the midday meal, for the poison from the darts does not reduce the
edibility at all, and Sadok stowed the legs for further food. After
the lunch they set out in a generally southeasterly direction, as
Nicky knew it would bring them at length to another of those odd
channels that divide Aru, and he wanted to see something of Vorkai,
the southernmost island. A large screw pine came in sight. Its almost
bare branches twisted high into the bright sunlight, and the spikes
of daggerlike leaves growing in clusters at the branch tips drew an
exclamation of pleasure from Sadok, for he was nearly out of pandanus
leaf to wrap “spec’mens” in. They went over to it.
“Hi!” called Nicky. “Look who’s here!”
A large brown animal was climbing around up near the tops.
“Tree kangaroo. Get him! The curator will want one!” cried the boy,
drawing his revolver. He aimed carefully, and at the report the animal
flinched, but seemed to maintain its hold in the branches. He fired
again, with the same result. The tree kangaroo now moved sluggishly
toward another branch.
“Shoot, Sadok! I _must_ have hit him, but he sure can carry a lot of
lead!”
Sadok raised the blowgun to his lips and held his cupped fist over
his mouth. Filling his lungs, he blew a full breath. The dart soared
up into the tree top and they saw it sticking from the animal’s side.
Presently his limbs grew limp and he partly fell, but his long, hooked
claws caught in the branches and hung. He made no further move.
“Dead as a mackerel, but I’ll have to swarm up after him!” declared
Nicky, emphatically. He was a fearless climber, and he shinned the
trunk and was soon in the branches. Worming up one of them, he reached
the tree kangaroo. It was like its cousins, the wallaby of New Guinea
and the great gray kangaroo of Australia, but with heavy, coarse fur
and long, hooked claws especially adapted to climbing.
“Hit him both times, myself,” he called down: “Gorry! but he’s
tenacious of life!” He detached the animal from its hold and dropped
it down. It weighed some sixty pounds. They were an hour skinning it,
after which Sadok put away some of the choicest meat, for he never let
an opportunity for food go by in the jungle.
Then Nicky spied a great blue butterfly, the _Papilio ulysses_, soaring
through the tops of the screw pine overhead. They set off in hot
pursuit, with the skin of the kangaroo hanging to his belt.
“Dwight will want this fellow!” urged Nicky, stumbling through thickets
and over stony and coralline ground. Hermit crabs scuttled out of their
way in the underbrush; lizards of every shade streaked across under
their feet, but still the lad kept his eyes on that magnificent prize
which persistently flew high. At length it came down and alighted on a
moist spot in the earth, evidently thirsty. He crept up and dropped his
helmet over the great metallic-blue beauty.
“Hooray! What a prize for Dwight! How in thunder am I ever going to
carry it, though?” He started to pin it to his helmet, but Sadok shook
his head.
“Him all tore, in bushes,” he objected. “Me show’m.” Searching the
jungle awhile, he presently came back with a broad, flat cactus leaf
which he was busily paring of thorns as he walked. Then he slit it open
with his kriss and gouged out a recess for the body of the butterfly
in its pulpy interior. Lining it with flat pieces of pandanus, he was
ready for _Papilio ulysses_, who was forthwith spread out, flat winged,
and then securely bound in his green prison with thongs of rattan.
“Some sandwich!” grinned Nicky as it was slipped into the map pocket
of his rucksack. “Worth about fifty dollars just as it stands! Won’t I
have some fun with old Dwight, with it, though!”
They abandoned collecting for the time, as the canteens were running
low and water was getting to be a problem unless they expected to live
on what could be poured from the air plants that grew profusely in
the dry jungle. A small ravine running downhill looked promising, and
they climbed down into it. After half a mile it grew swampy, and soon
a small, clear stream of fresh water developed. They were filling the
canteens at the nearest hollow when voices came through the jungle, the
chatter of a child and the deep cackle of an old man, both speaking
Papuan. Sadok and Nicky waited. Presently both appeared, coming down to
the brook. The man was an almost naked, mop-haired Aru native, carrying
a bow and quiver; the pickaninny wore only a string around his fat
middle, and had a tiny bow in his hands. Both jumped and dashed back
into the jungle, with grunts and squeals of fear, at sight of Nicky.
The latter laughed and called after them reassuringly. Presently the
pickaninny appeared, climbing a sapling trunk like a small tree frog.
He stopped, peering around the trunk at them curiously, his feet dug
into the bark with bunched-up toes, his sinewy little hands wound
around the trunk, while his inquisitive face looked at them with a
half-fearful expression.
Nicky smiled at him and dug into his pockets. He fished out a small
bag of beads and held out a few of the sparkling trinkets in his palm.
The youngster’s eyes snapped. They could see the old man peering at
them through the underbrush, arrow on bow, afraid to come out at all.
Nicky beckoned to the boy and motioned to give him some. He finally
descended the tree, and with many advances and retreats ventured out to
clutch the beads in his small paw. Then he dashed back into the jungle,
where a childish yell and the sound of a slap told that the old man had
seized him and rifled him of his beads.
Nicky called out the pickaninny and gave him more. Then the old man
poked his head out, and Sadok spoke to him in Malay. He knew that
tongue enough to talk, and presently they were exchanging news. With
much coaxing he was finally got out where Nicky could pour him quite a
handful of the green, blue, red, and yellow trinkets. Much impressed,
he jerked his thumb over shoulder and invited them to visit their
village, which, he said, lay a short distance on.
They followed up what appeared to be something of a trail, and soon the
jungle cleared and a blue arm of the sea lay before them, with a large
island offshore. Nicky took it to be Varkai, but his attention was
soon called to the village itself. It was of two palm huts, built on
piles about seven feet above the ground, and the place was crowded with
natives, most of whom gave one astonished look at Nicky and then bolted
for the jungle.
The old man called them back, and presently the _orang-kaya_, or chief,
came toward him, holding out his hand for more beads. It was not long
before Nicky was the center of an excited throng of chattering Papuans,
who fingered his clothing and pranced around him with characteristic
native merriment. Nicky was a whole circus in himself, he began to
appreciate. Men, women, and children never seemed to tire of standing
and gazing at him, after which they would usually do a somersault or
roll on the ground with explosions of boisterous laughter. To them he
and his clothes were the funniest thing they had ever looked at.
As it was growing late, Sadok arranged for a night’s lodgings. A space
about ten by twenty feet at the end of one of the huts was cleared off
and turned over to their use. Here they laid down their few belongings
and sat down on mats to watch the strange life around them. A clay
floor behind a partition served for a fireplace, where Sadok set about
cooking the kangaroo meat. The rest of the hut was jammed with natives
talking and laughing incessantly, only ceasing when their eyes were
fully occupied in staring at him.
In the midst of it all, a yell, “_Bajak! Bajak!_” (“Pirates! Pirates!”)
arose, and everyone tumbled out of the hut and poured down to the
beach. Great guard fires piled up along shore were lit, and their lurid
glare lighted up the whole scene; the proas of the natives hauled up
on the beach, the warriors dancing along the shore, brandishing their
bows and spears and yelling defiance, and the two huts back a short
distance, with the black wall of the jungle behind them, made a wild
picture that long remained vivid in Nicky’s memory.
Nicky and Sadok had come down, eager to be in the fray, and it seemed
to the boy that never had he been in so savage a spot on the earth as
in this forgotten corner of Aru, with native warriors around him and a
pirate ship from the New Guinea coast somewhere out there on the sea.
Presently he made her out a long double proa, or catamaran, with one
big lateen sail; a small lakatoi, with at least fifty warriors in her,
the _orang-kaya_ told him. She came on swiftly, under both paddles and
sails, and, when some fifty yards off the beach, opened fire with the
flash and bang of Singapore muskets loaded with black powder.
Bows twanged all about Nicky, javelins flew through the air, Sadok’s
sumpitan coughed. Some of the younger warriors turned to run at the
sound of gunfire, but the older men held steady, for their homes and
ships would be plundered if defeated. Nicky drew his revolver and
opened fire in return. The heavy thunder of its .38 special cartridges,
close at hand, made all the warriors near him jump and run, but the
fact of six flashes along shore and the execution it evidently did
among the pirates caused them to stop paddling and haul in sheet as the
lakatoi swung around.
“Now, then, Sadok, launch one of those proas and after ’em and we’ll
have ’em on the run!” barked Nicky, seizing the psychological moment to
attack. Sadok called on the _orang-kaya_, and he and a dozen warriors
sprang to the nearest proa and launched her, Nicky reloading swiftly.
As she put out for the pirate lakatoi he opened up with a second burst
of pistol shots. The pirate was now making all sail out to sea, the
few flashes from her native muskets showing that most of her crew were
paddling hard away from them. Presently her mat sail came down and
she paddled into the eye of the wind, where their own proa could not
follow. Nicky shot a third burst after them as the range widened out of
bow shot.
“Gee! the curator told me that New Guinea pirates still attacked the
villages in the wilder part of Aru, but I couldn’t have believed it!”
he muttered to himself. “Now I’ve been in it--and we drove them off!
Must be a fine country we’re going to, what Sadok!”
“Plenty bad mans ober dere!” agreed Sadok. “Mus’ shoot all time.”
They picked up a few dead men out of the dark waters. Hideously
streaked with white clay, they wore long white boars’ tusks through
their noses, and had a peculiar breast guard, made of rows of boars’
tusks one above the other, woven in a kind of net of palm-fiber. A
keen, flat bamboo knife floating in the water gave Nicky a clew as to
the tribe.
“Tugeri!” he exclaimed. “Head hunters. They were after heads and loot,
Sadok! A sudden attack and a quick getaway is their style. Last year
they appeared suddenly inside the barbed wire of the Dutch fort at
Merauke and decapitated six Javanese and got away before the garrison
could get out after them. We’ll have a time, with either them or the
Outanatas!”
The proa returned to shore amid the shouts and rejoicings of all the
village capering about the beach. Nicky and Sadok, utterly weary,
retired to their portion of the hut to sleep, after the first burst of
enthusiasm had died down. But the natives made an all-night orgy of it.
Nicky put on his bathing suit headgear and his night socks over his
arms and wrists, and turned in on a palm-fiber mat, while mosquitoes
hummed about him and the noise and shouting and laughter on shore
dulled away in his drowsy ears.
Next day they bade good-by to the chief. He had a present to make,
it seemed, in return for the white man’s services in repelling their
visitors of the night before. Out of a fetish bag, that held evidently
the treasures of the entire village, he took a parcel carefully wrapped
in cotton. Unwinding it, he drew out the skin of a bird of more than
ordinary interest. Reverently he unwrapped the last of its bindings,
and handed it to Nicky with a smile of grateful pleasure.
“Gorry!” muttered the boy, as he received the present before the
whole tribe. “If I’m not wrong, that’s the rarest of the rare--the
magnificent bird of paradise! Won’t the curator be tickled, though!”
It was a small bird, but brilliant in the extreme of plumage. The
head was covered with small, brown, velvety feathers, but back of its
neck arose a fan-shaped ruffle of the most brilliant yellow, backed
by a second fan of intense metallic orange. The whole of the breast
was rich, deep green, in changeable hues of peacock and purple. The
tail was formed of two curved plumes of delicate metallic brown, which
curved in airy spirals--a feathered gem as rich in coloring as the
vividest-hued humming bird, but far larger.
“The only one!” managed the chief, in Malay, as Nicky bowed his thanks.
“I’ll bet it is! But two have been found in all New Guinea. This is the
first reported from Aru. Had it long, Chief?”
“Many years. No more. White man welcome!” grinned the old fellow,
gratefully.
They bade them all good-by and set out by compass for the neighborhood
of camp. How to find it was something of a poser, but after a morning’s
march the lay of the hills began to seem familiar once more and Sadok
led them in to the very jungle of tall trees where they had first seen
the great birds of paradise.
Dwight was in camp, and overjoyed at Nicky’s present of the _Papilio
ulysses_, which was so rare a treasure that he at once set about
pouring a plaster-of-Paris mold for it and getting it under glass
without delay.
“I wish I had a trade-last for you, old scout,” said Dwight as he
mounted the specimen, “but I haven’t. The curator and I have been
mineralogizing since you were gone. We found out a lot about the
interior of New Guinea--”
“New Guinea!” echoed Nicky, amazedly.
“Yes, New Guinea,” retorted Dwight, and he told Nicky of the source of
the channels that divide Aru.
“And didn’t you get a single sea snake, down there?” asked Nicky,
regretfully. “The shallow sea’s full of ’em, all highly venomous, you
know--”
“I didn’t!” shivered Dwight, recalling the hours they had spent
unprotected on the raft. “That’s more in your line. Real sea serpents,
eh?”
“Yep. I still believe in the sea serpent,” laughed Nicky. “There are
plenty of small ones among the New Guinea coasts and up the lagoons.
They have a broad, finny tail like an eel, but are true serpents. They
swim up near the surface and live on fish, but have poison fangs just
like many of the land snakes. That’s why I am still convinced that
there may be a larger species, sometimes seen far at sea by ships. They
have been too often reported to be a myth. But these islands are too
dry and rocky for anything but lizards. Where’s the curator gone?”
“He went after a black cockatoo which came through the grove awhile
ago. I heard his gun recently.”
A little later the curator returned, carrying a specimen of the great
black cockatoo, a rare find, but it was nothing to his delight over the
magnificent bird of paradise that Nicky sprang on him unawares.
“Man dear, where did you get _that_!” he yelled, examining it avidly.
“That’s the big prize of the expedition, so far. I guess we can go on
to New Guinea, now!”
On the next day camp was broken and the party steered out of the
jungle by compass and hunter’s paths, arriving back at the bungalow
by nightfall. The following two days were mighty busy, for Nicky, as
“snakeologist” of the expedition, had a large assortment of reptile
skins to prepare, and the curator, as ornithologist, likewise; and all
of them had to be packed in ant-proof tin receptacles before leaving.
Dwight, as entomologist, mounted his specimens in flat, glass-covered
wooden boxes, which could be packed a dozen at a time in tin cases.
That evening the curator hunted up the captain and crew of the proa
and they warped her out into the harbor, for they were to sail for
New Guinea the next morning. They all slept aboard once more, and at
dawn stood out of the coral reefs and headed around Kobror for the
hundred-mile run across to the coast of Dutch New Guinea. Two mornings
after, the lofty chain of the Charles Louis Mountains, as the northern
end of the Snow Mountains has been named, jutted out of the sea under
banks of clouds. Navigators have measured the height of these mountains
at six to nine thousand feet, taking observations from the decks of
passing vessels, while the higher peaks of the Snow Mountains to the
south rise to sixteen thousand feet. The mouths of a few rivers in
that country have been noted on the map; but the hinterland remains a
mystery to the world. Even the South and North Poles are better known.
By afternoon, the mainland had become quite visible, jungly foothills
rising ridge on ridge to the base of the Great Precipice, which
stretches south for two hundred miles, the greatest precipice in the
world. Above it towered the snowy peaks far back in the mainland. They
came to realize how utterly unknown and impenetrable it all is, when
they awoke next morning to find the proa at anchor in a deep bay, with
the jungly mountains all around them and a lagoon thirty miles long
stretching back into the hinterland. Mangrove swamps lined the shore
in an unbroken line. Here and there a dent in them told of the mouth
of a stream. No living human was in sight, but the smoke of signal
fires rose from points along shore, and scouting parties of native
savages could be made out through the glasses already watching them,
swinging through the trees over the mangroves like troops of monkeys.
Now and then a long black canoe, with high carved prow, would cross
the upper lagoon, driven by lines of paddling blacks. The very haste of
them spelled danger, the passing of the word through the villages that
a strange proa was here. A short raid on shore, a few miles into the
jungle at most, unless attempted by a whole regiment of soldiers, would
be certain to end in ambush and murder. As for those dense jungles and
towering mountains back a day’s march into the interior--Unexplored!
Danger! Pygmies! Head hunters! was written all over them!
They were examining the shore curiously, with a sense of the utter
hopelessness of the undertaking oppressing them, when a huge black
lakatoi, or native catamaran, jutted its prow around the point of a
cape to seaward. Everyone turned to watch it, and with chatterings and
gesticulations the crew sprang to life.
“Lakatoi, _Orang-kaya_!” sang out Sadok, pointing to seaward. She
towered like a castle out of the sea. A single mast rose out of her
amidships, carrying one long triangular mat sail with deeply incurved
ends. Around the mast was a wooden platform, a sort of fighting deck
with rails around it, and it was held down on the two log canoes which
floated the structure by long bamboo arches like the backs of a
bridge. The lakatoi was crowded with warriors whose spears and bows and
clubs could be made out jutting up through the serried ranks like tiny
black jackstraws.
“_Bajak! Bajak!_” (“Pirates! Pirates!”) rose the excited yell forward,
and there was a mad scramble of the crew to the waist for weapons.
“Every lakatoi full of natives is a ‘pirate’ to these beggars,” laughed
the curator. “They’ll probably prove hostile, though. Look to your
guns, boys.”
“Are you going to use the queer pistol, sir?” asked Dwight, curiously,
slipping a clip of cartridges into the butt of his automatic.
“Nope. Won’t need to this time,” smiled the curator. “Got to save it
for something worse!” He strolled to the deck house and went inside.
Dwight and Nicky watched the lakatoi bowling down toward them. The
natives on her were brandishing their bows and spears and did not seem
in the least friendly. Their own crew now lined the rails of the proa,
armed with a motley collection of Singapore muskets, old repeating
rifles of the Spencer vintage, and bows and arrows. They yelled
defiance at the approaching catamaran and were evidently eager for a
fight.
She came steadily on, while everyone crouched behind the gunwales,
peering at her. At about fifty yards a cloud of arrows sailed from
her and came swishing and singing aboard, striking the deck house and
sticking in the soft planks. Dwight picked up one of them, while the
thunder of black-powder guns roared out from their own ship. The arrow
was of cane, without nock or feathers, a yard long, and had a point of
ebony notched with barbs for a foot back.
“Outanatas!” he exclaimed. “They mean business. Give it to ’em, Nick!”
They fired their pistols, hoping to add to the number who had already
dropped struggling on the fighting platform. Sadok’s long sumpitan
stuck out over the gunwale, and at every cough from its muzzle a
yelling, arrow-shooting native would grow livid and fall helplessly
among his comrades. Her deck was a shambles, but there were plenty of
them left and she came steadily on.
A crash shivered the proa from stem to stern as the lakatoi’s high
prows rode up over their gunwale, and twenty blacks leaped aboard,
stabbing with their spears over shields that were hideous with the
carved scrolls of diabolical faces on them. Parangs flashed out among
the crew and a fierce hand-to-hand struggle on deck ensued. The crew
charged at the invaders, led by Sadok, whose whirling parang-ihlang
swung around his head in red flashes that cleft to the bone where they
struck. The boys held off, firing deliberately where a particularly
fierce native seemed to be carrying all before him. On and on came
the boarders in a living black stream, while the air sang with arrows
from those still on the lakatoi. They were outnumbered, three to one.
Slowly the crew gave back in the furious mêlée, the struggling mass
of brown and black men stabbing and cutting in a writhing heap in the
waist. Behind them two tall natives fought toward the masts, armed with
blazing torches to set the sail afire. With a fierce burst of pistol
shots the boys picked them off.
Then the brown flash of the curator’s long frame leaped out of the deck
house. An arrow pierced his helmet as his arm swept over his head in
the cricketer’s swing. A brown object like a baseball shot over to the
lakatoi, followed by another and another as the arm went on swinging
with incredible swiftness.
_Brr-aaam! Brr-aam! Brr-aam!_ The detonation was frightful, riving the
lakatoi apart in great splinters of logs and planks as the grenades
exploded. Men, sails, and spars were torn apart in livid flashes of
blinding light. The concussion knocked down the combatants on their
own ship, while a giant, foamy wave leaped out of the sea and engulfed
them, the water falling on the fighting men in the waist like a deluge.
Terror-stricken, the boarders gave back, falling like flies before
the busy parangs, the survivors leaping headlong into the sea. Of the
lakatoi there was nothing left but a mass of floating fragments. In
a moment more it was all over and the crew stood breathing heavily,
looking at the curator with broad grins of delight.
“Welcome to New Guinea!” laughed the curator, grimly, standing with a
fourth hand grenade in his grip, its firing mechanism still unarmed.
“I guess that will be about all, Captain,” he said to the _jurugan_,
who stood nursing a cut shoulder. “Stop those fellows!” he ordered, for
the guns were beginning to bark again at the survivors of the lakatoi
swimming in the water. “Let ’em get ashore and tell all about it. Ought
to give us quite a rep! How did you make out, boys?” he asked, turning
to them coolly. “This was nothing compared with some of our trench
parties.”
“Nice souvenir you’ve got, sir!” grinned Nicky, pointing to the long
arrow still sticking in the curator’s helmet. “Dwight and I got off
easy. They didn’t seem to pay much attention to us. Never saw a firearm
before, I suppose. A lot of the crew seem dead or wounded, though, and
I saw Baderoon go down.”
“Get hold of Sadok, when you can,” ordered the curator. “I see he’s
busy in the waist. And have them bring Baderoon into the deck house.”
Some of the crew were now cleaning up the waist and others were
hoisting the anchor by its primitive wooden windlass so as to sail the
proa farther up the lagoon. Sadok came up, breathing happily through
his wide Malay nostrils.
“Me have’m lov’y fight, _Orang-kaya_!” he beamed. “Catch’m three head!”
He grinned, holding up the gory trophies for them to admire. “But you,
_Orang-kaya_!” His eyes looked adoringly at the curator. “White man
debbil-debbil verree strong! Him fight like hell!”
IV
NICK ENCOUNTERS A DEATH ADDER