Like a flash the scene changed. It was day—Sunday in the little old church at home. Someone rose to sing; a beautiful white-gowned figure with a sweet melodious voice. She sang, but the words of the song had no meaning for him. It was as if they were sung in a foreign tongue.
And now he was gazing upon a sunrise. Such a sunrise as is never seen on land or sea, all red, orange and gold.
It was in the midst of this last broken dream that he opened his eyes and stared around him.
To his vast amazement he saw that the vision of orange and gold had not completely vanished. Neither had the singing nor the sound of thunder been hushed. They had merely taken on a more definite form, a truer meaning. The words of the song:
“Ne-ha aba ne ha aba muta,Sagmuk labsa abonaSag aba don,”
“Ne-ha aba ne ha aba muta,
Sagmuk labsa abona
Sag aba don,”
were not entirely strange to him, but they had no real meaning for him. He had heard his Caribs sing them around his camp fire. They were the words of a strange native song. As for the thunder, it was merely the wild beating of a barrel drum. And the flash of orange and gold was a girl, a very beautiful girl, swaying gracefully in a sort of rhythmic exercise to the beating of the drum.
He stared in unbelieving astonishment. The thing was not real. He was still dreaming. He tried to put up a hand to rub the illusion away, but finding this difficult because of weakness, contented himself with staring about the room where the golden vision continued to sway and whirl and the reverberating drum shook dust from the ceiling.
Slowly familiar objects came to view. The roof of the palm thatched cabin looked familiar. He had lain beneath it some time. That might have been long ago, or was it yesterday? He remembered the holes in the roof. The holes, one had been triangular, another round. The spots were still there, but instead of sunlight streaming through, the holes were covered by a fresh green palm leaf thatch.
He looked again at the swaying spot of gold that was the girl. The girl seemed almost real. Her face was flushed. It would be, if she swayed to music in such a clime. The black woman, like an ebony statue, sat beating the drum as she sang:
“Ne-ha aba ne ha aba muta.”
“Ne-ha aba ne ha aba muta.”
Then a sudden thought struck Johnny. The dancing girl was not black; she was not golden-brown like the Indian, not the brown of the Mexican, either. She was white like himself. A very comely white girl she was, too; red cheeks, tossing curly hair, freckles, slightly turned-up nose—a real girl.
“It’s a dream,” he told himself. “A white girl in the heart of this wilderness? I’m dead. This is Heaven. She’s an angel.”
He wanted to laugh at this last, but did not dare. It might break the spell! The girl was too robust, too red-cheeked for an angel. Whoever heard of a freckle-faced angel? But whoever heard of a real white girl in such a spot?
The mats looked real, too. What of those on which he lay? He ran his fingers over them.
“New, too,” he told himself. “How strange!”
Things were coming back to him. He had walked a long way, crept farther, dragged himself to this cabin. Here, after one try at bringing water, he had lain himself down to die.
“Apparently I’m not dead,” he told himself. “These people must have arrived to save me.”
He closed his eyes and tried to think. In the process he fell asleep.
What had happened was this. Having found Johnny dying of fever there in the abandoned hut, the girl, Jean, had insisted upon abandoning all plans for their future except the business of bringing him back to life. To this end the native Carib woman had searched the jungle for such herbs as have long been used by her people for curing a fever. To this same end, brother and sister had searched that same forest for birds that would provide broth and for fruits to supply refreshing drink for the invalid.
The strange music and the rythmic motion that accompanied it was the idea of the Carib woman. Did she attach some wild native religious significance to it? Who can tell? The boy had made the drum from a deer’s skin and a hollow log; the girl had joined in merely to please the Carib woman and satisfy her simple soul.
Native medicine, the jungle’s nourishment, the black woman’s wild music, the white girl’s tender care, all these in their way had helped. When Johnny woke the second time he was well on his way to recovery.
It is one thing to lie alone, helpless and dying in a wretched cabin in the heart of a wilderness; quite another to find one’s self surrounded by true friends, none the less real because they are new, and to feel strength and life coursing back into one’s veins.
At first Johnny asked few questions. Asking questions had never been his way of discovering the truth. He looked on with astonishment at the things that went on around him. The wilderness which to him had been a land of famine was suddenly as if by magic turned into a Garden of Eden. Early in the morning he heard the pop of a light rifle somewhere in the brush. At night he drank such broth and ate such tender shreds of meat as had never passed his lips before. The strange, glorious girl vanished for an hour, to return with yellow melons, melons that grew on trees,—“pawpaw” she called it. She brought water that was sweet and fresh, not from the hot stream, but from a vine torn from a tree where it clung. A hundred other miracles were wrought for his comfort and healing. And all the time, as if by magic, strength came back to him. On the fourth day he walked a bit unsteadily, but quite confidently, out of the cabin to sit on a mahogany log with a cabbage tree for a back support. Here he sat and watched dreamily the golden girl who, at this moment dressed in her humblest garb of faded khaki, was bending over a native mahogany wash bowl, found somewhere in the cabin, washing clothes.
Engaged in this task, with her thick, curly hair drawn up in a tight knot at the top of her head, with her brown arms flaked with suds, she seemed real enough.
“No angel,” he murmured, “just a real girl; a whole lot better!” he told himself. “I wonder where they came from, and where they were going when they found me?”
Strangely enough, had he asked the girl this last question she would have been obliged to answer: “I don’t know.”
The truth was that the Scotch girl and her brother were quite as lost in this wilderness as he and quite as eager to find their way out.
* * * * * * * *
In the meantime the strange doings, the flashes of phosphorescent light and strange noises, continued behind the locked door of Johnny’s office at the camp on Rio Hondo. In spite of this, however, the Caribs continued to work faithfully at their tasks and the work of getting out the red lure went on.
“You’re making fine progress,” said Hardgrave.
“Yes,” said Pant, “we’ll be able to show a fine profit. That is,” his brow wrinkled, “if we can take it out of here.”
“You’ll make it. Never fear.” said Hardgrave. “Daego’s getting worried. Another pit-pan load of his blacks went down the river last night. Wait and see.”
“It’s the ghost,” smiled Pant.
Strange as it may seem, though Johnny in his far away jungle hut was greatly improved in health, his ghost walked nightly upon the sky above the timber that faced Daego’s camp.
Every night, too, Pant slipped across the river to join the enemy’s camp and to catch the drift of events. He found that these Central Americans, black and brown alike, had a great fear of ghosts, particularly of white ghosts. Johnny’s ghost hovering there near the clouds threw some into near hysteria and sent others hurrying down the river.
It was easy to see, they explained, why this white ghost hovered above the tree tops. The hot and humid air close to the earth in the jungle has always been hated and feared by the white man. Above the trees the air is fresh and crisp. Why, then, should any ghost descend to earth?
But despite the fact that he did not descend, his presence above them meant that in time pestilence, a death-dealing fever, a destructive storm or a flood would descend upon the camp and wipe it from the face of the earth.
One person did not believe in the ghost—Daego. He raved and stormed at his men. Day and night, as if searching for something, he haunted the banks of the river. More than once Pant barely escaped being discovered by him. In spite of all this, however, the ghost appeared promptly on schedule and Daego’s ranks grew thinner and thinner.
“Keep it up, dear ghost,” Pant whispered, “keep it up, and in time we’ll have nothing to fear from Daego. Oh!” he sighed, “if only Johnny were here to enjoy it all!”
But Johnny was far away in the palm leaf thatched cabin on a stream that was as strange to those who had battled for his life as it was to him.
And then one night Johnny’s ghost vanished into thin air.
Before that happened, however, there were many other strange doings on the upper stretches of Rio Hondo.
Ten days after his discovery there in the abandoned cabin, Johnny Thompson was ready to travel. He was ready to embark in the dugout of his new found friends.
“It will not be long,” he assured Jean, “before I will be able to do my bit with the paddle, to assist you in going wherever you wish to go.” Where that might be he had not the slightest notion.
One thing puzzled him. As they prepared to leave the cabin, the dugout was loaded fore and aft with food supplies. In the prow, carefully wrapped in green palm leaves, were the carcasses of two young peccaries, killed that very morning. Piled on top of these were three or four dozen ripe cocoanuts. In the stem were casabas (great potato-like vegetables), tree melons, breadfruit, and a basket filled with strange little red tomatoes.
“Rations for a week,” he mused. “How far from home are these people, anyway?”
He was soon enough to know. Hardly had the dugout, with Roderick in the stem as steersman, been pushed from the shore and allowed to take a downstream course, than the girl, turning upon Johnny one of her most wonderful smiles, said:
“I suppose you think we know where we’re going; but we don’t. We only know we’re on our way.”
“Don—don’t know where you’re going!” Johnny gasped in astonishment. “Then you’re—”
“Lost!” The girl’s brow wrinkled for a second, then the smile came back.
“Shake,” said Johnny, solemnly stretching forth a hand. “We’ll go it together.”
For a second their hands met Then, as a swirling eddy set the boat whirling, the girl seized a paddle.
“You see,” she said quietly as they reached more placid water, “we didn’t tell you while you were ill; afraid it would disturb you.”
“It would have,” said Johnny. Quite suddenly something had come to him. “The red lure!” he murmured, quite unconscious of the fact that he spoke out loud. “When will I ever get back to it?”
“What is the red lure?” the girl asked in surprise.
“The red lure? Why, that’s my pet name for mahogany, the prince of priceless woods. If you’ve ever seen the mirror-like gleam of its polished surface, if you’ve seen how like a fire on the hearth at sunset it is, you know what it means.”
“I have. I do,” she said simply.
“Well,” he went on, “I’ve been given an opportunity to bring down a sample, one boom full, a hundred thousand feet or so of that matchless wood from a forest the value of which can scarcely be estimated. I had made a fine start, too, when I was suddenly driven into the bush. I promptly got myself lost, and here I am.”
Reading intense interest in her eyes, he told her the whole story of his adventure thus far.
“And now,” he ended with an uncertain smile, “it seems that we—you, your brother and I—are all babes in the woods, so to speak.”
“Perhaps it’s not quite as bad as that,” said Jean. “Bad enough, though. You see, I’ve always lived in the tropics with my father. He brought me here when I was five. My brother, who is three years older, was left behind in England.
“He’s done a lot of things, my father has,—bananas, cocoanuts, grapefruit. Just now he is gathering chicle up a lost river.
“Four months ago Rod came to us. The jungle is all new to him. He was quite wild about it. So we went on little exploring trips. I love it, don’t you?”
“Nothing like it,” said Johnny.
“It’s all new up in this country. If ever a white man set foot on it he’s forgot it long ago. You cut your way through a jungle, you find a stream, you launch your dugout, which you’ve dragged after you, and you drift on and on through a land that white men have never seen. It’s wonderful! Wonderful!” She closed her eyes as if in a dream.
“It’s dangerous, too,” she exclaimed, suddenly starting up. “You may get lost. We did. One night we slept in the bottom of our dugout—Rod, old Midge and I. When morning came we found ourselves drifting in the center of a great river. What do you think of that? Go to sleep in a stream you can all but reach across, and wake in a broad river. Magic, wouldn’t you call it?”
“I might.”
“No magic about it, though. A thing had happened to our tie rope. Some creature had gnawed it square off. And there we were, drifting down a great black silent river we had never seen before. What were we to do? What would you have done?”
“Try to find my way back to the mouth of the little stream from which I had drifted.”
“That was just what we attempted. That’s how we found you. The mouth of every stream looked alike to us, so all we could do was to go up each one a short way until we knew it was the wrong stream. We had about decided that this was the wrong stream, too, when I discovered your hand print in the mud.”
“And you’ve spent all this time—”
“Getting you well.”
“That’s wonderfully kind. That’s—”
“Not so much in the tropics. Down here time doesn’t matter. We’ll find our way home sooner or later. When we do I’ll say: ‘Hello, Dad. I’m back,’ and Dad will say, ‘So I see, daughter, so I see.’”
So lightly did these words come tripping from her lips, so rippling was the laughter following, that for a moment Johnny was deceived.
“She means it, too,” he told himself. “So this is the way of the tropics.”
The deception lasted for but one moment. The wrinkle across her brow, the far away look in her eyes, the irregular dip of her paddle, all told plainer than words that she had been playing a part; that she was concealing homesickness and hunger for friends; that they might be days, even weeks, finding their way back, and that in the meantime all her father’s men would be searching the streams and bush for her and her brother.
In the midst of all this fresh revelation, their boat suddenly shot from the creek into a mighty stream of black and sullen waters.
“The Rio Hondo!” exclaimed Johnny.
“And down this river is your camp,” the girl said quietly. “We will take you there at once.”
For a moment Johnny was tempted. He had been away for more than two weeks. What had happened in that time? What of Pant? What of his Caribs? What of Daego and his men? Had there been a battle? If so, who had won? Whose camp fires gleamed there in the heart of that magic mahogany forest, his own or Daego’s? He did so want to know the answer to all these questions.
But suddenly there flashed through his mind the worried face of the girl.
“Brave girl!” he breathed as a lump in his throat all but choked him. “She saved my life. It cost her many days. She must go home. She’s a girl. I’m a boy. I can’t let them take me first.”
“No,” he exclaimed, snatching the paddle from her hands, “there is time enough for me.”
With the paddle he deftly turned the boat about. Then, nothing loath, Roderick and the black woman joined him in the stroke that sent it speeding upstream. So, once more, Johnny’s back was turned on the red lure.
That night Johnny dreamed once more of little golden brown women grinding and spinning, of hunters returning with deer and wild pigs slung across their backs, and of the three gods,—one black, one green and one of pure gold.
Strangely enough, when he awoke from this dream he felt nearer the fabled Indian village; the dream seemed more real than ever before.
Once more it was morning on the upper reaches of Rio Hondo. The dugout was tied to the bared roots of a gnarled old mangrove. The camp of Jean and Johnny, of Rod and the Carib woman, was on the crest of a high bank that overlooked the black waters.
The aged Carib woman was frying cakes made from casabas ground to powder and mixed with water. Jean was frying slices of meat from the ham of a peccary. Johnny was engaged in the business of making coffee. After his first demonstration this had been his allotted task.
While the coffee was now coming to a boil, he sat alternating gazing away at the swift flowing waters and looking dreamily at the golden girl whose hair was glorified by a touch of sunrise mingled with the glow of the fire.
“Fine chance she’s got of finding her way home,” he thought. They had searched all the previous day for the right creek. “There are a hundred creeks. They don’t know how long they drifted nor how far. Not a chance. Have to be some other way. Some of her father’s men may come upon us, or we might go back to camp. Someone there might know the way.”
He was meditating on the advisability of proposing this last course when there came a sudden excited shout from the bush.
“Roderick!” exclaimed the girl. “Something has happened to him.” For a moment the camp was in commotion, then the Scotch boy came bounding out of the bush.
“Jean! Jean!” he shouted, seizing her by the shoulders and waltzing her about. “I’ve found a trail, a hard-beaten trail.”
“The Old Portage,” the girl cried breathlessly. “The trail that leads to home!”
Suddenly crumpling up in her tracks, she sank to the ground and hid her face in her hands. Unmoved as she had been through all this strange and trying adventure, now as the end appeared at hand she was for a moment just a girl with the heart of a girl and a girl’s way of shedding tears in times of great joy or deep sorrow. And who would not like her the better for it?
The Old Portage, the brother and sister informed Johnny, was a trail used alike by Mexicans and Indians. The trail led from Rio Hondo to the upper waters of their own river, the one on which their father’s camp was located. Neither had been over this trail, but their father had. He had told them of passing over it. It was an old, old trail, he had explained, which might have been in existence at the time of the Spanish conquest.
“There can’t be a bit of doubt about its being the trail,” said Roderick. “It’s so hard-packed and old that it seems made of cement.”
“It’s our trail!” the girl rejoiced. “By to-night, or to-morrow noon at most, we will be home. And you?” she said suddenly turning to Johnny.
The question startled him. It had not occurred to him that there was a possible parting of the ways.
“You’ll be going back to your camp, of course,” said Roderick. “You’re quite welcome to our dugout. You may have an opportunity to send it back. We may pass your way. It’s no matter. What’s a dugout? You’ll be in your camp by night.”
This time, to his own great stupefaction, Johnny did not pause to reason why, but simply said:
“No, since I’ve come this far, I believe I’ll see you home.” He looked straight at the golden girl as he spoke. Had he but known it, he was taking a rather large contract.
Roderick looked surprised. The girl looked Johnny frankly in the eye and said: “That will be very kind of you.”
It was not hard to see that she had greater faith in the skill and courage of this new found friend than she had in her brother who, though educated in the way of books, was ignorant enough when it came to river lore and the ways of the jungle.
A half hour later, after dragging the dugout to a safe place on the bank, they prepared packs for a land journey. Johnny tried to think what it had been that had caused him to make the decision which must take him deeper into the jungle and farther from his camp. Other than a vague feeling that the girl who had saved his life might yet need his protection, he could discover no motive whatsoever.
“No sense to it,” he told himself, “not a bit in the world. But what’s the fun of always having a reason for things, anyway?”
“‘A boy’s will is a wind’s will, and the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts,’” he repeated as he strapped his pack to his shoulders and prepared to follow his companions through the brush to the hard beaten ancient trail.
It was strange, but the trail they followed that day did not seem quite like a portage trail leading from one river to another. At least it did not seem so to Johnny, not from the very start. At first his feelings on this subject were based on nothing tangible. As the day passed and still they plodded onward, he could have given reasons. He did not give them. What was the use? Time would tell.
They crossed no streams, yet they were not following the backbone of a ridge. That in itself was strange. They carried two canteens. These were soon emptied. Had it not been for Jean’s admirable knowledge of tropical vegetation they might have suffered from thirst. A vine growing close beside the trail, which Jean called Bejuco, filled their canteens while they rested.
At noon they paused for a light lunch. Mid-afternoon found them plodding upward; indeed, almost the whole day had showed them a slight up-grade trail.
“Should be coming to the divide,” Johnny said.
“Yes, we should.” The girl’s brow was wrinkled in thought. “Father never spoke of the divide, but there must be one. That’s the place where you stop going up, and start going down?”
“Yes.”
“We must come to it soon.”
But they did not.
Four o’clock found them resting beside a pool. A very strange pool it was. Circular, with moss and ferns growing to its very brink, its water clear as air, it seemed like a great funnel set in the earth.
“As if there had been a sudden cave-in,” said Jean.
Stranger still, they found on the side next to the trail four crude stone steps leading down to the brink of the pool.
“Did you never hear your father speak of this pool?” asked Johnny.
Neither Jean nor her brother had heard of it before.
“This,” thought Johnny to himself, “is not the portage. It is some other trail. But what trail can it be?”
Darkness found them still plodding upward. Loath to spend the night without water, at Jean’s direction the boys sought out a tree known as the “kerosene tree.” A match applied to a piece of this wood transforms it into a torch.
They had not gone far before the light of their torch was reflected by water.
“Another pool,” said Roderick, settling down upon the mosses that grew beside it.
“Here we camp,” said Johnny, holding out his torch that they might get a more perfect view of the pool.
It was very much the same as the other, only larger. The stone steps were not lacking, and beside them was a pillar of stone on which Johnny’s sensitive fingers traced some very definite carvings of strange animals and men.
“A relic of old Maya days,” he said.
“What is?” asked Jean.
“See this pillar beside the steps; the pool itself? Ever read about them?”
“No.”
“Built by Mayas, I believe. Interesting people. Hardgrave loaned me a book about them; the report of some ethnological society. It reads like one of Dumas’ novels. Tell you about them later.”
They were soon busy preparing camp for the night.
Two hours later, with the still waters of the pool reflecting the red glow of a half burned out campfire, with Roderick stretched out on the mosses fast asleep and the Carib woman nodding beneath a nut palm, Johnny sat beside the girl and told of the wonders of this land in the long ago.
“Do you see the cocoanut palm in the shadows at the far side of the pool?” he asked.
The girl nodded.
“We think it grew there wild. So it did. But how did it come there? Scholars say that its great, great, great grandfather, centuries back, must have been planted there, and that it may have grown beside a palace.”
“Whose palace?” the girl’s voice was low.
“The palace of a Maya prince.”
“Were there princes?”
“Princes and great rulers; a mighty people once lived here. Where this jungle now rules were cornfields, cocoanut plantations, farms, homes, cities and great temples, temples of stone, fifteen hundred feet long, two hundred wide, two or three stories high. That is the land of long ago, and now here is only the jungle and this pool.”
“Do you suppose this pool was here then?” The girl’s hand was on his arm.
“Why not? There are pools in Palestine to-day that were there two thousands years ago.”
“Then, if it could talk, what tales it could tell!”
For some time they sat there in silence, each dreaming the magic story in the fire and the deep, dark pool.
Long after the girl and the Carib woman had gone to sleep in the shadows, Johnny sat there. In his mind was a problem. They were on the wrong trail, he was sure of that now. What trail? It was a secret trail of some wild people, perhaps Mayas. Whatever people they were, there was a city. Such a hard beaten trail told of many travelers. What should he do? All his life he had dreamed of discovering a city, a city of lost people in some hidden corner of the world. This, perhaps, was his chance. For once the call of the red lure seemed faint and far away.
“Three gods,” he whispered, “one black, one green and one of pure gold.”
But there was Jean and her brother. They had not guessed, at least Roderick had not. He was not sure about Jean. They would discover the truth; too late perhaps to turn back. Had he the right not to warn them?
Long he pondered the problem. To go on alone was out of the question. His recent experience had given him an unconquerable fear of being alone in the bush. Was it selfishness that in the end counciled silence? Who can tell? At any rate, this was his decision: they would go ahead until Jean or her brother called a halt; when that would be he could not guess.
Johnny spent that night beside the dying embers of the camp fire. With legs doubled up beneath him, arms stretched out before him, head hanging low, he slept and sleeping dreamed again of golden brown natives, and of black, green and gold gods.
In the midst of this dream he awoke. Or did he awake? Did he but half awake? Was it reality or dream? Whatever it was, he saw by the light of the dying fire, on the opposite side of the pool where the palm leaves parted, the face of a little brown man, and above his head gleamed a spear. For an instant he saw, or at least seemed to see him, then the palm leaves silently swept together.
“Gone!” he whispered, starting up.
He was wide awake now. Had he been awake before? He dropped back into his place, but not to sleep again. Now the rustle of palm leaves or the snap of a twig aroused him, and now the long drawn call of some beast of the jungle sent a thrill through his being. But at last he slept, to dream no more that night.
Morning found him the first one stirring. Jean was his close second.
“Looks like a rocky ridge just up the trail,” he said. “Might be wild turkey up there.”
“Might.”
“Want to try it?”
Jean nodded.
The next moment, with Roderick’s light rifle, Johnny was leading the way. After ten minutes’ walking they came to a rocky ridge that led into the jungle. Here the vegetation was thin. By climbing a boulder, and creeping beneath a low-hanging palm, they were able to make their way forward.
They had just crept forward for some distance when, of a sudden, Johnny held up a finger of warning. From somewhere ahead of them came a drumming sound accompanied by a beating of wings.
“Turkey strut,” Johnny whispered. “C’mon.”
Together, scarcely breathing, they crept forward. Suddenly rounding a pile of moss-grown rocks, they saw the turkey.
It was a magnificent sight. Mounted upon a boulder that served as a pedestal, the sun turning the touch of bronze on his back to a plate of burnished gold and his red comb to a fiery torch, was the most magnificent wild gobbler Johnny had ever seen.
With a quick intake of breath, the girl touched Johnny’s arm. Without the slightest sound he moved the rifle toward her. A shake of the head, a finger pointed at the bird, told him to shoot.
His hand trembled slightly, but his aim was true. A crack of the rifle was followed for a moment by a mad beating of wings, then all was still.
“You—you got him,” the girl exulted.
Leaping to her feet she sprang over the rocks to at last find a seat upon the throne from which the winged monarch had so lately fallen.
“This,” she exclaimed, “is what I call life. I’ve always lived in the wilds. I will always want to. I’ve always wanted to go back, back, back into the wilderness, to discover something magnificent there. I never knew exactly what that would be until last night. When you told me last night of the Mayas and their wonderful cities, I knew; a city, a magnificent city filled with rare silks, jewels and gold.”
Johnny started. What was this? Did she know? Would she follow the trail even though she knew it to be the wrong one? Was she following a rainbow to find the pot of gold?
“All that happened long ago,” he said, speaking of the Mayas. “The riches, glory, beauty and power of their civilization perished centuries ago.”
“Oh,” she whispered as her head drooped with disappointment. “But then,” she exclaimed, “who knows what is back of this wilderness? On the map it is marked ‘unexplored.’ It is unexplored. No white man has ever been over—over—” she caught herself to stammer on, “has been—been across this great bush to the beyond. There may be—there must be just one city, one gorgeous city left.” Standing upon the rock, she threw her arms wide as she exclaimed: “There must be! There must!”
Would they go on over that trail to the great beyond? What call could be stronger? What fear could hinder? In vain Johnny told himself he must go back, back to Pant and the red lure, back to fight the treacherous Daego. All in vain. He owed it to this magnificent girl’s father to take her back. In vain he recalled old Hardgrave’s words: “They killed all white men who came to their camp except me.” They must go on. They would go on.
“Johnny,” said the girl suddenly, “we ought to have some sort of—of signal.”
“Signal?” Johnny was puzzled.
“Yes. Something one could shout or sing, if lost from the other.”
“I have it!” she exclaimed suddenly. “I read a story a short time ago. In that story the heroine taught the hero a strange sort of song. I believe it was called ‘An Indian Love Song.’ Anyhow, the first part, or prelude, went something like this:
‘Whoo-hoo-hoo,Whoo-hoo-hoo,Whoo-hoo-hoo.’”
‘Whoo-hoo-hoo,
Whoo-hoo-hoo,
Whoo-hoo-hoo.’”
Her clear voice rose high as she sang the notes. A distant cliff caught them and threw them back to her.
“Sing it!” she commanded.
As best he could, Johnny repeated:
“Whoo-hoo-hoo,Whoo-hoo-hoo,Whoo-hoo-hoo.”
“Whoo-hoo-hoo,
Whoo-hoo-hoo,
Whoo-hoo-hoo.”
Then they had a good laugh over the broken echoes that came back to them.
It all seemed very melodramatic and unreal to Johnny then, but the time was to come when he would cling to those notes as a drowning man to a spar.
By the light of the early morning sun they ate their breakfast; by that same light resumed the trail that led to the great unknown.
Roderick, who had lived his life on streets and in houses, suspected nothing. The black woman, like a slave, did not think. But the girl? She knew. Every glance she sent back to Johnny told him that she knew, and he gloried in her courage.
As Johnny’s interest in the red lure lost much of its intensity, Pant’s seemed to grow stronger. He left no stone unturned if its turning would in any way hinder the treacherous Daego and his band.
“Johnny’s ghost is doing much,” he told himself, “but it’s not enough. There must be other ways of annoying him.”
He thought of Daego’s black boats that moved by night and of the stationary engine he had heard pop-popping in the heart of the wilderness.
“I’ll go down there and look into that engine business,” he mused. “There may be something to it, something big. I’ll go down to-night.”
He left camp in his low, black dugout that night and paddled swiftly down the river. For some time he drove straight on; then of a sudden, as his keen eye caught a speck of light that flashed on and then blinked out like a match that is lighted and blown out, he swerved to the shore, threw a rope over the low limb of a mangrove, then sat there motionless, watching the river.
His thoughts were of that Spanish half-caste, Daego. “Isn’t it strange,” he mused. “There’s a man worth millions. If he never made another cent and lived a thousand years he’d never come to want. Yet he’s so greedy that he does crooked things that he may gain more. If someone tries to break into the mahogany or chicle business, instead of helping them in a brotherly fashion as he could well afford to do, he tries to throttle them.
“I suppose,” he said thoughtfully, “it’s all in the start one gets. If he starts out crooked, it doesn’t seem to matter much whether he succeeds or fails, he remains crooked to the end. One would think—”
Of a sudden his musings were cut short off. Something was moving out there in the water. Something like a shadow. Pant scarcely breathed as he watched that long shadow until it had disappeared up a bend in the river.
“That’s no shadow,” he muttered as he sat up. “It’s a pit-pan, one of those dugouts the natives use for coming on long journeys up the river. Must have been sixty feet long. The most marvelous pit-pan that ever was. Those pit-pans they used in other days had at least a dozen men at the paddles. I didn’t see a single man, and still it moved straight on upstream. Seems like I heard a purring sound. Surely here is mystery—a purring shadow.”
“Hardgrave spoke of Daego’s black boats,” he said to himself. “That thing must be one of them. And there’s nothing good about the thing they’re up to. Men don’t go creeping up the river in the silence of the night with an eel-like craft such as that for nothing. If I can find out what it’s all about and can trap one of his pit-pans I’ll be in a way to keep him so busy he won’t so much as have time to find out when our raft starts down the river.”
He arrived at the mouth of the creek, up which he had located the pop-popping of a stationary engine a half hour later. Taking a chance of being seen, he began skirting the bushes at the edge of the creek. For this move he was thankful. He had not gone a mile when, upon rounding a cocoanut palm that overhung the water, he came in sight of two long, dark objects that lay close to shore, half concealed by foliage. Seen from a little distance they resembled nothing quite so much as great, black water snakes asleep by the bank.
“Pit-pans!” he murmured as he came closer.
Pit-pans indeed they were, slender boats cut from the trunk of a tree, sixty or more feet in length.
“Blockade runners! Black devils!” he muttered as he passed. He dared not stop to inspect them. There might be men on the bank, watching.
Soon he caught the pop-pop of that stationary engine which had once so mystified him. This time, instead of turning back, he paddled straight on. A mile, two, three miles of water passed beneath his craft. Still he moved steadily forward until, when it seemed he must be almost upon the engine, he suddenly discovered that the sound was behind and to the right of him.
“Back in the bush,” he told himself. “Passed the trail without seeing it.”
Turning his boat about, he drifted slowly.
“There it is. Drift down thirty yards and hide my boat.”
This done, he struggled back along the bank to the entrance of the path.
Following a winding trail, with the sound of the motor growing louder, ever louder, with his heart keeping tune to its throbbing, he made his way forward until caution bade him slink into the shadows of the great leaves of a cohune tree.
There, with only the ceaseless throb of the motor to disturb his reflection, he had time to think things through. How was this all to end? His men were making progress, but Tivoli had told him that many of the men were becoming frightened by the wild tales they were hearing of the doings of the man-eating jaguar. Would fright drive them back down the river before their task was completed? He wished Johnny was here. Then he would feel more free to hunt that beast down. Must do it, anyway, very soon.
And what was Daego plotting up the river? He could not bribe the Caribs. Would there be a fight in the end? Well, if so, Daego would not find them unprepared. He was training his men in a new form of warfare. They were handy with their long-bladed machetes, very handy indeed. Daego should see!
He glanced about him. It was strange that he should be in such a place at such a time. Yet he wanted to know, to be sure. If things were as he thought, he’d make Daego no end of trouble. He’d trap one of those black shadows of his, show him up.
“Trap one,” he whispered, “but how?”
This was a puzzler. Moments of reflection, and then an inspiration.
“The very thing! Rivers have been blocked against war boats by chains. This is better than chains; it floats. It—”
His whisper broke short off. Someone was coming. They carried a lantern. He had not thought of a light. What if they should catch sight of him. Shuddering, he shrank farther into the bushes. Just then he caught sight of the foremost man’s face.
“Daego!” he breathed. “Daego himself!”
As he listened he crowded farther and farther back among the palm leaves. He was hearing voices, many voices. They were talking in Spanish. He did not understand Spanish. It was not what they said that increased his fright, but the numbers of them.