RODRIGUEZ HAS COMPANY
Hal awakened at the witching hour of midnight to find that he was being
deluged in a rainstorm, his fire was out and he couldn’t see anything
but the radium-faced dial of his wrist watch.
He jumped up and scurried to the shelter of some near-by trees,
shivering in his soaked clothes. Something moved swiftly near by, he
heard a rustle of leaves and the patter of slow, velvety footsteps on
the soggy ground.
In a second he had delved into his pocket and brought out his package of
matches. But they were dry and he had one lighted in an instant—in time
to catch a flashing glimpse of a jaguar’s yellowish-brown spots as it
leaped across Rodriguez’ temporary bier and disappeared between the
trees.
Hal shouted to frighten it and his match burned out. He continued to
shout, meanwhile breathlessly seeking for some of the drier pieces of
wood which he had stored beneath the trees. The rain stopped then, but
still it took him an interminable time to coax a flame out of the damp
wood. But at last he succeeded and after he had coaxed the flame into a
fairly generous fire he set about drying out the rest of the wood.
From time to time he glanced at the telltale mound in the shadows and
each time he shivered. The jaguar incident brought home to him the
realization that necessity forced Rodriguez’ last resting place to be in
the jungle. Decency forbade a recurrence of that midnight scene and he
knew that dawn would bring again the black scavengers of the air in
increased numbers. Nothing but a quick, effectual burial would drive
them away.
It was the only way out.
Hal spent the remainder of the black hours drying his clothes. His
immaculate flannels were now a brownish hue, spotted here and there with
mud and wrinkled into a state that defied even the dry cleaner. And his
shoes, once so trim and smart looking, were not recognizable because of
several layers of clay which had dried upon them.
Just before a new day dawned in the jungle, Hal groped his way through
the dark to the scene of the wreck. He built a small fire there to give
him light and proceeded to hunt about the framework for something which
could be used as a spade. But that availed him nothing, and he was about
to give up in despair when he happened to notice the trench which the
crippled engine had burrowed as it fell. The propeller, he saw at once,
had completely loosed itself in the impact and was lying a few feet
distant.
Hal pulled it out of the mud and with it a frightened spider which ran
across his hand, leaving a trail of poison which caused not only an
intense burning but severe inflammation as well. In point of fact, all
of Hal’s jungle trials seemed to begin with that spider’s infection.
He sucked out the poison as best he could and trudged back to the
clearing with the propeller. Dawn found him using it as a spade with
which to dig a last resting place for José Rodriguez, and if it was
rather ineffectual as an instrument, it was none the less fitting that
it should be used in preparing an airman’s grave.
The sun was high in the east when Hal had pounded the last bit of mire
into place. Solemnly, then, he dug the propeller at its head and left it
there as a marker. For a moment he stood glancing at his handiwork,
feeling inexpressibly sad and without hope. His hand caused him much
pain; he was weary from irregular sleep and his thirst knew no bounds.
The grave seemed to be the final gesture. It was his admission of lost
hope and he voiced it aloud. Not a bit of use was there to scan the blue
chink of sky. Carmichael was not to be the means of his rescue, he felt
it just as surely as he felt thirst. What would be the means of his
rescue, if at all, he could not feel. Indeed, the thought itself seemed
to be swallowed up in the vague mists of the future.
He turned his back on the lonely grave, wrapped in despair. Nothing
mattered much except that he get a drink of water, somewhere, somehow.
He turned east, thinking that at least he was facing _Manaos_ and if he
was fortunate enough to keep going in that direction he would some day
reach there.
“_Some day!_” Hal laughed bitterly. “It’s like tomorrow, I guess—it
never comes.”
And as he stepped from the clearing into the trackless maze of jungle, a
beautiful yellow-breasted, black-coated bird warbled at his back with an
insistence that Hal felt was nothing but mockery. Its cheerful whistling
note he could not bear. It was decidedly out of place in that dismal
solitude, he thought, as he turned to view the creature.
But he quickly changed his mind, however, when he saw that the
silver-throated creature had hopped onto a limb of the tree that
shadowed Rodriguez’ grave. The bird seemed to defy all that was sad and
with its graceful head to one side it poured out a medley of cheer in
the trilling call, _pir-i-pi-pi, pir-i-pi-pi_. And strangest of all, the
beautiful little creature seemed to be directing its efforts toward the
silent mound beneath it.
Hal turned his back on the clearing for good and all, then. He could do
it now with a heart less heavy. At least he would not have that
contemptible feeling that he was leaving a fellow being in the eternal
solitude of the jungle.
Rodriguez would never be alone.