DESTRUCTION
Banana land is never fully cleared before planting. Great giants of the
forest, mahogany, nargusta, black tamarind, Santa Maria, and many other
great trees are girdled and left standing to rattle their dry and
leafless limbs like bones on a gibbet to every wind that blows. In the
time of a great wind such as often sweeps across the Caribbean Sea, dead
limbs of girdled trees and the ponderous fronds of palms come crashing
down upon the less stalwart banana plants.
It was on such a half cleared plantation that Johnny Thompson, Madge
Kennedy and the giant black Carib Indian found themselves when the storm
came tearing in from the sea.
That they were in a tight place Johnny knew right well. He had heard of
these tropical storms. Many an old timer had told him of braving them
upon sea and land. Travelers in this land are told in awed tones strange
tales of terrific gales.
Johnny shuddered as he heard the crack and crash of giant trees torn and
tortured by the wind.
“What shall we do?” he said to the girl. “Can we get out of this?”
“No.” She spoke slowly, deliberately, as one may who knows her land and
its storms. “The tossing banana plants will shut off the roads. Some will
fall, blocking the way. The wind will increase in violence. The storm
will last for hours.”
“Then we must find shelter.”
“Yes.”
“But where?”
The girl shook her head. “I don’t know.” As if determined to destroy
them, the palm sent a second discarded frond sailing toward them. It fell
with a crash that brought down a dozen banana plants with it.
Madge shuddered.
The currents of winds above them seemed greater than those that agitated
the banana plants just over their heads. Great dead trees writhed and
tossed as if in terrible agony, while from here and there at a distance
there came the crash of one that had been broken off or uprooted.
Of a sudden the force of the winds appeared to double in volume. At the
same instant Johnny saw a great black mass come leaping toward him.
Powerless to move or speak for a second, he saw the thing leap straight
at him. Giving up hope, he shut his eyes.
There came a deafening crash. A sharp quick cut across the face brought
him to himself. He leaped to his feet. The wind caught him and threw him
violently. His senses reeled. The thing was too monstrous. What had
happened? His face was bleeding. He did not feel it. His senses were
benumbed.
“I must act!” he told himself savagely. “Something must be done. There is
the girl.”
He had succeeded in coming back into control of his senses when something
hurtled past him.
“It’s the Carib,” he told himself. “No, the girl!” He had caught the
flash of her blue dress.
“It is the Carib and the girl.” He realized that the aged black giant had
seized the girl in his arms and was battling his way straight into the
teeth of the storm.
“What can he hope to do?” he asked himself as, first on hands and knees,
then crouching low, on his feet, he struggled forward in their wake.
Dimly, he became conscious of the thing that had happened. A great
sapodilla tree, uprooted by the storm, had pitched straight at them.
“Ten feet nearer and we would have been killed,” he thought. “That’s the
black bulk that leaped at us.”
The thing the Carib was doing puzzled him. He was fighting his way over
broken branches and beneath threatening trees. At last, finding himself
at a branchless trunk, and seeing his way blocked by a tangled mass of
vegetation, he held the girl in one arm while, apelike, he climbed to the
prostrate trunk, then against the terrific force of the gale battled his
way to the shelter of the roots of the giant tree.
“What strength!” thought Johnny. “What magnificent power!”
He was content to creep the length of the log, to come up panting beside
them. Not a word was said. The din about them was deafening. The howl of
the wind, the crash of breaking, falling limbs, the groan of tortured
trees, all this was enough to inspire silent awe.
A moment they rested here. A moment only. Then, at the Carib’s sign, they
slid off the log to battle their way around the up-ended roots.
Johnny saw the Carib suddenly disappear. He saw a chasm yawning before
him; saw the girl leap. He followed her, landing with a shock that set
his teeth rattling, then became conscious of the fact that the storm was
not cracking about his ears.
“Storm cellar provided by nature,” he thought. It was true. The chasm
left by the tree roots was ten feet deep.
“Gabriel thought of it,” said Madge. “It is his country. He is very old.
He always knows the right thing to do. Isn’t it grand?”
Johnny thought it a little more than grand.
“We British and you Americans,” she said slowly, “think we are very
smart. We know many things. But the natives of other lands, they know
many useful things that we never dreamed of.
“But you are hurt. Your face—it is bloody.” Her eyes grew suddenly large.
“No, I guess not. Nothing much. It must have been the branch of that
fallen tree. Lucky it didn’t kill us all.”
The wound, little more than a deep scratch, was soon dressed. Then,
against the sheltered side of the “storm cellar” left by the tree roots,
they sat down to patiently await the passing of the storm.
“Getting worse. Listen!” Johnny whispered as the wind whipped the dead
branches with increasing fury.
The girl shuddered. “The bananas,” she said. “They will all be down.
Ruined. The whole plantation. There will be no more for nine months.”
“Then it’s the end of our plans.”
“I am afraid so.”
“Anyway, Diaz had us blocked.”
“Perhaps.”
“Did you ever think,” the girl said after a while, “that even had you
succeeded in loading the bananas and grapefruit you might have been worse
off than before?”
“Why? The ship’s all right. Isn’t she?”
“Yes, but at the other end? Did you never think that an organization like
the Fruit Company, powerful enough to control the purchasing of all fruit
of Central America, could control the selling market as well. Do you
think a big commission merchant would dare purchase your load of bananas
and grapefruit? Could you deliver to him regularly? You couldn’t. What
could he do if the powerful Fruit Company should refuse to sell to him
because he bought from you? Not a thing.”
Johnny was stunned. He had not thought of this.
“So you see,” said the girl in a very quiet tone, “while it was brave and
generous of you to try to help grandfather and—and me, after all it was
just as well that nature and Spanish trickery took a hand.”
“I’m not so sure,” said Johnny grimly. “I’d like to have the chance at
it, even now. I’d risk it. I—why, I’d hunt up my old friend Tony, the
push-cart man, if necessary, and I’d say, ‘Tony, I have a ship load of
fruit at half price down at the dock. Go tell your pals.’
“In a half hour’s time there would be a mile of push-carts coming my way.
“But now,” he said slowly, almost despondently, “this is the end.”
In this he was mistaken. It was scarcely the beginning of what was to
prove a thrilling adventure. “The _North Star_!” he exclaimed suddenly.
“She was tied to the dock. What will happen to her?”
Since the girl did not know the answer, she did not reply.
A moment later, the Carib crept up the bank of the pit to disappear into
the storm. Ten minutes later, when he reappeared, his jacket was filled
with cocoanuts.
“Food and drink,” smiled Madge. “We shall not fare so badly in our cave,
after all.”
Still the wind raged on. Rain came and with it night.
A great flat boulder, turned half over by the uprooted tree, left a sort
of narrow grotto with a stone floor. By crowding well back into this
grotto, Johnny and the girl were able to escape the terrific downpour of
rain. The Carib, who minded a wetting about as much as a duck, sat
chuckling to himself beneath the tree’s great roots.
For a time the girl and the boy talked of many things, of their homes, of
their native lands, of strange customs and stranger laws, of the sea and
of the land.
The conversation turned to chicle gathering. Then it was that Johnny told
of his friend Pant, how he had found his long lost grandfather and how
they were, beyond doubt, at that very moment gathering chicle in the
forest around Rio de Grande.
“The Rio de Grande!” exclaimed the girl. “Diaz gathers chicle there. He
will stop them if he can.”
“Diaz!” came from Johnny. “He has a hand in everything down here!”
“By the way,” he said a moment later, “I have a queer sort of message
from my pal here in my pocket. It’s all done in figures and signs. How he
could expect me to read it is more than I know. And yet, somehow I feel
that it must be important.”
“Perhaps I can help you. Let me see it.”
Johnny drew the crumpled bit of paper from his pocket, smoothed it out on
his knee, then gave it to the girl.
By the light of a tiny flashlight, which Johnny always carried, she
studied it for a full three minutes.
“That is queer,” she said at last, twisting her brow into a puzzled
frown. “But somehow it seems easy enough if only one knew how to begin.”
For three minutes longer, as the wind sang across the top of their grotto
and the rain came dashing down, she studied that bit of paper. Then of a
sudden she asked:
“Johnny, how does your friend end his notes to you?”
“Why,” said Johnny thoughtfully, “he hasn’t written me many. Near as I
can recall, when he comes to the end he just stops.”
The girl’s laugh rang out high and clear.
“I mean does he say, ‘Yours truly,’ ‘Your pal,’ or something like that?”
“No.” Johnny’s answer was prompt. “He always says ‘Good luck—Pant.’”
“That’s it!” The girl gave a sudden excited jump that brought a shower of
small rocks down from above. “That’s it! See! Now we are making progress.
See! This hyphen stands for g. Those two nines for double o, percentage
sign for d, and so on. I know now. This was written on a typewriter, one
of the little portable kind.”
“Oh!” said Johnny, beginning to see the light. “What a chump I am. Can
you make it out?”
“I think I can,” she cried excitedly.
“Read it,” said Johnny.
“I can’t just yet. Let me think. Your typewriter is one of those small
portable affairs that fold over and fit into a black case, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“Let me think. I learned the touch system on one of those. Let me feel it
out. Got a pencil?”
Johnny produced a stub of what had once been a pencil.
Turning the note over, the girl began drumming on it with all her
fingers.
“As if she were playing a piano,” thought Johnny.
“There!” She put down a figure. “And there!” she set down a sign.
So at last she filled the back of the sheet with figures and signs.
“Now we can do it,” she said at last. “It’s all quite simple.”
“It would seem so,” said Johnny skeptically.
“It really is, only you must know the position of numbers, letters and
signs on your typewriter keyboard. If you had studied it out before your
typewriter it would have been simple in the extreme.
“Your typewriter has three shifts; one for letters, one for capitals and
one for figures and signs. The thing Pant did was to lock his machine for
figures and signs, then write his note as if the machine were set for
letters. Now I have worked out the location of letters, figures and signs
by memory and the touch system, it will be very simple. The figure 5
stands for t, the percent sign for d, and so on.”
For a little time longer she studied. Then on a second scrap of paper she
wrote the following, which was Pant’s note to Johnny, written many days
previous:
Johnny:
The map is gone. The Spaniards have it. I am going into the jungle
after it. I will get it, never fear. Look out for a Spaniard named
Diaz. He is a Devil. Never trust nor believe him for a moment.
Good Luck,
Pant.
“So that was it,” Johnny said thoughtfully. “They stole his chart. I only
hope he got it back.”
Then after a time, “Well, I wish you had seen that note sooner. I did
trust Diaz. I did believe him. That was a great mistake.”
Still the wind howled and the rain came beating down upon a plantation
where thousands of banana stalks lay on the ground.