The Pathless Trail, Arthur O. Friel [digital e reader txt] 📗
- Author: Arthur O. Friel
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He extended an arm dotted with swollen red spots.
"Ants!" said McKay, after one glance. "Ants, not cooties. They're everywhere. Especially under the floor. That's one reason why folks sleep in hammocks down here. Even then they're likely to come down the hammock cords and drive you out."
"Ants, hey? Never thought o' that. And I'd sooner spend another night fightin' all the man-eatin' jaggers in the jungle than them bugs. It's the little things that count, as the feller said when his wife give him his fourteenth baby."
He downed the thick coffee brought by Thomaz, demanded another cup, accepted cigarette and light from Knowlton, and sighed heavily.
"Who tried to hit you?" Knowlton persisted.
"Aw, I dunno. Two-three fellers took swipes at me with bottles and things. Me and Joey went to a place where they's card games and so on—only place in town where the village sports can git action. Joey offers to buy, and does. Stuff tastes kind o' moldy to me, so I asks have they got any American beer. They have. It's bottled and warm, but it's beer and tastes like home. It goes down so slick I buy another round, and then one more, lettin' in a thirsty-lookin' stranger on the third round. That makes seven bottles altogether. Then I think mebbe I better pay up now before I lose track. Looey, guess what them seven bottles o' suds come to in American money."
"M-m-m! Well, say about three and a half or four dollars."
"That's what I figgered," mourned Tim. "But them highbinders want thirty-two dollars and twenty cents, American gold."
"What!"
"Sad but true. Seems the stuff sells here for four bucks and sixty cents a bottle. Thinkin' I'm gittin' rooked because I'm a tenderfoot, I raise a row to oncet and start to climb the guy. Other folks mix in and things git lively right off. But after I've dropped a couple o' fellers Joey winds himself round me and begs me not to make him arrest me, and also tells me I'm all wrong—that's the regular price. So o'course that makes me out a cheap skate unless I come acrost, and I do the right thing."
"Lucky you had the money on you," said McKay, eying him a bit oddly.
"I didn't," chuckled Tim. "All the dough I had was one pore lonesome ten-spot—the one I got from ye yesterday, Cap. But I don't tell 'em that. I jest wave my hand like thirty-two plunks wasn't nothin' in my young life, and start to work meself out o' the hole. After the two guys on the floor are brought back to their senses I order up drinks for all hands and git popular again. Then I git out the bones."
"Oh! I see!" McKay laughed silently.
"Sure. Remember they told us on the boat that these guys will gamble on anything? And that a feller without shoes on may be some rubber worker packin' a roll that would choke a horse? Wal, I make a few passes with them dice o' mine and their eyes light up like somebody had switched on the current. Then I scrabble me hand around in me pants pocket, like I was peelin' a bill off a roll so big I didn't want to flash the whole wad, and haul out that pore li'l' ten and ask would anybody like to play a man's game.
"They would. I'll say they would. And they got the coin to back up their play, too. Before I come home I was buyin' beer by the case instead o' the bottle. And it's all paid for, and I got more 'n a hundred dollars left, besides givin' Joey a fistful o' money jest for bein' a good feller. This ain't a bad town at all, gents. Outside o' that buckin'-broncho hammick and the man-eatin' ants I had a lovely evenin'."
"How about Joao's lady friend?" quizzed Knowlton.
"Huh? Oh, I didn't git to see her. When bones and beer are rollin' high and handsome I got no time for women. Besides, I found out she was mostly Injun and fat as a hog. Nothin' like that for li'l' Timmy Ryan. Oh, say, before I forgit it—I asked Joey about this Dutchman here, and he says—"
McKay scowled, shook his head, pointed toward the closed door of Schwandorf. Tim lifted his brows, winked understanding, and went on with a break: "—that this guy Sworn-off is a reg'lar feller and knows this river like a book. Says he's one fine guy and a man from hair to heels."
Following which he grimaced as if something smelled bad, adding in a barely audible whisper, "And that's the worst lie I ever told."
"We met Mr. Schwandorf last night after you went," Knowlton said, easily, drawing down one eyelid. "Very likable sort of chap. He's going to help us get started upriver."
"Uh-huh. When do we go? To-day?"
"If possible."
"Glad of it. This big-town sportin' life would be the ruination of a simple country kid like me. Yo-hum! Wonder how all our neighbors are this mornin'—the goat and the drunk and the two sick fellers. Kind o' quiet over that side o' the room."
Thomaz entered just then with more coffee. Knowlton turned to him.
"Are the sick men better to-day, Thomaz?"
"Much better, senhor," the lad said, carelessly. "They are dead."
"Huh?" Tim grunted, explosively.
"Dead," the youth repeated. "They were taken out at dawn. Do not be alarmed. It was the swamp fever, which is not—what you say?—catching."
"Humph! Sort of a reg'lar thing to die of fever here, hey?"
Thomaz shrugged as if hearing a foolish question.
"Si. Swamp fever, yellow fever, smallpox, beriberi—to-day we live, to-morrow we are dead."
"True for ye. They's allays somethin' hidin' round the corner waitin' to jump ye, no matter where ye are. If 'tain't one thing, it's another."
Despite his philosophical answer, however, Tim fell silent, his eyes going to the doors of the rooms where Death had stalked last night while he was gambling. Like most men in whose veins red blood runs bold and free, he had no fear of the sort of death befitting a fighter—sudden and violent—but a deep repugnance for those two assassins against which a victim could not fight back—disease and poison. The Brazilian youth's nonchalant fatalism aroused him to the fact that here both those forms of death were very near him; the one in the air, the other on the ground—fever and snakes.
For the moment he was depressed. Then curiosity awoke.
"If this here, now, Javary fever ain't catchin', how does a feller git it?"
"Mosquitoes," McKay enlightened him. "The anopheles. It bites a man who has fever, then bites a well man and leaves the fever in him. Inside of ten days he's sick, unless he takes a huge dose of quinine right away. Mosquito attacks perpendicular to the skin. That is, it stands on its head. If you ever notice one of them biting that way get busy with the quinine."
"Huh! Fat chance a feller's got o' seein' just how all these bugs bite him. And one muskeeter standin' on its head does all that, hey?"
"So they say. Also they say it's only the female that bites."
"Yeah. I believe it. I been stung more 'n once by females before now. How about the yeller fever? Git that the same way?"
"Same way, only a different mosquito—the stegomyia. When you begin to vomit black you're gone. And if you get beriberi you're gone, too. First symptoms of that are numbness of the fingers and toes. Muscular paralysis goes on until your heart stops."
"Uh-huh. Nice cheerful place to die in, this Ammyzon jungle. Aw well, what's the odds?"
Wherewith he inhaled more coffee, flipped his cigarette butt at a small lizard on the floor not far away, yawned once more, and swaggered out to the piazza, bawling:
Don't bury me a-tall,
But pickle me bones
In alky-hawl—"
When his roar had subsided and the two former officers had sat silent a moment, smiling over his nocturnal adventures, the door of Schwandorf's room opened abruptly and the German stepped out.
"Morgen," he grunted, striding to the table. "Thomaz!"
"Si, Senhor Sssondoff." The youth faded away into the kitchen quarters.
"Always feel grumpy until I eat," grumbled the blackbeard. "None of this coffee-cigarette breakfast for me. A real meal, coffee with gin in it, a cigar—then I feel human. Sleep well?"
His bold gaze never flickered as it encountered Knowlton's.
"Fine. If you snored I didn't know it. Didn't hear the bodies taken out this morning, either."
"Bodies! Oh! Those fellows dead?" He tilted his head toward the doors behind which the sick men had lain. "Glad of it. Best for them and everybody else. Hate to have sick people in the place."
The Americans said nothing. They lit new cigarettes and waited for the other to become "human." And when his substantial breakfast was down, his gin-flavored coffee had disappeared, and his big cigar was aglow, he did.
"Well, gentlemen, have you decided to take good advice and let your Raposa alone?" he asked, affably.
"Who ever follows good advice?" Knowlton countered. Schwandorf chuckled.
"Niemand. Nobody. So you will go." He shook his head solemnly. "I have said all I can without offense. But if you persist I can only help you to start. If possible I should like to go with you up the river to the place where you will take to the bush; but I must go to Iquitos, in Peru, on the monthly launch which is due in a day or two, so all my business is in the other direction. If now I can aid in the matter of a crew—"
"That is what we were about to ask of you."
"So. Then let us be about it. I have been thinking, since you showed your determination last night, and have made inquiries about men. There are now in Nazareth, the little Peruvian town across the river, several men from whom you can pick an excellent crew. Men of the river and the bush, not worthless loafers like these townsmen here. Men who are not afraid of hell or high water, as the saying is. Not remarkable for either beauty or brains, but good men for your work—by far the best you can obtain. I would suggest a large canoe and six or eight of those men as crew."
The others smoked thoughtfully. Then McKay said, "We should prefer Brazilians."
"Not if you knew the people hereabouts as well as I. It, of course, makes no personal difference to me what sort of crew you get, but I tell you that these men are best. What does it matter which side of the river they come from? Men are men."
"True," McKay conceded.
"Can't be too fussy here," Knowlton added. "Let's see the men."
All rose. But then Schwandorf suggested:
"No need of your going to Nazareth. Better stay here, unless you want to go through a great deal of ceremonious foolishness over there. It's Peruvian ground and the barefooted ignoramuses of officials may insist on showing their importance by demanding your papers and all that. I can go across, get the men, and be back here before you'd be half through the preliminaries. Saves time."
"All right, if it's not too much trouble."
"A good deal less trouble than if you went, to be frank. I'm known, and I can go straight about the business. So sit down and wait. Thomaz! My hat!"
Out he tramped to the piazza, where he paused a moment to run a swift eye over the disheveled figure of Tim, who had fallen sound asleep in a chair. Then, without a further word or glance, he descended the ladder and swung away down the street. The Americans, watching him from the doorway, observed that children in his path hastened to get out of it, and that he spoke to nobody.
"Prussian," rasped McKay.
"M-hm! Done time in the Kaiser's army, too, even if he has been here since before the war. But he's treating us pretty white."
The captain made no answer. Their eyes followed the big figure until they saw it go sliding away toward Peru in a canoe propelled by two languid townsmen. Then McKay dropped a hand on Tim's shoulder. The red-lashed eyes flew open instantly.
Briefly, quietly, Knowlton told of what had passed while he napped, then asked what information he had gleaned from Joao.
"He says," answered Tim, "this guy is a queer duck. Been around here quite a while, but Joey don't know what's his game. He goes off on trips upriver, stays quite a while, comes back unexpected, and nobody knows where he's been or why. He don't use Brazilian boatmen—gits his men on the other side. And the Peru boys
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