DEATH AHEAD
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 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.