IN THE NIGHT WATCH
Day by day the long canoe crawled into the vast unknown. Day by day the
down-flowing jungle river pushed steadily, sullenly against its prow, as
if striving to repel the invasion of its secret places by the
fair-skinned men of another continent. Day by day it slid past in
resentful impotence, conquered by the swinging blades of the Peruvian
_bogas_. And day by day the close companionship of canoe and camp seemed
to weld the voyagers into one compact unit.
Through hours of blazing sun, when the mercury of the thermometer which
Knowlton had hung inside the shady _toldo_ cabin fluctuated well above
100 degrees, the hardy crew forged on. Through drenching rains they
still hung doggedly to their work, suspending it only when the water
fell in such drowning quantities that they were forced to tie up hastily
to shore and seek cover in order to breathe. When sunset neared they
picked with unerring eye a spot fit for camping, attacked the bush with
whirling machetes, cleared a space, threw up pole frameworks, swiftly
thatched them with great palm leaves, and thus created from the jungle
two crude but efficient huts--one for themselves and one for their
_patrones_. When night had shut down and all hands squatted around the
fire in a nightly smoke talk they regaled their employers with wild
tales of adventures in bush and town, some of which were not at all
polite, but all of which were mightily interesting. And despite all
discomforts, fatigue, and the minor incidents and accidents which often
lead fellow travelers in the wilderness to bickering and bitterness, no
friction developed between the men of the north and the men of the
south.
Not that the Peruvians were at all obsequious or servile. They were a
reckless, lawless, Godless gang, perpetually bearing themselves with the
careless insolence which had characterized them at first, blasphemous of
speech toward one another--but never toward the North Americans.
Disputes arose among them with volcanic suddenness, and more than once
knives were half drawn, only to be slipped back under the tongue-lashing
of the hawk-nosed _puntero_, José, who damned the disputants completely
and promised to cut out the bowels of any man daring to lift his
blade clear of its sheath. Five minutes afterward the fire eaters
would be on as good terms as ever, shrugging and grinning at their
passengers--particularly Tim, who, shaking his head disgustedly, would
grumble:
"Aw, pickles! Another frog fight gone bust!"
Yet Tim, for all his disparagement of these abortive spats, knew full
well that any one of them held the makings of a deadly duel and that
José's lurid threats were no mere Latin hyperbole. He realized that the
red-crowned bowman ruled his crew exactly as any of the old-time
buccaneers whom he resembled had governed their free-booting gangs--by
the iron hand; and that, though these men sailed no Spanish Main and
flew no black flag, the iron-hand government was needed. He saw also
that the rough-and-ready courtesy of this crowd toward their passengers
was due largely to the attitude of Captain McKay, who had enforced their
respect at the start by his soldierly bearing and retained it ever since
by his military management.
For the captain, experienced in directing men, conducted himself at all
times as a commanding officer should: he saw all, said little, treated
José as a subordinate officer, and left the handling of the crew
entirely to him. His aloofness forestalled any of that familiarity
which, with such a gang, would have led to contempt. On the other hand,
his avoidance of any assumption of meddlesome authority prevented the
irritation and dislike which free men inevitably feel for the
self-important type of leader. Thus he cannily steered himself and his
mates between the two rocks which might have wrecked the expedition
before it was well started. And Knowlton, ex-lieutenant, and Tim,
ex-sergeant, seeing and understanding, followed his example.
So the days and nights rolled by, the miles of never-ending jungle shore
fell away behind, and, save for the occasional outbreaks between members
of the crew, all was serene. To all appearances the Peruvians were
whole-heartedly interested in serving their employers faithfully, and
the North Americans were gliding onward with no thought of insecurity.
Yet appearances frequently are deceptive.
In the heat of the day--in fact, before the broiling sun neared the
zenith--Tim and Knowlton habitually fell asleep inside the _toldo_, not
to awake until two hours before sunset, when, according to the routine
agreed upon, the night's camping place would be sought and two or three
of the Peruvians would go into the bush with rifles, seeking fresh meat.
McKay never slept during the day's traverse. Nothing escaped his eye
from the time when he emerged from his mosquito net in the misty morning
until he entered it again by firelight. The men in the boat; the
floating alligators and wading birds of the water; the flashing parrots,
jacamars, toucans, trogons, and hummers of the air; the yard-long
lizards and nervous spider monkeys of the tangled tree branches
alongshore--all these he watched quietly as the boat forged on. And the
sinister Francisco, watching him in turn, and the paddlers throwing
occasional glances his way, came to regard him as the only alert member
of the trio. Wherein they erred.
The truth was that every one of the three adventurers was on his guard.
Tim had not forgotten the last words of his boon companion, Joao, and at
the first opportunity he had quietly passed on that warning. Moreover,
McKay and Knowlton, without discussing the matter, had meditated on the
unexpected assistance of Schwandorf, the speed with which the crew had
been obtained, the promptness of José to accept the first payment
offered, and other things. Wherefore it had come about that at no hour
of the twenty-four was every eye and ear closed. And the real reason why
red Tim and blond Knowlton slept by day was that they thus made up the
slumber lost at night.
Not that either of them patrolled the camp in sentry go. So far as the
Peruvians knew, they slept as soundly as McKay. But, lying in their
hammocks, they divided the night watches between them on a schedule as
regular as that of a military camp, though the shifts necessarily were
longer. As sunset came always at six o'clock and all hands sought their
hanging beds two hours later, Tim's "tour of duty" lasted until one in
the morning. When the phosphorescent hands of his watch pointed to that
hour he stealthily reached out and jabbed Knowlton, sleeping beside him.
When a barely audible "All right" reached his ears he was officially
relieved.
Night followed night, became a week, lengthened into a fortnight. Still,
so far as the crew was concerned, nothing happened. A little rough
banter among them as they smoked their last cigarettes, then sleep and
snores; and that was all until morning. Men less experienced in night
vigils than the ex-soldiers would have abandoned their watches long
before this--if, indeed, they had ever adopted them. But these three
were schooled in patience. Moreover, neither Tim nor Knowlton had ever
before penetrated the jungle, and at times the light of the waxing moon
revealed to their eyes strange things which they never would have seen
by day. So the tedium of the long hours of wakefulness might be broken
at any moment.
Once they camped close to a conical hillock of compact earth, some four
feet high and almost stone hard, from which radiated narrow covered
galleries--the citadel and viaducts of a community of termites. Tim,
still harboring vivid recollections of his ant battle at Remate de
Males--though by this time he had trained himself to sleep in his
hammock, where he was comparatively safe--looked askance at it when told
what it was, and was only partly reassured by the information that
termites were eaters of wood rather than of flesh. After sleep had
embraced the rest of the camp he still was uneasy, lifting his net at
long intervals and squinting at the moonlit mound as if expecting a
horde of pincer-jawed insects to erupt from it and charge him. And
during one of these inspections he saw something totally unexpected.
From the black shadows of the forest had emerged another shadow, so
grotesque and misshapen that it seemed a figment of indigestion and
weird dreams--a thing from whose shaggy body protruded what appeared to
be only a long tubular snout where a head should be, and which looked to
be overbalanced at the other end by a great mass of hair. It stood stone
still, and for the moment Tim could not decide which end of it was head
and which was tail, or even whether it were not double-tailed and
headless. Then, slowly, the apparition moved.
Into that hard-packed earth it dug huge hooked claws, and from its
tapering muzzle a wormlike tongue licked about, gathering the outrushing
white ants into its gullet. For minutes Tim lay blinking at it,
wondering if he really saw it.
Then, picking up his rifle, he slipped outside his net and advanced on
the creature.
The animal turned, sat back on its great tail, lifted its terrible
claws, and waited. Six feet away, just out of its reach, Tim stopped and
stared anew. Then he grinned.
"You win, feller," he informed the beast. "What ye are I dunno, but any
critter that's got the guts to ramble right into camp and offer to gimme
a battle is too good a sport for me to shoot. Help yourself to all the
ants in the world, for all o' me. I'm goin' back to bed. Bon sewer,
monseer."
Wherewith, still grinning, but warily watching, he backed until sure the
big invader would not spring at him. Knowing nothing of ant bears, he
did not know it was hardly a springing animal.
Its claws looked sufficiently formidable to disembowel a man--as,
indeed, they were, if the man came near enough. But when Tim had
withdrawn and the sluggish brute had decided that it would not need to
defend itself, it sank to all-fours and passed stiffly away into the
shades whence it had come.
On another night, when Tim slept, Knowlton detected a creeping,
slithering sound which made him slip off the safety catch of his
heavy-bulleted pistol and peer at the hut where slept the crew. No man
was moving there. Still the sound persisted. Lifting his net, he spied
beyond the hut of the Peruvians a moving mass on the ground--a
cylindrical bulk which looked to be two feet thick, and which glided
past like a solid stream of dark water flowing along above the dirt. Its
beginning and end were hidden in the bush, and not until it tapered into
nothing and was gone did he realize fully that he had been gazing at an
enormous anaconda. Then he kicked himself for not shooting it. But
before long he congratulated himself for letting it go.
Perhaps an hour later the startled forest resounded with an agonized
scream, so piercing and so appallingly human that all the camp sprang
awake. The outcry came but once, sounding from some place not far off,
near the water's edge, and in the direction toward which the huge
serpent had disappeared. Before the watcher had time to tell the others
of what he had seen, one of the boatmen discovered the rut left in the
soft ground by the reptile. Thereafter Knowlton kept his own counsel,
listening to the excited curses of the men and observing their pallor
and their nervous scanning of the shadows. José said the screech
undoubtedly was the death shriek of some animal caught and crushed in
the snake's tremendous coil. McKay concurred with a nod. And when
Knowlton casually said it was tough that nobody had been awake to shoot
the thing as it passed the camp, José emphatically disagreed.
A bullet fired into that fiendish giant, he averred, would have meant
death to one or more men; for the serpent's writhing coils and lashing
tail would have knocked down the sleeping-hut and shattered the spines
of any men they struck. No, let Señor Knowlton thank the saints that the
awful master of the swamps had gone its way unmolested. For the rest of
that night Knowlton kept his watch openly, accompanied by José and three
of the paddlers, who refused to sleep again until they should be miles
away from the vicinity of that dread monster.
Two nights afterward the camp was aroused again. Tim alone saw the start
of the disturbance, and he kept mum about it because he did not choose
to let the Peruvians know he had been on the alert. Out from the gloom
and straight past the huts a thick-bodied, curve-snouted animal came
charging madly for the river, carrying on its back a ferocious cat
creature whose fangs were buried deep in its steed's neck--a tapir
attacked by a jaguar. With a resounding plunge the elephantine quarry
struck the water and was gone. The tiger cat, forced to relinquish its
hold or drown, swam hurriedly back to the bank below the encampment,
where it roared and spat and squalled in a blood-chilling paroxysm of
baffled fury. And though every man was awakened, not one left the flimsy
shelter of his net. Nor did anyone so much as speak until Tim, wearying
of the noise, announced his intention to "go bust that critter in the
nose and give him somethin' to yowl about."
The proposal met with instant and peremptory veto.
"As you were!" snapped McKay. "Let him alone! You wouldn't have a
Chinaman's chance in that black bush. A jaguar is bad all the time, and
when he's mad he's deadly. Never fool with one of those beasts, Tim.
I've met them before and I know what they can do."
To which José agreed with many picturesque oaths, declaring that a
jaguar was no mere beast--it was a devil. Tim, grumbling, obeyed orders.
The jaguar, hearing their voices, stopped its noise and probably
reconnoitered the camp. But no man saw the brute, and its next roar
sounded from some spot far off in the jungle.
Other things, too, passed within Tim's range of vision from time to time
in the moonlit hours: a queer bony creature which he took for some new
kind of turtle, but which really was an armadillo; a monstrous hairy
spider which slid like a streak up his net, hung there for a time,
decided to go elsewhere, and departed with such speed that the man
inside rubbed his eyes and wondered if he was "seein' things that
ain't"; a couple of vampires which flitted in from nowhere like ghoulish
ghosts, wheeled and floated silently on wide wings, seeking an exposed
foot protruding from the hammocks, found none, rested a moment on the
roof poles, chirping hoarsely, and veered out again into the night.
To Knowlton's watch came a strange owl-faced little monkey with great
staring eyes and face ringed with pale fur--one of those night apes
seldom seen by man; a small troop of kinkajous, slender, long-tailed
animals which looked to be monkeys, but were not, and which leaped
deftly among the branches like frolicsome little devils let loose to
play under the jungle moon; a big scaly iguana, its back ridged with saw
teeth and its pendulous throat pouch dangling grotesquely under its jaw;
and more than one deadly snake and huge alligator, the first gliding
past with venomous head raised and cold eye glinting, the second lying
quiescent except for occasional openings of horrific jaws.
To the ears of both the hammock sentinels came the mournful sounds of
living things unseen. From the depths beyond drifted the weird plaint of
the sloth, crying in the night, "Oh me, poor sloth, oh-oh-oh-oh!" Goat
suckers repeated by the hour their monotonous refrains, "Quao quao," or
"Cho-co-co-cao," while a third earnestly exhorted, "Joao corta pao!"
("John, cut wood!"). Tree frogs and crickets clacked and drummed and
hoo-hooed, guaribas poured their awful discord into the air, and on one
bright breathless night there sounded over and over a call freighted
with wretchedness and despair--the wail of that lonely owl known to the
bushmen as "the mother of the moon," whose dreadful cry portends evil to
those who hear it.
Sometimes the air shook with the thunderous concussion of some great
falling tree which, long since bled to death by parasitical plant
growths, now at last toppled crashing back into the dank soil whence it
had forced its way up into a place in the sun. Other noises, infrequent
and unexplainable, also drifted at long intervals from the mysterious
blackness. And in all the medley of night sounds not one was cheerful.
The burden of the jungle's cacophonic cantanta ever was the
same--despair, disaster, death.
Then came the fifteenth day. It dawned red, the sun fighting an
ensanguined battle with the heavy morning mists and throwing on the
faces of the early-rising travelers a sinister crimson hue. Before that
sun should rise again some of those faces were to be stained a deeper
red.