Crouched at the edge of the jungle, where the clearing began, Paula
heard four shots. Two in quick succession, and a wait of minutes. Then
a third, and another long wait, and then the last. Then silence. Paula
began to shiver. Bell had helped her ashore from the raft and insisted
on her waiting at the edge of the jungle.
"Not that you'll be any safer," he had told her grimly, "but that I
may be. One person can move more quickly than two. And if I'm chased
I'll plunge for the place you're hidden, and you can open fire. Then
the two of us might hold them off."
"Why?" Paula said slowly.
And Bell caught at her wrist.
"Don't let me hear you talk like that!" he said sharply. "We're going
to beat this thing! We've got to! And being desperate helps, but being
in despair doesn't help a bit. Buck up!"
He frowned at her until she smiled.
"I will not despair again without your permission," she told him.
"Really. I will not."
He found her a hiding-place and went cautiously out into the clearing,
still frowning.
* * * * *
He had been gone five minutes before the first shot sounded, and quite
ten before the last rang out dully, and was echoed and re-echoed
hollowly by the jungle trees. And Paula lay waiting by the edge of the
clearing, Ribiera's pearl-handled automatic in her hand--Bell had
carried the rifle from the plane. Small insects moved all about her,
and she heard soft rustlings as the life of the jungle went on over
her head and under her feet, and terror welled up in her throat.
She was trembling almost uncontrollably when Bell came back. He walked
openly toward her hiding-place.
"Paula."
She came out, trying to steady her quivering lips.
"We're all right," said Bell grimly. "This is the _fazenda_ of a
sub-deputy. I suspect, also, it's an emergency landing field for
Ribiera on the way to that place he talked to last night. There's a
two-place plane here with both wheels and floats, in a filthy little
shed. It seems to be all right. We're going to take off in it and try
to make Moradores, where your people are. What's the matter?"
Her face was deathly pale.
"I thought," she said with some difficulty, "when I heard the shots--I
thought you were killed."
Bell shook his head.
"I wasn't," he said grimly. "It was four other men who were killed."
* * * * *
He led her carefully past the house. It was a fairly typical _fazenda_
dwelling, if more substantial than most. It was wholly unpretentious,
with whitewashed walls, and the effect of grandeur it would give to
natives of this region would come solely from the number of buildings.
There were half a dozen or more.
"I killed four men," repeated Bell coldly. "And I'm damned glad of it.
That scream we heard.... I know pretty well what happened here last
night. Remember, Ribiera spoke of using a beam-wireless to make his
report. He must have had a short-wave beam set somewhere on the
outskirts of Rio, aimed at whatever headquarters he reports to. He's
going up to that headquarters some time to-day, by plane, of course.
He needed emergency landing fields along the route, and here he picked
out a native and made him a sub-deputy. Charming...."
Moving past the buildings, Paula caught sight of massive wooden bars
set in the side of a building. Something crumpled up and limp lay
before them.
"Don't look over there," said Bell harshly. "There was a woman in this
house and she told me what happened, though I'd guessed it before. The
sub-deputy was here last night with a party of friends. Newly
enslaved, some of them. He entertained them.... Up at Ribiera's place
a girl told me she and her husband had been shown a Secret Service
man. He went mad before their eyes. It was an object-lesson for them,
a clear illustration of what would happen to them if they ever
disobeyed. I imagine that something of the sort is used by all The
Master's deputies to convince their slaves of the fate that awaits
them for disobedience. The local man had brought a party up to watch
two men go mad. After that sight they'll be obedient."
* * * * *
He reached a shed, huge, but in disrepair. Monster doors were ajar.
Bell heaved at them and swung them wide. A small, trim, two-seated
plane showed in the shadowy interior.
"This is for emergency use," said Bell grimly, "and we face an
emergency. I'll get it out and load it up. There's a dump of gas and
so on here. You might look around outside the door, in case the one
man who got away can find someone to help stop me."
He set to work checking on fuel and oil. He loaded extra gas in the
front cockpit, a huge tin of it. Another would crowd him badly in the
pilot's cockpit in the rear, but he stowed it as carefully as he
could.
"The local sub-deputy," he added evenly, "has added to the thrill by
having the two men put in one cage. He let his guests observe the
progress of the madness the damned poison produces. And presently, as
the madness grew, the two men fought. They were murder mad. The local
sub-deputy gave his guests the thrill of watching maniacs battling to
the death. He left early this morning with his party, and I imagine
that everyone was suitably submissive to his demands for the future.
There were four men and a woman left as caretakers here. I found the
four men before the cage, baiting the poor devil who'd killed the
other last night. That's why we heard the scream. When I came up with
my rifle they stared at me, and ran.
* * * * *
"I got one then, and as a matter of mercy I put a bullet through the
man who'd gone murder mad. The"--Bell sounded as if he were acutely
nauseated--"the man he'd killed was still in the cage. My God!... Then
I went looking for the other three men. Wasting time, no doubt, but I
found them. I was angry. I got one, and the others ran away again. A
little later the third man jumped me with a knife. He slit my sleeve.
I killed him. Didn't find the fourth man." Bell moved to the front of
the plane. "I'll see if she catches."
He swung on the stick. It went over stiffly. Again, and again. With a
bellow, the motor caught. Bell shouted in Paula's ear.
"We'll get in. Use the warming-up period to taxi out. We want to get
away as soon as we can."
He helped her up into the seat, then remembered. He rummaged about and
flung a tumbled flying suit up in the cockpit with her.
"If you get a chance, put it on!" he shouted. He stepped into a
similar outfit, reached up and throttled down the motor, and kicked
away the blocks under the wheels. He vaulted up into place. And slowly
and clumsily the trim little ship came lurching and rolling out of the
shed.
* * * * *
The landing field was not large, but Bell took the plane to its edge.
He faced it about, and bent below the cockpit combing to avoid the
slip stream and look at his maps again, brought from the big
amphibian. Something caught his eye. Another radio receiving set.
"Amphibian planes," he muttered, "for landing on earth or water. And
radios. I wonder if he has directional for a guide? It would seem
sensible, and if a plane went down the rest of them would know about
where to look."
Paula reached about and touched his shoulder. She pointed. There was a
movement at the edge of the jungle and a puff of smoke. A bullet went
through the fusilage of the plane, inches behind Bell. He frowned,
grasped the stick, and gave the motor the gun.
It lifted heavily, like all amphibians, but it soared over the group
of buildings some twenty or thirty feet above the top of the wireless
mast and went on, rising steadily, to clear even the topmost trees on
the farther side of the stream by a hundred feet or more.
It went on and on, roaring upward, and the jungle receded ever farther
below it. The horizon drew back and back. At two thousand feet the
earth began to have the appearance of a shallow platter. At three
thousand it was a steep sided bowl, and Bell could look down and trace
the meandering of the stream on which he had landed the night before.
Not too far downstream--some fifteen miles, perhaps--were the squalid,
toy sized structures of a town of the far interior of Brazil. He never
learned its name, but even in his preoccupation with the management
of the plane and a search for landmarks, he wondered very grimly
indeed what would be the state of things in that town. If in Rio,
where civilization held sway, Ribiera exercised such despotic though
secret power, in a squalid and forgotten little village like this the
rule of a sub-deputy of The Master could be bestial and horrible
beyond belief.
* * * * *
Eastward. Bell had overshot the mark the night before. Before he had
located himself he was quite fifty miles beyond the spot Paula had
suggested as a hiding place. Now he retraced his way. A peak jutting
up from far beyond the horizon was a guiding mark. He set the plane's
nose for it, and relaxed.
The motor thundered on valorously. Far below was a vast expanse of
thick jungle, intercepted but nowhere broken by occasional small
streams and now and then the tiny, angular things which might be
houses. But houses were very infrequent. In the first ten miles--with
a view of twenty miles in every direction--Bell picked out no more
than four small groups of buildings which might be the unspeakably
isolated _fazendas_ of the folk of this region.
"Ribiera was coming this way," he muttered.
He fumbled the headphone of the radio set into place. The set seemed
to be already arbitrarily tuned. He turned it on. There was a
monotonous series of flashes, with the singing note of a buzzer in
them. A radio direction signal.
"Ribiera's on the way."
Bell stared far ahead, without reason. And it seemed to him that just
then, against that far distant guiding peak, he saw a black speck
floating in mid-air.
* * * * *
He pulled back the joy stick. Detached, feathery clouds spread across
the sky, and he was climbing for them. Paula looked behind at him, and
he pointed. He saw her seem to stiffen upon sight of the other
aircraft.
In minutes Bell's plane was tearing madly through sunlit fleecy
monsters which looked soft and warm and alluring, and were cold and
damp and blinding in their depths. Bell kept on his course. The two
planes were approaching each other at a rate of nearly two hundred
miles an hour.
And then, while the harsh, discordant notes of the radio signal
sounded monotonously in his ears, Bell stared down and, through a rift
between two clouds, saw the other plane for an instant, a thousand
feet below.
The sun shone upon it fiercely. Its propeller was a shimmering,
cobwebby disk before it. It seemed to hang motionless--so short was
Bell's view of it--between earth and sky: a fat glistening body as of
a monstrous insect. Bell could even see figures in its cockpits.
Then it was gone, but Bell felt a curious hatred of the thing. Ribiera
was almost certainly in it, headed for the place to which he had
spoken the night before. And Bell was no longer able to think of
Ribiera with any calmness. He felt a personal, gusty hatred for the
man and all he stood for.
* * * * *
His face was grim and savage as his own plane sped through the clouds.
But just as the two aircraft had approached each other with the
combined speed of both, so they separated. It seemed only a moment
later that Bell dipped down below the clouds and the other plane was
visible only as a swiftly receding mote in the sunlight.
"I wonder," said Bell coldly to himself, with the thunder of the motor
coming through the singing of the air route signal, "I wonder if he'll
see the ship I cracked up last night?"
Paula was pointing. The shoulder of a hill upthrust beneath the
jungle. The tall trees were cleared away at its crest. Small,
whitewashed buildings appeared below.
"Good landing field," said Bell, his eyes narrowing suddenly. "On the
direct route. Fifty miles back there's another landing field. I
wonder...."
He was already suspicious before he flattened out above the house,
while dogs fled madly. He noticed, too, that horses in a corral near
the buildings showed no signs of fright. And horses are always afraid
of landing aircraft, unless they have had much opportunity to grow
accustomed to them.
The little plane rolled and bumped, and gradually came to a stop. Bell
inconspicuously shifted a revolver to the outer pocket of his flying
suit. Figures came toward them, with a certain hesitating reluctance
that changed Bell's suspicions even while it confirmed them.
* * * * *
"Paula," he said grimly, "this is another landing field for Ribiera's
emergency use. It sticks out all over the place. Relatives or no
relatives, you want to make sure of them. You understand?"
Her eyes widened in a sudden startled fear. She caught her breath
sharply. Then she said quietly, though her voice trembled:
"I understand. Of course."
She slipped out of the plane and advanced to meet the approaching
figures. There were surprised, astounded exclamations: A bearded man
embraced her and shouted. Women appeared and, after staring, embraced.
Paula turned to wave her hand reassuringly to Bell, and vanished
inside the house.
Bell looked over his instruments, examined the gas in the tank, and
began to work over his maps in the blaring sunlight. He cut out the
switch and the motor stopped with minor hissings of compression. The
maps held his attention, though he listened keenly as he worked for
any signs of trouble that Paula might encounter.
He was beginning to have a definite idea in his mind. Ribiera had
talked to a headquarters somewhere, by beam radio from Rio. Beam
wireless, of course, is nothing more or less than a concentration of
a radio signal in a nearly straight line, instead of allowing it to
spread about equally on all sides of the transmitting station. It
makes both for secrecy and economy, since nearly all the power used at
the sending apparatus is confined to an arc of about three degrees of
a circle. Directed to a given receiving station, receiving outfits to
one side or the other of that path are unable to listen in, and the
signal is markedly stronger in the chosen path. Exactly the same
process, of course, is used for radio directional signals, one of
which still buzzed monotonously in Bell's ears until he impatiently
turned it off. A plane in the path hears the signal. If it does not
hear the signal, it is demonstrably off the straight route.
* * * * *
Bell, then, was in a direct line from Rio to the source of a radio
direction signal. Fifty miles back, where the big amphibian had
crashed, he was in the same air line. To extend that line on into the
interior would give the destination of Ribiera, and the location of
the headquarters where direct communication with The Master was
maintained.
He worked busily. His maps were in separate sheets, and it took time
to check the line from Rio. When he had finished, he computed grimly.
"At a hundred miles in hour...." He was figuring the maximum distance
which could plausibly be accepted as a day's journeying by air. He
surveyed the maps again. "The plateau of Cuyaba, at a guess. Hm....
Fleets of aircraft could practise there and never be seen. An army
could be maneuvered without being reported. Certainly the headquarters
for the whole continent could be there. Striking distance of Rio,
Montevideo, Buenos Aires, La Paz, and Asuncion. Five republics."
* * * * *
Certainly, from his figures, it seemed plausible that somewhere up on
the Plateau of Cuyaba--where no rails run, no boats ply, and no
telegraph line penetrates; which juts out ultimately into that
unknown region where the Rio Zingu and the Tapajoz have their
origins--certainly it seemed plausible that there must lie the
headquarters of the whole ghastly conspiracy. There, it might be, the
deadly plants from which The Master's poison was brewed were grown.
There the deadly stuff was measured out and mixed with its temporary
antidote....
Paula came back, a young man with her. Her eyes were wide and staring,
as if she had looked upon something vastly worse than death.
"He--Ribiera," she gasped. "My uncle, he owned this place. They--have
him here--alive--and mad! And all the rest...."
Bell fumbled in the pocket of his flying suit. The young man with
Paula was looking carefully at the plane. And there was a revolver in
a holster at his side. An air of grim and desperate doggedness was
upon him.
"This is--my cousin," gasped Paula. "He--and his wife--and--and--"
* * * * *
The young man took out his weapon. He fired. There was a clanging of
metal, the screech of tortured steel. Bell's own revolver went off the
fraction of a second too late.
"You may kill me, Senhor," said the young man through stiff lips. His
revolver had dropped from limp fingers. He pressed the fingers of his
left hand upon the place where blood welled out, just above his right
elbow. "You may kill me. But if you and my cousin Paula escaped.... I
have a wife, Senhor, and my mother, and my children. Kill me if you
please. It is your right. But I have seen my father go mad." Sweat,
the sweat of agony and of shame, came out upon his face. "I fought
him, Senhor, to save the lives of all the rest. And I have spoiled
your engine, and I have already sent word that you and Paula are here.
Not for my own life, but...."
He waited, haggard and ashamed and desperate and hopeless. But Bell
was staring at the motor of the airplane.
"Crankcase punctured," he said dully. "Aluminum. The bullet went right
through. We can't fly five miles. And Ribiera knows we're here--or
will."