vessels to catch the milky juice and in extracting rubber. He carried
water from the river and fashioned large clay repositories, one for so
many rubber trees; also he made small vessels and troughs. These baked
hard in the sun. Then he cut the trees so the sap would flow freely.
They would die; but that was of no moment to the outlaw. He had brought
a number of kettles, in which he made a thick steam by heating palm
nuts. Taking a stick with a clay mold on the end, he dipped it first in
the milk, and then dried the milk in the stream. From a vessel full of
milk, he got one third its weight in rubber.
“Señor,” he said proudly, “I can make a hundred pounds of rubber in a
day.”
It was a toil-filled time, in which the united efforts of Manuel and
Señor were given to making an immense cargo of rubber. Swiftly the days
passed into weeks, the weeks summed months, and the rainy season was at
hand. Soon the rubber hunters must expect a daily deluge, a flooded,
sticky forest, intolerable humidity, and sun like an open furnace door.
Manuel awoke from his lust for rubber.
“The canoe won’t hold another layer,” he said. “She’ll be loggy enough
now. We can rest and drift clear to Iquitos. How good! We must be
starting.”
Like a flitting shadow, a strange, sad smile crossed Señor’s face. Its
meaning haunted Manuel, and recalled the early days of the trip, before
the craze for rubber had driven all else from his mind. A wonderful
change had come over Señor. He gave all his strength to the gathering
of rubber, but no longer with a madness for sheer action. He no longer
invited the torture of the stinging pests. He ate like a hungry man,
and his sleep was untroubled. Even his silence had undergone change.
The inward burning, the intensity of mind forever riveted upon the
thing that had been the dividing spear of his life, had given place to
austere tranquillity.
Other enlightenment flashed into Manuel’s darksome thought. The fancy
grew upon him that he had come to be to Señor what Señor was to him. He
sensed it, felt it, finally realized it.
Pondering this man’s deep influence, he tried to judge what it meant.
Something shook his pulse, some power from without; some warm, living
thing drew him to Señor. It was more than the intimate bond of men of
like caliber, alone in the wilds, facing peril carelessly, dependent
upon one another. Too subtle it was for Manuel, too mysterious for
his crude reasoning; always it kept aloof, in the fringe of his mind.
He floundered in thought, and seemed to go wandering in the realms of
imagery, to become lost in memory, where the unreal present mingled
with the actual past, through both of which ran Señor’s baffling,
intangible hold on his heartstrings.
“Maybe I’ve got a touch of fever,” he soliloquized.
Another day went by, and still he hesitated to speak the word for
departure. More and more the task grew harder, for added watching,
thought, realization, strengthened his conviction that Señor intended
to remain alone on the Palcazu. Had the man come to hide in the jungle,
to face his soul in the solitude, to forget in the extremes of
endurance? Yes, but more! He sought the end--annihilation!
Manuel had never feared to use his tongue, yet now he could not speak.
It was midday, and he lay beside Señor in the shack, sheltered from the
torrid heat. Usually absolute silence prevailed at this hour. On this
day, however, gentle gusts of wind beat the fronds of the palms. What
a peculiar sound! It had no similarity to the muffled beating of the
heart heard in the ear; yet it suggested that to Manuel, and wrought
ominously upon his superstition.
He listened. Sudden, soft gust--gentle beat, beat, beat hastening
at the end! Was it the wind? How seldom had he heard wind in the
jungle! Was it the fronds of the palms or the beating of his heart
or of Señor’s? His blood did beat thick in his ears. Then a chill
passed over him, a certainty of some calamity about to be, beyond his
comprehension; and he wrenched decision out of his wavering will, and
swore that he would start down the Palcazu on the morrow, if not with
this strange companion, then alone.
Manuel fell into a doze. He awakened presently, and sat up, drowsy and
hot. He was alone in the shack. Then a hand protruded under the flap of
the netting and plucked at him.
“Hurry! Hurry!” came the hoarse whisper. “Don’t speak--don’t make a
noise!”
Wide awake in a second, Manuel swept aside the flap and straightened up
outside. Señor stood very close to him. On the instant, low, whirring
sounds caught his ear. From the green wall of cane streaked little
things that he took for birds. Bright and swift the glints of light
shot through the yellow sunshine. All about him they struck with tiny,
pattering thuds and spats. Suddenly the shack appeared to be covered
with quivering butterflies. They were gaudy, feathered darts from
blowguns of the cannibals.
“Cashibos!” yelled Manuel.
“Run! Run!” cried Señor. He thrust his coat over Manuel and turned him
with a violent push. “Run for the river!”
The frenzy of his voice and will served almost to make Manuel act
automatically. But he looked back, then stood with suspended breath and
leaden feet.
Bronze shadows darted through the interstices of the cane. Then the
open sunlight burnished small, naked savages, lean, wild, as agile and
bounding as if they were made of the rubber of their jungle home.
Señor jerked Manuel’s machete from a log of firewood, and rushed to
meet them. His back was covered with gaudy butterfly darts. The sight
held Manuel stricken in his tracks. Señor had made his broad body a
shield, had stood buffer between his comrade and the poisoned darts of
the Cashibos.
Like a swarm of copper bees shining in the sun, the cannibals poured
out of the cane, incredibly swift and silent, leveling their blowguns
and brandishing their spears.
Señor plunged at them, sweeping the machete. A row of nimble bodies
wilted before him, went down as grain before a scythe. Again the blade
swept backward, to whistle forward and describe a circle through
tumbling, copper-colored bodies.
Rooted in horror, Manuel saw the first spear point come out of Señor’s
back. Another and another! They slipped out as easily as if coming
through water. Señor dropped the machete, and swaying, upheld by
spears, he broke that silent fight with a terrible cry. It pealed out,
piercingly shrill with pain, horrible in its human note of death, but
strange and significant in its ringing triumph. Then he fell, and the
Cashibos hurdled his body.
Animal instinct to survive burst the bonds that held Manuel as
paralyzed. One leap carried him behind the shack, another into the
cane, where he sprang into headlong flight. The cane offered little
resistance to his giant bounds. Soon he reached the bank of the river.
The canoe was gone. Rows of caymans lay along the beach. So swiftly he
leaped down that he beat them into the water. Then, drawing Señor’s
coat tight around his head and shoulders, he plunged out with powerful
strokes.
He had gained the middle of the estuary, when he saw arrowy gleams
glance before him. Like hissing hail, a shower of darts struck the
water. Then it seemed that gaudy butterflies floated about his face.
Diving deep, he swam until compelled to rise for breath.
As he came up, a crocodile rolled menacingly near. Manuel hit it a blow
with his fist, and dove again. The coat hindered rapid swimming under
water. He rose again to hear the crocodile swirling behind him. Darts
splashed big drops on his cheeks, tugged at his head covering, streaked
beyond him to skitter along the surface of the estuary.
Reaching shallow water, he crawled into the reeds. White-mouthed snakes
struck at him. The bank was low and overhung with rank growths. Manuel
scrambled through to the solid ground; and then turned to have a look
at his pursuers.
Up and down the sandy beach a hundred or more Cashibos were running.
How wild they were, how springy and fleet! How similar to the hungry,
whirling sand flies! For a moment the disturbed caymans threshed about
in the estuary, holding the cannibals back. Presently several of the
most daring waded in above the commotion; then others entered below.
Manuel breasted the dense jungle. Before him rose an apparently
impenetrable wall of green. He dove into it, tore through it, leaving a
trail of broken branches, twisted vines, and turned leaves. In places
he ran encumbered by clinging creepers; in others he parted the thick
growths with his hands and leaped high to separate them. Again he bent
low to crawl along the peccary trails.
Despite the obstacles, he went so swiftly that the jungle pests could
not get at him; the few which did could not keep their hold, because of
the scraping brush. Soon he ran out of a vine-webbed canebrake into a
grove of sitekas, rubber trees, and palms. At every bound he sank into
the moist earth, still he kept on running. He heard a scattering of
animals before him, and saw a blur of flapping birds.
The day seemed to darken. He looked up to see trees branching at a
height of two hundred feet, and intermingling their foliage to obscure
sun and sky. Here was the dim shade of the great forest of the Amazon
tributaries. Sheering off to the right, he ran until the clinging earth
clogged his feet.
The forest was like a huge, dim hall full of humming life. Lines of
shrieking monkeys hung on the ropelike vines that reached from the
ground to green canopy overhead. Birds of paradise sailed like showers
of gold through the thick, hazy air. Before him fled boas, peccaries,
ant-eaters, spotted cats, and beasts that he could not name.
Manuel chose the oozy ground, for there the underbrush was not higher
than his knees. On and on he wallowed through the moist labyrinth of
intricate thickets, of aisles lined by the red capironas, of peccary
trails worn in the earth, of glades starry with exquisite orchids. A
fragrance of nauseous sweetness, like that of rotting jessamine and
tuberose, mingled with fetid odor of wet, hot earth, of ripe life
and luxuriance. The forest was steeped in a steam from overheat,
overmoisture, overgrowth.
The gloom deepened. Somewhere back of Manuel rasped out the cough of
a jaguar. He quickened his weary steps, soon to strike rising ground
and pass out of the dark forest into groves of _sitekas_. The day was
waning. He ascended a ridge, following the patches of open ground where
the baked clay shone white. This hard ground would hide his trail from
the cannibals, but he had no hope of eluding the jaguars. Still, he
could climb out of reach of the hunting cats. It was the little, winged
devils, the tiny, creeping fiends that most menaced his life.
He strode on till the shadows warned him of approaching night.
Selecting a group of palms with tops interlocking, he climbed one, and
perched in the midst of the stems of the leaves. Laboriously he broke
stem after stem, bent and laid them crosswise in the middle of the
tree. Then he straddled another stem, let his feet hang down, and lay
back upon the rude floor he had constructed. Finally, wrapping head and
face in Señor’s coat and hiding his hands, he composed himself to rest.
He was dripping wet, hot as fire, pulsating, seething, aching, his
whole body inflamed. Gradually the riot of his nerves, the race of
hot blood subsided and cooled. Night set in, and the jungle awoke to
the hue and cry of its bloody denizens. Mosquitoes swarmed around his
perch with a continuous hum not unlike the long, low roll of a drum.
Huge bats whizzed to and fro, brushing the palm leaves. Light steps
on the hard clay, rustling of brush and snapping of twigs attested to
the movement of peccaries. These sounds significantly ceased at the
stealthy, padded tread of a jaguar. From distant points came the hungry
snarl, the fighting squall, the ominous cough of the jungle cats.
Sometime late in the night Manuel fell asleep. When he awoke the fog
clouds were mustering, bulging, mushrooming all in a swirl as they
lifted. Like a disk of molten silver, the sun glared through the misty
curtain. The drip, drip, drip of dew was all the sound to break the
silence. Manuel’s cramped muscles made descending to the ground an
awkward task.
He estimated that his flight had taken him miles into the interior.
Evidently for the time being he had eluded the Cashibos. However,
his situation was gravely critical, and he would never be safe until
he got clear of Palcazu territory. It was impossible for him to
protect himself from the jungle parasites. His instant and inflexible
determination was to make his way back to the river, find his canoe,
or steal one from the cannibals, and, failing both, lash some logs
together and trust to the current.
The rains were due; soon the rivers would be raging floods; he would
make fast time. Manuel had no fear of starvation, of the deadly heat,
the fatal dews, the rainy-season fever, or of the Cashibos. What he
feared was the infernal flies, ticks, ants, mosquitoes--the whole
blood-sucking horde. Well he knew that they might bite him blind,
poison his blood, drive him mad, actually kill him before he got out of
the jungle.
As he was about to start, a small leather pocketbook fell from Señor’s
coat. Manuel picked it up. He saw again those broad shoulders covered
with the gaudy butterfly darts. He drew his breath with a sharp catch.
Fingering the little book, unaccountably impelled, he opened it. Inside
was a picture.
He looked down into the dark, challenging eyes, the piquant, alluring
face of the woman who had been his sweetheart wife!
Manuel smiled dreamily. How clear was the vision! But almost instantly
he jerked up his head, hid the picture, and gazed furtively about him,
trembling and startled. The glaring jungle was no lying deceit of the
fancy.
Slowly he drew forth the picture. Again the proud, dark eyes, the sweet
lips, the face arch with girl’s willfulness, importunate with woman’s
charm!
Manuel shifted his straining gaze to Señor’s coat.
“Señor! He was the man--that sailor from over the sea--whom she loved
at Malaga! What does it all mean? I felt his secret--I lied--I hatched
that murderous story to help him. But he knew I did not kill her!”
Manuel pitched high his arms, quivering, riven by the might of the
truth.
“He recognized me! He knew me all the time! He saved my life!”
Manuel fell backward and lay motionless, with his hands shutting out
the light. An hour passed. At last he arose, half dazed, fighting to
understand.
With Señor’s coat and the picture before him, he traced the wonderful
association between them and him. There were the plain facts, as clear
in his sight as the pictured face of the woman who had ruined him, but
they were bewildering: he could feel but not comprehend them. They
obscured their meaning in mystery, in the inscrutable mystery of human
life. He had freed her, had left her to be happy with the man she loved.
Had she betrayed him, too? It was not impossible that a woman who had
ceased to love one man would cease to love his successor. Some subtle
meaning pervaded the atmosphere of that faded coat, that leather book,
that woman’s face, with its smile, and by the meaning Manuel knew Señor
had suffered the same stunning stroke that had blighted him. Señor had
cried out in the night: “Oh God, let me forget!”
It was the same story--hell in the mind, because one day on a woman’s
face shone that mysterious thing, a light, a smile for him alone, and
on the next day it vanished. Fever in the blood, madness to forget,
wandering, a hunt for peace, and the wasting years--how he knew them!
Manuel thought of Señor, of his magnificent strength, of the lion in
him as he sprang to meet the Cashibos, of the gaudy butterfly darts
imbedded in his back, of the glory and pathos of his death. What his
life might have been! A strung cord snapped in Manuel’s breast; his
heart broke. Bitter salt tears flowed for Señor, for himself, for
all miserable wretches for all time. In that revealing moment he
caught a glimpse of the infinite. He saw the helplessness of man, the
unintelligible fatality of chance, motive, power, charm, love--all
that made up the complexity of life.
How little it mattered, from the view of what made life significant
to him, that he was a rubber hunter, lost in the jungle, hunted by
cannibals, tortured by heat, thirst, hunger, vermin! His real life was
deep-seated in the richly colored halls of memory; and when he lived at
all, it was when he dreamed therein. His outside existence, habits of
toil, and debauchery were horrors that he hated. On the outside he was
a brutalized rubber hunter, unkempt and unwashed, a coarse clod, given
over to gaming and _chicha_. In that inner life he lived on a windy
hill, watching white sails on a blue sea, listening to a woman’s voice.
But some change had come that would now affect his exterior
life; something beautiful crowned the hideous span of years. His
companionship with Señor had softened him, and the tragedy, with its
divine communication of truth, was a lightning flash into the black
gulf of his soul.
By its light he felt pity for her, for Señor, for himself, for all who
lived and loved and suffered. By its light he divined the intricate web
and tangle and cross and counter-cross of the instincts and feelings
of human nature--all that made love transient in one heart, steadfast
in another, fleeting as the shadow of a flitting wing--wonderful,
terrible, unquenchable as the burning sun.
By its light he saw woman, the mother of life, the source of love, the
fountain of joy, the embodiment of change--nature’s tool to further her
unfathomable design, forever and ever to lure man by grace and beauty,
to win him, to fetter him in unattainable, ever-enthralling desires. By
its light he saw himself another man, a long-tried, long-failing man,
faithful to his better self at the last.
Manuel set forth toward the river, keeping in the shade of trees,
walking cautiously, with suspicious eyes ever on the outlook. He
walked all day, covering twice the distance he calculated he had fled
inland. When night fell, he went on by the light of the stars until the
fog obscured them. The rest of the night he walked round a tree with
covered head. In the morning the sun rose on the side he had thought
was west. He had become lost in the jungle.
Heretofore panic had always seized him on a like occasion; this time
it did not. Taking the direction he thought right, he pressed on till
the midday sun boiled his blood. Succulent leaves and the pith of small
palms served as food. He moistened his parching mouth with the sap of
trees. Lying down, he covered himself with the coat and a pile of brush
and slept; then awoke to trudge on, fighting the flies.
He entered the great jungle forest, and sought his back trail, but did
not find it. Swampy water allayed his thirst, and a snake served for
meat. The jaguars drove him out of the forest. He began to wander in
a circle; and that night and the following day and the next were but
augmented repetitions of what had gone before.
The rains did not come. The fronds of the palms beat in the still air.
Manuel heard in them a knell. Bitten blind, flayed alive by pests, he
fell at last with clouded mind. The whizzing wheel of flies circled
lower; the armies of marching ants spread over him; the red splotches
of ticks on the leaves spilled themselves upon him like quicksilver. He
crawled on through the hot bushes. The light of his mind wavered, and
he raved of infernal fires. He was rolling in fire; forked tongues of
flame licked at his flesh; red sparks ate into his brain. Down, down
under the heated earth, through hot vapors blown by fiery gusts! It
was a jungle with underbrush of flame, trees in the image of pillars
of fire, screeching red monkeys in service as imps, birds of dazzling
coals; and over all and under all and through all a vast humming horde
of living embers that bit with white-hot teeth.
As Manuel’s reason flickered, ready to go out forever, the rain
descended, and it cooled him and washed him clean of insects. It
slaked his thirst and soothed his blinded eyes. At length the tropical
cloudburst roared away, leaving the jungle drenched. Manuel followed a
rushing stream of water that he knew would lead him to the river. In
him resurged effort and resistance.
By nightfall he had come to the border of cane. Like an eel through
grass, he slipped between the stalks to the river. On the opposite
shore faint lights twinkled. At first he took them for fireflies. But
dark forms moving across the lights told him he had stumbled upon an
encampment of the Cashibos.
The river seemed uneasy, stirring. It was rising fast. By dawn it
would be bank full with a swift current. Under the pale stars the
water shimmered, steely black in the shade of overhanging shore, dead
silver in the center, where the fish swirled and the crocodiles trailed
dimpling wakes.
Without hesitation, Manuel stepped into the water, noiselessly
sinking himself to his neck. With his ear level with the surface, he
subordinated every sense to that of hearing. The river was a sounding
board, augmenting the faint jungle sounds. Crossing would be as safe
for him then as it would ever be.
Grim as death, Manuel trusted himself to the river. He glided off the
shoal without making a ripple, and swam deep with guarded strokes.
Fish sported before him; spiders and snakes grazed his cheeks; caymans
floated by with knotty snout parting the current, and lines of bubbles
bursting with hollow sound betrayed the underwater passage of more of
the lazy reptiles.
Once Manuel felt the swirl and heave of water disturbed by a powerful
force. A soft river breeze wafted to him the smell of burning wood
and the dull roar of distant rapids. He crossed the shimmering space
between the shadows of shore. Looking backward, he descried a circle of
black snouts lazily closing in upon him. He quickened his strokes. The
twinkling lights disappeared. All before him was black. He felt slimy
reeds touch his face, and, lowering his feet, found the bottom, and
cautiously waded out. Then he crouched down to rest to gather all his
wit and strength for the final move.
Toward the bank he could not see his hand before his face; riverward
there was a glancing sheen of water that made the gloom opaque. He
began to crawl, feeling in the darkness for a canoe. Moving downstream,
he worked out of the marshy sedge to ground worn smooth and hard. It
was a landing place for canoes.
He strained his eyes. All about him were shadowy, merging shades
without shape. The low murmur of strange voices halted him; he was
within hearing of the cannibals. Then in him awoke the stealth and
savage spirit of a jaguar stalking prey. Gliding up the trail, he
peeped over the bank. Fires flickered back in the blackness, lighting
wan circles that were streaked and shadowed by moving, dark forms.
With fateful eyes Manuel watched.
Below him a slight splash drew his attention. He fancied it too thin,
too hard and dead, to be made by water creature. Again it broke the
silence, unnatural to his trained ear. It was the splash of a paddle.
Soundless as the shadows about him, Manuel glided down to the edge of
the river and lay flat, hugging the sand.
A long, low canoe, black against the background of the river gloom,
swept in to the landing gloom, swept in to the landing, grated on the
sand, and spread gentle, lapping waves against the beach. A slender
form, smooth and wild in outline, stepped out within a yard of Manuel.
Like a specter Manuel loomed up, and his hands closed vise-tight around
the neck of the cannibal. He lifted him clear of the ground, and
there held him, wrestling, wriggling till fierce struggles ceased in
spasmodic convulsions and these subsided in a slow, trembling stretch.
When the body hung limp, Manuel laid it down, and looked up the dim
trail leading to the camp of the Cashibos. Upon him was the spell to
kill. He saw again the gaudy butterfly darts in Señor’s back; he heard
again that strange, terrible cry of triumph. Over him surged Señor’s
grand disdain of life. Almost he yielded to an irresistible impulse to
make that the end.