JOHNNY’S GHOST WALKS
Palms that hung over the silent, swiftly flowing stream murmured and
sighed. Their murmuring and sighing was as sad as the voice of pines and
hemlocks in a graveyard on a winter’s night. Sadder still was the strange
wail of some tropical bird, piping always on the same minor key. On the
bed of decaying mats in the abandoned cabin where little lizards ran in
and out, Johnny Thompson lay white and motionless.
Came an hour when there fell upon all this gloom a shrill discordant
note. The scream of a wild parrot broke the drowsy silence. This was
answered by another, and yet another, until all up and down the stream
the air was filled with harsh, discordant music.
The innocent cause of all this disturbance was a fantastically painted
dugout, all striped and spotted with red, blue, green and white. Its prow
and stern rose high out of the water like the ancient crafts of the
Vikings.
Forward sat a girl, aft was a boy, and in the middle sat a large native
Carib woman. So brown and rugged was the girl that she might easily have
been taken for a Spaniard. A second look revealed deep-set freckles, a
glow of color, a mass of curly hair, and an indefinable air of confidence
and frankness that could belong only to an Anglo-Saxon. This girl, Jean
McQueen, was Scotch. The boy was her brother. Just over from England,
where he had attended school for years, he had the attire, the manners
and the color of a perfect young English gentleman. In his tweed nickers
and his smart sport shirt, he seemed quite as much out of place in the
wilderness as his sister in her patched and faded khaki suit seemed at
home.
“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 a
low-hanging palm leaf, the girl seized her paddle to send the light craft
forward.
For a space of ten minutes nothing might be heard save the dip-dip of
their 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 few
days.” She pointed to a well-defined hand print in the half-dried mud of
the 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 creek
for water had made. The boy followed, reluctantly, and the Carib woman
waddled along behind. More than once the girl paused to examine with a
practiced eye patches of grass that lay flat down as if some wild
creature had slept there. These were the spots where Johnny had fallen
and found himself too weak to rise at once.
A little cry of dismay escaped the girl’s lips as her eyes fell upon the
white-faced, prostrate form on the decaying mats.
“Dead!” her lips framed the word she did not speak. Death to this girl
who knew so much of life, and loved it so, was a terrifying thing, thrice
terrible in the heart of a wilderness. Yet here was a boy, a boy of her
own race, who, to all appearances, had died here alone in this abandoned
hut.
“Dead!” she whispered. “How—how awful!”
Some little lizards scampered over the dry palm leaves as her foot
stirred the dust at the door. In another moment she was bending over the
prostrate 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 the
prostrate boy’s face. There are lines in one’s face which to the keen
observer tells the story of his life. Has he been kind and thoughtful of
others? Has he lived brave and clean? It is written there. Has he been
harsh, impatient, careless, dissipated even in small ways? This, too, is
recorded there. As the girl read the story of Johnny’s life she found
herself 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’s
lips.
A moment of silence followed. Then of a sudden the wrinkle of anxiety on
the girl’s brow disappeared. Johnny’s lips moved in an inarticulate
murmur.
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. It
seemed night. He was hidden away in some deep forest. A storm had set the
tree tops to twisting and writhing. The constant roll of thunder, mingled
with the moaning of the trees, made the night hideous.
Like a flash the scene changed. It was day—Sunday in the little old
church at home. Someone rose to sing; a beautiful white-gowned figure
with a sweet melodious voice. She sang, but the words of the song had no
meaning 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 on
land or sea, all red, orange and gold.
It was in the midst of this last broken dream that he opened his eyes and
stared around him.
To his vast amazement he saw that the vision of orange and gold had not
completely vanished. Neither had the singing nor the sound of thunder
been hushed. They had merely taken on a more definite form, a truer
meaning. 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 the
words of a strange native song. As for the thunder, it was merely the
wild beating of a barrel drum. And the flash of orange and gold was a
girl, a very beautiful girl, swaying gracefully in a sort of rhythmic
exercise to the beating of the drum.
He stared in unbelieving astonishment. The thing was not real. He was
still dreaming. He tried to put up a hand to rub the illusion away, but
finding this difficult because of weakness, contented himself with
staring about the room where the golden vision continued to sway and
whirl and the reverberating drum shook dust from the ceiling.
Slowly familiar objects came to view. The roof of the palm thatched cabin
looked familiar. He had lain beneath it some time. That might have been
long ago, or was it yesterday? He remembered the holes in the roof. The
holes, one had been triangular, another round. The spots were still
there, but instead of sunlight streaming through, the holes were covered
by a fresh green palm leaf thatch.
He looked again at the swaying spot of gold that was the girl. The girl
seemed almost real. Her face was flushed. It would be, if she swayed to
music in such a clime. The black woman, like an ebony statue, sat beating
the drum as she sang:
“Ne-ha aba ne ha aba muta.”
Then a sudden thought struck Johnny. The dancing girl was not black; she
was 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—a
real girl.
“It’s a dream,” he told himself. “A white girl in the heart of this
wilderness? I’m dead. This is Heaven. She’s an angel.”
He wanted to laugh at this last, but did not dare. It might break the
spell! The girl was too robust, too red-cheeked for an angel. Whoever
heard of a freckle-faced angel? But whoever heard of a real white girl in
such a spot?
The mats looked real, too. What of those on which he lay? He ran his
fingers 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, he
had lain himself down to die.
“Apparently I’m not dead,” he told himself. “These people must have
arrived 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 in
the abandoned hut, the girl, Jean, had insisted upon abandoning all plans
for their future except the business of bringing him back to life. To
this end the native Carib woman had searched the jungle for such herbs as
have 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 would
provide broth and for fruits to supply refreshing drink for the invalid.
The strange music and the rythmic motion that accompanied it was the idea
of the Carib woman. Did she attach some wild native religious
significance to it? Who can tell? The boy had made the drum from a deer’s
skin and a hollow log; the girl had joined in merely to please the Carib
woman 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. When
Johnny 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 in
the heart of a wilderness; quite another to find one’s self surrounded by
true friends, none the less real because they are new, and to feel
strength and life coursing back into one’s veins.
At first Johnny asked few questions. Asking questions had never been his
way of discovering the truth. He looked on with astonishment at the
things that went on around him. The wilderness which to him had been a
land 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 the
brush. At night he drank such broth and ate such tender shreds of meat as
had never passed his lips before. The strange, glorious girl vanished for
an hour, to return with yellow melons, melons that grew on
trees,—“pawpaw” she called it. She brought water that was sweet and
fresh, not from the hot stream, but from a vine torn from a tree where it
clung. 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 the
fourth day he walked a bit unsteadily, but quite confidently, out of the
cabin 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 moment
dressed in her humblest garb of faded khaki, was bending over a native
mahogany wash bowl, found somewhere in the cabin, washing clothes.
Engaged in this task, with her thick, curly hair drawn up in a tight knot
at the top of her head, with her brown arms flaked with suds, she seemed
real enough.
“No angel,” he murmured, “just a real girl; a whole lot better!” he told
himself. “I wonder where they came from, and where they were going when
they found me?”
Strangely enough, had he asked the girl this last question she would have
been obliged to answer: “I don’t know.”
The truth was that the Scotch girl and her brother were quite as lost in
this wilderness as he and quite as eager to find their way out.
* * * * * * * *
In the meantime the strange doings, the flashes of phosphorescent light
and strange noises, continued behind the locked door of Johnny’s office
at the camp on Rio Hondo. In spite of this, however, the Caribs continued
to work faithfully at their tasks and the work of getting out the red
lure went on.
“You’re making fine progress,” said Hardgrave.
“Yes,” said Pant, “we’ll be able to show a fine profit. That is,” his
brow 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. Wait
and see.”
“It’s the ghost,” smiled Pant.
Strange as it may seem, though Johnny in his far away jungle hut was
greatly improved in health, his ghost walked nightly upon the sky above
the timber that faced Daego’s camp.
Every night, too, Pant slipped across the river to join the enemy’s camp
and to catch the drift of events. He found that these Central Americans,
black and brown alike, had a great fear of ghosts, particularly of white
ghosts. Johnny’s ghost hovering there near the clouds threw some into
near hysteria and sent others hurrying down the river.
It was easy to see, they explained, why this white ghost hovered above
the tree tops. The hot and humid air close to the earth in the jungle has
always been hated and feared by the white man. Above the trees the air is
fresh and crisp. Why, then, should any ghost descend to earth?
But despite the fact that he did not descend, his presence above them
meant that in time pestilence, a death-dealing fever, a destructive storm
or a flood would descend upon the camp and wipe it from the face of the
earth.
One person did not believe in the ghost—Daego. He raved and stormed at
his men. Day and night, as if searching for something, he haunted the
banks of the river. More than once Pant barely escaped being discovered
by him. In spite of all this, however, the ghost appeared promptly on
schedule and Daego’s ranks grew thinner and thinner.
“Keep it up, dear ghost,” Pant whispered, “keep it up, and in time we’ll
have nothing to fear from Daego. Oh!” he sighed, “if only Johnny were
here to enjoy it all!”
But Johnny was far away in the palm leaf thatched cabin on a stream that
was 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 on
the upper stretches of Rio Hondo.