bad dreams, he found himself in a cool and comfortable bed on shore. A doctor was bending over him.
“That’s fine, old boy,” the doctor was saying. “Now you’ll do. You got quite a welt on the head. But your jolly old bean is hard. Never cracked it a mite.”
“But the treasure box!” Pant exclaimed, still unable to think clearly, or use caution. “Where is it?”
“The treasure box? I see you are still a little off in the head. Here, take this; it will clear you up,” said the doctor.
Pant took the contents of the glass held out to him at a single draught and without a question. In the meantime his head cleared. He said no more about the box of pearls, but learned by judicious questioning that the attacking band had on the night before been driven off with little loss of men or goods. A few sacks of chicle had drifted away in the night, that was all.
“And if one of them has a green thread running through the sack!” he thought to himself, and was thrown into a near panic.
“And the schooners?” he asked suddenly. “Where are they?”
“Got a fair wind and sailed this morning for Belize. Must be there by now.”
“They’ll load the chicle aboard the Torentia?”
“Naturally.”
“And she sails—”
“In about twenty-four hours.”
“Doctor!” exclaimed the boy sitting straight up in bed and gripping his arm hard. “Fix me up someway. I’ve got to get over to Belize. At once! Right away, doctor. This very minute!”
“Well, young fellow,” said the doctor, rescuing his arm and putting on a wry face as he rubbed it vigorously, “you seem to have plenty of strength. I’ll see what I can do.”
A half hour later, a trifle unsteady on his feet, but otherwise quite himself, Pant was making his way to the water front of Stann Creek, the port to which he was carried after the battle. He felt the heavy bandages about his head, blinked at the sunlight, looked this way then that, until spying what appeared to be a small store just before him, he hurried in.
“I want a boat,” he said to the black proprietor.
“What kind of a boat?”
“Any boat that will take me to Belize.”
“No boat go to-day.” The man settled back in his corner.
“You mean they won’t go to-day?” The boy’s brow wrinkled.
“No go.”
“Not for any price?”
“Oh! Special trip, go. Maybe. You got twenty dollars?”
Pant hesitated. He had twenty dollars and a little change. To part with it all would seem to be courting disaster. But much was at stake. He threw all in the balance.
“Yes, I have twenty dollars. Where is the boat?”
“Me see.” The man held out a hand. Pant showed him two golden eagles.
“My boat sailing boat. Good boat. Very fast boat. Ready to go, fifteen minutes.” At sight of the gold the man went into action.
Action on land is one thing. On sea it is quite another. They were half way up the bay when the wind fell. The sail fell with it, and the boat stood still in a placid sea.
For two precious hours the boy with a bruised and aching head lay beneath a pitiless tropical sun. Then the merciful after dinner breeze came up and at once they went booming along.
Nothing can be more delightful than a sail in a Carib boat on the Caribbean Sea. To lie on deck and sense the lifting glide of the prow, to feel the cool breeze on your face, to see the water go rippling by, that is joy indeed. Pant would have enjoyed it to the full had not his mind been vexed by many questions. Would he reach Belize in time or would the steamer be gone? Was the chicle sack of the green thread still on the sailing boat of the night before, or had the marauders carried it away? If it were still on board, if it went to America and he did not go with it, what then? Would he recover the treasure?
“Not a chance,” he told himself. “I must have been out of my head to hide the box in such a place. But now I must see it through.
“Why must I?” he asked himself, and at once came the answer, “The old Don.” Unconsciously he had come to think of the treasure of pearls as belonging as much to the aged Don as to himself. And to that man he owed much. He had, beyond doubt, once saved his grandfather’s life.