_Mystery Stories for Boys_
The Red Lure
_By_
ROY J. SNELL
The Reilly & Lee Co.
Chicago
_Printed in the United States of America_
Copyright, 1926
by
The Reilly & Lee Co.
_All Rights Reserved_
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I The White Gleam 9
II Sudden Catastrophe 23
III Mysterious Sounds 38
IV Tree Hay and a Jaguar 47
V Narrow Escapes 58
VI Lost in the Jungle 65
VII Peril in the Dark 77
VIII Death Ahead 87
IX “It’s Death an’ Destruction” 100
X Johnny’s Ghost Walks 114
XI Provisioned for a Long Journey 128
XII A Bronze Beauty 135
XIII Purring Shadows 151
XIV Forgotten Tribes 159
XV The Hidden City 169
XVI Pant Sets a Trap 177
XVII The Spanish Girl Reappears 185
XVIII Pant Springs the Trap 191
XIX Capturing a Black Shadow 199
XX Century Old Caverns 209
XXI Trapped 218
XXII Magic Power 228
XXIII The Passing of the Ghost 237
XXIV Blind Drifting 242
XXV The Battle of Rio Hondo 252
THE RED LURE
CHAPTER I
THE WHITE GLEAM
As Johnny Thompson bent over the black waters of the river he thought he
heard a stealthy movement behind him. Before he could decide whether or
not his eyes had deceived him he caught the reflection of a sudden white
gleam on the dark surface of the water. At the same time something told
him to dive, and dive he did. With the rocket-like speed that was his, he
shot straight into the water, then away beneath the surface. He rose some
ten yards downstream. After one deep, silent breath, he grasped a red
mangrove branch for support, then paused to listen.
He did not listen long, for there came a sudden wild swirl of water close
beside him.
“Alligator!” he breathed, as with a sudden and mighty tug at the mangrove
branch he threw himself clear of the water and out upon the bank.
Here he paused to listen again. Catching no sound, he began creeping back
toward his first position, the foot of the path that had been cut to the
river.
All this time his mind was working on double-quick time. What had caused
that sound behind him there on the bank—man or beast? What was the white
gleam? Was it, after all, only a product of his overwrought mind? The
whole day had seemed full of brooding menace.
“No,” he told himself stoutly, “it was not all imagination. The sound
might have been—but the white gleam? No. I saw that. After all, though,
it might have been only the reflection of a white heron in silent
flight.”
Night was coming on. It would soon be dark. He did not care for that. His
flashlight was in his pocket. As he crept forward through the thick
tangled brush he seemed to feel the swift power of the dark old river.
Rio Hondo, they called it—Black River. And black it was. Johnny had never
before seen water that could so perfectly reproduce the black gleam of
polish ebony. And yet, somehow, he had come to think of the river as his
friend. That was how he came to be there now. Pant, his pal, was away.
The thirty black and brown faces about camp had seemed singularly strange
and unfriendly, so he had come to the river for comfort. And now, how had
it repaid him? Had it in that white gleam given him a friendly warning,
or had it tricked him into a place of great peril, into danger of being
eaten by an alligator?
Suddenly his thoughts came to an end. Sooner than he expected he broke
through the “bush” into the path. Starting back, he stared for a second
in silence.
“No one here,” he whispered. “But wait; some one has been here.”
In astonishment he picked up a long-bladed, gleaming knife. It was a
machete, the tool and weapon of the bushman of Central America.
“Looks like Petillo’s machete,” he breathed. What could it mean?
Just then he caught a sudden sound from the water. It was like a startled
cry for help. He thought he caught sight of a head above the black
waters. He might have been mistaken. It was growing dark. He drew his
flashlight from his pocket. It was water-logged, short circuited,
useless.
Again came the strange cry and at the same time a great swirl of water.
“The alligator!” he breathed.
For an instant he thought of throwing himself in the water to go to the
rescue. This he knew was madness. There were other alligators. Grim,
terrible, man-eating beasts were these sharp nosed alligators of British
Honduras, Central America.
So, as he sat there, crowded well back in the bushes, silent, motionless,
listening and thinking, darkness came and blotted out all, both good and
bad, that might have been seen upon the surface of the Rio Hondo.
A deep feeling of foreboding and gloom settled down upon him as darkness
hid the river.
Picking up the machete that lay at his feet, he felt of its edge.
“Keen as a razor,” he murmured. “Did some one try to kill me with it? If
so, I wonder why? Well, he didn’t, and won’t. Providence took a hand.
Must have lost his balance and fallen in. Bad swimmer. Current carried
him out and a ’gator got him. That’s the way it looks. Can’t tell,
though.”
He shuddered at the thought; the ’gator might have gotten him, too.
Johnny was in a strange land, the strangest he had ever seen. In other
days, as you will know if you have read our other stories of the
adventures of Johnny Thompson, fate had led him over the frozen trails of
Alaska, down the timber roads of the Cascades and out over the sea. Now
here he was far up a tropical river, in the heart of the “bush,” alone.
It is not pleasant to be alone in a tropical jungle at night. Johnny rose
to go. His flashlight gone, there was nothing left but to grope his way
back over the machete-hewn trail to camp. It was some distance—all of a
mile.
As he took his first step, off to the right a twig snapped. His heart
skipped a beat and his face felt strangely cold. Had he been watched? Now
the creature was going on before him. Was it a man, or a jaguar? (Natives
called them tigers.) He preferred the word “tiger.”
Gripping the keen edged machete, he struck away straight down the trail.
There came no further sound. Slowly, steadily, he advanced. Half the
distance was covered. He was breathing more easily when a sudden hoarse
sound brought him to a stand.
Then he laughed. Off to the right he caught the gleam of two small red
balls of fire. And again that hoarse bark broke the silence of the night.
“’Gator,” he said with a chuckle. “Forgot there was one in a pool over
there.”
He did not laugh five minutes later as he heard, off to the left, the
pu-pu-pu of a jaguar. These great cats were dangerous. They had been
known to kill a horse and swim a river with the carcass. The golden balls
that now peered at him from the first branch of a great Santa Maria tree
were not reassuring.
Redoubling his pace, he hurried on toward camp. Five minutes later, with
a sigh of satisfaction, he broke through the brush into a clearing.
Here he paused in astonishment. The place was silent, more silent than he
had known it even in the dead of night. The gleam of coals on the cooking
platform and the dim bulk of cabins looming in the dark were the only
signs that men lived here.
“Hello there!” he shouted.
To his utter bewilderment there came no answer.
An hour before he had left thirty men here. Now there was not one. What
could it mean? Again cold dread gripped his heart.
Turning, he hurried down a logging road to the edge of a broad creek.
There the white bulk of a large flat-bottomed boat greeted him.
“They didn’t take the _Maria Theresa_, anyway.” There was a comfort in
that. “Fellow’d sure be up against it a hundred miles from the coast
without a boat.”
Even as he thought this, his ears caught the steady dip-dip of pit-pan
paddles.
“Hello! Hello there!” he shouted.
Again there came no answer. Even the paddles, if paddles there had been,
were silent.
“Huh!”
He turned and walked slowly back to camp. There he groped about until he
had found a bench. This he leaned against the side of a cabin, and
burying his back in the soft cohune nut thatch, pressed his brow with
both hands in an endeavor to think sanely and clearly.
Time passed. The coals on the cooking platform growing dimmer and dimmer,
at last blinked out. The darkness appeared to grow more intense, the
night more silent.
“They said it couldn’t be done,” he muttered at last, “and perhaps it
can’t. But there was the red lure. The red lure,” he repeated softly.
The red lure! He had heard of it first in a little cabinetmaker’s shop in
Chicago. In that shop an old man wrought wonders with precious
woods—rosewood and ebony and mahogany. Strange tales this old man had to
tell, and he told them as he worked. Tales they were of tropical isles,
of green rivers and dense forests.
One day as he put the last touch to a bit of wood that gleamed red as a
western sunset, he had exclaimed:
“The red lure, Johnny! The red lure! That’s what’s beckoned men on, and
times enough to their death!”
Then, after laying the bit of wood down as gently as if it had been a
priceless porcelain top, he had added:
“And, Johnny, I know where the lure ends. Far up a tropical river, a big
black river. It’s there, Johnny, and unscarred by the hand of man.”
“Why?” Awed by the old man’s tones, Johnny had whispered the word.
“That’s it, Johnny.” The old man had half closed his eyes. “That’s what
the owner of that land would like to know. Three times he has sent men in
boats up the Rio Hondo. Three times they came back empty handed; that is,
the ones that came back at all. Why? Who knows. Who can solve all the
mysteries of the tropics? Who can guess the trickery and intrigue that
lies hidden in a Spaniard’s mind? The red lure is still there. Men have
died for it; but there it stands. The red lure, Johnny. The red lure!”
He had turned once more to his work, but Johnny had not forgotten.
Something within him had been stirred to the depths. He had heard the
call of the wilderness, had felt the challenge of the impossible.
In time, having sought out his partner of many adventures, “Panther Eye,”
or “Pant” as he was called, he had gone in search of the owner of the red
lure. He had found him to be a rich business man.
At first this capitalist, Roderick Grayson, had merely laughed at the
proposition which the two boys made—that they be given a try at the red
lure. In time he had come to take them more seriously.
At last he had made them a proposition.
“I’m tired of having you about,” he growled good-naturedly. “I’ll give
you a chance. You go to Belize, the Capitol of Honduras. That’s a city of
twelve thousand. Plenty of men and boats there. I’ll instruct my agent
there to furnish you with motor boats and pay for thirty men. You may
have them a hundred days, not a day more. At the end of that time you
must show me a profit from your expedition or you lose this concession.
Is that plain? And satisfactory?”
“Quite.”
“Then good-bye.”
The rich man had bowed them out, and that is how it happened that on this
particular night Johnny was far up the Rio Hondo.
“And now this!” Johnny said to himself. “A bolt out of the blue! An
apparent attempt at my life. My men vanish. What is to be the end of it
all?”
Suddenly he realized that he was alone in the dark; that perils lurked in
every corner of the jungle.
“Well enough to have some sort of light,” he told himself.
There was a flashlight on a beam in the very cabin against which his
bench rested. To secure that and to try it out by a flash on the floor
was but the work of a moment.
Upon returning to the bench he felt a little more secure. As he sat down
his foot struck something and sent it to the ground with a thud.
“The machete,” he thought.
Picking it up, he examined it curiously. On the horn handle of this
bushman’s sword he discovered the initials, S. P.
“Seperino Petillo,” he said with a start. “So it was Petillo. I was not
mistaken.”
His mind was in a whirl. Petillo, a half-caste Spaniard, had been his
foreman. Surely, this was a strange land. The very man to whom he had
given position and standing among his people had, apparently, tried to
kill him.
For some time he sat there thinking and his thoughts were long, long
thoughts.
The red lure was all about him. The smell of it was in his nostrils.
Yet, less than a third of their work was done. To establish a camp, to
build cabins from the trunks and leaves of the cohune nut tree, to cut
paths and roads, all this had taken time. A few weeks more and they would
have been drifting silently downstream with their red treasure.
“And now this has happened!” he groaned.
And yet, what had happened? He could not tell—could only guess.
Hearing a sound to the right, he turned to listen. Catching it again, he
threw his powerful flashlight on the spot.
To his astonishment the light fell full upon the face and figure of a
girl.
She was a short, brown-eyed, bare-footed, Spanish girl, about sixteen
years of age. Too startled to move, she stood there for an instant,
blinking in the light. Then she turned and fled down the path.
Too much surprised to follow at once, Johnny sat in his place, wondering.
“There’s not such a girl within fifty miles. I am sure of that,” he told
himself. “Must have come over from Quintanaroo.”
Beyond the Rio Hondo lay Quintanaroo, a land of many mysteries.
Rising, he followed down the path to the creek’s edge. There he sent the
gleam of his flashlight shooting down the creek. He was just in time to
see a slender canoe disappear round a clump of red mangrove.
“That’s where she came from,” he assured himself. “I wonder why?”
As he turned to retrace his steps he caught the long drawn, hoarse call
of a jaguar. There were empty, palm thatched cottages up the river.
Rumors were afloat of a man-eating “tiger” who had carried away the
former owners of these cabins. Could it be that he had been mistaken
about the plot? Had he misjudged the action of the unfortunate one at the
river bank? Had his men become frightened by tales of the man-eater, and
fled? Who could tell?
“Oh, well,” he sighed, “morning will come, and with it the light.”