the sun burned down upon them. When the tangled balls of snakes melted
off the branches, and the water smoked and the paddles were too hot to
handle, Manuel shoved the canoe into the shade of overhanging vines. It
was a time when all living things, except the heat-born sand flies, hid
from the direct rays of the midday sun. While the Spaniard draped a net
over the bow of the canoe these sand flies hummed by like bullets. Then
Manuel motioned his comrade to crawl with him under cover, and there
they slept away those hours wherein action was forbidden.
About the middle of the afternoon they awoke to resume their journey;
leisurely at first, and then, as the sun declined, with more energy.
Fish and crocodiles rippled the surface of the river, and innumerable
wild fowl skimmed its green width.
Toward sunset Manuel beached on a sandy bank, where there was a grove
of _siteka_ trees. He had gone into the jungle at this point and
brought out rubber. The camp site was now waist deep in vegetation,
which Manuel mowed down with his machete. Then he built two fires of
damp leaves and wood, so they would smoke and somewhat lessen the
scourge of mosquitoes. After that he carried up the charcoal box from
the canoe and cooked the evening meal.
Manuel found it good to unseal the fountain of speech, that always went
dry when he was alone in the jungle. It took him a little while to
realize that he did all the talking, that Señor was a silent man who
replied only to a direct question, and then mostly in monosyllables.
Slowly this dawned upon the voluble Spaniard, and slowly he froze into
the silence natural to him in the wilderness.
They finished the meal, eating under their head nets, and then sat a
while over the smoky fires, with the splash of fish and the incessant
whining hum of mosquitoes in their ears. When the stars came out,
lightening the ebony darkness, they manned the canoe again, and for
long hours poled up the misty gloom of the river.
In the morning they resumed travel, slept through the sweltering noon,
and went on in the night. At the end of the fifth day’s advance, Manuel
pointed out the mouth of a small tributary.
“So far I’ve been. Beyond here all is strange to me. White men from
Lima have come down the river; but of those who have gone up farther
than this, none have ever returned.”
What a light flashed from the eyes of his partner! Manuel was slow to
see anything singular in men. But this served to focus his mind on the
strangest companion with whom he had ever traveled.
Señor was exceedingly strong and implacably tireless; a perfect fiend
for action. He minded not the toil, nor the flies, nor the mosquitoes,
nor the heat; nothing concerned him except standing still. Señor never
lagged, never shirked his part of the labor, never stole the bigger
share of food, which was more than remarkable in the partner of a
rubber hunter.
So Manuel passed through stages of attention, from a vague stirring
of interest to respect and admiration, and from these to wonder and
liking, emotions long dormant within him. The result was for him to
become absorbed in covert observation of his strange comrade.
Señor ate little, and appeared to force that. He slept only a few
hours every day, and his slumbers were restless, broken by turning and
mumbling. Sometimes Manuel awakened to find him pacing the canoe or
along a sandy strip of shore. All the hot hours of their toil he bent
his broad shoulders to the paddle, wet with sweat. Indeed, he invited
the torture of the sun and flies. His white face, that Manuel likened
to a woman’s, was burned red and bitten black and streaked with blood.
When Manuel told him to take the gun and kill wild fowl, he reached
instinctively for it with the action of a man used to sport, and then
he drew back and let his companion do the shooting. He never struck at
one of the thousands of snakes, or slapped at one of the millions of
flies, or crushed one of the millions of flies, or one of the billions
of mosquitoes.
When Manuel called to Señor, as was frequently necessary in the
management of the canoe, he would start as if recalled from engrossing
thought. Then he would work like an ox, so that it began to be
vexatious for Manuel to find himself doing the lesser share. Slowly he
realized Señor’s intensity, the burning in him, the tremendous driving
power that appeared to have no definite end.
For years Manuel had been wandering in wild places, and, as the men
with whom he came in contact were brutal and callous, answering only
to savage impulses, so the evil in him, the worst of him, had risen
to meet its like. But with this man of shadowed eye Manuel felt the
flux and reflux of old forces, dim shades drawn from old memories, the
painful resurrection of dead good, the rising of the phantom of what
had once been the best in him.
The days passed, and the Pachitea narrowed and grew swifter, and its
green color took on a tinge of blue.
“A-ha!” cried Manuel. “The Palcazu is blue. We must be near the mouth.
Listen.”
Above the hum of the sand flies rose a rumble, like low thunder, only a
long, unending roll. It was the roar of rapids. The men leaned on their
paddles and trudged the length of the canoe, steadily gliding upstream,
covering the interminable reaches, winding the serpentine bends. The
rumble lulled and swelled, and then, as they turned a bend, burst upon
their ears with clear thunder. The Palcazu entered the larger river
by splitting round a rocky island. On one side tumbled a current that
raced across the Pachitea to buffet a stony bluff. On the other side
sloped a long incline of beautiful blue-green water, shining like
painted glass.
Manuel poled up the left shore as far as possible, then leaped out
to wade at the bow. Señor waded at the stern, and thus they strove
against the current. It was shallow, but so swift that it made progress
laboriously slow, and it climbed in thin sheets up the limbs of the
travelers. Foot by foot they ascended the rapid, at last to surmount it
and beach the canoe in a rocky shore.
“Water from the Andes!” exclaimed Manuel. “It’s years since I felt such
water. Here’s a bad place to float a canoe full of rubber.”
“You’ll have jolly sport shooting this rapid,” replied Señor.
“We’re entering Cashibos country now. We must eat fish--no firing the
guns.”
Wild cane grew thick on the bank; groves of the white sitekas led to
the dark forest where the giant capirona trees stood out, their tall
trunks bare and crimson against the green; and beyond ranged densely
wooded hills to far distant purple outline of mountains or clouds.
“There’s cowcha here, but not enough,” said Manuel.
They rested, as usual during the blistering noon hours, then faced up
the Palcazu. Before them stretched a tropical scene. The blue water
reflected the blue sky and the white clouds, and the hanging vines and
leaning orchid-tufted, creeper-covered trees. Green parrots hung back
downward from the branches, feeding on pods; macaws of gaudy plumage
wheeled overhead; herons of many hues took to lumbering flight before
the canoe.
The placid stretch of river gave place to a succession of rapids, up
which the men had to wade. A downpour of rain joined forces with the
stubborn current in hindering progress. The supplies had to be covered
with palm leaves; stops had to be made to bail out the canoe; at times
the rain was a blinding sheet. Then the clouds passed over and the sun
shone hot. The rocks were coated with a slime so slippery that sure
footing was impossible.
Manuel found hard wading; and Señor, unaccustomed to such locomotion,
slid over the rocks and fell often. The air was humid and heavy,
difficult to breathe; the trees smoked and the river steamed. Another
chute, a mill race steep as the ingenuity of the voyagers, put them to
tremendous exertions. They mounted it and rested at the head, eyes down
the glancing descent.
“What jolly sport you’ll have shooting that one!” exclaimed Señor; and
he laughed for the first time; not mirthfully, rather with a note that
rang close to envy.
Manuel gazed loweringly from under his shaggy brows. This was the
second time Señor had spoken of the return trip. Manuel’s sharpening
wits divined a subtle import--Señor’s consciousness that for himself
there would be no return. The thing fixed itself on Manuel’s mind and
would not be shaken. Blunt and caustic as he was, something withheld
his speech; he asked only himself, and knew the answer. Señor was
another of those men who plunge into the unbroken fastnesses of a wild
country to leave no trace. Wanderers were old comrades to Manuel. He
had met them going down to the sea and treading the trails; and he knew
there had been reasons why they had left the comforts of home, the
haunts of men, the lips of women. Derelicts on the drifting currents
had once been stately ships; wanderers in the wilds had once swung with
free stride on sunny streets.
“He’s only another ruined man,” muttered Manuel, under his breath.
“He’s going to hide. After a while he will slink out of the jungle to
become like all the others--like me!”
But Manuel found his mind working differently from its old habit; the
bitterness that his speech expressed could not dispel a yearning which
was new to him.
While making camp on a shelf of shore he was absorbed in his new
thoughts, forgetting to curse the mosquitoes and ants.
When the men finished their meal, twilight had shaded to dusk. Owing to
the many rapids, travel by night had become impossible. Manuel drooped
over one smoky fire and Señor sat by another. After sunset there never
was any real silence in the jungle. This hour was, nevertheless,
remarkably quiet. It wore, shaded, blackened, into wild, lonely night.
The remoteness of that spot seemed to dwell in the sultry air, in the
luminous fog shrouding the river, in the moving gloom under the black
trees, in the odor of decaying vegetable life.
Manuel nodded and his shoulders sagged. Presently Señor raised his
head, as if startled.
“Listen!” he whispered, touching his comrade’s arm.
Then in the semidarkness they listened. Señor raised his head net above
his ears.
“There! Hear it?” he breathed low. “What on earth--or in hell? What is
it?”
“I hear nothing,” replied Manuel.
Señor straightened his tall form and stood with clenched hands.
“If that was fancy--then--” He muttered deep in his chest. All at once
he swayed to one side. And became strung in the attitude of listening.
“Again! Hear it! Listen!”
Out of the weird darkness wailed a soft, sad note, to be followed by
another, lower, sweeter, and then another still fainter.
“I hear nothing,” repeated Manuel. This time, out of curiosity and
indefinable portent, he lied.
“No! You’re sure?” asked Señor huskily. He placed a shaking hand on
Manuel. “You heard no cry--like--like--” He drew up sharply. “Perhaps I
only thought I heard something--I’m fanciful at times.”
He stirred the camp fire and renewed it with dry sticks. Evidently he
wanted light. A slight blaze flickered up, intensifying the somber
dusk. A vampire bat wheeled in the lighted circle. Manuel watched his
companion, studying the face, somehow still white through the swollen
fly blotches and scorch of sun, marveling at its expression. What had
Señor imagined he had heard?
Again the falling note! Clearer than the clearest bell, sweeter than
the saddest music, wailed out of a succession of melancholy, descending
tones, to linger mournfully, to hold the last note in exquisite
suspense, to hush away, and leave its phantom echo in the charged air.
A woman, dying in agony and glad to die, not from disease or violence,
but from unutterable woe, might have wailed out that last note to the
last beat of a broken heart.
Señor gripped Manuel’s arm.
“You heard that--you heard it? Tell me!”
“Oh, is that what you meant? Surely I heard it,” replied Manuel.
“That’s only the Perde-alma.”
“Perde-alma?” echoed Señor.
“Bird of the Lost Soul. Sounded like a woman, didn’t it? We rubber
hunters like his song. The Indians believe he sings only when death is
near. But that signifies nothing. For above the Pachitea life and death
are one. Life is here, and a step there is death! Perde-alma sings
seldom. I was years on the river before I heard him.”
“Bird of the Lost Soul! A bird! Manuel, I did not think that cry came
from any living thing.”
He spoke no more, and paced to and fro in the waning camp-fire glow,
oblivious to the web of mosquitoes settling on his unprotected head.
Manuel pondered over the circumstance till his sleepy mind refused to
revolve another idea. In the night he awoke and knew from the feeling
of his unrested body that he had not slept long. He had been awakened
by his comrade talking in troubled slumber.
“Lost soul--wandering--never to return! Yes! Yes! But oh let me forget!
Her face! Her voice! Could I have forgotten if I had killed her?
Driven, always driven--never to find--never--”
So Señor cried aloud, and murmured low, and mumbled incoherently, till
at last, when the black night wore gray, he lay silent.
“A woman!” thought Manuel. “So a woman drove him across the seas to
the Palcazu. Driven--driven! How mad men are!”
Señor had turned his face from his world, to drift with the eddying
stream of wanderers who follow no path and find no peace, to be
forgotten, to end in evil, to die forlorn--all for a woman.
In the darkness of this Peruvian forest, Señor lay amid the crawling
vermin unconsciously muttering of a woman. Night spoke aloud thoughts
deep hidden by day. Señor had a sailor’s eye, a soldier’s mien; he
had not shrunk from the racking toil, the maddening insects, the
blood-boiling heat; he was both strong and brave; yet he was so haunted
by a woman that he trembled to hear the fancied voice of his ghost of
love in the wailing note of a jungle bird. That note was the echo of
his haunting pain. Señor’s secret was a woman.
Manuel understood now why he had been inexplicably drawn to this man.
A ghost had risen out of his own dead years. It rolled back time for
Manuel, lifting from the depths a submerged memory, that, like a
long-sunken bell, rang the muffled music of its past.
Out of the gray jungle gloom glided the wraith of one he had loved
long ago. She recalled sunny Spain--a grassy hill over the blue
bay--love--home--dark in his inner eye. And the faint jungle murmuring
resembled a voice. Thus after absence of years, Manuel’s ghost of love
and life had come to him again. It had its resurrection in the agony
of his comrade. For Manuel there was only that intangible feeling,
the sweetness of remembered pain. Life had no more shocks to deal him,
he thought; that keen ache in the breastbone, that poignant pang could
never again be his. Manuel was life worn. He felt an immunity from
further affliction, and consciousness of age crept across the line of
years.
How different from other mornings in the past was the breaking of this
gray dawn! The mist was as hard to breathe, the humidity as oppressive,
the sun as hot, and the singing spiteful, invisible, winged demons
stung with the same teeth of poisoned fire--all the hardship of jungle
travel was as before, yet it seemed immeasurably lessened.
For many years Manuel had slaved up these smoky rivers, sometimes with
men who hated him, and whom he learned to hate. But no man could have
hated Señor. In these enterprises of lonely peril, where men were
chained together in the wilderness, with life strained to the last
notch, there could be no middle course of feeling. A man must either
hate his companion and want to kill him, or love him and fight to save
him.
So Manuel loved Señor, and laughed at the great white wonder of it,
lightening it all; and once again the sealed fountain of his speech
broke and flowed. Back in the settlement _chicha_ had always loosed
Manuel’s tongue, liberated wild mirth, incited fierce passions; here
in the jungle the divining of another’s pain, such as had seared him
years before, pierced to the deeps of his soul, and brought forth kind
words that came haltingly through lips long grimly set to curse.
In the beginning of that new kinship, Señor looked in amaze upon his
changed comrade, and asked if he had fever. Manuel shook his shaggy
head. Señor then fell silent; but he listened, he had to listen, and,
listening, forgot himself. A new spirit fused the relation of these men.
“Señor, we are hunters,” said Manuel. “I for gold that I do not want
and shall easily find, you for--”
“Peace, Manuel, peace, that I ceaselessly want, but will never find.”
Onward the voyagers poled and waded up the blue Palcazu. The broken
waters held them to five miles a day. Only giants could have made even
so many. The slimy rocks over which floundered the hydra-headed balls
of snakes, the stench of hot ponds behind the bars, the rush of current
to be fought inch by inch, the torrents of rain, the bailing of the
canoe, the merciless heat, and the everwhirling, steel-colored bands
of venomous flies--these made day a hell, rest a time of pain, sleep a
nightmare; but the hunters, one grim, the other gay, strengthened with
the slow advance.
Often Manuel climbed the banks, to return saying there was cowcha,
more than he had seen, yet still not enough. They must go higher, to
richer soil. They camped where sunset overtook them. As they sat over
the smoky fires or fished in the river or lay side by side under the
tent, Manuel talked. He had gone over the vast fund of his wilderness
knowledge, experience in that sun-festered world, stories of river and
jungle, of fights and fevers. Circling back on his seafaring life,
as castaway, mariner, smuggler, he dredged memory of the happenings
of those years till he reached the catastrophe that had made him a
wanderer.
“What made me a caucho outlaw?” he queried, whipping his big hand
through the flying swarm about his face. “A woman! What sends
most wandering men down the false trails of the world? What drove
you, comrade? Perhaps a woman! _Quien sabe?_ I loved a girl. She
had eyes like night--lips of fire--she was as sweet as life. See
my hand tremble! Señor, it was years ago--five, maybe ten, I don’t
remember--what are years? We were married, and had a cottage on a
grassy hill above the bay, where the wind blew, and we could see the
white ripples creeping up the sand. Then a sailor came from over the
sea; a naval man, Señor, of your country. He had seen the world;
he could fascinate women--and women change their love. She walked
with me along the beach in the twilight. The wind tossed her hair.
I repeated gossip, accused her of loving this man I had never seen.
She acknowledged her love; proudly, I thought bravely; surely without
shame. Señor, with these same hands I forced her to her knees, stifled
her cry--and slowly, slowly watched the great staring eyes grow fixed
and awful--the lips fall wide--”
“You strangled her?” burst from Señor in passionate force.
“I was a fiend,” went on the Spaniard. “I felt nothing except that her
love had changed. I fled over the seas. For long my mind was dark, but
clearness came, and with it truth. How I knew it I can’t say--these
things abide in mystery--but my girl was innocent. Then hell gaped for
me. Burning days--endless nights under the hateful stars--no rest--her
last cry, like the Perde-alma, Señor--her great, wide eyes--the beat,
the beat, the eternal beat of pain, made him you see a thing of iron
and stone.
“What was left, Señor? Only a wild life. You see the wanderer
with crimes on him thick as his gray hairs. Ah! What I might have
done--might have been! I see that in your eyes. What a man might have
been! Holy Mercy! A braver part no man ever had chance to play. I could
have left her free. I would not have heard the hound of remorse ever
baying my trail. I could have hidden like a stricken deer, and died
alone. But I was a blind coward. Men see differently after years go by.
What is love? What is this thing that makes one woman all of life to a
man? Constant or fickle, she is fair to him. Bound or free, she answers
to nameless force.”
“Where did you--all this happen?” asked Señor hurriedly and low.
“It was at Malaga, on the Mediterranean.”
Señor stalked off into the gloom, whispering.
Manuel did not notice his comrade’s agitation; he was in the rude grip
of unfamiliar emotions. His story had been a deliberate lie, yet it
contained truth enough to recall the old feeling out of its grave. He
thought he had divined Señor’s secret, his sacrifice, the motive behind
his wandering in a God-forsaken land. He believed it was to leave a
woman free and to forget. He felt the man’s burning regret that he had
not spilled blood in vengeance. So he had lied, had made himself a
murderer, that by a somber contrast Señor might see in forgiveness and
mercy the nobler part.
Deep in Manuel’s bitter soul he knew how he had lied--for that woman of
his youth had not been innocent; he had not harmed her, and he had left
her free. Señor would believe his fabricated tragedy, and, looking on
this hulk of a man, this wandering wretch, haunted by what he might
have been, and, thanking God for his clean hands, might yet see the
darkness illumined.
More days the hunters poled and pulled up the Palcazu, to enter, at
length, the mouth of a deep estuary coming in from the north.
This water was a blue-green reflection of sky and foliage. It was a
beautiful lane, winding between laced and fringed, woven and flowered
walls. The heavy perfume of overluxuriance was sickening. Life was
manifold. The estuary dimpled and swelled and splashed--everywhere were
movements and sounds of water creatures. Gorgeous parrots screeched
from the trailing vines; monkeys chattered from the swishing branches.
Myriads of bright-plumaged birds, flitting from bank to bank, gave the
effect of a many-colored net stretched above the water. Dreamy music
seemed to soar in the rich, thick atmosphere.
The estuary widened presently into a narrow, oval lake, with a sandy
shore on the north. Crocodiles basked in the sun, and, as Manuel turned
the canoe shoreward, they raised themselves on stumpy legs, jaws wide,
grotesque and hideous, and lunged for the water.
“Cayman! I never saw so many,” exclaimed Manuel, striking right and
left with his paddle. “Where I find caymans, there’s always cowcha.
Señor, I believe here is the place.”
They ascended the bank, and threaded a maze of wild cane rising
to higher ground. The soil was a rich alluvial. Manuel dug into
it with his hands, as if, indeed, he expected to find gold there.
The ridge they mounted was not thickly forested. Manuel made two
discoveries--they were on the borderland of the eastern Andes, and
all about them were rubber trees. Whether or not Manuel cared for the
fortune represented by one hundredth part of the rubber he could see,
certain it was that he ran from one tree to another clasping each in a
kind of ecstasy.
“Iquitos will go mad,” he cried. “A thousand tons of cowcha in sight!
It’s here. Look at the trees--fifty, sixty feet high! Señor, we shall
go in rich, rich, rich!”
They packed the supplies up from the river to escape the sand flies,
and built a shack, elevating it slightly on forked sticks to evade the
marching ants and creeping insects. Inside the palm-leaf walls they
hung the net, fitting it snugly in the cramped space. By clearing away
the underbrush and burning the ground bare, they added still more to
the utility of their camp site, and, as far as it was possible in that
jungle, approached comfort.
A troop of monkeys took refuge in the tops of some palms and set up
a resentful chattering; parrots and macaws swelled the unwelcoming
chorus; a boa wound away from the spot, shaking a long line of bushes;
and an anteater ran off into the _sitekas_.
Manuel caught up his gun, making as if to pursue the beast, then slowly
laid the weapon down.
“I’d forgotten. We’re in Cashibos country now. I’ve seen no signs, but
we had best be quiet. At that we may have to shoot the jaguars. They
stalk a man.”
The rubber hunters worked from dawn till the noonday heat, rested
through the white, intense hours, resumed their tasks in the afternoon,
and continued while the light lasted. The method of honest rubber
hunters was to tap a tree in the evening and visit it the next morning
to get the juice. This was too slow a process for Manuel--as it took
several days for a flow of a few ounces.