  As Johnny Thompson bent over the black waters of the river he thought he heard a stealthy movement behind him. Before he could decide whether or not his eyes had deceived him he caught the reflection of a sudden white gleam on the dark surface of the water. At the same time something told him to dive, and dive he did. With the rocket-like speed that was his, he shot straight into the water, then away beneath the surface. He rose some ten yards downstream. After one deep, silent breath, he grasped a red mangrove branch for support, then paused to listen. He did not listen long, for there came a sudden wild swirl of water close beside him. “Alligator!” he breathed, as with a sudden and mighty tug at the mangrove branch he threw himself clear of the water and out upon the bank. Here he paused to listen again. Catching no sound, he began creeping back toward his first position, the foot of the path that had been cut to the river. All this time his mind was working on double-quick time. What had caused that sound behind him there on the bank—man or beast? What was the white gleam? Was it, after all, only a product of his overwrought mind? The whole day had seemed full of brooding menace. “No,” he told himself stoutly, “it was not all imagination. The sound might have been—but the white gleam? No. I saw that. After all, though, it might have been only the reflection of a white heron in silent flight.” Night was coming on. It would soon be dark. He did not care for that. His flashlight was in his pocket. As he crept forward through the thick tangled brush he seemed to feel the swift power of the dark old river. Rio Hondo, they called it—Black River. And black it was. Johnny had never before seen water that could so perfectly reproduce the black gleam of polish ebony. And yet, somehow, he had come to think of the river as his friend. That was how he came to be there now. Pant, his pal, was away. The thirty black and brown faces about camp had seemed singularly strange and unfriendly, so he had come to the river for comfort. And now, how had it repaid him? Had it in that white gleam given him a friendly warning, or had it tricked him into a place of great peril, into danger of being eaten by an alligator? Suddenly his thoughts came to an end. Sooner than he expected he broke through the “bush” into the path. Starting back, he stared for a second in silence. “No one here,” he whispered. “But wait; some one has been here.” In astonishment he picked up a long-bladed, gleaming knife. It was a machete, the tool and weapon of the bushman of Central America. “Looks like Petillo’s machete,” he breathed. What could it mean? Just then he caught a sudden sound from the water. It was like a startled cry for help. He thought he caught sight of a head above the black waters. He might have been mistaken. It was growing dark. He drew his flashlight from his pocket. It was water-logged, short circuited, useless. Again came the strange cry and at the same time a great swirl of water. “The alligator!” he breathed. For an instant he thought of throwing himself in the water to go to the rescue. This he knew was madness. There were other alligators. Grim, terrible, man-eating beasts were these sharp nosed alligators of British Honduras, Central America. So, as he sat there, crowded well back in the bushes, silent, motionless, listening and thinking, darkness came and blotted out all, both good and bad, that might have been seen upon the surface of the Rio Hondo. A deep feeling of foreboding and gloom settled down upon him as darkness hid the river. Picking up the machete that lay at his feet, he felt of its edge. “Keen as a razor,” he murmured. “Did some one try to kill me with it? If so, I wonder why? Well, he didn’t, and won’t. Providence took a hand. Must have lost his balance and fallen in. Bad swimmer. Current carried him out and a ’gator got him. That’s the way it looks. Can’t tell, though.” He shuddered at the thought; the ’gator might have gotten him, too. Johnny was in a strange land, the strangest he had ever seen. In other days, as you will know if you have read our other stories of the adventures of Johnny Thompson, fate had led him over the frozen trails of Alaska, down the timber roads of the Cascades and out over the sea. Now here he was far up a tropical river, in the heart of the “bush,” alone. It is not pleasant to be alone in a tropical jungle at night. Johnny rose to go. His flashlight gone, there was nothing left but to grope his way back over the machete-hewn trail to camp. It was some distance—all of a mile. As he took his first step, off to the right a twig snapped. His heart skipped a beat and his face felt strangely cold. Had he been watched? Now the creature was going on before him. Was it a man, or a jaguar? (Natives called them tigers.) He preferred the word “tiger.” Gripping the keen edged machete, he struck away straight down the trail. There came no further sound. Slowly, steadily, he advanced. Half the distance was covered. He was breathing more easily when a sudden hoarse sound brought him to a stand. Then he laughed. Off to the right he caught the gleam of two small red balls of fire. And again that hoarse bark broke the silence of the night. “’Gator,” he said with a chuckle. “Forgot there was one in a pool over there.” He did not laugh five minutes later as he heard, off to the left, the pu-pu-pu of a jaguar. These great cats were dangerous. They had been known to kill a horse and swim a river with the carcass. The golden balls that now peered at him from the first branch of a great Santa Maria tree were not reassuring. Redoubling his pace, he hurried on toward camp. Five minutes later, with a sigh of satisfaction, he broke through the brush into a clearing. Here he paused in astonishment. The place was silent, more silent than he had known it even in the dead of night. The gleam of coals on the cooking platform and the dim bulk of cabins looming in the dark were the only signs that men lived here. “Hello there!” he shouted. To his utter bewilderment there came no answer. An hour before he had left thirty men here. Now there was not one. What could it mean? Again cold dread gripped his heart. Turning, he hurried down a logging road to the edge of a broad creek. There the white bulk of a large flat-bottomed boat greeted him. “They didn’t take the Maria Theresa, anyway.” There was a comfort in that. “Fellow’d sure be up against it a hundred miles from the coast without a boat.” Even as he thought this, his ears caught the steady dip-dip of pit-pan paddles. “Hello! Hello there!” he shouted. Again there came no answer. Even the paddles, if paddles there had been, were silent. “Huh!” He turned and walked slowly back to camp. There he groped about until he had found a bench. This he leaned against the side of a cabin, and burying his back in the soft cohune nut thatch, pressed his brow with both hands in an endeavor to think sanely and clearly. Time passed. The coals on the cooking platform growing dimmer and dimmer, at last blinked out. The darkness appeared to grow more intense, the night more silent. “They said it couldn’t be done,” he muttered at last, “and perhaps it can’t. But there was the red lure. The red lure,” he repeated softly. The red lure! He had heard of it first in a little cabinetmaker’s shop in Chicago. In that shop an old man wrought wonders with precious woods—rosewood and ebony and mahogany. Strange tales this old man had to tell, and he told them as he worked. Tales they were of tropical isles, of green rivers and dense forests. One day as he put the last touch to a bit of wood that gleamed red as a western sunset, he had exclaimed: “The red lure, Johnny! The red lure! That’s what’s beckoned men on, and times enough to their death!” Then, after laying the bit of wood down as gently as if it had been a priceless porcelain top, he had added: “And, Johnny, I know where the lure ends. Far up a tropical river, a big black river. It’s there, Johnny, and unscarred by the hand of man.” “Why?” Awed by the old man’s tones, Johnny had whispered the word. “That’s it, Johnny.” The old man had half closed his eyes. “That’s what the owner of that land would like to know. Three times he has sent men in boats up the Rio Hondo. Three times they came back empty handed; that is, the ones that came back at all. Why? Who knows. Who can solve all the mysteries of the tropics? Who can guess the trickery and intrigue that lies hidden in a Spaniard’s mind? The red lure is still there. Men have died for it; but there it stands. The red lure, Johnny. The red lure!” He had turned once more to his work, but Johnny had not forgotten. Something within him had been stirred to the depths. He had heard the call of the wilderness, had felt the challenge of the impossible. In time, having sought out his partner of many adventures, “Panther Eye,” or “Pant” as he was called, he had gone in search of the owner of the red lure. He had found him to be a rich business man. At first this capitalist, Roderick Grayson, had merely laughed at the proposition which the two boys made—that they be given a try at the red lure. In time he had come to take them more seriously. At last he had made them a proposition. “I’m tired of having you about,” he growled good-naturedly. “I’ll give you a chance. You go to Belize, the Capitol of Honduras. That’s a city of twelve thousand. Plenty of men and boats there. I’ll instruct my agent there to furnish you with motor boats and pay for thirty men. You may have them a hundred days, not a day more. At the end of that time you must show me a profit from your expedition or you lose this concession. Is that plain? And satisfactory?” “Quite.” “Then good-bye.” The rich man had bowed them out, and that is how it happened that on this particular night Johnny was far up the Rio Hondo. “And now this!” Johnny said to himself. “A bolt out of the blue! An apparent attempt at my life. My men vanish. What is to be the end of it all?” Suddenly he realized that he was alone in the dark; that perils lurked in every corner of the jungle. “Well enough to have some sort of light,” he told himself. There was a flashlight on a beam in the very cabin against which his bench rested. To secure that and to try it out by a flash on the floor was but the work of a moment. Upon returning to the bench he felt a little more secure. As he sat down his foot struck something and sent it to the ground with a thud. “The machete,” he thought. Picking it up, he examined it curiously. On the horn handle of this bushman’s sword he discovered the initials, S. P. “Seperino Petillo,” he said with a start. “So it was Petillo. I was not mistaken.” His mind was in a whirl. Petillo, a half-caste Spaniard, had been his foreman. Surely, this was a strange land. The very man to whom he had given position and standing among his people had, apparently, tried to kill him. For some time he sat there thinking and his thoughts were long, long thoughts. The red lure was all about him. The smell of it was in his nostrils. Yet, less than a third of their work was done. To establish a camp, to build cabins from the trunks and leaves of the cohune nut tree, to cut paths and roads, all this had taken time. A few weeks more and they would have been drifting silently downstream with their red treasure. “And now this has happened!” he groaned. And yet, what had happened? He could not tell—could only guess. Hearing a sound to the right, he turned to listen. Catching it again, he threw his powerful flashlight on the spot. To his astonishment the light fell full upon the face and figure of a girl. She was a short, brown-eyed, bare-footed, Spanish girl, about sixteen years of age. Too startled to move, she stood there for an instant, blinking in the light. Then she turned and fled down the path. Too much surprised to follow at once, Johnny sat in his place, wondering. “There’s not such a girl within fifty miles. I am sure of that,” he told himself. “Must have come over from Quintanaroo.” Beyond the Rio Hondo lay Quintanaroo, a land of many mysteries. Rising, he followed down the path to the creek’s edge. There he sent the gleam of his flashlight shooting down the creek. He was just in time to see a slender canoe disappear round a clump of red mangrove. “That’s where she came from,” he assured himself. “I wonder why?” As he turned to retrace his steps he caught the long drawn, hoarse call of a jaguar. There were empty, palm thatched cottages up the river. Rumors were afloat of a man-eating “tiger” who had carried away the former owners of these cabins. Could it be that he had been mistaken about the plot? Had he misjudged the action of the unfortunate one at the river bank? Had his men become frightened by tales of the man-eater, and fled? Who could tell? “Oh, well,” he sighed, “morning will come, and with it the light.” |
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