THE VAMPIRES
After breakfast, Professor Amandus Ditson called the party together for
a conference in a wide, cool veranda on the ground floor.
"I should like to outline to you my plan of our expedition," he
announced precisely.
Jud gave an angry grunt. The old adventurer, who had been a hero among
prospectors and trappers in the Far North, was accustomed to be
consulted in any expedition of which he was a member.
"It seems to me, Professor Ditson," he remarked aggressively, "that
you're pretty uppity about this trip. Other people here have had
experience in treasure-huntin'."
"Meaning yourself, I presume," returned Professor Ditson, acidly.
"Yes, sir!" shouted Jud, thoroughly aroused, "that's exactly who I do
mean. I know as much about--_ouch!_" The last exclamation came when Jud
brought down his open hand for emphasis on the side of his chair and
incidently on a lurid brown insect nearly three inches in length, with
enormous nippers and a rounded body ending in what looked like a long
sting. Jud jerked his hand away and gazed in horror at his threatening
seat-mate.
"I believe I'm stung," he murmured faintly, gazing anxiously at his
hand. "What is it?"
"It would hardly seem to me," observed Professor Ditson, scathingly,
"that a man who is afraid of a harmless arachnid like a whip-scorpion,
and who nearly falls out of a canoe at the sight of a manta-ray
disporting itself, would be the one to lead an expedition through the
unexplored wilds of South America. We are going into a country," he went
on more earnestly, "where a hasty step, the careless touching of a tree,
or the tasting of a leaf or fruit may mean instant death, to say nothing
of the dangers from some of the larger carnivora and wandering
cannibals. I have had some experience with this region," he went on,
"and if there is no objection, I will outline my plan."
There was none. Even Jud, who had removed himself to another chair with
great rapidity, had not a word to say.
"I propose that we take a steamer by the end of this week to Manaos, a
thousand miles up the Amazon," continued the professor. "In the
meantime, we can do some hunting and collecting in this neighborhood.
After we reach Manaos we can go by boat down the Rio Negros until we
strike the old Slave Trail which leads across the Amazon basin and up
into the highlands of Peru."
"Who made that trail?" inquired Will, much interested.
"It was cut by the Spanish conquerors of Peru nearly four hundred years
ago," returned the scientist. "They used to send expeditions down into
the Amazon region after slaves to work their mines. Since then," he went
on, "it has been kept open by the Indians themselves, and, as far as I
know, has not been traversed by a white man for centuries. I learned the
secret of it many years ago, while I was living with one of the wilder
tribes," he finished.
The professor's plan was adopted unanimously, Jud not voting.
Then followed nearly a week of wonderful hunting and collecting. Even
Jud, who regarded everything with a severe and jaundiced eye, could not
conceal his interest in the multitude of wonderful new sights, sounds,
and scents which they experienced every day. As for Will, he lived in
the delightful excitement which only a bird-student knows who finds
himself surrounded by a host of unknown and beautiful birds. Some of
them, unlike good children, were heard but not seen. Once, as they
pushed their way in single file along a little path which wound through
the jungle, there suddenly sounded, from the dark depths beyond, a
shriek of agony and despair. In a moment it was taken up by another
voice and another and another, until there were at least twenty
screamers performing in chorus.
"It's only the ypicaha rail," remarked the professor, indifferently.
Hen Pine, who was in the rear with Will, shook his head doubtfully.
"Dis ol' jungle," he whispered, "is full o' squallers. De professor he
call 'em birds, but dey sound more like ha'nts to me."
Beyond the rail colony they heard at intervals a hollow, mysterious cry.
"That," explained Pinto, "is the Witch of the Woods. No one ever sees
her unless she is answered. Then she comes and drives mad the one who
called her."
"Nice cheery place, this!" broke in Jud.
"The alleged witch," remarked Professor Ditson severely, "happens to be
the little waterhen."
Later they heard a strange, clanging noise, which sounded as if some one
had struck a tree with an iron bar, and at intervals from the deepest
part of the forest there came a single, wild, fierce cry. Even Professor
Ditson could not identify these sounds.
"Dem most suttinly is ha'nts," volunteered Hen. "I know 'em. You
wouldn't catch dis chile goin' far alone in dese woods."
One of the smaller birds which interested Will was the many-colored
knight, which looked much like one of the northern kinglets. His little
body, smaller than that of a house-wren, showed seven colors--black,
white, green, blue, orange, yellow, and scarlet, and he had a blue crown
and a sky-blue eye. Moreover, his nest, fastened to a single rush, was a
marvel of skill and beauty, being made entirely of soft bits of dry,
yellow sedge, cemented together with gum so smoothly that it looked as
if it had been cast in a mold. Then there was the Bienteveo tyrant, a
bird about nine inches long, which caught fish, flies, and game, and fed
on fruit and carrion indiscriminately. It was entirely devoted to its
mate, and whenever a pair of tyrants were separated, they would
constantly call back and forth to each other reassuringly, even when
they were hunting. When they finally met again, they would perch close
to each other and scream joyously at being reunited. Another bird of the
same family, the scarlet tyrant, all black and scarlet, was so brilliant
that even the rainbow-hued tanagers seemed pale and the jeweled
humming-bird sad-colored in the presence of "coal-o'-fire," as the
Indians have named this bird.
Jud was more impressed with the wonders of the vegetable kingdom.
Whenever he strayed off the beaten path or tried to cut his way through
a thicket, he tangled himself in the curved spines of the
pull-and-haul-back vine, a thorny shrub which lives up to its name, or
was stabbed by the devil-plant, a sprawling cactus which tries quite
successfully to fill up all the vacant spaces in the jungle where it
grows. Each stem of this well-named shrub had three or four angles, and
each angle was lined with thorns an inch or more in length, so sharp and
strong that they pierced Jud's heavy hunting-boots like steel needles.
If it had not been for Hen, who was a master with the machete, Jud never
would have broken loose from his entanglements. Beyond the cactus, the
old trapper came to a patch of poor-man's plaster, a shrub with
attractive yellow flowers, but whose leaves, which broke off at a touch,
were covered on the under side with barbed hairs, which caught and clung
to any one touching them. The farther Jud went, the more he became
plastered with these sticky leaves, until he began to look like some
huge chrysalis. The end came when he tripped on a network of invisible
wires, the stems of species of smilax and morning-glory, and rolled over
and over in a thicket of the plasters. When at last he gained his feet,
he looked like nothing human, but seemed only a walking mass of green
leaves and clinging stems.
"Yah, yah, yah!" roared Hen. "Mars' Jud he look des like Br'er Rabbit
did when he spilled Br'er Bear's bucket o' honey over hisself an' rolled
in leafs tryin' to clean hisself. Mars' Jud sure look like de
grand-daddy ob all de ha'nts in dese yere woods."
"Shut up, you fool darky," said Jud, decidedly miffed. "Come and help
unwrap me. I feel like a cigar."
Hen laughed so that it was with difficulty that he freed Jud, prancing
with impatience, from his many layers of leaves. Later on, Hen showed
himself to be an even more present help in trouble. The two were
following a path a short distance away from the rest of the party, with
Jud in the lead. Suddenly the trapper heard the slash of the negro's
machete just behind him, and turned around to see him cutting the head
from a coiled rattlesnake over which Jud had stepped. If Jud had stopped
or touched the snake with either foot, he would most certainly have been
bitten, and it spoke well for Hen's presence of mind that he kept
perfectly quiet until the danger was over. This South American
rattlesnake had a smaller head and rougher scales than any of the
thirteen North American varieties, and was nearly six feet in length.
Professor Ditson was filled with regret that it had not been caught
alive.
"Never kill a harmless snake," he said severely to Hen, "without
consulting me. I would have been glad to have added this specimen to the
collection of the Zoölogical Gardens."
"Harmless!" yelled Jud, much incensed. "A rattlesnake harmless! How do
you get that way?"
"He didn't do you any harm, did he?" retorted the professor, acidly. "It
is certainly ungrateful of you to slander a snake just after he has
saved your life."
"How did he save my life?" asked Jud.
"By not biting you," returned Professor Ditson, promptly.
A little later poor Jud had a hair-raising experience with another
snake. He had shot a carancha, that curious South American hawk which
wails and whines when it is happy, and, although a fruit-eater with weak
claws and only a slightly hooked beak, attacks horses and kills lambs.
Jud had tucked his specimen into a back pocket of his shooting-jacket
and was following a little path which led through an open space in the
jungle. He had turned over his shot-gun to Joe, and was trying his best
to keep clear of any more tangling vines, when suddenly right beside him
a great dark snake reared its head until its black glittering eyes
looked level into Jud's, and its flickering tongue was not a foot from
his face. With a yell, Jud broke the world's record for the
back-standing broad-jump and tore down the trail shouting, "Bushmaster!
bushmaster!" at the top of his voice. As he ran he suddenly felt a sharp
pain in his back.
"He's got me!" he called back to Hen Pine, who came hurrying after him.
"Ouch! There he goes again!" and he plunged headlong into a patch of
pull-and-haul-back vine, which anchored him until Hen came up.
"Dat ain't no bushmaster, Mars' Jud," the latter called soothingly. "Dat
was only a trail-haunting blacksnake. He like to lie next to a path an'
stick up his ol' head to see who's comin', kin' o' friendly like."
"Friendly nothin'!" groaned Jud. "He's just bit me again."
As soon as Hen laid hold of Jud's jacket he found out what was the
matter. The hawk had only been stunned by Jud's shot and, coming to life
again, had promptly sunk his claws into the latter's back, and Jud had
mistaken the bird's talons for the fangs of the bushmaster. Professor
Ditson, who had hurried up, was much disappointed.
"If you ever meet a bushmaster, you'll learn the difference between it
and a harmless blacksnake," he observed. "Probably, however," he went on
thoughtfully, "it will be too late to do you much good."
"Why do all the snakes in South America pick on me?" complained Jud.
"There don't seem to be nothin' here but snakes an' thorns."
It was Pinto who gave the old trapper his first favorable impression of
the jungle. They had reached a deserted bungalow in the heart of the
woods, which Professor Ditson had once made his headquarters a number of
years before. There they planned to have lunch and spend the night. At
the meal Jud showed his usual good appetite in spite of his misfortunes,
but he complained afterward to Hen, who had attached himself specially
to the old man, about the absence of dessert.
"I got a kind of a sweet tooth," he said. "You ain't got a piece of pie
handy, have you?"
"No sah, no sah," replied Hen, regretfully. "You's about three thousand
miles south ob de pie-belt."
"Wait," broke in Pinto, who had been listening. "Wait a minute; I get
you something sweet," and he led the way to an enormous tree with
reddish, ragged bark. Some distance up its trunk was a deep hollow, out
of which showed a spout of dark wax nearly two feet long. In and out of
this buzzed a cloud of bees.
"I get you!" shouted Jud, much delighted, "a bee-tree! Look out, boy,"
he went on, as the Indian, clinging to the ridges of the bark with his
fingers and toes, began to climb. "Those bees'll sting you to death."
"South American bees hab no sting," explained Hen, as Pinto reached the
wax spout, and, breaking it off, thrust his hand fearlessly through the
cloud of bees into the store of honey beyond. A moment later, and he was
back again, laden with masses of dripping honeycomb, the cells of which,
instead of being six-sided, as with our northern bees, resembled each
one a little bottle. The honey was clear and sweet, yet had a curious
tart flavor. While Jud was sampling a bit of honeycomb, Pinto borrowed
Hen's machete and cut a deep gash through the rough red bark of the
tree. Immediately there flowed out from the cut the same thick, milky
juice which they had seen at their first breakfast in South America. The
Indian cut a separate gash for each one of the party, and they all
finished their meal with draughts of the sweet, creamy juice.
"It sure is a land flowing with milk an' honey," remarked Jud, at last,
after he had eaten and drunk all that he could hold.
"This vegetable milk is particularly rich in gluten," observed Professor
Ditson, learnedly.
"I guess it'd gluten up a fellow's stomach all right if he drank too
much of it," remarked Jud, smacking his lips over the sweet, sticky
taste which the juice of the cow-tree left in his mouth.
After lunch, most of the party retired to their hammocks in the cool
dark of the house for the siesta which South American travelers find an
indispensable part of a tropical day. Only the scientist and Will stayed
awake to catch butterflies through the scented silence of the forest
where the air, filled with the steam and perfume of a green blaze of
growth, had the wet hotness of a conservatory. When even the insects and
the untiring tree-toads were silenced by the sun, Professor Ditson,
wearing a gray linen suit with a low collar and a black tie, was as
enthusiastic as ever over the collecting of rare specimens, and was
greatly pleased at Will's interest in his out-of-door hobbies.
Together they stepped into the jungle, where scarlet passion-flowers
shone like stars through the green. Almost immediately they began to see
butterflies. The first one was a magnificent grass-green specimen,
closely followed by others whose iridescent, mother-of-pearl wings
gleamed in the sunlight like bits of rainbow. On a patch of damp sand a
group made a cloud of sulphur-yellow, sapphire-blue, and gilded
green-and-orange. The professor told Will that in other years he had
found over seven hundred different kinds within an hour's walk from this
forest bungalow, being more than double the number of varieties found in
all Europe.
Deep in the jungle, they at last came to a little open stretch where
the Professor had often collected before and which to-day seemed full of
butterflies. Never had Will imagined such a riot of color and beauty as
there dazzled his eyes. Some of the butterflies were red and yellow, the
colors of Spain. Others were green, purple, and blue, bordered and
spangled with spots of silver and gold. Then there were the strange
transparent "glass-wings." One of these, the _Hetaira esmeralda_, Will
was convinced must be the most beautiful of all flying creatures. Its
wings were like clear glass, with a spot of mingled violet and rose in
the center of each one. At a distance, only this shimmering spot could
be seen rising and falling through the air, like the wind-borne petals
of some beautiful flower. Indeed, as the procession of color drifted by,
it seemed to the boy as if all the loveliest flowers on earth had taken
to themselves wings, or that the rainbow-bridge of the sky had been
shattered into fragments which were drifting slowly down to earth.
The largest of them all were the swallowtails, belonging to the same
family as the tiger, and blue and black swallowtail, which Will had so
often caught in Cornwall. One of that family gleamed in the sunlight
like a blue meteor as it flapped its great wings, seven inches from tip
to tip and of a dazzling blue, high above the tree-tops. Another member
of the same family, and nearly as large, was satiny white in color.
Professor Ditson told Will that both of these varieties were almost
unknown in any collection, as they never came within twenty feet of the
ground, so that the only specimens secured were those of disabled or
imperfect butterflies which had dropped to the lower levels.
"Why couldn't I climb to the top of one of those trees with a net and
catch some?" inquired Will, looking wistfully up at the gleaming shapes
flitting through the air so far above him.
"Fire-ants and wasps," returned the professor, concisely. "They are
found in virtually every tree. No one can stand the pain of an ant's
bite, and one sting of a Maribundi wasp has been known to kill a strong
man."
That night, tired out by their long day of hunting, the whole party went
to bed early. Will's sleeping-room was an upper screened alcove, just
large enough to hold a single hammock. Somehow, even after his long hard
day, he did not feel sleepy. Great trees shadowed his corner, so thick
that even the stars could not shine through their leaves, and it seemed
to Will as if he could stretch out his hands and lift up dripping masses
of blackness, smothering, terrifying in its denseness. From a far-away
tree-top the witch-owl muttered over and over again that mysterious word
of evil, "Murucututu, murucututu," in a forgotten Indian tongue. He had
laughed when Pinto told him a few nights before that the owl was trying
to lay a spell on those who listened, but to-night in the dark he did
not laugh.
Then close at hand in a neighborhood tree-top sounded a beautiful
contralto frog-note slowly repeated. "Gul, gul, gul, gul, guggle, gul,
guggle," it throbbed. The slow, sweet call gave the boy a sense of
companionship, and he fell asleep with the music of it still sounding in
his ears.
Toward midnight he woke with a vague sense of uneasiness. It was as if
some hidden subconsciousness of danger had sounded an alarm note within
his nerve centers and awakened him. Something seemed to be moving and
whispering outside of the screened alcove. Then a body struck the screen
of mosquito-netting, and he heard the rotten fiber rip. Another second,
and his little room was filled with moving, flitting, invisible shapes.
Great wings fanned the air just above his face. There was the faint reek
of hot, furry bodies passing back and forth and all around him. For a
moment Will lay thinking that he was in a nightmare, for he had that
strange sense of horror which paralyzes one's muscles during a bad dream
so that movement is impossible. At last, by a sudden effort, he
stretched out his hand and struck a match from a box which stood on a
stand beside his hammock. At the quick spurt of flame through the dark,
from all parts of the little room came tiny, shrill screeches, and the
air around him was black with whirling, darting shapes. Suddenly into
the little circle of light from the match swept the horrible figure of a
giant bat, whose leathern wings had a spread of nearly two and a half
feet, and whose horrible face hovered and hung close to his own. Never
had the boy believed that any created thing could be so grotesquely
hideous. The face that peered into his own was flanked on each side by
an enormous leathery ear. From the tip of the hairy muzzle grew a
spearlike spike, and the grinning mouth was filled with rows of
irregular, tiny, gleaming sharp teeth, gritting and clicking against
each other. Deep-set little green eyes, which glistened and gleamed like
glass, glared into Will's face. Before he could move, a great cloud of
flying bats, large and small, settled down upon him. Some of them were
small gray vampire-bats with white markings, others were the great
fruit-eating bats, and there were still others dark-red, tawny-brown,
and fox-yellow. Whirling and wheeling around the little point of flame,
they dashed it out, and crawled all over the boy until he felt stifled
and smothered with the heat of their clinging bodies.
Suddenly he felt a stinging pain in his bare shoulder and in one of his
exposed feet. As he threw out his hands desperately, tiny clicking teeth
cut the flesh of wrists and arms. The scent of blood seemed to madden
the whole company of these deaths-in-the-dark, and, although the actual
bites were made by the little vampire-bats, yet at the sight of them
feasting, the other night-fliers descended upon the boy like a black
cloud and clustered around the little wounds, as Will had seen moths
gather around syrup spread on trees of a warm June night.
The sting of their bites lasted for only a second, and the flapping of
their wings made a cool current of air which seemed to drug his senses.
Dreamily he felt them against him, knew that they were draining his
life, yet lacked the will-power to drive them away. Suddenly there
flashed into his mind all that he had heard and read of the deadly
methods of these dark enemies of mankind. With a shriek, he threw out
his arms through the furry cloud that hung over him and sprang out of
his hammock.
At his scream, Professor Ditson rushed in with a flash-light, followed
by Pinto, Hen, and Joe, while Jud slept serenely through the whole
tumult. They found Will dripping with blood from a dozen little
punctures made by the sharp teeth of the bats, and almost exhausted from
fright and the loss of blood. Then came pandemonium. Seizing sticks,
brooms, machetes, anything that came to hand, while Will sank back into
his hammock, the others attacked the bats. Lighted by the flash of
Professor Ditson's electric light, they drove the squeaking, shrieking
cloud of dark figures back and forth through the little room until the
last one had escaped through the torn netting or was lying dead on the
floor.
Twenty-seven bats altogether were piled in a heap when the fight was
over.