CHAPTER VI.
IN THE NIGHT WATCH
Day by day the long canoe crawled into the vast unknown. Day by day thedown-flowing jungle river pushed steadily, sullenly against its prow, asif striving to repel the invasion of its secret places by thefair-skinned men of another continent. Day by day it slid past inresentful impotence, conquered by the swinging blades of the Peruvian_bogas_. And day by day the close companionship of canoe and camp seemedto weld the voyagers into one compact unit.
Through hours of blazing sun, when the mercury of the thermometer whichKnowlton had hung inside the shady _toldo_ cabin fluctuated well above100 degrees, the hardy crew forged on. Through drenching rains theystill hung doggedly to their work, suspending it only when the waterfell in such drowning quantities that they were forced to tie up hastilyto shore and seek cover in order to breathe. When sunset neared theypicked with unerring eye a spot fit for camping, attacked the bush withwhirling machetes, cleared a space, threw up pole frameworks, swiftlythatched them with great palm leaves, and thus created from the jungletwo crude but efficient huts--one for themselves and one for their_patrones_. When night had shut down and all hands squatted around thefire in a nightly smoke talk they regaled their employers with wildtales of adventures in bush and town, some of which were not at allpolite, but all of which were mightily interesting. And despite alldiscomforts, fatigue, and the minor incidents and accidents which oftenlead fellow travelers in the wilderness to bickering and bitterness, nofriction developed between the men of the north and the men of thesouth.
Not that the Peruvians were at all obsequious or servile. They were areckless, lawless, Godless gang, perpetually bearing themselves with thecareless insolence which had characterized them at first, blasphemous ofspeech toward one another--but never toward the North Americans.Disputes arose among them with volcanic suddenness, and more than onceknives were half drawn, only to be slipped back under the tongue-lashingof the hawk-nosed _puntero_, Jose, who damned the disputants completelyand promised to cut out the bowels of any man daring to lift hisblade clear of its sheath. Five minutes afterward the fire eaterswould be on as good terms as ever, shrugging and grinning at theirpassengers--particularly Tim, who, shaking his head disgustedly, wouldgrumble:
"Aw, pickles! Another frog fight gone bust!"
Yet Tim, for all his disparagement of these abortive spats, knew fullwell that any one of them held the makings of a deadly duel and thatJose's lurid threats were no mere Latin hyperbole. He realized that thered-crowned bowman ruled his crew exactly as any of the old-timebuccaneers whom he resembled had governed their free-booting gangs--bythe iron hand; and that, though these men sailed no Spanish Main andflew no black flag, the iron-hand government was needed. He saw alsothat the rough-and-ready courtesy of this crowd toward their passengerswas due largely to the attitude of Captain McKay, who had enforced theirrespect at the start by his soldierly bearing and retained it ever sinceby his military management.
For the captain, experienced in directing men, conducted himself at alltimes as a commanding officer should: he saw all, said little, treatedJose as a subordinate officer, and left the handling of the crewentirely to him. His aloofness forestalled any of that familiaritywhich, with such a gang, would have led to contempt. On the other hand,his avoidance of any assumption of meddlesome authority prevented theirritation and dislike which free men inevitably feel for theself-important type of leader. Thus he cannily steered himself and hismates between the two rocks which might have wrecked the expeditionbefore it was well started. And Knowlton, ex-lieutenant, and Tim,ex-sergeant, seeing and understanding, followed his example.
So the days and nights rolled by, the miles of never-ending jungle shorefell away behind, and, save for the occasional outbreaks between membersof the crew, all was serene. To all appearances the Peruvians werewhole-heartedly interested in serving their employers faithfully, andthe North Americans were gliding onward with no thought of insecurity.Yet appearances frequently are deceptive.
In the heat of the day--in fact, before the broiling sun neared thezenith--Tim and Knowlton habitually fell asleep inside the _toldo_, notto awake until two hours before sunset, when, according to the routineagreed upon, the night's camping place would be sought and two or threeof the Peruvians would go into the bush with rifles, seeking fresh meat.McKay never slept during the day's traverse. Nothing escaped his eyefrom the time when he emerged from his mosquito net in the misty morninguntil he entered it again by firelight. The men in the boat; thefloating alligators and wading birds of the water; the flashing parrots,jacamars, toucans, trogons, and hummers of the air; the yard-longlizards and nervous spider monkeys of the tangled tree branchesalongshore--all these he watched quietly as the boat forged on. And thesinister Francisco, watching him in turn, and the paddlers throwingoccasional glances his way, came to regard him as the only alert memberof the trio. Wherein they erred.
The truth was that every one of the three adventurers was on his guard.Tim had not forgotten the last words of his boon companion, Joao, and atthe first opportunity he had quietly passed on that warning. Moreover,McKay and Knowlton, without discussing the matter, had meditated on theunexpected assistance of Schwandorf, the speed with which the crew hadbeen obtained, the promptness of Jose to accept the first paymentoffered, and other things. Wherefore it had come about that at no hourof the twenty-four was every eye and ear closed. And the real reason whyred Tim and blond Knowlton slept by day was that they thus made up theslumber lost at night.
Not that either of them patrolled the camp in sentry go. So far as thePeruvians knew, they slept as soundly as McKay. But, lying in theirhammocks, they divided the night watches between them on a schedule asregular as that of a military camp, though the shifts necessarily werelonger. As sunset came always at six o'clock and all hands sought theirhanging beds two hours later, Tim's "tour of duty" lasted until one inthe morning. When the phosphorescent hands of his watch pointed to thathour he stealthily reached out and jabbed Knowlton, sleeping beside him.When a barely audible "All right" reached his ears he was officiallyrelieved.
Night followed night, became a week, lengthened into a fortnight. Still,so far as the crew was concerned, nothing happened. A little roughbanter among them as they smoked their last cigarettes, then sleep andsnores; and that was all until morning. Men less experienced in nightvigils than the ex-soldiers would have abandoned their watches longbefore this--if, indeed, they had ever adopted them. But these threewere schooled in patience. Moreover, neither Tim nor Knowlton had everbefore penetrated the jungle, and at times the light of the waxing moonrevealed to their eyes strange things which they never would have seenby day. So the tedium of the long hours of wakefulness might be brokenat any moment.
Once they camped close to a conical hillock of compact earth, some fourfeet high and almost stone hard, from which radiated narrow coveredgalleries--the citadel and viaducts of a community of termites. Tim,still harboring vivid recollections of his ant battle at Remate deMales--though by this time he had trained himself to sleep in hishammock, where he was comparatively safe--looked askance at it when toldwhat it was, and was only partly reassured by the information thattermites were eaters of wood rather than of flesh. After sleep hadembraced the rest of the camp he still was uneasy, lifting his net atlong intervals and squinting at the moonlit mound as if expecting ahorde of pincer-jawed insects to erupt from it and charge him. Andduring one of these inspections he saw something totally unexpected.
From the black shadows of the forest had emerged another shadow, sogrotesque and misshapen that it seemed a figment of indigestion andweird dreams--a thing from whose shaggy body protruded what appeared tobe only a long tubular snout where a head should be, and which looked tobe overbalanced at the other end by a great mass of hair. It stood stonestill, and for the moment Tim could not decide which end of it was headand which was tail, or even whether it were not double-tailed andheadless. Then, slowly, the apparition moved.
Into that hard-packed earth it dug
huge hooked claws, and from itstapering muzzle a wormlike tongue licked about, gathering the outrushingwhite ants into its gullet. For minutes Tim lay blinking at it,wondering if he really saw it.
Then, picking up his rifle, he slipped outside his net and advanced onthe creature.
The animal turned, sat back on its great tail, lifted its terribleclaws, and waited. Six feet away, just out of its reach, Tim stopped andstared anew. Then he grinned.
"You win, feller," he informed the beast. "What ye are I dunno, but anycritter that's got the guts to ramble right into camp and offer to gimmea battle is too good a sport for me to shoot. Help yourself to all theants in the world, for all o' me. I'm goin' back to bed. Bon sewer,monseer."
Wherewith, still grinning, but warily watching, he backed until sure thebig invader would not spring at him. Knowing nothing of ant bears, hedid not know it was hardly a springing animal.
Its claws looked sufficiently formidable to disembowel a man--as,indeed, they were, if the man came near enough. But when Tim hadwithdrawn and the sluggish brute had decided that it would not need todefend itself, it sank to all-fours and passed stiffly away into theshades whence it had come.
On another night, when Tim slept, Knowlton detected a creeping,slithering sound which made him slip off the safety catch of hisheavy-bulleted pistol and peer at the hut where slept the crew. No manwas moving there. Still the sound persisted. Lifting his net, he spiedbeyond the hut of the Peruvians a moving mass on the ground--acylindrical bulk which looked to be two feet thick, and which glidedpast like a solid stream of dark water flowing along above the dirt. Itsbeginning and end were hidden in the bush, and not until it tapered intonothing and was gone did he realize fully that he had been gazing at anenormous anaconda. Then he kicked himself for not shooting it. Butbefore long he congratulated himself for letting it go.
Perhaps an hour later the startled forest resounded with an agonizedscream, so piercing and so appallingly human that all the camp sprangawake. The outcry came but once, sounding from some place not far off,near the water's edge, and in the direction toward which the hugeserpent had disappeared. Before the watcher had time to tell the othersof what he had seen, one of the boatmen discovered the rut left in thesoft ground by the reptile. Thereafter Knowlton kept his own counsel,listening to the excited curses of the men and observing their pallorand their nervous scanning of the shadows. Jose said the screechundoubtedly was the death shriek of some animal caught and crushed inthe snake's tremendous coil. McKay concurred with a nod. And whenKnowlton casually said it was tough that nobody had been awake to shootthe thing as it passed the camp, Jose emphatically disagreed.
A bullet fired into that fiendish giant, he averred, would have meantdeath to one or more men; for the serpent's writhing coils and lashingtail would have knocked down the sleeping-hut and shattered the spinesof any men they struck. No, let Senor Knowlton thank the saints that theawful master of the swamps had gone its way unmolested. For the rest ofthat night Knowlton kept his watch openly, accompanied by Jose and threeof the paddlers, who refused to sleep again until they should be milesaway from the vicinity of that dread monster.
Two nights afterward the camp was aroused again. Tim alone saw the startof the disturbance, and he kept mum about it because he did not chooseto let the Peruvians know he had been on the alert. Out from the gloomand straight past the huts a thick-bodied, curve-snouted animal camecharging madly for the river, carrying on its back a ferocious catcreature whose fangs were buried deep in its steed's neck--a tapirattacked by a jaguar. With a resounding plunge the elephantine quarrystruck the water and was gone. The tiger cat, forced to relinquish itshold or drown, swam hurriedly back to the bank below the encampment,where it roared and spat and squalled in a blood-chilling paroxysm ofbaffled fury. And though every man was awakened, not one left the flimsyshelter of his net. Nor did anyone so much as speak until Tim, wearyingof the noise, announced his intention to "go bust that critter in thenose and give him somethin' to yowl about."
The proposal met with instant and peremptory veto.
"As you were!" snapped McKay. "Let him alone! You wouldn't have aChinaman's chance in that black bush. A jaguar is bad all the time, andwhen he's mad he's deadly. Never fool with one of those beasts, Tim.I've met them before and I know what they can do."
To which Jose agreed with many picturesque oaths, declaring that ajaguar was no mere beast--it was a devil. Tim, grumbling, obeyed orders.The jaguar, hearing their voices, stopped its noise and probablyreconnoitered the camp. But no man saw the brute, and its next roarsounded from some spot far off in the jungle.
Other things, too, passed within Tim's range of vision from time to timein the moonlit hours: a queer bony creature which he took for some newkind of turtle, but which really was an armadillo; a monstrous hairyspider which slid like a streak up his net, hung there for a time,decided to go elsewhere, and departed with such speed that the maninside rubbed his eyes and wondered if he was "seein' things thatain't"; a couple of vampires which flitted in from nowhere like ghoulishghosts, wheeled and floated silently on wide wings, seeking an exposedfoot protruding from the hammocks, found none, rested a moment on theroof poles, chirping hoarsely, and veered out again into the night.
To Knowlton's watch came a strange owl-faced little monkey with greatstaring eyes and face ringed with pale fur--one of those night apesseldom seen by man; a small troop of kinkajous, slender, long-tailedanimals which looked to be monkeys, but were not, and which leapeddeftly among the branches like frolicsome little devils let loose toplay under the jungle moon; a big scaly iguana, its back ridged with sawteeth and its pendulous throat pouch dangling grotesquely under its jaw;and more than one deadly snake and huge alligator, the first glidingpast with venomous head raised and cold eye glinting, the second lyingquiescent except for occasional openings of horrific jaws.
To the ears of both the hammock sentinels came the mournful sounds ofliving things unseen. From the depths beyond drifted the weird plaint ofthe sloth, crying in the night, "Oh me, poor sloth, oh-oh-oh-oh!" Goatsuckers repeated by the hour their monotonous refrains, "Quao quao," or"Cho-co-co-cao," while a third earnestly exhorted, "Joao corta pao!"("John, cut wood!"). Tree frogs and crickets clacked and drummed andhoo-hooed, guaribas poured their awful discord into the air, and on onebright breathless night there sounded over and over a call freightedwith wretchedness and despair--the wail of that lonely owl known to thebushmen as "the mother of the moon," whose dreadful cry portends evil tothose who hear it.
Sometimes the air shook with the thunderous concussion of some greatfalling tree which, long since bled to death by parasitical plantgrowths, now at last toppled crashing back into the dank soil whence ithad forced its way up into a place in the sun. Other noises, infrequentand unexplainable, also drifted at long intervals from the mysteriousblackness. And in all the medley of night sounds not one was cheerful.The burden of the jungle's cacophonic cantanta ever was thesame--despair, disaster, death.
Then came the fifteenth day. It dawned red, the sun fighting anensanguined battle with the heavy morning mists and throwing on thefaces of the early-rising travelers a sinister crimson hue. Before thatsun should rise again some of those faces were to be stained a deeperred.