I.
FOUR of us went.
Two of us came back.
And this, senhores, is the tale of all four of us, but particularly of the pair who did not return.
I—Lourenço Moraes—and my partner, Pedro Andrada, were rovers of the jungle of the Javary, western frontier of Brazil: a couple of seringuerios in the employ of Coronel Nunes, owner of the greatest rubber estate along the border, who often called us “tramps” and “scamps,” but who relied on us to do dangerous scouting for him. It was while we ranged the bush in his service that we met the two North Americans.
The first of these was Senhor Thomas Gordon Mack, an explorer whom we found a captive of brutal snake-men and saved from a hideous death. The second was Senhorita Marion Marshall, whom Senhor Tom himself rescued from the merciless claws of Black Hawk, a negro-Indian who sought to make himself ruler of all the country between the rivers Javary and Jurua.
They were North Americans both, as I have said. Yet, though they came from the same country and each fell into the power of brutes, neither knew of the other's existence until we bushmen brought them together. And between the night when we snatched Senhor Tom from 'the fangs of snakes and the afternoon when he killed Black Hawk before his whole Indian army, there passed many days of wilderness travel.
Now, with the Hawk dead behind us and his gang of Tucuna Indians broken up and hurrying to their jungle homes, we four swung our canoes northward along a creek leading toward the Amazon town of Viciado, where the senhorita had been captured and her uncle murdered and robbed by renegades. She alone of our party had ever traveled that creek before, for we three had come to the stronghold of Black Hawk from the west and south; and even she knew next to nothing about it, for on her previous journey, she had been a bound captive, dreading death or worse, and not gifted with the jungle-trained mind which sees and remembers without effort. But she did know that her captors had paddled only three days with her.
To us, accustomed to traveling long distances by canoe, a journey of less than half a week seemed mere play, and we pulled our dugouts along carelessly, expecting no danger nor even any trouble. Which shows, senhores, what fools men can be. The fact that you have just beaten Death does not mean that he is not waiting for you in another shape at the next turn of the river.
As we went, the eyes of three of us rested often on the fourth. And the fourth, as you may guess, was the senhorita. We admired her, as men long used to seeing only Indian women are compelled to admire a handsome white girl; but more than her beauty we approved her spirit. For she was not lolling lazily in Senhor Tom's boat and taking advantage of the fact that she was a young woman recently rescued from peril. Dressed in the explorer's spare khaki, with her black hair snugly pinned up by thorns and shirt-sleeves rolled high, she was swinging her paddle as regularly as any of us.
As she worked she kept her eyes straight ahead in a constant watch for snags. So Pedro and I had plenty of chance to watch her and also to squint now and then at Senhor Tom, who seldom took his gaze off her swaying shoulders.
We saw that her stroke was smooth and clean, but that she was working too hard. We saw also that Senhor Tom's blond-bearded jaw was clamped tight and that he was pulling hard in an attempt to ease the toil for her. The result was that both were laboring too much and their craft was surging along at top speed. There was no sense in this, and we decided to make them ease up.
So, after Pedro had given me a wink and a side-move of the head toward their dugout, he suddenly drew in his paddle, snatched up his rifle, peered ahead, and hissed:
“Slow! Hold!”
At once they bore back on their blades. The water swashed loudly, then stilled as their boat lost headway. Senhor Tom deftly slipped his blade into the boat and rose, gun in hand. The girl leaned forward, her eyes roving along the bushy banks to see what caused our alertness.
Our canoe slid past theirs, and I kept on paddling slowly, as if we really had spied something alarming. Understanding Pedro's ruse, I expected him to grunt in a relieved way and resume paddling at an easy rate, keeping the other craft behind us. But he did not.
As we floated around a steep-banked bend he made a soft noise. I looked more sharply at the left shore, toward which his face was turned. Then I saw, only a few feet from us and lying beside a narrow cleft in the bank, a rusty rifle.
If we had not been playing that game and scanning the shore so closely we should have passed the gun without seeing it, for it was partly hidden among small stalks of driftwood. Now I turned the canoe aside and we grounded beside it. For a moment we searched the earth around us before touching the weapon. Footprints, blurred by rains, led up to the top of the incline. Whoever had been there had been gone for some time—or was still up above.
No canoe lay in the crack, and the man who owned that firearm must have gone his way. But no man is likely to abandon his rifle without a very good reason, especially in our jungle, where a gun is life itself. So, leaving the weapon where it lay, Pedro and I dug our toes into the clay and mounted to the top of the slope, carrying our guns ready.
Less than a rod from the edge we saw a flimsy shelter of poles and palm-leaves. In it hung an empty hammock. On the ground lay what was left of the man who had slept there.
His bones were scattered about, his shirt and breeches now were only torn rags, and we saw nothing at all to show who he was. But we quickly saw why he was there. In the skull gaped a big bullet-hole.
For a few minutes we stood looking at it and at the bush round about. Then Pedro turned the skull over with his gun-muzzle.
“Por Deus!” he muttered. “This is a sweet thing to find lying on the river-bank, Lourenço. It is murder.”
I nodded, for I too saw that the man had been shot while asleep. Only the one hole was in the skull, and it was high on the back of the crown. The bullet had been fired while he lay at rest, ranging downward and probably coming out through his throat.
“Shot in the night by a companion who then fled in their canoe,” Pedro added. “The murderer dropped that rifle down below in his hurry to get away, and either forgot it or could not find it in the darkness. The gun may belong either to the killer or to this man. Let us look at it. Perhaps it may tell us a tale. There is nothing else here that will.”
But just as we turned back toward the water I saw a brownish bit of wood among the rags. Stooping, I grasped it and picked it up. It was the haft of a sheath-knife.
“Here is something,” I said. “A rusty blade of about seven inches, with four nicks on the back which look as if made by a file. And the-wood has been checkered to give a firm grip in a hot hand. It looks like the weapon of a knife-fighter.”
“And so it is,” my partner agreed after studying it and feeling its weight and balance. “Those four nicks must mean four human lives. That is why this man was killed by stealth, no doubt—his killer dared not fight him. Now we have only to learn who carried this knife and who traveled with him.”
“A very simple matter in this vast bush, of course,” I jeered.
Yet it was much more simple than either of us expected. The answer to our problem came before we again picked up our paddles.
Down below Senhor Tom had stepped ashore and pulled the abandoned rifle out of the driftwood, and now he and the Senhorita were looking at it. As we slid down to them he turned to us, his blue eyes gleaming.
“Say, fellows, this is—Hullo! What's that you've got? Find something upstairs?”
“A hammock and this knife,” I answered, passing the ugly blade to him. The girl leaned forward eagerly and looked.
“Oh, now I'm absolutely sure of it!” she cried. “That was the knife of the tall man!”
“What tall man?” Pedro demanded.
“One of the two who carried me to the camp of the Hawk! He was a yellow-faced animal with a thick mouth and the eyes of a snake, and he was noisy and quarrelsome. He drew this knife more than a dozen times on the journey, threatening the other man with it, and once he pointed to these dents on the back of it. I saw this handle sticking out from his waistband all the time for three days, and I shall never forget it.
“The other man was shorter and very brown—an Indian, or nearly so—and not so noisy; but I watched his eyes once after the tall one threatened him, and they made me shiver. They looked positively poisonous. He”
She stopped suddenly, looking from one to the other of us and up at the top of the bank. She paled a little.
“Are they—are they dead?” she asked.
“The tall one is very dead,” Pedro told her. “The other is gone. But what about the rifle?”
Senhor Tom answered:
“Miss Marshall was saying she thought this gun belonged to one of those skunks, though she wasn't sure. The butt is dented. See? Looks like old tooth-marks. Some animal bit it some time, perhaps. Nothing else to distinguish it from any other repeater. Forty-four caliber, as usual, and rotten dirty inside and out.”
He dropped the weapon and climbed the bank. While he was gone we examined the gun and found it just as he had said. Between rust and foulness, it was worthless. I pitched it back among the muddy sticks and rubbed the rust from my hands on to my jungle-stained breeches. And then Senhor Tom came slipping down, grinning.
“Old Lady Nemesis sure tapped that mutt hard when she called on him,” he said. “Shoved her finger clear through his head—beg pardon, Miss Marshall. Still, I don't suppose it shocks you to know that one of your uncle's murderers got what was coming to him. Retribution, and all that.”
The girl did not answer his words or his smile. Her deep eyes, so darkly blue that they seemed almost black, rested steadily on his bronzed face for a time. Then she glanced away down the creek and held her paddle as if anxious to go.
The blond man's grin faded. He rubbed his jaw, scowled, shrugged and took his place in his dugout. We boarded our own craft and shoved off ahead of them. And as we swung on down the creek I wondered what had displeased the girl.
But I did not wonder long, for women and their moods have never troubled me much. Soon my thoughts were all on the thing that had taken place on the shore behind us. I could see the night fire smoldering red in the gloom; the two men lying in their hammocks; the slow, stealthy raising of the short man's head, and his motionless watch of the tall one's breathing; the silent swing of a gun, the sudden flash of the shot; and then the hurried plundering of the body and the hasty departure down the black stream.
It was nothing to me that the the yellow-faced brute had been murdered in his sleep. A man who would carry a white girl, or any other girl, to such a fate as awaited her in the camp of Black Hawk deserved a hundred deaths. It was nothing to me that the short man, murderer of his comrade, was still alive. But it was something to all three of us men that that short man was not yet punished for his share in abducting the senhorita.
There were others besides him, too, who had had a hand in that outrage—men of Viciado, one of the worst towns on the great river, toward which we now were journeying. And as I thought, I spoke my thought.
“We shall find him in Viciado, no doubt. Within the week we can teach him and his fellows what it means to treat white women brutally.”
Pedro, up in the bow, grunted agreement. And while we stroked ahead at the slow pace we had chosen, we pictured with grim satisfaction what we should do three days thence.
What fools we were!
We did not know what awaited us down the stream.