CHAPTER IX "IT'S DEATH AN' DESTRUCTION"
Having barely escaped dropping into the jaws of an alligator, JohnnyThompson wound his leg about his vine rope at a spot where a knottyprojection would give him partial support, then proceeded to make a sadsurvey of the situation. There was the cocoanut tree, and there thealligator. There were two other 'gators floating silently on the surfaceof the pool. To land there was out of the question. There might be alanding place on the other side of that particular rocky formation. Itwas his only chance.
After climbing the vine, a slow and painful process, he made a hastysurvey. Already it was growing dark. There was need of haste, but thedull stupor of the tropics was still upon him. He could not hasten. Hefound it necessary to make his way over the jagged rocks for somedistance before finding a safe fastening for his vine.
When at last all was secure the sun had gone down and a dark bank ofclouds 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 uponwhich he was to land. There, for a time, he lost his courage. His lateexperience had unnerved him. What sort of landing was this which he nowapproached? It is difficult to distinguish a motionless alligator from arocky surface even in broad daylight. How impossible in the dusk! So heclung there motionless, trying to stare into the half darkness.
"Can--can't hang here forever," he breathed at last. "Here goes, andhere's hoping!"
To his great joy he landed safely on a high and dry rock, quite free fromdanger.
But at once there arose the problem of finding his way to the cocoanuttree. 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--threeripe ones and many green ones. The problem of securing the food was stillbefore him. At close sight of the tree his heart sank. It was taller andlarger 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 betweenhim and the nuts appeared to present a solid barrier through which it wasgoing 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 timestried to break his way through the ring of branches to the fruit; foughtthere until cold perspiration stood out upon his brow and his knees shookso he could scarcely support himself; then each time slid slowly down.
The last time, with something very much like a sob, he threw himself uponthe 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 nofire, with only the glittering stars above him, he slept the deep sleepof utter exhaustion. From time to time as he slept there came sounds ofscratches on the rock above him, of grunts and other sounds in thedarkness; but no wild thing dared approach too close to this strangesmelling creature from another world.
The three days that followed that night on the rocks beside the fallswere like a long drawn out evil dream. True, Fate dropped him acomforting morsel. One of the cocoanuts, a small one, had fallen duringthe night. With fingers that shook, Johnny bored a hole through one eyeof it and drank the milk eagerly; drank to the last drop. Then he brokethe nut on a rock and gnawed at the rich, white meat until not a shredwas left.
Lacking strength and courage to build a second raft, he began making hisway 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 beganto feel faint. Now and again, as he paused to rest, he felt that he mustbe losing consciousness.
A great desire to sleep came over him. Nothing much mattered. A strangepeace, 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 journeyon. When night came he could not rightly tell. In that gloom there was noday. 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 ofbeasts of prey, all were the same to him, for all came faint andindistinct as in a dream.
Once he fought with a great spotted beast. A jaguar, perhaps. Or wasthat, too, only a dream? He could not tell. He seemed to wake from ahorrible nightmare of claws and wild snarls to find his arms and chesttorn and bleeding and his knife gone.
"Must have fought with my knife and lost it in the struggle," was hismental comment.
He did not feel badly about that, nor did he search for it long. Nothingseemed to trouble him. Great waves of dreams swept over him.
His lips were dry and parched. "Fever. Malaria. That mosquito did it," hetold himself. That did not matter, either. Nothing mattered.
He dragged himself to the bank of the stream to cleanse his wounds. Hedrank long and deeply. A small fish, darting too close, was caught in hishand. This he devoured whole.
Other things of the jungle he ate--strange fruits, nuts and roots. Werethey poison? It did not matter. Nothing mattered.
So, every day growing weaker, he came at the end of the third day tosomething very much like an abandoned clearing. Such it was, but he wastoo far lost in his drowsy sleep to know it. He had passed half throughit when, of a sudden, he came upon a hut, a palm-thatched, forlorn anddeserted hut. Yet, to him in his delirium of fever it was something fargreater than an abandoned hut.
"Home!" he cried hoarsely. "Home!"
Throwing himself across the threshold, he fell prone in the dust of thefloor.
A great lizard, sleeping in the corner, awoke and darted away; a smallbird, whose nest was in the thatch, scolded shrilly. But Johnny heardnothing, saw nothing.
When at last he summoned up strength enough to drag himself to a cornerand 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 oneoverwrought 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 hehad found a mouldy gourd. With this in hand he dragged himself on handsand knees to the river. Here in his eagerness for water he all butpitched head-foremost into the stream. As it was, he left a print of hishand in the plastic ooze on the bank.
The gourd he filled with water. Having spilled most of it on the wayback, 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, whilegrowing brighter, appeared always to elude them. "The red lure. The redlure!" he repeated over and over.
Next morning found him too weak to rise or to think. He had only strengthto breathe. He could only stare helplessly at the dull brown roof of thehut and hope for things that never come.
But now the scene was changed. Instead of the smell of decay all abouthim, there was the perfume of apple blossoms. Over his head the white andpink glory of Springtime blended with white patches of sunshine. Beneathhim was a soft bed of grass; above him apple trees and sky. From far andnear came the warble of thrushes, the chirp of robins, the shrillchallenge of woodpeckers. He was once more in the orchard that witnessedhis 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 himselfupon an elbow. He failed. Could he lift a hand? He could not. His eyesclosed 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 thedishonest, the unkind, mean and criminal to a wholesome fear; the handthat had never been employed in mere selfish ends, was powerless andstill.
The stream rushing past that cabin seemed a funeral train, powerful andfree, ready to carry that brave spirit away. Some strange bird sang asong 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 upthere in the dust to sleep. The figure on the cot did not move. A greatlizard crept in through a rotted corner to gaze blinking at him. Thesnake, sensing a dinner, slowly uncoiled, then with a motion surprisinglyquick for a creature of its kind, darted, forked tongue flashing, at thelizard. There was a scurry of feet, a gliding scrape. Lizard and snakepassed within a few inches of that prostrate head. The snake passed overthe 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 thewind through the palms seemed to say:
"He is dead! Dead! Dead!"
* * * * * * * *
Pant would not believe that Johnny was dead. "They can't have done himin," he said to Hardgrave. "It's a thing that really can't be done. BurlyRussians; treacherous, slant-eyed Yellow men have tried it; yes, anddaring white crooks, too. These didn't get Johnny, so why should a mereSpanish half-caste succeed?"
No, he would not admit that Johnny was dead; but as days passed and hedid not return he grew more and more restless. Each morning strengthenedhis determination to discover what had happened to his good pal. Eachevening found him with some more daring plan for discovering hiswhereabouts. When sending his men as spies among Daego's men at nightfailed, he took to paddling across the river and drifting in and outamong them in the dark himself. This was exceedingly dangerous business.He might be discovered, and if he were he would doubtless go the way ofhis pal, whatever way that might be. He was careless of danger; any riskwas not too great, could he but find Johnny.
It was during one of his secret visits to the enemy's camp that anexceedingly strange thing happened.
It was a hot, sultry night. Daego's men lay about on mats before thehuts. The murmur of voices constantly hung upon the air. Now and againthere came a shout of laughter from some black man. Half the workers wereblacks from Belize. The others were Spaniards. These seldom laughed.
At times, when the hum of voices ceased and laughter died away, from outof the bush there came the hoarse call of a jaguar, and who could say itwas not the "killer?"
Pant had dropped upon a mat at the edge of a group of black men. In theshadows 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 andsent ghost-like shimmers of light across the patches of mist that rosefrom the river.
The hum of voices was at its loudest. A black man, close to Pant, was inthe midst of a loud guffaw when, of a sudden, the laugh appeared tofreeze in his throat. This sound, or sudden cessation of sound, sounusual and so apparently without cause, spread silence like a blanketover 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. Hisoutstretched arm, clad as it was in a white sleeve of cotton stuff, waslike 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 bloodrun cold and set the hair at the back of his head standing on end. Themoonlight playing across the sky had caught something white and faintlyluminous that floated on air well above the tree tops. Even as hewatched, the thing seemed to assume the form of a white-robed figure. Thehead began to come out with glimmering brightness. Eyes appeared, and thesemblance of a mouth. Then, as the whole company, far and near, laywrapped in silence, there sounded such a rattling as one may sometimesfancy 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 thatwhite boy Daego drove into the bush. He's come back to ha'nt us. It'sdeath 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 cornerthere rose the chant of the only Carib of the crew. He was singing thenative song of his people--the Devil Song that is supposed to drive outevil spirits. Weird and fantastic as his song was, the thing that floatedabove the tree tops was far more weird.
Over in another corner Pant heard a shuffling of feet. Someone was movingaway, going toward the river. Fearing that they might find his dugout andso rob him of his means of returning to his own camp, he went skulkingalong after them. There were five or six black men in the group. Sincethey were not approaching his boat, he followed close enough to hear whatthey were saying. Arriving at the river bank, they pushed a long dugoutinto the water and with scarcely a sound leaped in and shoved away fromthe 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 themthar 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 willfollow; perhaps many more. Not so bad for a ghost," and he laughed softlyto himself.