CHAPTER X JOHNNY'S GHOST WALKS
Palms that hung over the silent, swiftly flowing stream murmured andsighed. Their murmuring and sighing was as sad as the voice of pines andhemlocks in a graveyard on a winter's night. Sadder still was the strangewail of some tropical bird, piping always on the same minor key. On thebed of decaying mats in the abandoned cabin where little lizards ran inand out, Johnny Thompson lay white and motionless.
Came an hour when there fell upon all this gloom a shrill discordantnote. The scream of a wild parrot broke the drowsy silence. This wasanswered by another, and yet another, until all up and down the streamthe air was filled with harsh, discordant music.
The innocent cause of all this disturbance was a fantastically painteddugout, all striped and spotted with red, blue, green and white. Its prowand stern rose high out of the water like the ancient crafts of theVikings.
Forward sat a girl, aft was a boy, and in the middle sat a large nativeCarib woman. So brown and rugged was the girl that she might easily havebeen taken for a Spaniard. A second look revealed deep-set freckles, aglow of color, a mass of curly hair, and an indefinable air of confidenceand frankness that could belong only to an Anglo-Saxon. This girl, JeanMcQueen, was Scotch. The boy was her brother. Just over from England,where he had attended school for years, he had the attire, the mannersand the color of a perfect young English gentleman. In his tweed nickersand his smart sport shirt, he seemed quite as much out of place in thewilderness as his sister in her patched and faded khaki suit seemed athome.
"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 alow-hanging palm leaf, the girl seized her paddle to send the light craftforward.
For a space of ten minutes nothing might be heard save the dip-dip oftheir 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 fewdays." She pointed to a well-defined hand print in the half-dried mud ofthe 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 creekfor water had made. The boy followed, reluctantly, and the Carib womanwaddled along behind. More than once the girl paused to examine with apracticed eye patches of grass that lay flat down as if some wildcreature had slept there. These were the spots where Johnny had fallenand found himself too weak to rise at once.
A little cry of dismay escaped the girl's lips as her eyes fell upon thewhite-faced, prostrate form on the decaying mats.
"Dead!" her lips framed the word she did not speak. Death to this girlwho knew so much of life, and loved it so, was a terrifying thing, thriceterrible in the heart of a wilderness. Yet here was a boy, a boy of herown race, who, to all appearances, had died here alone in this abandonedhut.
"Dead!" she whispered. "How--how awful!"
Some little lizards scampered over the dry palm leaves as her footstirred the dust at the door. In another moment she was bending over theprostrate 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 theprostrate boy's face. There are lines in one's face which to the keenobserver tells the story of his life. Has he been kind and thoughtful ofothers? Has he lived brave and clean? It is written there. Has he beenharsh, impatient, careless, dissipated even in small ways? This, too, isrecorded there. As the girl read the story of Johnny's life she foundherself 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'slips.
A moment of silence followed. Then of a sudden the wrinkle of anxiety onthe girl's brow disappeared. Johnny's lips moved in an inarticulatemurmur.
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. Itseemed night. He was hidden away in some deep forest. A storm had set thetree tops to twisting and writhing. The constant roll of thunder, mingledwith the moaning of the trees, made the night hideous.
Like a flash the scene changed. It was day--Sunday in the little oldchurch at home. Someone rose to sing; a beautiful white-gowned figurewith a sweet melodious voice. She sang, but the words of the song had nomeaning 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 onland or sea, all red, orange and gold.
It was in the midst of this last broken dream that he opened his eyes andstared around him.
To his vast amazement he saw that the vision of orange and gold had notcompletely vanished. Neither had the singing nor the sound of thunderbeen hushed. They had merely taken on a more definite form, a truermeaning. The words of the song:
"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 thewords of a strange native song. As for the thunder, it was merely thewild beating of a barrel drum. And the flash of orange and gold was agirl, a very beautiful girl, swaying gracefully in a sort of rhythmicexercise to the beating of the drum.
He stared in unbelieving astonishment. The thing was not real. He wasstill dreaming. He tried to put up a hand to rub the illusion away, butfinding this difficult because of weakness, contented himself withstaring about the room where the golden vision continued to sway andwhirl and the reverberating drum shook dust from the ceiling.
Slowly familiar objects came to view. The roof of the palm thatched cabinlooked familiar. He had lain beneath it some time. That might have beenlong ago, or was it yesterday? He remembered the holes in the roof. Theholes, one had been triangular, another round. The spots were stillthere, but instead of sunlight streaming through, the holes were coveredby a fresh green palm leaf thatch.
He looked again at the swaying spot of gold that was the girl. The girlseemed almost real. Her face was flushed. It would be, if she swayed tomusic in such a clime. The black woman, like an ebony statue, sat beatingthe drum as she sang:
"Ne-ha aba ne ha aba muta."
Then a sudden thought struck Johnny. The dancing girl was not black; shewas 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--areal girl.
"It's a dream," he told himself. "A white girl in the heart of thiswilderness? I'm dead. This is Heaven. She's an angel."
He wanted to laugh at this last, but did not dare. It might break thespell! The girl was too robust, too red-cheeked for an angel. Whoeverheard of a freckle-faced angel? But whoever heard of a real white girl insuch a spot?
The mats looked real, too. What of those on which he lay? He ran hisfingers 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, hehad lain himself down to die.
"Apparen
tly I'm not dead," he told himself. "These people must havearrived 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 inthe abandoned hut, the girl, Jean, had insisted upon abandoning all plansfor their future except the business of bringing him back to life. Tothis end the native Carib woman had searched the jungle for such herbs ashave 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 wouldprovide broth and for fruits to supply refreshing drink for the invalid.
The strange music and the rythmic motion that accompanied it was the ideaof the Carib woman. Did she attach some wild native religioussignificance to it? Who can tell? The boy had made the drum from a deer'sskin and a hollow log; the girl had joined in merely to please the Caribwoman 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. WhenJohnny 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 inthe heart of a wilderness; quite another to find one's self surrounded bytrue friends, none the less real because they are new, and to feelstrength and life coursing back into one's veins.
At first Johnny asked few questions. Asking questions had never been hisway of discovering the truth. He looked on with astonishment at thethings that went on around him. The wilderness which to him had been aland 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 thebrush. At night he drank such broth and ate such tender shreds of meat ashad never passed his lips before. The strange, glorious girl vanished foran hour, to return with yellow melons, melons that grew ontrees,--"pawpaw" she called it. She brought water that was sweet andfresh, not from the hot stream, but from a vine torn from a tree where itclung. 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 thefourth day he walked a bit unsteadily, but quite confidently, out of thecabin 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 momentdressed in her humblest garb of faded khaki, was bending over a nativemahogany wash bowl, found somewhere in the cabin, washing clothes.
Engaged in this task, with her thick, curly hair drawn up in a tight knotat the top of her head, with her brown arms flaked with suds, she seemedreal enough.
"No angel," he murmured, "just a real girl; a whole lot better!" he toldhimself. "I wonder where they came from, and where they were going whenthey found me?"
Strangely enough, had he asked the girl this last question she would havebeen obliged to answer: "I don't know."
The truth was that the Scotch girl and her brother were quite as lost inthis wilderness as he and quite as eager to find their way out.
* * * * * * * *
In the meantime the strange doings, the flashes of phosphorescent lightand strange noises, continued behind the locked door of Johnny's officeat the camp on Rio Hondo. In spite of this, however, the Caribs continuedto work faithfully at their tasks and the work of getting out the redlure went on.
"You're making fine progress," said Hardgrave.
"Yes," said Pant, "we'll be able to show a fine profit. That is," hisbrow 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. Waitand see."
"It's the ghost," smiled Pant.
Strange as it may seem, though Johnny in his far away jungle hut wasgreatly improved in health, his ghost walked nightly upon the sky abovethe timber that faced Daego's camp.
Every night, too, Pant slipped across the river to join the enemy's campand to catch the drift of events. He found that these Central Americans,black and brown alike, had a great fear of ghosts, particularly of whiteghosts. Johnny's ghost hovering there near the clouds threw some intonear hysteria and sent others hurrying down the river.
It was easy to see, they explained, why this white ghost hovered abovethe tree tops. The hot and humid air close to the earth in the jungle hasalways been hated and feared by the white man. Above the trees the air isfresh and crisp. Why, then, should any ghost descend to earth?
But despite the fact that he did not descend, his presence above themmeant that in time pestilence, a death-dealing fever, a destructive stormor a flood would descend upon the camp and wipe it from the face of theearth.
One person did not believe in the ghost--Daego. He raved and stormed athis men. Day and night, as if searching for something, he haunted thebanks of the river. More than once Pant barely escaped being discoveredby him. In spite of all this, however, the ghost appeared promptly onschedule and Daego's ranks grew thinner and thinner.
"Keep it up, dear ghost," Pant whispered, "keep it up, and in time we'llhave nothing to fear from Daego. Oh!" he sighed, "if only Johnny werehere to enjoy it all!"
But Johnny was far away in the palm leaf thatched cabin on a stream thatwas 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 onthe upper stretches of Rio Hondo.