“IT’S DEATH AN’ DESTRUCTION”
Having barely escaped dropping into the jaws of an alligator, Johnny
Thompson wound his leg about his vine rope at a spot where a knotty
projection would give him partial support, then proceeded to make a sad
survey of the situation. There was the cocoanut tree, and there the
alligator. There were two other ’gators floating silently on the surface
of the pool. To land there was out of the question. There might be a
landing place on the other side of that particular rocky formation. It
was his only chance.
After climbing the vine, a slow and painful process, he made a hasty
survey. Already it was growing dark. There was need of haste, but the
dull stupor of the tropics was still upon him. He could not hasten. He
found it necessary to make his way over the jagged rocks for some
distance before finding a safe fastening for his vine.
When at last all was secure the sun had gone down and a dark bank of
clouds 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 upon
which he was to land. There, for a time, he lost his courage. His late
experience had unnerved him. What sort of landing was this which he now
approached? It is difficult to distinguish a motionless alligator from a
rocky surface even in broad daylight. How impossible in the dusk! So he
clung there motionless, trying to stare into the half darkness.
“Can—can’t hang here forever,” he breathed at last. “Here goes, and
here’s hoping!”
To his great joy he landed safely on a high and dry rock, quite free from
danger.
But at once there arose the problem of finding his way to the cocoanut
tree. 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—three
ripe ones and many green ones. The problem of securing the food was still
before him. At close sight of the tree his heart sank. It was taller and
larger 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 between
him and the nuts appeared to present a solid barrier through which it was
going 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 times
tried to break his way through the ring of branches to the fruit; fought
there until cold perspiration stood out upon his brow and his knees shook
so he could scarcely support himself; then each time slid slowly down.
The last time, with something very much like a sob, he threw himself upon
the 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 no
fire, with only the glittering stars above him, he slept the deep sleep
of utter exhaustion. From time to time as he slept there came sounds of
scratches on the rock above him, of grunts and other sounds in the
darkness; but no wild thing dared approach too close to this strange
smelling creature from another world.
The three days that followed that night on the rocks beside the falls
were like a long drawn out evil dream. True, Fate dropped him a
comforting morsel. One of the cocoanuts, a small one, had fallen during
the night. With fingers that shook, Johnny bored a hole through one eye
of it and drank the milk eagerly; drank to the last drop. Then he broke
the nut on a rock and gnawed at the rich, white meat until not a shred
was left.
Lacking strength and courage to build a second raft, he began making his
way 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 began
to feel faint. Now and again, as he paused to rest, he felt that he must
be losing consciousness.
A great desire to sleep came over him. Nothing much mattered. A strange
peace, 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 journey
on. When night came he could not rightly tell. In that gloom there was no
day. 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 of
beasts of prey, all were the same to him, for all came faint and
indistinct as in a dream.
Once he fought with a great spotted beast. A jaguar, perhaps. Or was
that, too, only a dream? He could not tell. He seemed to wake from a
horrible nightmare of claws and wild snarls to find his arms and chest
torn and bleeding and his knife gone.
“Must have fought with my knife and lost it in the struggle,” was his
mental comment.
He did not feel badly about that, nor did he search for it long. Nothing
seemed to trouble him. Great waves of dreams swept over him.
His lips were dry and parched. “Fever. Malaria. That mosquito did it,” he
told himself. That did not matter, either. Nothing mattered.
He dragged himself to the bank of the stream to cleanse his wounds. He
drank long and deeply. A small fish, darting too close, was caught in his
hand. This he devoured whole.
Other things of the jungle he ate—strange fruits, nuts and roots. Were
they poison? It did not matter. Nothing mattered.
So, every day growing weaker, he came at the end of the third day to
something very much like an abandoned clearing. Such it was, but he was
too far lost in his drowsy sleep to know it. He had passed half through
it when, of a sudden, he came upon a hut, a palm-thatched, forlorn and
deserted hut. Yet, to him in his delirium of fever it was something far
greater than an abandoned hut.
“Home!” he cried hoarsely. “Home!”
Throwing himself across the threshold, he fell prone in the dust of the
floor.
A great lizard, sleeping in the corner, awoke and darted away; a small
bird, whose nest was in the thatch, scolded shrilly. But Johnny heard
nothing, saw nothing.
When at last he summoned up strength enough to drag himself to a corner
and 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 one
overwrought 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 he
had found a mouldy gourd. With this in hand he dragged himself on hands
and knees to the river. Here in his eagerness for water he all but
pitched head-foremost into the stream. As it was, he left a print of his
hand in the plastic ooze on the bank.
The gourd he filled with water. Having spilled most of it on the way
back, 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, while
growing brighter, appeared always to elude them. “The red lure. The red
lure!” he repeated over and over.
Next morning found him too weak to rise or to think. He had only strength
to breathe. He could only stare helplessly at the dull brown roof of the
hut and hope for things that never come.
But now the scene was changed. Instead of the smell of decay all about
him, there was the perfume of apple blossoms. Over his head the white and
pink glory of Springtime blended with white patches of sunshine. Beneath
him was a soft bed of grass; above him apple trees and sky. From far and
near came the warble of thrushes, the chirp of robins, the shrill
challenge of woodpeckers. He was once more in the orchard that witnessed
his 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 himself
upon an elbow. He failed. Could he lift a hand? He could not. His eyes
closed 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 the
dishonest, the unkind, mean and criminal to a wholesome fear; the hand
that had never been employed in mere selfish ends, was powerless and
still.
The stream rushing past that cabin seemed a funeral train, powerful and
free, ready to carry that brave spirit away. Some strange bird sang a
song 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 up
there in the dust to sleep. The figure on the cot did not move. A great
lizard crept in through a rotted corner to gaze blinking at him. The
snake, sensing a dinner, slowly uncoiled, then with a motion surprisingly
quick for a creature of its kind, darted, forked tongue flashing, at the
lizard. There was a scurry of feet, a gliding scrape. Lizard and snake
passed within a few inches of that prostrate head. The snake passed over
the 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 the
wind through the palms seemed to say:
“He is dead! Dead! Dead!”
* * * * * * * *
Pant would not believe that Johnny was dead. “They can’t have done him
in,” he said to Hardgrave. “It’s a thing that really can’t be done. Burly
Russians; treacherous, slant-eyed Yellow men have tried it; yes, and
daring white crooks, too. These didn’t get Johnny, so why should a mere
Spanish half-caste succeed?”
No, he would not admit that Johnny was dead; but as days passed and he
did not return he grew more and more restless. Each morning strengthened
his determination to discover what had happened to his good pal. Each
evening found him with some more daring plan for discovering his
whereabouts. When sending his men as spies among Daego’s men at night
failed, he took to paddling across the river and drifting in and out
among them in the dark himself. This was exceedingly dangerous business.
He might be discovered, and if he were he would doubtless go the way of
his pal, whatever way that might be. He was careless of danger; any risk
was not too great, could he but find Johnny.
It was during one of his secret visits to the enemy’s camp that an
exceedingly strange thing happened.
It was a hot, sultry night. Daego’s men lay about on mats before the
huts. The murmur of voices constantly hung upon the air. Now and again
there came a shout of laughter from some black man. Half the workers were
blacks from Belize. The others were Spaniards. These seldom laughed.
At times, when the hum of voices ceased and laughter died away, from out
of the bush there came the hoarse call of a jaguar, and who could say it
was not the “killer?”
Pant had dropped upon a mat at the edge of a group of black men. In the
shadows 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 and
sent ghost-like shimmers of light across the patches of mist that rose
from the river.
The hum of voices was at its loudest. A black man, close to Pant, was in
the midst of a loud guffaw when, of a sudden, the laugh appeared to
freeze in his throat. This sound, or sudden cessation of sound, so
unusual and so apparently without cause, spread silence like a blanket
over 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. His
outstretched arm, clad as it was in a white sleeve of cotton stuff, was
like 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 blood
run cold and set the hair at the back of his head standing on end. The
moonlight playing across the sky had caught something white and faintly
luminous that floated on air well above the tree tops. Even as he
watched, the thing seemed to assume the form of a white-robed figure. The
head began to come out with glimmering brightness. Eyes appeared, and the
semblance of a mouth. Then, as the whole company, far and near, lay
wrapped in silence, there sounded such a rattling as one may sometimes
fancy 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 that
white boy Daego drove into the bush. He’s come back to ha’nt us. It’s
death 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 corner
there rose the chant of the only Carib of the crew. He was singing the
native song of his people—the Devil Song that is supposed to drive out
evil spirits. Weird and fantastic as his song was, the thing that floated
above the tree tops was far more weird.
Over in another corner Pant heard a shuffling of feet. Someone was moving
away, going toward the river. Fearing that they might find his dugout and
so rob him of his means of returning to his own camp, he went skulking
along after them. There were five or six black men in the group. Since
they were not approaching his boat, he followed close enough to hear what
they were saying. Arriving at the river bank, they pushed a long dugout
into the water and with scarcely a sound leaped in and shoved away from
the 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 them
thar 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 will
follow; perhaps many more. Not so bad for a ghost,” and he laughed softly
to himself.