  Palms that hung over the silent, swiftly flowing stream murmured and sighed. Their murmuring and sighing was as sad as the voice of pines and hemlocks in a graveyard on a winter’s night. Sadder still was the strange wail of some tropical bird, piping always on the same minor key. On the bed of decaying mats in the abandoned cabin where little lizards ran in and out, Johnny Thompson lay white and motionless. Came an hour when there fell upon all this gloom a shrill discordant note. The scream of a wild parrot broke the drowsy silence. This was answered by another, and yet another, until all up and down the stream the air was filled with harsh, discordant music. The innocent cause of all this disturbance was a fantastically painted dugout, all striped and spotted with red, blue, green and white. Its prow and stern rose high out of the water like the ancient crafts of the Vikings. Forward sat a girl, aft was a boy, and in the middle sat a large native Carib woman. So brown and rugged was the girl that she might easily have been taken for a Spaniard. A second look revealed deep-set freckles, a glow of color, a mass of curly hair, and an indefinable air of confidence and frankness that could belong only to an Anglo-Saxon. This girl, Jean McQueen, was Scotch. The boy was her brother. Just over from England, where he had attended school for years, he had the attire, the manners and the color of a perfect young English gentleman. In his tweed nickers and his smart sport shirt, he seemed quite as much out of place in the wilderness as his sister in her patched and faded khaki suit seemed at home. “This is not the creek,” the boy said. There was impatience in his tone, and something that suggested fear. “Let’s turn back.” “It might be, Rod. We’ll go on a little farther.” Brushing aside a low-hanging palm leaf, the girl seized her paddle to send the light craft forward. For a space of ten minutes nothing might be heard save the dip-dip of their paddles and the scream of parrots over their heads. Suddenly the boat swerved to the right shore. “Abandoned, I guess,” said the girl, sweeping the clearing with her eyes. “Might tell us something, though.” “Some sort of old cabin over there.” “Look!” exclaimed the girl. “Someone’s here—or has been in the last few days.” She pointed to a well-defined hand print in the half-dried mud of the bank. “Who—who do you suppose?” “Rubber hunters, perhaps, or a chiclero. Let’s go up.” The boy hung back. “Aren’t afraid, are you?” the girl laughed. It was a rich, free, melodious laugh. “Nobody’s goin’ to hurt you in this wilderness. C’mon!” She led the way over the trail which Johnny on his journey to the creek for water had made. The boy followed, reluctantly, and the Carib woman waddled along behind. More than once the girl paused to examine with a practiced eye patches of grass that lay flat down as if some wild creature had slept there. These were the spots where Johnny had fallen and found himself too weak to rise at once. A little cry of dismay escaped the girl’s lips as her eyes fell upon the white-faced, prostrate form on the decaying mats. “Dead!” her lips framed the word she did not speak. Death to this girl who knew so much of life, and loved it so, was a terrifying thing, thrice terrible in the heart of a wilderness. Yet here was a boy, a boy of her own race, who, to all appearances, had died here alone in this abandoned hut. “Dead!” she whispered. “How—how awful!” Some little lizards scampered over the dry palm leaves as her foot stirred the dust at the door. In another moment she was bending over the prostrate form. “You—you can’t always tell.” There was a note of hope in her tone. “Rod, bring some water, quick.” During the dragging moments of her brother’s absence she studied the prostrate boy’s face. There are lines in one’s face which to the keen observer tells the story of his life. Has he been kind and thoughtful of others? Has he lived brave and clean? It is written there. Has he been harsh, impatient, careless, dissipated even in small ways? This, too, is recorded there. As the girl read the story of Johnny’s life she found herself hoping more and more that she might save him. “Give it to me,” she whispered as her brother appeared with the canteen. With trembling fingers she placed the mouth of the canteen to the boy’s lips. A moment of silence followed. Then of a sudden the wrinkle of anxiety on the girl’s brow disappeared. Johnny’s lips moved in an inarticulate murmur. With a little exclamation of joy the girl sprang to her feet. “He lives! He lives!” Then all was silent again on stream and jungle. * * * * * * * * It was a strangely mixed dream through which Johnny was passing. It seemed night. He was hidden away in some deep forest. A storm had set the tree tops to twisting and writhing. The constant roll of thunder, mingled with the moaning of the trees, made the night hideous. Like a flash the scene changed. It was day—Sunday in the little old church at home. Someone rose to sing; a beautiful white-gowned figure with a sweet melodious voice. She sang, but the words of the song had no meaning for him. It was as if they were sung in a foreign tongue. And now he was gazing upon a sunrise. Such a sunrise as is never seen on land or sea, all red, orange and gold. It was in the midst of this last broken dream that he opened his eyes and stared around him. To his vast amazement he saw that the vision of orange and gold had not completely vanished. Neither had the singing nor the sound of thunder been hushed. They had merely taken on a more definite form, a truer meaning. The words of the song: “Ne-ha aba ne ha aba muta, Sagmuk labsa abona Sag aba don,” were not entirely strange to him, but they had no real meaning for him. He had heard his Caribs sing them around his camp fire. They were the words of a strange native song. As for the thunder, it was merely the wild beating of a barrel drum. And the flash of orange and gold was a girl, a very beautiful girl, swaying gracefully in a sort of rhythmic exercise to the beating of the drum. He stared in unbelieving astonishment. The thing was not real. He was still dreaming. He tried to put up a hand to rub the illusion away, but finding this difficult because of weakness, contented himself with staring about the room where the golden vision continued to sway and whirl and the reverberating drum shook dust from the ceiling. Slowly familiar objects came to view. The roof of the palm thatched cabin looked familiar. He had lain beneath it some time. That might have been long ago, or was it yesterday? He remembered the holes in the roof. The holes, one had been triangular, another round. The spots were still there, but instead of sunlight streaming through, the holes were covered by a fresh green palm leaf thatch. He looked again at the swaying spot of gold that was the girl. The girl seemed almost real. Her face was flushed. It would be, if she swayed to music in such a clime. The black woman, like an ebony statue, sat beating the drum as she sang: “Ne-ha aba ne ha aba muta.” Then a sudden thought struck Johnny. The dancing girl was not black; she was not golden-brown like the Indian, not the brown of the Mexican, either. She was white like himself. A very comely white girl she was, too; red cheeks, tossing curly hair, freckles, slightly turned-up nose—a real girl. “It’s a dream,” he told himself. “A white girl in the heart of this wilderness? I’m dead. This is Heaven. She’s an angel.” He wanted to laugh at this last, but did not dare. It might break the spell! The girl was too robust, too red-cheeked for an angel. Whoever heard of a freckle-faced angel? But whoever heard of a real white girl in such a spot? The mats looked real, too. What of those on which he lay? He ran his fingers over them. “New, too,” he told himself. “How strange!” Things were coming back to him. He had walked a long way, crept farther, dragged himself to this cabin. Here, after one try at bringing water, he had lain himself down to die. “Apparently I’m not dead,” he told himself. “These people must have arrived to save me.” He closed his eyes and tried to think. In the process he fell asleep. What had happened was this. Having found Johnny dying of fever there in the abandoned hut, the girl, Jean, had insisted upon abandoning all plans for their future except the business of bringing him back to life. To this end the native Carib woman had searched the jungle for such herbs as have long been used by her people for curing a fever. To this same end, brother and sister had searched that same forest for birds that would provide broth and for fruits to supply refreshing drink for the invalid. The strange music and the rythmic motion that accompanied it was the idea of the Carib woman. Did she attach some wild native religious significance to it? Who can tell? The boy had made the drum from a deer’s skin and a hollow log; the girl had joined in merely to please the Carib woman and satisfy her simple soul. Native medicine, the jungle’s nourishment, the black woman’s wild music, the white girl’s tender care, all these in their way had helped. When Johnny woke the second time he was well on his way to recovery. It is one thing to lie alone, helpless and dying in a wretched cabin in the heart of a wilderness; quite another to find one’s self surrounded by true friends, none the less real because they are new, and to feel strength and life coursing back into one’s veins. At first Johnny asked few questions. Asking questions had never been his way of discovering the truth. He looked on with astonishment at the things that went on around him. The wilderness which to him had been a land of famine was suddenly as if by magic turned into a Garden of Eden. Early in the morning he heard the pop of a light rifle somewhere in the brush. At night he drank such broth and ate such tender shreds of meat as had never passed his lips before. The strange, glorious girl vanished for an hour, to return with yellow melons, melons that grew on trees,—“pawpaw” she called it. She brought water that was sweet and fresh, not from the hot stream, but from a vine torn from a tree where it clung. A hundred other miracles were wrought for his comfort and healing. And all the time, as if by magic, strength came back to him. On the fourth day he walked a bit unsteadily, but quite confidently, out of the cabin to sit on a mahogany log with a cabbage tree for a back support. Here he sat and watched dreamily the golden girl who, at this moment dressed in her humblest garb of faded khaki, was bending over a native mahogany wash bowl, found somewhere in the cabin, washing clothes. Engaged in this task, with her thick, curly hair drawn up in a tight knot at the top of her head, with her brown arms flaked with suds, she seemed real enough. “No angel,” he murmured, “just a real girl; a whole lot better!” he told himself. “I wonder where they came from, and where they were going when they found me?” Strangely enough, had he asked the girl this last question she would have been obliged to answer: “I don’t know.” The truth was that the Scotch girl and her brother were quite as lost in this wilderness as he and quite as eager to find their way out. * * * * * * * * In the meantime the strange doings, the flashes of phosphorescent light and strange noises, continued behind the locked door of Johnny’s office at the camp on Rio Hondo. In spite of this, however, the Caribs continued to work faithfully at their tasks and the work of getting out the red lure went on. “You’re making fine progress,” said Hardgrave. “Yes,” said Pant, “we’ll be able to show a fine profit. That is,” his brow wrinkled, “if we can take it out of here.” “You’ll make it. Never fear.” said Hardgrave. “Daego’s getting worried. Another pit-pan load of his blacks went down the river last night. Wait and see.” “It’s the ghost,” smiled Pant. Strange as it may seem, though Johnny in his far away jungle hut was greatly improved in health, his ghost walked nightly upon the sky above the timber that faced Daego’s camp. Every night, too, Pant slipped across the river to join the enemy’s camp and to catch the drift of events. He found that these Central Americans, black and brown alike, had a great fear of ghosts, particularly of white ghosts. Johnny’s ghost hovering there near the clouds threw some into near hysteria and sent others hurrying down the river. It was easy to see, they explained, why this white ghost hovered above the tree tops. The hot and humid air close to the earth in the jungle has always been hated and feared by the white man. Above the trees the air is fresh and crisp. Why, then, should any ghost descend to earth? But despite the fact that he did not descend, his presence above them meant that in time pestilence, a death-dealing fever, a destructive storm or a flood would descend upon the camp and wipe it from the face of the earth. One person did not believe in the ghost—Daego. He raved and stormed at his men. Day and night, as if searching for something, he haunted the banks of the river. More than once Pant barely escaped being discovered by him. In spite of all this, however, the ghost appeared promptly on schedule and Daego’s ranks grew thinner and thinner. “Keep it up, dear ghost,” Pant whispered, “keep it up, and in time we’ll have nothing to fear from Daego. Oh!” he sighed, “if only Johnny were here to enjoy it all!” But Johnny was far away in the palm leaf thatched cabin on a stream that was as strange to those who had battled for his life as it was to him. And then one night Johnny’s ghost vanished into thin air. Before that happened, however, there were many other strange doings on the upper stretches of Rio Hondo. |
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