CAL'S VISITORS AND HIS BREAKFAST.
Even when he was lost in the chaparral, and saw the sun go down without
any hope of escaping from the spider-web of buffalo-paths, Cal had not
felt quite so badly as he did when he found himself staked out. There he
lay upon his back under the vast canopy of an ancient cypress-tree. Near
him the two uncouth-looking Apaches had thrown themselves upon the
grass. They seemed to be asleep pretty soon, for there was no more need
of their watching the prisoner.
Get away?
He could move his hands and feet just enough to keep the blood in
circulation, and that was all. He could turn his head and look at the
glow of the camp-fires and at the forms of men that now and then went
stalking to and fro. They were only dog-soldier Indian police in charge
of the camp, for the remainder of the band was taking all the sleep it
could get. Even the dogs were entirely quiet. If he looked up, there was
nothing but a dense mass of foliage, but it began at a height of fifty
feet or more from the ground. Great branches reached out, and from these
hung long ropes of vines of some sort, here and there, to the very
ground. There was no opening through which a star could be seen, and it
seemed to Cal as if his last hope had departed.
The position of a staked-out man is peculiarly uncomfortable, but it is
the traditional method of the red men for securing captives. The Hurons
and Shawnees and Iroquois, and other eastern tribes, made a forest-jail
in precisely the same way before any white men ever came among them. Cal
found that it was a great affliction not to be able to turn over in bed,
but that was nothing to the torment of having a mosquito on his chin,
another on his nose, and ten more humming around his head on all sides,
with no hand loose to slap among them. He almost ceased thinking of
Indian cruelties while suffering the merciless torments of those
insects. Tired as he was, he felt no longer any inclination to sleep.
His eyes grew accustomed to the dimness about him and over him. As he
looked up into the branches of the tree, after a while, he heard a
strange, mournful cry, very much like something that he had listened to
before, and then something whitish and wide-winged came sweeping down
from the darkness, and his eyes followed it as it swiftly shot across
the camp.
"Owl, I guess," groaned Cal. "Never saw one so large before. White owl.
What a hoot he had! Oh, my nose! These are the biggest kind of
mosquitoes."
So they were, and they kept their victim in continual misery. It was not
long before he saw something else, not so large as the owl, fly very
silently past him. It went and came several times, with a peculiarly
rapid flight, and he had pretty fair glimpses of it.
"What an enormous bat!" exclaimed Cal. "They have almost everything down
here. What I'm most afraid of are scorpions and centipedes and
tarantulas. Such woods as these must have lots of 'em, and I couldn't
get away."
They were dreadful things to think of, but Cal had not remembered all of
the customary inhabitants of a Mexican forest. He was put in mind of yet
one more after a while. He heard a rustling sound among the grass and
leaves near him, and it made him lift his head as high as he could. Just
then something else lifted its head, and Cal saw a pair of small,
glittering, greenish eyes that travelled right along at a few inches
above the ground. The cold sweat broke out all over him, but he held
perfectly still.
"They don't bite if you don't stir or provoke them," was the thought in
his mind; but that snake was not of the biting, venomous kind. It was
only a constrictor, not more than seven or eight feet long, and only
three inches thick at his thickest point. He was in no hurry, and it
seemed to Cal as if it took him about half an hour, or half a century,
he could not tell which, to crawl across the pair of legs which the
Apaches had pinned down. It was really about a quarter of a minute.
Cal had no idea how hard he had been straining at his fetters, spurred
by the mosquitoes. He made an unintentional jerk with his right arm as
the snake disappeared, and was startled by a discovery.
"Loose?" he said to himself. "Then I can loosen it more. I won't disturb
either of those fellows, but I must scratch these mosquito-bites."
A pull, another pull, and that forked stick began to come up, for one of
its legs had been put down in a gopher's hole, and had no holding. Out
it came, slowly, softly, and Cal's right hand was free to reach over and
help his left. That stake was hard pulling, but it came up at last, and
then the ankles could be set free.
"I'll drive them all down again hard," said Cal to himself, and he did
so.
"Let them wonder how I got out," he added; "but there isn't any use in
my trying to run away. They'd only catch me and kill me at once."
He rose to his feet, and it occurred to him that his safest place might
be by one of the smouldering camp-fires. The short June night was nearly
over, and the dawn was in the tree-tops when Cal walked away from the
shadow of the great cypress. He had a sort of desperate feeling, and it
made him singularly cool and steady. He did not meet anybody on his way.
His first discovery, as he drew near the fire, was that the Apaches had
found plentiful supplies in the packs of the Mexican mules. They knew
how to make coffee, too, for there was a big tin coffee-pot nearly full.
Cal put it upon some coals to heat, and then he saw a tin cup lying on
the ground, a box of sugar, a piece of bacon, and a fragment of coarse
corn-cake.
"That'll do," he said to himself. "I may as well eat."
The coffee boiled quickly, and Cal sat with a cup of it in one hand,
while with the other he held a stick with a slice of bacon at the fire
end of it. He did not know what was happening under the cypress.
One wrinkle-faced brave opened his beady black eyes and looked at the
place where the staked-out captive had been. The mocking smile he had
begun flitted away from his lips.
"Ugh!" he exclaimed as he sprang up and kicked his comrade, and in an
instant more two dreadfully puzzled Apaches were examining the forked
stakes which ought to have had a white boy's wrists and ankles in them.
Hard driven into the ground were all four, but the white boy? Where was
he?
"Heap bad medicine!" exclaimed one brave, almost despairingly.
"Boy heap gone," said the other.
They looked in all directions, but the last refuge they dreamed of was
the camp-fire where Cal was sitting.