AN UNPLEASANT TRIP
That trip up the Rio Patuca was one of the worst experiences Tom had
ever been through, and Bill agreed with him when he said so.
Starting through a narrow inlet, taking advantage of the inflow of the
tide, the canoes came into a lagoon; the water was shallow but clear;
the banks were lined with the most dense and varied vegetation
imaginable; Tom could recognize at a distance, only the cocoanut palms,
and the mangroves, with their huge, spreading roots.
The canoes proceeded up the lagoon to a native village, marked by a
cluster of coco-palms which seemed to be floating in the water. The
whole village turned out to watch the landing of the white men and their
young companion and Tom saw that they were as curious about him as he
was about them. The young men were clean-limbed and had very fine faces;
the girls were almost beautiful, though the older women showed how labor
and daily toil aged and furrowed their faces and bent their bodies.
After a stay overnight the canoes set out again, and day after day the
routine of paddling, fighting mosquitos, landing for lunch, going
forward, finding a place to camp, putting up mosquito bars and trying to
prevent them from being filled by the pests before it was too late, was
all there was to report.
“They certainly named this country well,” Tom told Bill as they dived
under their mosquito netting on the second day of the trip.
The mosquitos were much larger than the Northern species, and were of
such a tough, rubbery body that in order to destroy them it was
necessary to strike ones-self with great force—“More punishment than
relief!” Tom observed, ruefully, as he fought the pests.
“They have to be killed,” replied Bill, “and we’ll have to get our net
up earlier at night, because they get worse as we go on, Henry says.”
“Yes,” Tom admitted. “He told me that if anybody stayed out from the
protection of his net for an hour at night, he’d be bitten to death!”
Bill agreed that it was quite probable.
As they went on, finally reaching and turning into the muddy mouth of
the river itself through a narrow channel, Tom and Bill came to the
conclusion that their trip had more difficulties in store than the
pestilence of the country’s terrible mosquitos. Henry Morgan kept away
from them, morose and sullen; when he caught Henry’s eyes bent on him,
or on Bill, Tom saw that they were brooding and angry. Henry had long
since disposed of his final bottle of “tonic,” and he seemed to be
holding and feeding his grudge against Bill and Tom for destroying the
other bottle.
He was very hard on his Indians. He yelled at them, drove them, said
foul things to them and about them. Tom and Bill, on the contrary, were
decent in their attitudes; and, although the Indians were stolid and
silent, seldom speaking, almost never smiling, they showed, in little
services, that were human and responsive under their stolid exteriors.
They often put up Tom’s mosquito bar for him, gave him and his closer
companion the best they had, but always without the least flicker of
expression.
Henry had to demand help, had to drive and threaten to get anything
done; Tom had only to wish for an adjustment of his sleeping couch, of
boughs, in a rude camp—and it was done! Perhaps it was because, during
the long, humid, tensely hot days, he took the trouble to see that the
heavy bough with which he fought mosquitos was used to drive them away
from the paddlers as well; also, because he and Bill shared their food
when the Indians had little. There seemed to be no open appreciation,
but gratitude was evident in many ways, although Henry, seeing them wave
their branches to flick the mosquitos from the Indians’ backs, derided
them and sneered, saying an Indian had no feelings.
Camping on mud banks, uncomfortable and mean, paddling through muddy
waters, past vast jungles and wide, low savannas of lush grass, past
wide cane-brakes, they pursued slow but steady, if tedious progress. Tom
began to wish the trip were done. Rain, fog and wet, dreary days were
far more frequent than dry ones; and this, added to the mud beneath
their camps, the small food supply and the mean temper of Morgan, made
things more than unpleasant.
In time they reached a small village; the huts were of palmetto stakes,
driven into the ground close together, in the shape of an oblong
enclosure with rounded ends and a space for a door; roofs were of a
thatch of woven reeds or brush. The few Indians were silent, stolid
people, but not unkind or cruel in their attitude. At this village, Bill
and Henry were informed, they would be left until men came down the
river to take them on.
“Do they know we’re here—and in a hurry?” ventured Tom.
The canoeman looked blank and said little.
“They know,” Morgan responded in surly, husky tones. “Indians know when
people come.”
“How do they know?” Tom persisted. “Do they send messengers?”
“They know!” snapped Henry and turned away.
Tom made no comment on the rude behavior, but busied himself making
friends with a small boy, evidently a child belonging to some one of
importance. The youngster, about eight, liked the white boy, some years
older, and when his shyness was overcome, he spent hours watching Tom as
the white youth demonstrated how a small, bright red magnet he carried
would draw and cling to several nails he also had.
The boy, Porfirio, in response, showed Tom many trails across the swamp
savannas surrounding the village, and helped him to search for beautiful
tropical birds’ eggs, curious stones, and other specimens. Always he
begged to be shown the magnet and its power; it fascinated him and, the
day that Tom let him, fearfully and timidly, take it and play with it
for a while, he looked toward Tom as one might have looked at a master,
and from then on, followed him like a dog.
By that time Tom had picked up enough of the village dialect to learn
that Porfirio’s father had been slain by one of the jaguars—or, as the
natives termed the ferocious cats, tigers, caught on a lonely trail
without a weapon, and horribly mangled. Tom felt sorry for the desolate
child and did his best to amuse him.
After several wasted weeks, a great canoe arrived from upriver, in
which, besides the paddlers, was an old man, bent and wizened and
terribly dwarfed; yet he was stronger than any other man—or any two
men—among the Indians, and seemed to be greatly respected. He was Toosa,
the man they had come so far to see!
Henry at once began to question him, but Toosa paid no heed to him at
all. He had come, primarily, to take the child, Porfirio, a
great-grandson, to his own village further up the turbid stream.
“We came all the way up here—you recognize me, don’t you?” Henry cried,
and when the old man nodded, went on, “we came all the way to find out
where——”
Toosa made a gesture, stopping Henry. He had just landed and his young
great-grandson ran to greet him. Toosa merely touched his shoulder with
a finger and turned back toward the boats after a brief word with one of
the natives. But Henry caught his thin, though muscular and wiry arm.
Tom, watching, saw a display of a curious power that the old man
possessed. He did not move his body or shake Henry off; he simply turned
his head and fixed his steady, bright eyes on the impatient white man.
Henry, about to speak, seemed to be struck by some invisible message of
power, for he closed his lips, holding the grip he had for a moment;
then his hand loosened and dropped, and he stood still. Toosa, turning
back toward the boats, resumed his way, the small boy trotting at his
side.
“We don’t want to let him get away, though, at that,” demurred Tom, but
Bill merely gave him a warning glance, and slowly strolled along behind
the dwarfed, bent old figure. Henry, after a moment, took up the march,
and Tom kept close to Bill, curious and uncertain what was to happen.
“He’s a powerful chief, even if he isn’t the magician that the Indians
think he is,” Bill observed quietly to Tom. “He won’t talk to us until
he has settled himself in his own village.”
“But how will we get there?” Tom wondered.
He soon found out. As soon as he had settled himself in his great,
roughly shaped canoe, made from the trunk of a huge tree, Toosa turned
to the three whites on the bank, and beckoned.
“You take us?” asked Bill in slow English. “Good!”
“I take!”
“Did you expect us?” asked Tom, mystified at the Indian’s calm
arrangements for them.
“How did you know?——”
“I know!” answered the old man briefly, and said no more. As they took
their designated positions the chief took a paddle several times heavier
and broader than the rest, made a signal, and the canoe began to glide
away from the Indians, watching on the bank.
That huge paddle served well during the trip up the river, and the
amazing strength with which the wiry old man used it was a marvel to
Tom. There were rapids, and dangerous ones they proved to be. The swift
water almost carried the canoe back, but with a strong sweep of that
great driver, the Indian caused it to tremble; with a second heave,
while the other Indians strove with their smaller paddles, he sent the
boat forward, and then guided and drove it between the rocks, over the
rough waters, past dangerous whirlpools. Once, only a swift swing of his
paddle turned them aside before they were dashed to death in a whirling
smother of foaming waters. Again, by exertions that seemed akin to those
of a giant, he took the craft forward when one of the lighter paddles
broke and the crew was in confusion and terror.
And when, close to nightfall, they landed, he stepped from the canoe as
serene and unwearied as if he had been one of the three white
passengers. Tom heard from Bill that the oldest Indians in that country
claimed that Toosa lived there and was just as they saw him today, when
the Indians themselves had been children.
Quartered in a hut, fed and well cared for, at least two of the white
travelers obeyed Toosa’s brief order, which Bill understood to be a
command that they must not set foot outside the hut. The reason for it
seemed plain. It was a precaution against danger. During Toosa’s absence
many of the villagers had become demons through drinking the fermented
cane-juice which was brewed in a huge trough in the village and from
which much had been taken.
The Indians were not only noisy and, in some cases, quarrelsome; they
were beyond control.
In spite of their remonstrances Henry Morgan elbowed his way past Tom
and Bill, his rifle under his arm.
“He’s going out to mix with them and join in their orgies!” cried Bill.
“I hope——”
“He knows them. He’s been here often, he says,” Tom reminded him, “he
isn’t in any danger.” Bill shook his head. He was not convinced.
“It’s not him I’m worrying about, or what they’ll do to him,” he said
moodily, “it’s what he may tell them about us—remember, he’s nursing a
grudge against us, Tom.”
“Yes,” agreed Tom. “That—and cane-juice—make a bad pair!”