“Goin’ up the Hondo,” he had said to a friend before he set out. “Coupla boys up there a tryin’ to do a little stunt of bringing out some of the red lure. Jest boys, they are; no match for that crafty Daego. Reckon I’ll jest run up there and give ’em a little help for, after all, they’re from the United States and so am I, though I been down here quite a spell, and all us folks from up there has to sort of hang together. It—it’s sort of in the blood.”
So, Pant was soon to receive re-inforcements. The re-inforcements consisted of but one man, but there are times when one is as good as a host.
* * * * * * * *
Morning brought bitter disappointment to Johnny. He had hoped that the palm tree he had seen down the creek was a cocoanut tree. The milk even of a green cocoanut is sweet and refreshing. Since ripe nuts fall the year round, there was reason to hope too that some of these might be found on the ground. But early morning light revealed a cohune nut tree. True, there were great clusters of nuts hanging from this tree, but these Johnny had been told were composed mostly of a hard shell. The meat, such as there was of it, was dry and indigestible.
“Oh, well,” he sighed, “got to eat.”
At that he worked his way downstream to the tree. After spending a half hour cracking three nuts, and finding their meat meager and tough, he turned to other quarters for food.
A tropical wilderness abounds in fruit. The strangest, most unheard of trees in the world were at Johnny’s very elbow. The fruit of many of these was good to eat. Some might be eaten raw; others were delicious when cooked. But some, too, were deadly poison. Which might be eaten? Which not? This he could not tell. To his right was a tree laden with a green cucumber-like fruit, and over to his left one that hung heavy with long yellow muskmellons, or so they seemed to be.
“If I only knew!” he groaned. “If I only did!”
He recalled hours wasted that might have been put to good use roaming the jungle with one of his Caribs, learning the use and value of these plants.
“If I get back in safety I’ll never waste another hour!” he resolved.— “I’ll learn, and learn and learn until there is not an important thing in this wilderness that I do not have some accurate knowledge of.”
In the meantime, however, his stomach was crying loudly for food. Food? Without doubt there was plenty at hand, but he dared not eat it.
There were fishes in the stream. He could see them calmly fanning the water in a pool beside the rocks. Fish were always good. His mouth watered at thought of the fry he would have on the hot rocks. But he had no hooks. He tried a snare of tie-tie vine, but the fish were too quick for him.
At last, despairing of his undertaking, he dropped on hands and knees to creep away into the bush. He had not gone far before his heart was gladdened by what he saw just before him. It was a hot, humid morning. A peccary, a little wild pig, with her half grown brood, having without doubt spent the cooler hours of night hunting grubs and roots, lay stretched out on a bed of dead ferns, fast asleep. One of the young porkers, lying with his two hind feet close together, was not twelve feet from where Johnny lay.
“A quick grab at those feet, a sudden get-away, and I have my breakfast,” he thought as he moved cautiously forward. “That fellow doesn’t weigh over ten pounds dressed, but that’s enough food for two days and by that time I’ll be back to camp.” Oh, vain hope!
Right hand out, right foot forward; left hand, left foot. So he moved ahead. Now half the distance was covered and still the little wild pigs slept. Now he was within arm’s length of his prey. Then, rising to his knees, he shot out a hand. There came a wild, piercing squeal, then all was commotion.
Quicker than he could think, the old peccary was after him.
“Insignificant little brute,” he thought. “I could brain you with a single blow of a club.”
He had no club, had not thought of that.
A convenient tree offered protection. Clinging to his squealing prey, he leaped to the first branch.
“Go away in a moment,” he told himself as with his clasp-knife he silenced the squeals of the young porker.
To his immense surprise, as he looked down he saw that the ground was literally alive with angry, grunting peccary pigs.
“Where’d they all come from?” he asked an hour later, as for the twentieth time he adjusted his sore muscles to their cramped position.
This question no one could answer. The angry horde had apparently declared the tree to be in a state of siege. And, though they were small, they were terrible to look at. There were gnarled old fathers of that herd whose ugly yellow tusks, curled twice round, stood out at the end like spears.
“Rip a fellow to pieces before he’d gone ten steps,” groaned the boy.
As his position in this small mahogany tree with its smooth limbs became all but unbearable, he cast about for relief. Next to this tree was a larger one and beyond that a great, broad-spreading palm.
“If only I can reach the palm,” he told himself, “I will at least have a comfortable place to rest and maybe grab a few moments of sleep.”
Tying the dead peccary to his back, he climbed out as far as he dared upon his limb, then executed a sort of flying leap for the next tree. It was a daring venture, but a successful one. Five minutes later, with the carefully dressed peccary meat hanging nearby, he sank into a cushioned depth of the palm tree and was soon fast asleep.
Some time later, much later, he awoke. At first, as he attempted to gaze about him, he could not believe his senses.
“It can’t be true,” he insisted. “There has been an eclipse. I have gone blind. It can’t be night!”
But it was. Overcome by exhaustion and the humid heat of the tropics, he had slept the day through and a short way into the night. So had passed the day that was to have seen his raft built and launched, to have seen him on his way back to camp.
“And here I am!” he exclaimed in disgust.
“Well, at any rate,” he sighed, “I now have some supper and may make my way back to the rock and cook it.”
“But can I?” he started. “What of that wild horde with their ugly yellow tusks? Are they still waiting down there?”
For a moment he hesitated. Then, with a sudden resolve born of necessity, he began to descend.
Peccary meat was Johnny’s supper. A dry supper it was, and old Father Gloom sat across the fire from him while he ate. To have wasted a whole day; to face a second night of vigil; to recall those pairs of burning, greedy, red eyes; to know that with the passing of the hours the owners of those eyes must certainly grow bolder; all this was depressing in the extreme. To add to this set of depressing circumstances, a small thing happened; a very small thing indeed, but fraught with great consequences. There were not many mosquitos in this place at this time. The streams were swift, and at this time of year there were no water holes for breeding them.
For all this, a single mosquito, drifting in from nowhere, alighted on Johnny’s hand and began to drill. He had half finished his task when, without thinking, Johnny crushed him at a blow.
Instantly the boy’s mind was filled with foreboding. He had been bitten by a mosquito! One thing Hardgrave had said to him:
“Johnny, wherever you are, don’t ever lie down to sleep, not even in the daytime, without a mosquito-bar net over you. Malaria. The mosquitos carry it. It’s the only way you can get it.”
In camp they always slept beneath canopies.
“But out here,” Johnny grinned a wry grin, “what’s the chance? Well, if that was a malaria mosquito he’s got me loaded up good and plenty, and there’s no use bothering my mind about it.”
He did not bother his mind, but it bothered him. In his imagination he saw himself delirious with fever, insensible to his surroundings, wandering down narrow trails, tripped by vines, torn at by brambles. Watched from every dark hole and tree top by wild beasts, he saw himself struggle on until burned out by fever, exhausted by aimless, senseless endeavor, he at last lay down to die.
Shaking himself free from the haunting spectre, he threw fresh wood upon the fire.
He slept little that night, and welcomed the dawn less eagerly than he had the day before. He felt a desire to be idle, a dreamy indifference creeping over him.
“It’s the tropics,” he told himself. “Everyone slows up down here. The heat and the humidity makes you want to drag your feet, to loaf, to sit and dream. But I must not! I must act! Act! Now!”
At that he went at the task of building a raft and before noon it was completed.
A crude affair it was, to be sure. Dry logs of different lengths; there was no axe for hewing them. All these, bound clumsily together with tough tie-tie vine, made up the raft that eventually carried Johnny away from the great rocks and swiftly down the river. As far as he could see ahead, branches formed a perfect arch over the water, and at places hung so low that it was necessary for him to lie flat down to avoid being dragged off into the water.
He bade farewell to his rocky home with no regrets, but with some misgivings after all. He was to drift off into the unknown. What awaited him there? Who could tell?
“It—why, it’s like death,” he thought.
With this mood there drifted into his mind a bit of verse:
“I know not where His islands liftTheir fronded palms in air,I only know I cannot driftBeyond His love and care.”
“I know not where His islands lift
Their fronded palms in air,
I only know I cannot drift
Beyond His love and care.”
He felt a strange tightening at the throat as the words escaped his lips, and he blessed the teacher who had given them to him for just such a time as this.
Many and strange were the sensations that came to him as he drifted silently, swiftly beneath this cathedral-like arch of trees. A green parrot screamed at him as it fluttered away; a black monkey with a white face, clinging to a limb by a foot and his tail, scolded at him as he passed. A slow-moving snake, hanging from a tree trunk, darted out a black tongue. The jagged corner of the clumsy raft, catching on a snag, hung there while the water, warm as soapsuds, washed over the raft.
Loosened, the raft whirled on. More swiftly now they moved. The current was gaining strength. Rocks appeared, one to the right, one to the left, and one amid stream. The arch of trees rose higher. A patch of blue appeared. Rising to his feet, Johnny struggled with all his might, darting his pole first one side and then the other, to keep the raft off the rocks. Then suddenly, without warning, he was seized by an overhanging vine and dragged clear of the raft.
That was a tragic moment. With his raft went his last bit of food; and with it, too, for a moment his last bit of hope. With an eye out for drifting alligators, he swam strongly after the runaway raft.
Fortune favored him. For a moment the raft, caught in a corner between two rocks, hung motionless and in that moment, breathless, exhausted, he climbed aboard. At the same instant he sensed the presence of a wakened alligator nearby.
Quite motionless he lay for a full moment as the raft rushed on. This was no time for inaction. Faster, ever faster glided the raft; faster, faster the trees flew by.
And now a new catastrophe threatened. A sharp rock had cut one of the tie-tie vines that bound the raft. In another moment the raft might be torn in bits, leaving Johnny in the water, beyond hope. Seizing a fresh vine, he passed it over the ends of the logs and by exerting all his strength drew them to place and bound them there.
And now came a respite. Suddenly the river broadened. Blue sky appeared above him. He was floating slowly on the surface of a small lake.
Drawing his feet up under him, he gave himself over to much needed rest and enjoyment of the scene that lay before him. Surely here was beauty untouched by the hand of man. Had man’s eyes ever looked upon it? Surely no eyes of civilized man. Yet what a gleaming of blue waters, what a blending of matchless green and faultless blue!
If he did not allow his mind to linger long on all this matchless beauty of spreading palms, clinging vines and reflecting water, it was because the more practical side of his nature sought two things—a native hut and a cocoanut palm tree. One of these would be a boon indeed.
And one appeared. A leaning cocoanut tree hung over the water at the very spot where the lake ended and the current grew swift again. He saw it at the moment when his raft, caught by a stronger current, shot forward. At that same moment came a disturbing sound, a deep, low thunder that he did not wholly understand.
In his confusion of thought he all but lost his opportunity. Leaping to his feet, he struck at the palm with his long pole. Once, twice, three times he clubbed it, and with the third blow a ripe cocoanut came hurtling down to splash in the water beside his raft.
With a little cry of joy he dropped his pole and all but sprang in the water after it. Restraining this impulse, he dropped on hands and knees to reach for it. It was just beyond his grasp. The pole—yes, with the pole he could drag it to him. Sending the pole sweeping out over the water, he was about to bring the fugitive dinner to him when the raft, striking a submerged rock, whirled about and left him three full yards from the prize. At the same time there came to his ears again that dull thunder.
“Can’t be a storm,” he said, scanning the sky. “Clear as a bell.”
Sadly he watched the cocoanut as, abreast of his strange craft, but just out of reach of his pole, it drifted onward. Within that brown husk was delicious, refreshing drink and nourishing food.
Fate seemed to mock him. The current having carried the cocoanut within his reach, quickly whirled it away again. Then, tempting him, it whirled it close only to catch it and fling it at last into a backwater eddy where it was lost to him forever.
“That thundering sound is growing more distinct,” he told himself as, resigned to his loss, he settled down for a moment’s rest. “I wonder what it is.”
Then of a sudden he knew and the realization stunned him.
“Falls!” he said, leaping excitedly to his feet. “Falls in this river. Falls straight ahead!” The next moment he lay stunned, half unconscious on the raft. He had been struck on the head by an overhanging limb.
How long he lay there he will never know. Enough to say that when at last he struggled back to a sitting position the thunder of the falls filled all the air, while the trees and bushes, as if borne on by a cyclone, sped by him at unbelievable speed.
“Gotta stop!” he groaned. “Gotta get offa here somehow! Death in the falls. Won’t do! Gotta get off!”
With a mighty effort he dragged his scattered senses together. The next instant he found himself gripping the tough branches of a red mangrove tree, while his raft shot on to its doom.
With a sinking sensation about his heart and a dull pain in his head, Johnny saw his hope of an early return to camp disappear downstream. On that raft was tied a bit of peccary meat, the only morsel of food he had in the world. Yet where there is life there is hope, and after climbing carefully back over the limb that had saved him, he descended the tree to the ground.
An hour of struggling forward, sometimes through thickets, sometimes over rocks or through water to his waist, he ended at the top of a steep precipice that stood thirty feet above the side of a most beautiful waterfall.
“Beautiful things at times become terrible,” he told himself. “My raft is gone; my dinner with it. These beautiful falls took them. No use to waste time in vain regrets. I’ve got to get down some way.”
After exploring every corner he became convinced that there was no suggestion of a rugged stairway anywhere.
“Have to be some other way,” he thought wearily. Having glanced at a towering sapodilla tree, he noticed that a wild fig vine grew up its side.
“Make a rope of it. Let myself down,” he said, beginning to unlace his shoes.
Having climbed the tree for a distance of forty feet, he cut the vine and began stripping off a stem an inch in diameter. It was a long and dangerous task, for these vines, with a grip of death, in time hug the very life out of a tree. But in time he won and, attaching one end of the vine rope to the trunk of a tree, dropped it over the precipice. He then began nimbly following down.
“Looks like a cocoanut palm there by the pool at the foot of the falls. If it is, I know where I get my supper.”
It was indeed a cocoanut palm, a low one, standing not more than ten feet from the ground, but bearing cocoanuts all the same. He had not descended half way before he could count them. There were many green ones and three that were brown and ripe.
“Um-yum-yum!” he smacked his lips as he seemed to feel the rich white milk go gurgling down his throat.
He was still looking at that tree and trying to figure out how he could best reach it, when he suddenly discovered that he was all but at the bottom.
He had given no thought to what that landing might be like. He glanced downward, then with hands that trembled so he could scarcely open and close them he made desperate efforts to climb back.
Had he dropped another foot he must surely have fallen into the jaws of a mammoth alligator. The beast was asleep with his mouth wide open. Grinning terribly, his yellow tusks looking like rows of sharpened spikes, he lay there quite motionless. What would have been the consequences had the boy dropped that remaining foot? Would the alligator have tumbled in great fright into the water? Would his terrible jaws have closed like the iron gates of a prison? Who can tell? Who would care to perform the experiment that he might know?
* * * * * * * *
In the meantime Pant had not been idle. Good old Hardgrave, a plain man from Arkansas with the courage of a knight and heart of a king, had arrived. He had anchored his motor-boat with its wheezy engine close to the creek landing, then had unloaded his cargo of chemicals, retorts, toy balloons and cheesecloth.
“Where’s Johnny?” he asked the moment he stepped on land.
“Just what I was going to tell you.”
“Tell it, then.”
Pant did tell—told all he knew.
“Huh!” the old man grunted. “He’ll come back. Daego’s got him hid out somewhere. Wouldn’t quite dare kill him outright. Leastwise, I don’t think so. Can’t tell about that half-caste strain in his blood, though.”
“He’ll come back,” echoed Pant, “but meantime we’ve got to carry on the work. ’Twouldn’t do to disappoint Johnny when he comes back. We got to get all this red lure down by the water ready for the trip down.”
“What’s worse,” said Hardgrave, “we’ve got to do just what you said a minute ago; keep old Daego guessing. Don’t like his taking up more men. Looks bad. May come over here like a young army any time, bent on driving us out. Got any place for this?” He pointed at his miscellaneous cargo stacked on the bank.
“Have to use Johnny’s office, I guess.”
The next morning, Gesippio, a Carib who bunked close to the office, said to his work mate, “There was devil doin’s in that office of Johnny’s last night.”
“Devil doin’s?”
“Devil doin’s! First the whole place was lit up like it was busting with flames. Seemed like every crack was shootin’ flames. Then all was dark again. Pretty soon there came a blue blaze, sort of low-like, and a hissin’ sound like the old Serpent, the Evil One, might o’ made. Then all of a sudden, sendin’ me all of a heap, there came a most terrible bang. After that I didn’t hear no more.”
From that time on the cabin that had been Johnny’s office was kept carefully locked day and night.
Having barely escaped dropping into the jaws of an alligator, Johnny Thompson wound his leg about his vine rope at a spot where a knotty projection would give him partial support, then proceeded to make a sad survey of the situation. There was the cocoanut tree, and there the alligator. There were two other ’gators floating silently on the surface of the pool. To land there was out of the question. There might be a landing place on the other side of that particular rocky formation. It was his only chance.
After climbing the vine, a slow and painful process, he made a hasty survey. Already it was growing dark. There was need of haste, but the dull stupor of the tropics was still upon him. He could not hasten. He found it necessary to make his way over the jagged rocks for some distance before finding a safe fastening for his vine.
When at last all was secure the sun had gone down and a dark bank of clouds again obscured the sky.
“Got’a hurry,” he told himself. “Got to get down fast.”
He did go down rapidly until he had all but reached the rocky ledge upon which he was to land. There, for a time, he lost his courage. His late experience had unnerved him. What sort of landing was this which he now approached? It is difficult to distinguish a motionless alligator from a rocky surface even in broad daylight. How impossible in the dusk! So he clung there motionless, trying to stare into the half darkness.
“Can—can’t hang here forever,” he breathed at last. “Here goes, and here’s hoping!”
To his great joy he landed safely on a high and dry rock, quite free from danger.
But at once there arose the problem of finding his way to the cocoanut tree. After a half hour of groping about, he uttered a shout of joy:
“There! There it is!”
There indeed was the tree, and at the top of it were the cocoanuts—three ripe ones and many green ones. The problem of securing the food was still before him. At close sight of the tree his heart sank. It was taller and larger than he thought—fifteen feet high and a foot through at the base. What was worse, the circle of great fern-like leaves that grew between him and the nuts appeared to present a solid barrier through which it was going to be difficult to pass.
“I’m weak from hunger,” he told himself. “From hunger and something else. I’d rather lie down and sleep than climb that tree, but I must try.”
He did try. Three times he climbed to that green barrier; three times tried to break his way through the ring of branches to the fruit; fought there until cold perspiration stood out upon his brow and his knees shook so he could scarcely support himself; then each time slid slowly down.
The last time, with something very much like a sob, he threw himself upon the bare rocks and cried passionately:
“Oh, I can’t! I can’t! I can’t!”
That night, on the surface of the highest rock he could find, with no fire, with only the glittering stars above him, he slept the deep sleep of utter exhaustion. From time to time as he slept there came sounds of scratches on the rock above him, of grunts and other sounds in the darkness; but no wild thing dared approach too close to this strange smelling creature from another world.
The three days that followed that night on the rocks beside the falls were like a long drawn out evil dream. True, Fate dropped him a comforting morsel. One of the cocoanuts, a small one, had fallen during the night. With fingers that shook, Johnny bored a hole through one eye of it and drank the milk eagerly; drank to the last drop. Then he broke the nut on a rock and gnawed at the rich, white meat until not a shred was left.
Lacking strength and courage to build a second raft, he began making his way as best he could, now on hands and knees and now flat on his stomach, over the low, narrow game trail that followed the bank of the stream.
As the heat of the day beat its way through the tangled forest he began to feel faint. Now and again, as he paused to rest, he felt that he must be losing consciousness.
A great desire to sleep came over him. Nothing much mattered. A strange peace, the drowsy, drug-like peace of the tropics, lulled him to rest. Now he slept, defenseless in the open trail. And now he woke to journey on. When night came he could not rightly tell. In that gloom there was no day. In time he woke to find all dark about him. Still he struggled on.
The scream of parrots, the senseless chatter of monkeys, the roar of beasts of prey, all were the same to him, for all came faint and indistinct as in a dream.
Once he fought with a great spotted beast. A jaguar, perhaps. Or was that, too, only a dream? He could not tell. He seemed to wake from a horrible nightmare of claws and wild snarls to find his arms and chest torn and bleeding and his knife gone.
“Must have fought with my knife and lost it in the struggle,” was his mental comment.
He did not feel badly about that, nor did he search for it long. Nothing seemed to trouble him. Great waves of dreams swept over him.
His lips were dry and parched. “Fever. Malaria. That mosquito did it,” he told himself. That did not matter, either. Nothing mattered.
He dragged himself to the bank of the stream to cleanse his wounds. He drank long and deeply. A small fish, darting too close, was caught in his hand. This he devoured whole.
Other things of the jungle he ate—strange fruits, nuts and roots. Were they poison? It did not matter. Nothing mattered.
So, every day growing weaker, he came at the end of the third day to something very much like an abandoned clearing. Such it was, but he was too far lost in his drowsy sleep to know it. He had passed half through it when, of a sudden, he came upon a hut, a palm-thatched, forlorn and deserted hut. Yet, to him in his delirium of fever it was something far greater than an abandoned hut.
“Home!” he cried hoarsely. “Home!”
Throwing himself across the threshold, he fell prone in the dust of the floor.
A great lizard, sleeping in the corner, awoke and darted away; a small bird, whose nest was in the thatch, scolded shrilly. But Johnny heard nothing, saw nothing.
When at last he summoned up strength enough to drag himself to a corner and upon a bed of rotting mats, he murmured again:
“Home! Home! How good to be home!”
In the deserted cabin was dampness, mold and desolation. Only one overwrought by peril and trouble, or made delirious by a burning fever, could have thought of it as home. Home? Here there was neither water, food nor friends.
Once, having come out of his delirium, he managed to grope about until he had found a mouldy gourd. With this in hand he dragged himself on hands and knees to the river. Here in his eagerness for water he all but pitched head-foremost into the stream. As it was, he left a print of his hand in the plastic ooze on the bank.
The gourd he filled with water. Having spilled most of it on the way back, in a fever of haste lest the rest escape, he drank it greedily, then sank back on his musty little bed to dream delirious dreams.
In his dreams, with Pant by his side, he pursued a red gleam that, while growing brighter, appeared always to elude them. “The red lure. The red lure!” he repeated over and over.
Next morning found him too weak to rise or to think. He had only strength to breathe. He could only stare helplessly at the dull brown roof of the hut and hope for things that never come.
But now the scene was changed. Instead of the smell of decay all about him, there was the perfume of apple blossoms. Over his head the white and pink glory of Springtime blended with white patches of sunshine. Beneath him was a soft bed of grass; above him apple trees and sky. From far and near came the warble of thrushes, the chirp of robins, the shrill challenge of woodpeckers. He was once more in the orchard that witnessed his boyhood. Buried deep in clover, he was sensing the joy of Spring.
Then the hot light of a new day dragged him back to waking consciousness. Dreams vanished. Dull reality hung about him. He tried to lift himself upon an elbow. He failed. Could he lift a hand? He could not. His eyes closed from the mere force of this effort, and remained closed.
The hand of Johnny Thompson, that manly right hand that had scorned to strike one weaker than its owner; the hand that had so often inspired the dishonest, the unkind, mean and criminal to a wholesome fear; the hand that had never been employed in mere selfish ends, was powerless and still.
The stream rushing past that cabin seemed a funeral train, powerful and free, ready to carry that brave spirit away. Some strange bird sang a song from the tree tops. Its notes, measured and slow, were like a dirge.
A great snake, attracted by the dry warmth of the doorway, curled up there in the dust to sleep. The figure on the cot did not move. A great lizard crept in through a rotted corner to gaze blinking at him. The snake, sensing a dinner, slowly uncoiled, then with a motion surprisingly quick for a creature of its kind, darted, forked tongue flashing, at the lizard. There was a scurry of feet, a gliding scrape. Lizard and snake passed within a few inches of that prostrate head. The snake passed over the motionless hand, yet the hand did not stir, the eyes did not open.
The rush of waters, the distant mournful notes of birds, the sigh of the wind through the palms seemed to say:
“He is dead! Dead! Dead!”
* * * * * * * *
Pant would not believe that Johnny was dead. “They can’t have done him in,” he said to Hardgrave. “It’s a thing that really can’t be done. Burly Russians; treacherous, slant-eyed Yellow men have tried it; yes, and daring white crooks, too. These didn’t get Johnny, so why should a mere Spanish half-caste succeed?”
No, he would not admit that Johnny was dead; but as days passed and he did not return he grew more and more restless. Each morning strengthened his determination to discover what had happened to his good pal. Each evening found him with some more daring plan for discovering his whereabouts. When sending his men as spies among Daego’s men at night failed, he took to paddling across the river and drifting in and out among them in the dark himself. This was exceedingly dangerous business. He might be discovered, and if he were he would doubtless go the way of his pal, whatever way that might be. He was careless of danger; any risk was not too great, could he but find Johnny.
It was during one of his secret visits to the enemy’s camp that an exceedingly strange thing happened.
It was a hot, sultry night. Daego’s men lay about on mats before the huts. The murmur of voices constantly hung upon the air. Now and again there came a shout of laughter from some black man. Half the workers were blacks from Belize. The others were Spaniards. These seldom laughed.
At times, when the hum of voices ceased and laughter died away, from out of the bush there came the hoarse call of a jaguar, and who could say it was not the “killer?”
Pant had dropped upon a mat at the edge of a group of black men. In the shadows no man could see his neighbor’s face. No questions were asked. The moon, just rising over the edge of the jungle, cast long shadows and sent ghost-like shimmers of light across the patches of mist that rose from the river.
The hum of voices was at its loudest. A black man, close to Pant, was in the midst of a loud guffaw when, of a sudden, the laugh appeared to freeze in his throat. This sound, or sudden cessation of sound, so unusual and so apparently without cause, spread silence like a blanket over the clearing.
Out of that silence there rose a hoarse, high-pitched voice:
“Oh! Look up a-yonder!”
The man who spoke was the one who had so suddenly ceased laughing. His outstretched arm, clad as it was in a white sleeve of cotton stuff, was like a white pointer with a black tip pointing toward the sky.
What Pant saw as he followed the line of that pointer made even his blood run cold and set the hair at the back of his head standing on end. The moonlight playing across the sky had caught something white and faintly luminous that floated on air well above the tree tops. Even as he watched, the thing seemed to assume the form of a white-robed figure. The head began to come out with glimmering brightness. Eyes appeared, and the semblance of a mouth. Then, as the whole company, far and near, lay wrapped in silence, there sounded such a rattling as one may sometimes fancy he hears in passing a graveyard at the dead of night.
“Oh! My Massa!” groaned the black man. “It’s a ghost, the ghost of that white boy Daego drove into the bush. He’s come back to ha’nt us. It’s death an’ destruction! Destruction for Daego; and death for all of us. Oh! My Massa!”
There came a murmuring “Uh-huh” from many voices. Then from a dark corner there rose the chant of the only Carib of the crew. He was singing the native song of his people—the Devil Song that is supposed to drive out evil spirits. Weird and fantastic as his song was, the thing that floated above the tree tops was far more weird.
Over in another corner Pant heard a shuffling of feet. Someone was moving away, going toward the river. Fearing that they might find his dugout and so rob him of his means of returning to his own camp, he went skulking along after them. There were five or six black men in the group. Since they were not approaching his boat, he followed close enough to hear what they were saying. Arriving at the river bank, they pushed a long dugout into the water and with scarcely a sound leaped in and shoved away from the shore. A moment later, keeping to the shadows, the boy heard:
“Come daylight we’s far down this haunted river.”
“Yea-bo!” came back in answer.
“It’s death an’ destruction. I knowd twa’nt no sense afoolin’ with them thar white ha’nts,” gloomed another.
There was silence after that. The only sound was the dip-lip of paddles, but Pant had heard enough to make his heart glad.
“Johnny’s ghost,” he murmured. “Five men gone already, and more will follow; perhaps many more. Not so bad for a ghost,” and he laughed softly to himself.
Palms that hung over the silent, swiftly flowing stream murmured and sighed. Their murmuring and sighing was as sad as the voice of pines and hemlocks in a graveyard on a winter’s night. Sadder still was the strange wail of some tropical bird, piping always on the same minor key. On the bed of decaying mats in the abandoned cabin where little lizards ran in and out, Johnny Thompson lay white and motionless.
Came an hour when there fell upon all this gloom a shrill discordant note. The scream of a wild parrot broke the drowsy silence. This was answered by another, and yet another, until all up and down the stream the air was filled with harsh, discordant music.
The innocent cause of all this disturbance was a fantastically painted dugout, all striped and spotted with red, blue, green and white. Its prow and stern rose high out of the water like the ancient crafts of the Vikings.
Forward sat a girl, aft was a boy, and in the middle sat a large native Carib woman. So brown and rugged was the girl that she might easily have been taken for a Spaniard. A second look revealed deep-set freckles, a glow of color, a mass of curly hair, and an indefinable air of confidence and frankness that could belong only to an Anglo-Saxon. This girl, Jean McQueen, was Scotch. The boy was her brother. Just over from England, where he had attended school for years, he had the attire, the manners and the color of a perfect young English gentleman. In his tweed nickers and his smart sport shirt, he seemed quite as much out of place in the wilderness as his sister in her patched and faded khaki suit seemed at home.
“This is not the creek,” the boy said. There was impatience in his tone, and something that suggested fear. “Let’s turn back.”
“It might be, Rod. We’ll go on a little farther.” Brushing aside a low-hanging palm leaf, the girl seized her paddle to send the light craft forward.
For a space of ten minutes nothing might be heard save the dip-dip of their paddles and the scream of parrots over their heads.
Suddenly the boat swerved to the right shore.
“Abandoned, I guess,” said the girl, sweeping the clearing with her eyes. “Might tell us something, though.”
“Some sort of old cabin over there.”
“Look!” exclaimed the girl. “Someone’s here—or has been in the last few days.” She pointed to a well-defined hand print in the half-dried mud of the bank.
“Who—who do you suppose?”
“Rubber hunters, perhaps, or a chiclero. Let’s go up.”
The boy hung back.
“Aren’t afraid, are you?” the girl laughed. It was a rich, free, melodious laugh. “Nobody’s goin’ to hurt you in this wilderness. C’mon!”
She led the way over the trail which Johnny on his journey to the creek for water had made. The boy followed, reluctantly, and the Carib woman waddled along behind. More than once the girl paused to examine with a practiced eye patches of grass that lay flat down as if some wild creature had slept there. These were the spots where Johnny had fallen and found himself too weak to rise at once.
A little cry of dismay escaped the girl’s lips as her eyes fell upon the white-faced, prostrate form on the decaying mats.
“Dead!” her lips framed the word she did not speak. Death to this girl who knew so much of life, and loved it so, was a terrifying thing, thrice terrible in the heart of a wilderness. Yet here was a boy, a boy of her own race, who, to all appearances, had died here alone in this abandoned hut.
“Dead!” she whispered. “How—how awful!”
Some little lizards scampered over the dry palm leaves as her foot stirred the dust at the door. In another moment she was bending over the prostrate form.
“You—you can’t always tell.” There was a note of hope in her tone. “Rod, bring some water, quick.”
During the dragging moments of her brother’s absence she studied the prostrate boy’s face. There are lines in one’s face which to the keen observer tells the story of his life. Has he been kind and thoughtful of others? Has he lived brave and clean? It is written there. Has he been harsh, impatient, careless, dissipated even in small ways? This, too, is recorded there. As the girl read the story of Johnny’s life she found herself hoping more and more that she might save him.
“Give it to me,” she whispered as her brother appeared with the canteen.
With trembling fingers she placed the mouth of the canteen to the boy’s lips.
A moment of silence followed. Then of a sudden the wrinkle of anxiety on the girl’s brow disappeared. Johnny’s lips moved in an inarticulate murmur.
With a little exclamation of joy the girl sprang to her feet.
“He lives! He lives!”
Then all was silent again on stream and jungle.
* * * * * * * *
It was a strangely mixed dream through which Johnny was passing. It seemed night. He was hidden away in some deep forest. A storm had set the tree tops to twisting and writhing. The constant roll of thunder, mingled with the moaning of the trees, made the night hideous.