THE “GHOST” WALKS AGAIN
That night the “ghost” walked again—that is, Panther Eye returned. It was
late, how late Johnny did not quite know. He was seated beside the great,
wood-burning stove in the great front room of the Blue Moon.
The crowd was gone. And what a crowd it had been, a merry mob of college
folks celebrating a football game. Yells, songs, wild, fantastic dances
and eats, lots of eats, and good, hot drinks, that was what the long
evening had been. The Blue Moon was a success, a howling success. As he
sat there in the half-darkness—one dim light shone in a far corner—Johnny
was in a mellow mood.
And then, without a sound, the door opened. There came the shuffling of
feet. Johnny caught the pale gleam of two balls of fire. “Pant’s eyes,”
he whispered with an involuntary shudder.
“Hello, Johnny, I’m back,” came in a hoarse whisper.
“Hello, yourself,” Johnny was on his feet. “Wait. The coffee’s still hot.
There are mince pies, the turnover sort you can hold in your hands. I’ll
be back in a flash.” He was.
“Pant,” Johnny leaned forward eagerly as his strange visitor finished his
last bite of pie. “Last time I saw you, you were telling me of a
beautiful valley in Ethiopia and something about a girl, perhaps a white
girl, you didn’t seem to know. You said—”
“Yes,” Pant gave forth a low, hollow chuckle. “Yes, Johnny, that was
strange and—and exciting too.
“You see,” he settled back in his chair, his unusual eyes half closed.
“That girl was watching a small herd of cattle. They don’t have fences in
Ethiopia, at least, not in most places. So there was the girl and her
cattle, the green pasture like a magnificent oriental carpet, and the
small house set among the palms.
“It was warm, midafternoon. I sat down on a fallen tree to rest myself
and to just—well sort of enjoy that beautiful picture.
“I must have fallen asleep—” suddenly Pant’s eyes opened very wide. He
went through the preliminary motions of springing to his feet. “Yes, I
MUST have fallen asleep for, of a sudden, I heard a most unearthly
scream.
“I sprang to my feet just in time to see a huge, dark-faced man leap into
the brush. And, Johnny,” Pant drew in a long breath, “he was carrying
something on his back, carrying it like a sack of oats. He was carrying
that girl.”
“Oh-oo,” Johnny exclaimed.
“It’s quite common, that sort of thing there in Ethiopia,” Pant went on
more quietly. “You see, Johnny, they still have slaves in Ethiopia,
perhaps a million or two, no one seems to know exactly. And if you’re to
sell slaves, you must steal them. That’s what this fellow was doing.
Probably he was a Mohammedan, most of them are, a pretty low-lived lot.”
“And you—” Johnny began eagerly.
“Well, Johnny—” again the low, hollow chuckle, “it wasn’t any of my
business, not really. I hadn’t come there to reform the country. I just
wanted to see what it was like and to hunt up my brother. But this
fellow, that big, dark-faced man with a hooked nose, I learned about the
nose later, that fellow had spoiled my picture—you know, the girl, the
cattle, the carpet of green, the jewel of a house. It was all spoiled
after he had taken the girl. I wanted that girl back in the picture.
So—natur—ally—” Pant’s voice dropped to a drawl, “I went after him.”
“Pant,” exclaimed Johnny, “you are queer!”
“That’s what I’ve been told,” Pant grinned broadly.
“So you went after him,” Johnny prompted.
“Yes—I followed him. And that was the longest bit of following I’ve ever
done. That man, with the girl on his back, kept me coming along at a good
pace for hours and hours. Didn’t even stop for dark, just marched on and
on. Must have known every step of the way. And I—there I was
pussy-footing along, expecting every minute to have him whirl about and
drop me with the young cannon of a revolver he had slung from his belt.
“I didn’t carry a weapon, Johnny, just a big pocket knife, that’s all.
I’d left my light rifle at a bamboo shack in the jungle. I figured that
the night, darkness, and that fellow’s falling asleep was my only chance.
And here he was marching on and on.
“‘Might as well give it up,’ I told myself, ‘he’ll be breaking into a
clearing before long,—into a whole village of his sort. Then what will be
the good?’
“I was really about ready to give up when the fellow turned abruptly to
the right, went staggering up a stiff slope for maybe a thousand feet,
then vanished, just vanished—” Pant paused.
“A—a cave,” Johnny breathed.
“A cave,” Pant nodded his head.
“Just what you wanted.”
“Just that—” Pant nodded once more.
At that instant, through the half open window there came the high shrill
note of a whistle—just such a night call as Johnny had once heard in the
heart of a jungle at midnight.
Pant sprang to his feet. He went gliding to a window. There, crouching
low, he peered through a crack beneath the drawn shade out into the
night. He remained thus while the clock ticked off three full minutes,
then, without a word of explanation, resumed his place by the stove.
“You see,” he went on exactly where he had left off, “he had taken that
girl into the cave. He was armed, I was not. I could see in the dark, he
could not. But probably he had matches. Most likely he’d make a fire. I
had to have that girl back for my picture there at the edge of the
jungle. Besides—” Pant paused to stare at the floor, “I don’t like
slavery. Do you?”
“No one does, Pant, at least no one but those who keep slaves or make a
business of selling them.”
“That’s just it!” Pant agreed. “So of course I had to rescue that girl.
Don’t get me wrong, Johnny. I’m no romancer. Not a bit of it. But I had
to get that girl.”
“For your picture.”
“For my picture.
“He fell asleep—that man. I crept into the cave. The girl was there
unharmed. Terribly frightened, of course. Bound hand and foot. I should
have killed him, that slave-snatching son of Ali. But to try that would
have been dangerous. Besides I hate corpses. Don’t you, Johnny? Can’t
seem to forget ’em ever. Remember that man in the mine back there in
Russia?”
Johnny nodded.
“I never forgot how he looked, Johnny.”
“So you carried the girl away and that was all of it?” Johnny relaxed.
“No.” Once more Pant was on the prowl. Springing to his feet, he wandered
like a cat looking for a mouse all over the place. Then he came back and
sat down. “That,” he went on, “was only the beginning. You’d be
surprised, Johnny, you really would. Perhaps—” he spoke slowly, “perhaps,
you won’t believe the rest of it. I—I guess I better not tell you. It’s
too—”
“No! No!” Johnny’s voice rose. “Go on. Tell it all!”
“It wasn’t easy—” Pant went on at last in a slow drawl, “to find the way
back over the way we came, in fact, it was impossible. I tried to
remember the way we had come. But you know the jungle, Johnny, vines that
trip you and thorny bushes that turn you back. Rough and rugged it was
too, great rocks here and deep ravines there.
“The girl found it difficult to walk, she’d been bound for hours. I
helped her along until she showed me she could go it alone.
“Strange sort of girl, that one, Johnny. Never said a word—just marched
straight on behind me. Perhaps she didn’t know my language. Quite surely
she didn’t. Think of the languages spoken in Africa—French, Dutch,
Italian, German, and all the black lingos.
“We marched on for hours,” Pant heaved a heavy sigh. “All the time I was
looking for the way back. I found a river I’d seen. Then, in passing
around a rocky barrier, I lost it. All I could do was to make sure we
were going down, not up. That would take us toward valleys. What valleys?
Who could tell?
“All the time I was thinking of the girl. Was she all white or only one
of those white-blacks they call albino. And what did she think of me?
Perhaps she thought me one more slave trader who had stolen her from this
big fellow with the hooked nose.
“Johnny,” Pant sat up quite suddenly, his strange eyes gleaming, his tone
mysterious. “Johnny, did you ever see a man in one place, just see him a
time or two, not know him very well—and then, weeks later did you think
you saw him again in a different place thousands of miles away where he
couldn’t very well be?”
“No,” Johnny grinned. “There are some things that have never happened to
me. That’s one of them. Why?”
“Oh—oh nothing,” Pant settled back. “About this girl now. It was queer,
Johnny, downright queer. We’d come to the top of a high ridge. Dawn had
come, as it always does in the tropics, with a rush and with the joyous
scream of a thousand birds.
“We stood there on the ridge looking down at a sort of barren plateau
when some baboons, a whole troop of them, came marching out from the
jungle. Huge fellows they were. Powerful beasts with arms a foot longer
than mine. Powerful? Johnny, one of them could have grabbed me and broken
every bone in my body. But they wouldn’t, Johnny, I knew that well
enough. Once, for a whole week, I’d lived in such a place, just to watch
them. If I met one on the trail he’d try to bluff me. He’d march straight
at me swinging his huge fists and cracking his teeth as if he meant to
tear me to bits. When he was twenty feet away he’d stop dead in his
tracks. Then I’d laugh at him, laugh big and loud. And the poor old
fellow would turn and go slouching away like some huge bully who’s been
running a bluff.
“No, they wouldn’t harm us, Johnny, those baboons, but they were
interesting to watch. They played a sort of ball game with a cocoanut,
tossing it about. They did the leap-frog act better than any boys you’ve
ever seen. They had just seated themselves in a circle for some other
game, when all of a sudden, a sound from the jungle startled them.”
“A sound?”
“A shot, Johnny, a shot fired close at hand! You may think I wasn’t
startled. That big boy with the hooked nose was my first thought. I
dragged the girl into the fronds of a low growing palm.
“It wasn’t the big fellow with the hooked nose, Johnny. Worse than that.”
Pant rose to take one more prowl about the room. “Wild men, Johnny, a
whole troop of them! And were they wild! Such faces! Such bodies! Such
weapons!
“Scared, Johnny? Of course I was scared. All these wild men hate whites.
All whites looked the same to them. One glimpse of my face and the face
of the girl! That’s all that would be needed. They’d get us, those wild
men. Worse than a whole drove of those little tropical pigs, these wild
men were. They’d sure get us.
“I looked around for some place to hide. Then I glanced back where the
wild men were. I saw right away they had troubles of their own. They were
looking back and scurrying for shelter all at the same time.
“Somebody was after them. We were close to the border. Had they been on a
raid? Were whites after them or some other black men? There wasn’t time
to settle that.
“Gripping the girl by the wrist, I led her back among the bushes, then
along the ridge a short distance. And what do you think I saw, Johnny?”
“Can—can’t guess,” Johnny stammered.
“A cave, Johnny, a perfectly good cave. Wouldn’t believe it would you?
Well, you’ll not believe what happened after that—you couldn’t.”
“Yes, Pant,” Johnny’s voice was low, “I’ll believe it if you say it’s
true. Couldn’t be any stranger than the things that happened to us up
there on Behring Straits in Russia.”
“Don’t seem that they could be,” Pant rumbled down deep in his throat.
“You’ll be surprised, Johnny. Downright surprised. We—”
Pant broke short off to sit staring at the window. The shade was drawn.
Only one small light was turned on. This left the window in deep shadows.
The light from a street lamp was brighter than the light from within. The
wind was blowing, tossing tree branches about. Like ghostly fingers,
these branches traced strange moving patterns on the shade.
Johnny was shocked by the change that had come over his companion’s face.
Lips parted, nostrils wide, eyes aglow with strange fire, he sat there
staring as if entranced.
“Only the shadow of tossing branches,” Johnny said reassuringly.
“No, Johnny,” Pant’s voice sounded hollow, “No, Johnny, that was not all.
Excuse me, Johnny. I—I’ve got to go.” Next instant without a sound the
boy was gone.
Then Johnny, staring once more at the curtain saw, for an instant only, a
pair of massive shoulders, a giant head, a strangely hooked nose—all this
appeared in dark silhouette on the window shade. One instant it was
there, the next it was gone. Only the eerie, wind-traced tossing shadows
were left.
For a full five minutes Johnny sat there staring. At last, with a heavy
sigh, he arose to go.
Once again, as he snapped off the light, then for a period of seconds,
stood in the doorway, as on that other night, he was seized with a
strange notion, that Pant had not been there, only his ghost; that the
strange boy had been killed over there in Ethiopia—his spirit returned to
haunt his friends.
“Nonsense!” he exclaimed. “It’s true I didn’t touch him but ghosts don’t
eat mince pie.”