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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 42193 ***
+
+Transcriber's note:
+All apparent mistakes in dialogue have been retained.
+Italic text has been marked with _underscores_, while underlined text
+is marked with +plus signs+.
+
+
+
+
+  THE INCA EMERALD
+
+
+
+
+  +By SAMUEL SCOVILLE, JR.+
+
+
+  THE BLUE PEARL
+  BOY SCOUTS IN THE WILDERNESS
+  THE INCA EMERALD
+  MORE WILD FOLK
+  THE RED DIAMOND
+
+[Illustration: From the heart of the jungle sounded the deep, coughing
+roar of a jaguar]
+
+
+
+
+  THE INCA EMERALD
+
+  BY
+
+  SAMUEL SCOVILLE, Jr.
+
+  Author of "Boy Scouts in the Wilderness," "The Blue Pearl," etc.
+
+  ILLUSTRATED BY
+
+  CHARLES LIVINGSTON BULL
+
+[Illustration]
+
+  D. APPLETON-CENTURY COMPANY
+
+  INCORPORATED
+
+  NEW YORK LONDON
+
+  1936
+
+
+  Copyright, 1922, by The Century Co.
+
+  Copyright, 1922, by Samuel Scoville, Jr.
+
+  PRINTED IN U. S. A.
+
+
+  To
+
+  ALICE TRUMBULL SCOVILLE
+
+  My Kindest Critic
+
+
+
+
+  CONTENTS
+
+
+  CHAPTER                PAGE
+
+  I The Beginning           3
+
+  II A New World           29
+
+  III The Vampires         52
+
+  IV Death River           74
+
+  V Shipwreck              99
+
+  VI The Black Tiger      126
+
+  VII The Yellow Snake    153
+
+  VIII The Man-Eaters     177
+
+  IX The Pit              203
+
+  X Sky Bridge            227
+
+  XI The Lost City        250
+
+  XII Eldorado            275
+
+
+
+
+  LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+
+  From the heart of the jungle sounded the deep,
+  coughing roar of a jaguar                            _Frontispiece_
+
+                                                          FACING PAGE
+
+  "The bushmaster is the largest, rarest, and deadliest
+  of South American serpents"                                       6
+
+  It showed itself as the great condor of the Andes, the
+  second largest bird that flies                                  242
+
+  Hideous heads suddenly showed over the edge of the wall         264
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+THE BEGINNING
+
+
+It was a bushmaster which started the Quest of the Emerald--and only a
+possible bushmaster at that. One May evening in Cornwall, Big Jim
+Donegan, the lumber-king, sat in the misty moonlight with his slippered
+feet on the rail of the veranda of the great house in which he lived
+alone. He was puffing away at a corn-cob pipe as placidly as if he did
+not have more millions than Cornwall has hills--which is saying
+something, for Cornwall has twenty-seven of the latter. Along the gravel
+walk, which wound its way for nearly half a mile to the entrance of the
+estate, came the sound of a dragging footstep. A moment later, from out
+of the shadows stepped a man over six feet in height, a little stooped,
+and who wore a shiny frock-coat surmounted by a somewhat battered silk
+hat. The stranger had a long, clean-shaven, lantern-jawed face. His nose
+jutted out like a huge beak, a magnificent, domineering nose, which,
+however, did not seem in accord with his abstracted blue eyes and his
+precise voice.
+
+"What do you want?" snapped Big Jim, bringing his feet to the floor with
+alarming suddenness.
+
+The stranger blinked at him mildly for a moment with a gaze that seemed
+to be cataloguing the speaker.
+
+"This is Mr. James Donegan," he finally stated.
+
+"How do you know?" demanded the lumber-king.
+
+"You have all the characteristics of a magnate," returned the other,
+calmly, "energy, confidence, bad temper, worse manners, and--"
+
+"Whoa!" shouted Big Jim, whose bark was worse than his bite and who
+always respected people who stood up to him. "Never mind any more
+statistics. Who are you!"
+
+"My name is Ditson," responded the other, sitting down without
+invitation in the most comfortable chair in sight. "Professor Amandus
+Ditson. I am connected with the Smithsonian National Museum."
+
+"Well," returned Mr. Donegan, stiffening, "I don't intend to subscribe
+any money to the Smithsonian Museum or any other museum, so there's no
+use of your asking me."
+
+"I had no intention of asking you for anything," returned Professor
+Ditson, severely. "I had understood that you were a collector of gems,
+and I came to place at your disposal certain information in regard to
+the finest emeralds probably now in existence. I too am a collector," he
+went on abstractedly.
+
+"Humph!" grunted Big Jim. "What do you collect?" he inquired, regarding
+his visitor shrewdly.
+
+"Bushmasters," responded Professor Ditson, simply.
+
+"Come again," returned Big Jim, much puzzled, "I don't quite get you.
+What are bushmasters?"
+
+"The bushmaster," announced Professor Ditson, with more animation than
+he had yet shown, "is the largest, the rarest and the deadliest of South
+American serpents. It attains a length of over twelve feet and has fangs
+an inch and a half long. You will hardly believe me," he went on,
+tapping Mr. Donegan's knee with a long, bony forefinger, "but there is
+not a single living specimen in captivity at present, even in our
+largest cities."
+
+The lumber-king regarded the scientist with undisguised astonishment.
+
+"Professor Amandus Ditson," he announced solemnly, "so far as I'm
+concerned, there can continue to be a lack of bushmasters not only in
+our great cities, but everywhere else. Snakes of any kind are absolutely
+nothing in my young life."
+
+[Illustration: "The bushmaster is the largest, rarest, and deadliest of
+South American serpents"]
+
+"Tut! tut!" responded the professor, reprovingly. "I think that I could
+convince you that you are wrong in your unfortunate aversion to
+reptiles."
+
+"No you couldn't," returned Big Jim, positively, "not if you were to
+lecture all the rest of the year."
+
+"Well," responded Professor Ditson soothingly, "suppose we discuss your
+hobby, which I understand is precious stones."
+
+"Now you're talking," returned the other, enthusiastically, "I suppose
+I've about the finest collection of gems in this country, and in some
+lines perhaps the best on earth. Take pearls, for instance," he boasted.
+"Why, Professor Ditson, some boys right here in Cornwall helped me get
+the finest examples of pink and blue pearls that there are in any
+collection. When it comes to emeralds, there are half a dozen collectors
+who beat me out. What's all this dope you have about them, anyway?"
+
+"Last year," replied the other, "I was in Peru at a time when they were
+repairing one of the oldest cathedrals in that country. A native
+workman, knowing that I was interested in rarities of all kinds, brought
+me an old manuscript, which turned out to be a map and a description of
+the celebrated Lake of Eldorado."
+
+"That's the name of one of those dream places," interrupted Mr. Donegan,
+impatiently. "I've no time to listen to dreams."
+
+Professor Ditson was much incensed.
+
+"Sir," he returned austerely, "I deal in facts, not in dreams. I have
+traveled one thousand miles to see you, but if you can not speak more
+civilly, I shall be compelled to terminate this interview and go to some
+one with better manners and more sense."
+
+"Just what I was going to suggest," murmured Big Jim, taken aback, but
+much pleased by the professor's independence. "So long, however, as
+you've beat me to it, go on. I'll hear you out anyway."
+
+Professor Ditson stared at him sternly.
+
+"For nearly four hundred years," he began at last, "there have been
+legends of a sacred lake somewhere in Bolivia or Peru. Once a year,
+before the Spanish conquest, the chief of the Incas, the dominant race
+of Peru, covered with gold-dust, would be ferried out to the center of
+this lake. There he would throw into the lake the best emerald that had
+been found in their mines during the year and then leap in himself. At
+the same time the other members of the tribe would stand on the shores
+with their backs to the lake and throw into the water over their
+shoulders emeralds and gold ornaments."
+
+"Why on earth did they do that?" exclaimed the old collector.
+
+"As an offering to the Spirit of the Lake," returned the professor. "The
+Spaniards, when they heard the story, named the lake, Eldorado--The Lake
+of the Golden Man. As the centuries went by, the location was
+lost--until I found it again."
+
+There was a long pause, which was broken at last by the lumber-king.
+
+"Have you any proof that this story of yours is true?" he inquired
+sarcastically.
+
+For answer, the scientist fished a dingy bag from his pocket and shook
+out on the table a circlet of soft, pale gold in which gleamed three
+green stones.
+
+"I found this ten feet from the shore," he said simply.
+
+The lumber-king gasped as he studied the stones with an expert eye.
+
+"Professor Ditson," he admitted at last, "you're all right and I'm all
+wrong. That's South American gold. I know it by the color. African gold
+is the deepest, and South American the palest. Those stones are
+emeralds," he went on; "flawed ones, to be sure, but of the right color.
+The common emerald from the Ural Mountains is grass-green," lectured Mr.
+Donegan, fairly started on his hobby. "A few emeralds are gray-green.
+Those come from the old mines of the Pharaohs along the coast of the Red
+Sea. They are found on mummies and in the ruins of Pompeii and along the
+beach in front of Alexandria, where treasure-ships have been wrecked."
+
+Professor Ditson yawned rudely.
+
+"Once in a blue moon," went on the old collector, earnestly, "a real
+spring-green emerald with a velvety luster, like these stones, turns up.
+We call 'em 'treasure emeralds,'" he continued, while Professor Ditson
+shifted uneasily in his chair. "Most of them are in Spanish collections,
+and they are supposed to be part of the loot that Cortez and Pizarro
+brought back to Spain when they conquered Mexico and Peru. How large did
+these old Peruvian emeralds run?" he inquired suddenly.
+
+He had to repeat this question before Professor Ditson, who had been
+dozing lightly, roused himself.
+
+"Ah yes, quite so, very interesting, I'm sure," responded that
+scientist, confusedly. "As to the size of South American emeralds," he
+went on, rubbing his eyes, "the Spanish record shows that Pizarro sent
+back to Spain several which were as large as pigeon eggs, and there is a
+native tradition that the last Inca threw into Eldorado an oval emerald
+as large as a hen's egg."
+
+Donegan's face flushed with excitement.
+
+"Professor Ditson," he said at last, "I've got to have one of those
+emeralds. Come in," he went on, getting up suddenly, "and I'll show you
+my collection."
+
+Professor Ditson sat still.
+
+"No, Mr. Donegan," he said, "it would be just a waste of time. To me,
+gems are just a lot of colored crystals."
+
+The old lumber-king snorted.
+
+"I suppose you prefer snakes," he said cuttingly.
+
+Professor Ditson's face brightened at the word.
+
+"There," he said enthusiastically, "is something worth while. I only
+wish that I had you in my snake-room. I could show you live, uncaged
+specimens which would interest you deeply."
+
+"They sure would," returned Mr. Donegan, shivering slightly. "Well," he
+went on, "every man to his own taste. What's your idea about this
+emerald secret? Can we do business together?"
+
+The professor's face assumed an air of what he fondly believed to be
+great astuteness.
+
+"I would suggest," he said, "that you fit out an expedition to the
+Amazon basin under my direction, to remain there until I collect one or
+more perfect specimens of the bushmaster. Then I will guide the party to
+Eldorado and assist them, as far as I can, to recover the sunken
+treasure."
+
+He came to a full stop.
+
+"Well," queried the lumber-king, "what else?"
+
+The professor looked at him in surprise. "I have nothing else to
+suggest," he said.
+
+"Suppose we get emeralds which may be worth hundreds of thousands of
+dollars--what percentage will you claim?" persisted Mr. Donegan.
+
+"I thought that I had made it plain," returned the professor,
+impatiently, "that I have no interest whatever in emeralds. If you will
+pay the expenses of the expedition and allow me to keep as my own
+property any specimens of bushmasters obtained, it will be entirely
+satisfactory to me. Of course," finished the scientist, generously, "if
+we catch several bushmasters, I should have no objections to your having
+one."
+
+"Heaven forbid!" returned the lumber-king. "Professor," he went on with
+great emphasis, "I am perfectly willing that you shall have absolutely
+for your own use and benefit any and all bushmasters, crocodiles,
+snakes, toads, tarantulas, and any other similar bric-à-brac which you
+may find in South America. Moreover," he continued, "I'll fit out an
+expedition right here from Cornwall that will do the business for both
+of us. There's a good-for-nothin' old chap in this town named Jud Adams
+who has been all over the North huntin' an' trappin' an' prospectin'. In
+his younger days he was a pearl-diver. Then there're two young fellows
+here that went off last year with him for me and brought back the finest
+blue pearl in the world. I ain't got no manner of doubt but what all
+three of 'em will jump at the chance to go after emeralds and
+bushmasters."
+
+"Bushmasters and emeralds, please," corrected the professor.
+
+"Just as you say," responded the lumber-king. "Now you come right in and
+I'll put you up for the night and we'll send over at once for the crowd
+that I have in mind and get this expedition started right away."
+
+"The sooner the better," responded the professor, heartily. "Any day,
+some collector may bring back a bushmaster and beat me out with the
+Smithsonian."
+
+"I feel the same way," agreed the lumber-king. "I want Jim Donegan to
+have the first crack at those Inca emeralds."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+While all this talk about gold and emeralds and bushmasters was going
+on in Big Jim's big house, over in a little house on the tiptop of
+Yelpin Hill, Jud Adams, the old trapper, was just sitting down to supper
+with two of his best friends. One of these was Will Bright, a
+magnificently built boy of eighteen with copper-colored hair and dark
+blue eyes, and the other his chum, Joe Couteau, silent, lithe, and swart
+as his Indian ancestors. Jud himself was not much over five feet tall,
+with bushy gray hair and beard and steel-sharp eyes. These three, with
+Fred Perkins, the runner, had won their way to Goreloi, the Island of
+the Bear, and brought back Jim Donegan's most prized gem, as already
+chronicled in "The Blue Pearl." They had learned to care for one another
+as only those can who have fought together against monsters of the sea,
+savage beasts, and more savage men. Joe and Will, moreover, had shared
+other life-and-death adventures together, as told in "Boy Scouts in the
+Wilderness," and, starting without clothes, food, or fire, had lived a
+month in the heart of the woods, discovered the secret of Wizard Pond,
+and broken up Scar Dawson's gang of outlaws. Will never forgot that Joe
+had saved him from the carcajou, nor Joe that it was Will who gave him
+the first chance of safety when the bloodhounds were hot on their heels
+through the hidden passage from Wizard Pond. Each one of the four, as
+his share of the blue pearl, and the sea-otter pelt brought back from
+Akotan, had received fifteen thousand dollars. Fred had invested his
+money in his brother's business in Boston, left Cornwall, and bade fair
+to settle down into a successful business man. Will and Joe had both set
+aside from their share enough to take them through Yale. As for Jud, the
+day after he received his winnings in the game which the four had played
+against danger and death, he had a short interview with his old friend
+Mr. Donegan.
+
+"All my life long," began Jud, "I've been makin' money; but so far, I
+haven't got a cent saved up. I know how to tame 'most any other kind of
+wild animal, but money allers gets away from me. They do say, Jim," went
+on the old man, "that you've got the knack of keepin' it. Probably you
+wouldn't be worth your salt out in the woods, but every man's got
+somethin' that he can do better 'n most. So you just take my share of
+the blue-pearl money an' put it into somethin' safe an' sound that'll
+bring me an income. You see, Jim," he went on confidentially, "I ain't
+so young as I used to be."
+
+"I should say you ain't!" exclaimed Big Jim, knowing how Jud hated to be
+called old. "You're 'most a hundred now."
+
+"I ain't! I ain't!" howled Jud, indignantly. "I ain't a day over
+fifty--or thereabouts."
+
+"Well, well," said his friend, soothingly, "we won't quarrel over it.
+I'll take care of your money and see that you get all that's comin' to
+you for the two or three years which you've got left"; and with mutual
+abuse and affection the two parted as good friends as ever.
+
+To-night the old trapper and his guests had just finished supper when
+the telephone rang.
+
+"Jud," came Mr. Donegan's voice over the wire, "what would you and Bill
+and Joe think of another expedition--after emeralds this time?"
+
+"We'd think well of it," returned Jud, promptly. "The kids are here at
+my house now."
+
+"Good work!" exclaimed the lumber-king. "All three of you come right
+over. I've got a scientist here who's going to guide you to where the
+emeralds grow."
+
+"You got a what?" queried Jud.
+
+"A scientist!" shouted Big Jim, "a perfesser. One of those fellows who
+know all about everything except what's useful."
+
+"We'll be right over," said Jud, hanging up the receiver and breaking
+the news to his friends.
+
+"Listens good," said Will, while Joe grunted approvingly.
+
+"It's a pity old Jim ain't young and supple enough to go on these trips
+with us himself," remarked Jud, complacently.
+
+"He ten years younger than you," suggested Joe, slyly, who always
+delighted in teasing the old trapper about his age.
+
+"Where do you get such stuff?" returned Jud, indignantly. "Jim
+Donegan's old enough to be my father--or my brother, anyway," he
+finished, staring sternly at his grinning guests.
+
+"You're quite right, Jud," said Will, soothingly. "Let's go, though,
+before that scientist chap gets away."
+
+"He no get away," remarked Joe, sorrowfully, who had listened to the
+telephone conversation. "He go with us."
+
+"I don't think much of that," said Jud, wagging his head solemnly. "The
+last perfesser I traveled with was while I was prospectin' down in
+Arizona. He sold a cure for snakebites an' small-pox, an' one night he
+lit out with all our cash an' we never did catch him."
+
+Half an hour later found the whole party in Mr. Donegan's study, where
+they were introduced to Professor Ditson.
+
+"What might you be a perfesser of?" inquired Jud, staring at him with
+unconcealed hostility.
+
+The other stared back at him for a moment before he replied.
+
+"I have specialized," he said at last, "in reptiles, mammals, and
+birds, besides some research work in botany."
+
+"Didn't leave out much, did you?" sneered Jud.
+
+"Also," went on the professor, more quietly, "I learned early in life
+something about politeness. You would find it an interesting study," he
+went on, turning away.
+
+"Now, now," broke in Mr. Donegan, as Jud swallowed hard, "if you fellows
+are going treasure-hunting together, you mustn't begin by scrappin'."
+
+"I, sir," returned Professor Ditson, austerely, "have no intention of
+engaging in an altercation with any one. In the course of
+collecting-trips in the unsettled portions of all four continents, I
+have learned to live on good terms with vagabonds of all kinds, and I
+can do it again if necessary."
+
+"Exactly!" broke in Mr. Donegan, hurriedly, before Jud could speak;
+"that certainly shows a friendly spirit, and I am sure Jud feels the
+same way."
+
+"I do," returned the latter, puffingly, "just the same way. I got along
+once with a perfesser who was no darn good, and I guess I can again."
+
+"Then," said Mr. Donegan, briskly, "let's get down to business.
+Professor Ditson, show us, please, the map and manuscript with which you
+located Lake Eldorado."
+
+For reply, the gaunt scientist produced from a pocket a small copper
+cylinder, from which he drew a roll of yellowed parchment. Half of it
+was covered with crabbed writing in the imperishable sepia ink which the
+old scriveners used. The other half was apparently blank. The
+lumber-king screwed his face up wisely over the writing.
+
+"H'm-m," he remarked at last. "It's some foreign language. Let one of
+these young fellers who're going to college try."
+
+Will took one look at the paper.
+
+"I pass," he said simply; while Joe shook his head without even looking.
+
+"You're a fine lot of scholars!" scoffed Jud, as he received the
+scroll. "Listen now to Perfesser Adams of the University of
+Out-of-Doors."
+
+Then, to the astonishment of everybody, in his high-pitched voice he
+began to translate the labored lines, reading haltingly, like a
+school-boy:
+
+     "I, Alvarado, companion of Pizarro, about to die at dawn, to my
+     dear wife Oriana. I do repent me of my many sins. I am he who slew
+     the Inca Atahualpa and many of his people, and who played away the
+     Sun before sunrise. Now it comes that I too must die, nor of the
+     wealth that I have won have I aught save the Secret of Eldorado. On
+     a night of the full moon, I myself saw the Golden Man throw into
+     the lake the great Emerald of the Incas and a wealth of gold and
+     gems. This treasure-lake lies not far from Orcos in which was
+     thrown the Chain. I have drawn a map in the way thou didst show me
+     long years ago. Take it to the king. There be treasure enough there
+     for all Spain; and through his justice, thou and our children shall
+     have a share. Forgive me, Oriana, and forget me not.
+
+                                                               Alvarado"
+
+There was a silence when he had finished. It was as if the shadow of
+the tragedy of that wasted life and vain repentance had drifted down the
+centuries and hung over the little company who had listened to the
+reading of the undelivered letter. The stillness was broken by Mr.
+Donegan.
+
+"Where did you learn to read Spanish, you old rascal?" he inquired of
+Jud.
+
+"Down among the Greasers in Mexico," chuckled the latter, delightedly.
+
+"What does he mean by 'playing away the Sun' and the 'Chain'?" asked
+Will, of the scientist.
+
+"When the treasures of the Incas were divided," explained Professor
+Ditson, precisely, "Alvarado had for his share a golden image of the sun
+over ten feet in diameter. This he gambled away in a single night. The
+Chain," continued Professor Ditson, "surrounded the chief Inca's
+residence. It was made of gold, and was two hundred and thirty-three
+yards long. It was being carried by two hundred Indians to Cuzco to form
+part of the chief's ransom--a room filled with gold as high as he could
+reach. When the gold came to his shoulder, he was killed. At the news of
+his death, the men who were bringing the Chain threw it into Lake
+Orcos."
+
+"But--but," broke in the lumber-king, "where is the map? If you've got
+it with you, let's have a look at it."
+
+Without speaking, Professor Ditson reached over and took the match from
+the table. Lighting it, he held the flame for an instant close to the
+parchment. On the smooth surface before their eyes, suddenly appeared a
+series of vivid green lines, which at last took the form of a rude map.
+
+"What he learned from Oriana," explained Professor Ditson, "was how to
+make and use invisible ink."
+
+"Fellows," broke in Mr. Donegan, earnestly, "I believe that Professor
+Ditson has found Eldorado, and I'm willing to go the limit to get one of
+the emeralds of the Incas. I'll finance the expedition if you'll all go.
+What do you say?"
+
+"Aye," voted Will.
+
+"Aye," grunted Joe.
+
+"I assent," said Professor Ditson, with his usual preciseness.
+
+Jud alone said nothing.
+
+"How about it, Jud?" inquired Big Jim.
+
+"Well," returned Jud, doubtfully, "who's goin' to lead this expedition?"
+
+"Why, the professor here," returned the lumber-king, surprised. "He's
+the only one who knows the way."
+
+"That's it," objected Jud. "It's likely to be a rough trip, an'
+treasure-huntin' is always dangerous. Has the perfesser enough pep to
+keep up with us younger men?"
+
+Professor Ditson smiled bleakly.
+
+"I've been six times across South America, and once lived among the
+South American Indians for two years without seeing a white man," he
+remarked acidly. "Perhaps I can manage to keep up with an old man and
+two boys who have never been in the country before. You should
+understand," he went on, regarding the old trapper sternly, "that
+specialization in scientific investigation does not necessarily connote
+lack of physical ability."
+
+Jud gasped. "I don't know what he means," he returned angrily, "but he's
+wrong--specially that part about me bein' old."
+
+"I feel it is my duty to warn you," interrupted Professor Ditson, "that
+this trip may involve a special danger outside of those usual to the
+tropics. When I was last in Peru," he went on, "I had in my employ a man
+named Slaughter. He was an expert woodsman, but sinister in character
+and appearance and with great influence over the worst element among the
+Indians. One night I found him reading this manuscript, which he had
+taken from my tent while I was asleep. I persuaded him to give it up and
+leave my employ."
+
+"How did you persuade him?" queried Jud, curiously.
+
+"Automatically," responded Professor Ditson. "At least, I used a Colt's
+automatic," he explained. "His language, as he left, was deplorable,"
+continued the scientist, "and he declared, among other things, that I
+would have him to reckon with if I ever went again to Eldorado. I have
+no doubt that through his Indian allies he will be advised of the
+expedition when it reaches Peru and make trouble for us."
+
+"What did he look like?" inquired Mr. Donegan.
+
+"He was a giant," replied Professor Ditson, "and must have been over
+seven feet in height. His eyebrows made a straight line across his
+forehead, and he had a scar from his right eye to the corner of his
+jaw."
+
+"Scar Dawson!" shouted Will.
+
+"You don't mean the one who nearly burned you and Joe alive in the
+cabin?" said the lumber-king, incredulously.
+
+"It must be," said Will. "No other man would have that scar and height.
+I'll say 'some danger' is right," he concluded, while Joe nodded his
+head somberly.
+
+"That settles it!" said Jud. "It's evident this expedition needs a good
+man to keep these kids out of trouble. I'm on."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+A NEW WORLD
+
+
+A week later found the whole party aboard of one of the great South
+American liners bound for Belem. The voyage across was uneventful except
+for the constant bickerings between Jud and Professor Ditson, in which
+Will and Joe acted sometimes as peace-makers and sometimes as
+pace-makers. Then, one morning, Will woke up to find that the ocean had
+changed overnight from a warm sap-green to a muddy clay-color. Although
+they were not within sight of land, the vast river had swept enough
+earth from the southern continent into the ocean to change the color of
+the water for a hundred miles out at sea. Just at sunrise the next day
+the steamer glided up the Amazon on its way to the old city of Belem,
+seventy miles inland.
+
+"The air smells like a hot, mouldy cellar!" grumbled Jud; and soon the
+Cornwall pilgrims began to glimpse things strange and new to all three
+of them. Groups of slim assai-palms showed their feathery foliage;
+slender lianas hung like green snakes from the trees; and everywhere
+were pineapple plants, bread-fruit trees, mangos, blossoming oranges and
+lemons, rows of enormous silk-cotton trees, and superb banana plants,
+with glossy, velvety green leaves twelve feet in length curving over the
+roof of nearly every house. Beyond the city the boys had a sight of the
+jungle, which almost without a break covers the greater part of the
+Amazon basin, the largest river-basin on earth. They landed just before
+sunset, and, under Professor Ditson's direction, a retinue of porters
+carried their luggage to the professor's house, far down the beach, the
+starting-point for many of his South American expeditions.
+
+As the sun set, the sudden dark of the tropics dropped down upon them,
+with none of the twilight of higher latitudes. Jud grumbled at the
+novelty.
+
+"This ain't no way to do," he complained to Professor Ditson. "The sun
+no more than goes down, when bang! it's as black as your hat."
+
+"We'll have that seen to at once," responded the professor,
+sarcastically. "In the meantime, be as patient as you can."
+
+With the coming of the dark, a deafening din began. Frogs and toads
+croaked, drummed, brayed, and roared. Locusts whirred, and a vast
+variety of crickets and grasshoppers added their shrill note to the
+uproar, so strange to visitors and so unnoticed by natives in the
+tropics.
+
+"Hey, Professor!" shouted Jud, above the tumult, "what in time is all
+this noise, anyway?"
+
+"What noise?" inquired Professor Ditson, abstractedly.
+
+The old trapper waved both hands in a circle around his head and turned
+to the boys for sympathy. "Sounds like the Cornwall Drum and Fife Corps
+at its worst!" he shrieked.
+
+"What do you mean, Jud?" said Will, winking at Joe.
+
+"Poor Jud!" chimed in the latter, shaking his head sadly, "this trip too
+much for him. He hearing noises inside his head."
+
+For a moment, Jud looked so horrified that, in spite of their efforts to
+keep up the joke, the boys broke down and laughed uproariously.
+
+"You'll get so used to this," said Professor Ditson, at last
+understanding what they were talking about, "that after a few nights you
+won't notice it at all."
+
+At the professor's bungalow they met two other members of the
+expedition. One of these was Hen Pine, a negro over six feet tall, but
+with shoulders of such width that he seemed much shorter. He had an
+enormous head that seemed to be set directly between his shoulders, so
+short and thick was his neck. Hen had been with Professor Ditson for
+many years, and, in spite of his size and strength, was of a happy,
+good-natured disposition, constantly showing his white teeth in
+irresistible smiles. Pinto, Professor Ditson's other retainer, was short
+and dark, an Indian of the Mundurucu tribe, that warlike people which
+early made an alliance of peace with the Portuguese pioneers of Brazil
+which they had always scrupulously kept. Pinto had an oval aquiline
+face, and his bare breast and arms had the cross-marks of dark-blue
+tattooing which showed him to have won high rank as a warrior on the
+lonely River of the Tapirs, where his tribe held their own against the
+fierce Mayas, those outlawed cannibals who are the terror of the South
+American forest.
+
+That evening, after dinner, Professor Ditson took Jud and the boys out
+for a walk along the beach which stretched away in front of them in a
+long white curve under the light of the full moon. The night was full of
+strange sounds, and in the sky overhead burned new stars and unknown
+constellations, undimmed even by the moonlight, which showed like snow
+against the shadows of the jungle. Professor Ditson pointed out to the
+boys Agena and Bungula, a noble pair of first-magnitude stars never seen
+in the North, which flamed in the violet-black sky. As they looked, Will
+remembered the night up near Wizard Pond before the bear came, when Joe
+had told him Indian stories of the stars. To-night, almost overhead,
+shone the most famous of all tropical constellations, the Southern
+Cross.
+
+Professor Ditson told them that it had been visible on the horizon of
+Jerusalem about the date of the Crucifixion. From that day, the
+precession of the equinoxes had carried it slowly southward, and it
+became unknown to Europeans until Amerigo Vespucci on his first voyage
+saw and exultantly wrote that he had seen the "Four Stars," of which the
+tradition had lingered. The professor told them that it was the
+sky-clock of the tropics and that sailors, shepherds, and other
+night-wanderers could tell the time within fifteen minutes of watch-time
+by the position of the two upper stars of this constellation.
+
+"It looks more like a kite than a cross," interjected Jud. "What's that
+dark patch in the Milky Way?" he inquired, pointing to a strange black,
+blank space showing in the milky glimmer of the galaxy.
+
+"That must be the Coal-sack," broke in Will, before Professor Ditson
+could reply.
+
+"I remember reading about it at school," he went on.
+
+"When Magellan sailed around Cape Horn, his sailors saw it and were
+afraid that they would sail so far south that the sky wouldn't have any
+stars. What cheered them up," went on Will, "was the sight of old Orion,
+which stays in the sky in both hemispheres," and he pointed out the
+starry belt to Jud and Joe, with the sky-king Sirius shining above it
+instead of below as in the northern hemisphere.
+
+As Jud and the boys stared up at the familiar line of the three stars,
+with rose-red Betelgeuse on one side and fire-white Rigel on the other,
+they too felt something of the same comfort that the old-time navigators
+had known at the sight of this constellation, steadfast even when the
+Great Bear and the Pole Star itself had faded from the sky. As they
+continued to gaze upward they caught sight of another star, which shone
+with a wild, blue gleam which rivaled the green glare of the dog-star,
+Sirius. Professor Ditson told them that it was Canopus, Mohammed's star,
+which he thought led him to victory, even as Napoleon believed that the
+planet Venus, seen by daylight, was his guiding star. Then the professor
+traced for them that glittering river of stars, Eridanus, and showed
+them, guarding the southern horizon, gleaming Achernar, the End of the
+River, a star as bright as is Arcturus or Vega in the northern sky. Then
+he showed them Fomalhaut, of the Southern Fish, which in the North they
+had seen in the fall just skipping the horizon, one of the faintest of
+the first-magnitude stars. Down in the southern hemisphere it had come
+into its own and gleamed as brightly near this northern horizon as did
+Achernar by the southern. It was Will who discovered the Magellanic
+Clouds, like fragments of the Milky Way which had broken up and floated
+down toward the South Pole. These had been also seen and reported by
+Magellan on that first voyage ever taken around the world four hundred
+years ago.
+
+Farther up the beach, Jud and the boys came to a full stop. Before them
+towered so high that the stars seemed tangled in its leaves a royal
+palm, one of the most magnificent trees on earth. Its straight, tapered
+shaft shot up over a hundred and twenty-five feet and was crowned with a
+mass of glossy leaves, like deep-green plumes. As it touched the violet
+sky with the full moon rising back of its proud head, it had an air of
+unearthly majesty.
+
+Beneath their feet the beach was covered with "angel-wings," pure white
+shells eight inches long, shaped like the wings of angels in old
+pictures. With them were beautifully tinted tellinas, crimson olivias
+with their wonderful zigzag, tentlike color patterns, large dosinias
+round as dollars, and many other varieties, gold, crimson, and purple.
+
+Some distance down the beach the professor kept a large canoe, in
+which the whole party paddled out into the bay. As they flashed over the
+smooth surface, the clamor of the night-life dwindled. Suddenly, from
+the bushes on a little point, sounded a bird-song which held them all
+spellbound, a stream of joyous melody, full of rapid, ringing notes, yet
+with a purity of tone which made the song indescribably beautiful. It
+seemed to include the ethereal quality of the hermit-thrush, the lilt
+and richness of the thrasher, and the magic of the veery's song, and yet
+to be more beautiful than any or all of them together. On and on the
+magic melody flowed and rippled, throbbed and ebbed in the moonlight.
+Suddenly it stopped. Then from the same thicket burst out a medley of
+different songs. Some of them were slow and mellow. Others had silvery,
+bell-like trills. There were flutelike calls, gay hurried twitterings,
+and leisurely delicious strains--all of them songs of birds which the
+Cornwall visitors had never even heard. Then Will, the ornithologist of
+his party, began to hear songs which were familiar to him. There was the
+musical chuckle of the purple martin, the plaintive call of the upland
+plover, the curious "kow-kow" of the yellow-billed cuckoo, and the slow,
+labored music of the scarlet tanager. Suddenly all of them ceased and
+once again the original song burst out.
+
+"That thicket must be chuck-full of birds," whispered Jud.
+
+Professor Ditson shook his head.
+
+"It's only one bird," he said, "but the greatest singer of all the
+world--the white banded mocking bird."
+
+Even as he spoke, the songster itself fluttered up into the air, a brown
+bird with a white throat, and tail and wings broadly banded with the
+same color. Up and up it soared, and its notes chimed like a golden bell
+as its incomparable song drifted down through the moonlight to those
+listening below. Then on glistening wings the spent singer wavered down
+like some huge moth and disappeared in the dark of the thicket. In the
+silence that followed, Will drew a deep breath.
+
+"I'd have traveled around the world to hear that song," he half
+whispered.
+
+Professor Ditson nodded his head understandingly.
+
+"Many and many an ornithologist," he said, "has come to South America
+to listen to that bird and gone away without hearing what we have heard
+to-night. Between his own two songs," went on the professor, "I counted
+the notes of seventeen other birds of both North and South America that
+he mimicked."
+
+They paddled gently toward the shore, hoping to hear the bird again, but
+it sang no more that night. As they neared the beach, the moonlit air
+was heavy with the scent of jessamine, fragrant only after darkness, and
+the overpowering perfume of night-blooming cereuses, whose satin-white
+blossoms were three feet in circumference. Suddenly, just before them,
+the moon-flowers bloomed. Great snowy blossoms five inches across began
+to open slowly. There was a puff of wind, and hundreds of them burst
+into bloom at once, glorious white salvers of beauty and fragrance.
+
+"Everything here," said Will, "seems beautiful and peaceful and safe."
+
+Professor Ditson smiled sardonically. "South America is beautiful," he
+said precisely, "but it is never safe. Death and danger lurk everywhere
+and in the most unexpected forms. It is only in South America," he went
+on, "that you can be eaten alive by fish the size of small trout, or be
+killed by ants or little brown bats."
+
+Jud listened with much scorn. "Professor," he broke out at last, "I
+don't take much stock in that kind of talk. Your nerves are in a bad
+way. My advice to you is--"
+
+What Mr. Judson Adams's advice was, will never be known, for at that
+moment a dreadful thing happened. Into the beauty of the moonlight, from
+the glassy water of the bay soared a shape of horror, a black, monstrous
+creature like a gigantic bat. It had two wings which measured a good
+twenty feet from tip to tip, and was flat, like an enormous skate.
+Behind it streamed a spiked, flexible tail, while long feelers, like
+slim horns, projected several feet beyond a vast hooked mouth. Like some
+vampire shape from the Pit, it skimmed through the air across the bow of
+the canoe not ten feet from where Jud was sitting. The old trapper was
+no coward, but this sudden horror was too much even for his seasoned
+nerves. With a yell, he fell backward off his thwart, and as his legs
+kicked convulsively in the air, the monster came down with a crash that
+could have been heard a mile, raising a wave which nearly swamped the
+canoe. A moment later, the monstrous shape broke water again farther
+seaward, blotting out for an instant with its black bulk the rising
+moon.
+
+"What kind of a sea-devil is that, anyhow?" queried Jud, shakily, as he
+righted himself, with the second crash of the falling body still in his
+ears.
+
+"That," responded Professor Ditson, precisely, "is a well-nourished
+specimen of the manta-ray, a fish allied to the skate family--but you
+started to speak about nerves."
+
+Jud, however, said nothing and kept on saying the same all the way back
+to the house. Arriving there in safety, he went down to the spring for
+some water with Pinto, but a moment later came bolting back.
+
+"What's the matter now, Jud?" inquired Will, solicitously. "Did you find
+another water-devil in the spring?"
+
+"That's just what I did!" bellowed Jud. "When I started to dip out a
+pail of water, up pops about six feet of snake. Now you know, boys," he
+went on, panting, "I hate snakes, an' I jumped clear across the spring
+at the sight of this one; but what do you suppose that Injun did?" he
+continued excitedly. "Pats the snake's head an' tells me it's tame an'
+there to keep the spring free from frogs. Now what do you think of
+that?"
+
+"He was quite right," observed Professor Ditson, soothingly. "It is a
+perfectly harmless, well-behaved serpent, known as the mussarama. This
+one is a fine specimen which it will be worth your while to examine more
+carefully."
+
+"I've examined it just as carefully as I'm goin' to," shouted Jud,
+stamping into the house as Pinto came grunting up the path carrying a
+brimming bucket of water.
+
+As they sat down for supper, a long streak of black and white flashed
+across the ceiling just over Jud, who sat staring at it with a spoonful
+of soup half-way to his mouth.
+
+"Professor Ditson," he inquired softly, "is that thing on the ceiling
+another one of your tame snakes?"
+
+"No, sir," responded the professor, impatiently; "that is only a
+harmless house-lizard."
+
+"I just wanted to know," remarked Jud, rising and taking his plate to a
+bench outside of the door, where he finished his supper, in spite of all
+attempts on the part of the boys to bring him back.
+
+In front of Will stood a pitcher of rich yellow cream. "You have a good
+cow, Professor Ditson," he remarked politely as he poured some into a
+cup of the delicious coffee which is served with every meal in Brazil.
+
+"Yes," agreed the scientist, "I have a grove of them." Then he explained
+to the bewildered Will that the cream was the sap of the cow tree.
+
+Will was not so fortunate with his next investigation. Taking a second
+helping of a good-tasting stew which Pinto had brought in from the
+kitchen, he asked the Indian what it was made of.
+
+"Tinnala," replied the Mundurucu.
+
+"What is it in North American?" persisted Will.
+
+The Indian shook his head. "I not know any other name," he said. "Wait,
+I show you," he went on, disappearing into the kitchen to return a
+moment later with a long, hairy arm ending in a clenched fist. Will
+started up and clasped his stomach frantically, remembering all that he
+had read about cannibalism among the South American Indians. Even when
+Professor Ditson explained that the stew was made from a variety of
+monkey which was considered a great delicacy, he was not entirely
+reassured and finished his meal on oranges.
+
+Jud was much amused. "You always were a fussy eater, Bill," he remarked
+from the porch. "I remember you wouldn't eat mountain-lion meat up in
+the North when we were after the pearl. You ought to pattern after Joe.
+He don't find fault with his food."
+
+"All I want about food," grunted Joe, "is enough."
+
+That night the whole party slept side by side in hammocks swung in a
+screened veranda in the second story.
+
+During the night, Jud, who was always a light sleeper, was awakened by a
+curious, rustling, crackling sound which seemed to come from the
+storeroom, which opened into the sleeping-porch. After listening awhile
+he reached over and aroused Professor Ditson, who was sleeping soundly
+next to him.
+
+"Some one's stealin' your grub," he whispered.
+
+The professor stepped lightly out of his hammock, followed by Jud and
+the boys, who had been waked up by the whispering. Opening the door
+noiselessly, the scientist peered in. After a long look, Professor
+Ditson turned around to find Jud gripping his revolver and ready for the
+worst.
+
+"You can put up your gun," the scientist growled. "Bullets don't mean
+anything to thieves like these, and he flashed a light on a strange
+sight. On a long table stood native baskets full of cassava, that
+curious grainlike substance obtained from the root of the poisonous
+manihot and which takes the place of wheat in South America. The floor
+was covered with moving columns of ants, large and small, which had
+streamed up the legs of the table and into the baskets. Some of them
+were over an inch long, while others were smaller than the grains they
+were carrying. The noise which had aroused Jud had been made by their
+cutting off the dry leaves with which the baskets were lined, to use in
+lining their underground nest. Professor Ditson told them that nothing
+could stop an ant-army. Once on the march, they would not turn back for
+fire or water and would furiously attack anything that tried to check
+them. "A remarkably efficient insect," concluded the professor, "for it
+bites with one end and stings with the other."
+
+"This is what I call a nice quiet night!" murmured Jud, as he went back
+to his hammock. "Sea-devils, snakes, lizards--and now it's ants. I
+wonder what next?"
+
+"Next," however, was daylight, blazing with the startling suddenness of
+the tropics, where there is no dawn-light. With the light, the tumult of
+the night ceased, and in place of the insect din came a medley of
+bird-notes. When Jud opened his eyes Professor Ditson's hammock was
+empty, for the scientist usually got up long before daylight, and
+through the open door strutted a long-legged, wide-winged bird, nearly
+three feet tall, with a shimmering blue breast and throat. Without
+hesitating, she walked over to Jud's hammock and, spread her wings with
+a deep murmuring note, made a low bow.
+
+"Good morning to you," responded Jud, much pleased with his visitor.
+
+The bird bowed and murmured again and allowed him to pat her beautiful
+head as she bent forward. Then she went to the next hammock and the next
+and the next, until she had awakened all of the sleepers, whereupon,
+with deep bows and courtesies and murmurings, she sidled out of the
+room.
+
+"Now, that," said Jud, as he rolled out of the hammock and began to look
+for his shoes, "is an alarm-clock worth having!"
+
+Pinto, the Mundurucu, who appeared at this moment with a pail of spring
+water, told them that the bird was a tame female trumpeter which he had
+picked up as a queer, frightened little creature, all legs and neck, but
+which had become one of the best-loved of all of his many pets. Each
+morning the tame, beautiful bird would wander through the house, waking
+up every sleeper at sunrise. When Pinto took trips through the forest
+the bird always went with him, traveling on his back in a large-meshed
+fiber bag; and when he made camp it would parade around for a while,
+bowing and talking, and then fly up into the nearest tree, where it
+would spend the night. Tente, as it was named, was always gentle except
+when it met a dog. No matter how large or fierce the latter might be,
+Tente would fly at it, making a loud, rumbling noise, which always made
+the dog turn tail and run for its life.
+
+As Pinto started to fill the pitchers, Will, the bird expert of the
+party, began to ask him about some of the songs which were sounding all
+around the house. One bird which squalled and mewed interested him.
+
+"That bird chestnut cuckoo," said Pinto. "It have the soul of a cat."
+
+And as Will listened he could well believe it. A little farther off,
+another bird called constantly, "Crispen, Crispen, Crispen."
+
+"One time," narrated the Indian, "a girl and her little brother Crispen
+go walking in the woods. He very little boy and he wander away and get
+lost, and all day and all night and all next day she go through the
+woods calling, 'Crispen! Crispen! Crispen!' until at last she changed
+into a little bird. And still she flies through the woods and calls
+'Crispen!'"
+
+At this point, Jud finally found his missing shoes and started to put
+one on, but stopped at a shout from the Mundurucu.
+
+"Shake it out!" warned Pinto. "No one ever puts on shoes in this country
+without shaking out."
+
+Jud did as he was told. With the first shoe he drew a blank. Out of the
+second one, however, rattled down on the floor a centipede fully six
+inches long, which Pinto skillfully crushed with the heavy
+water-pitcher. Jud gasped and sank back into his hammock.
+
+"Boys," he said solemnly, "I doubt if I last out this trip!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+THE VAMPIRES
+
+
+After breakfast, Professor Amandus Ditson called the party together for
+a conference in a wide, cool veranda on the ground floor.
+
+"I should like to outline to you my plan of our expedition," he
+announced precisely.
+
+Jud gave an angry grunt. The old adventurer, who had been a hero among
+prospectors and trappers in the Far North, was accustomed to be
+consulted in any expedition of which he was a member.
+
+"It seems to me, Professor Ditson," he remarked aggressively, "that
+you're pretty uppity about this trip. Other people here have had
+experience in treasure-huntin'."
+
+"Meaning yourself, I presume," returned Professor Ditson, acidly.
+
+"Yes, sir!" shouted Jud, thoroughly aroused, "that's exactly who I do
+mean. I know as much about--_ouch!_" The last exclamation came when Jud
+brought down his open hand for emphasis on the side of his chair and
+incidently on a lurid brown insect nearly three inches in length, with
+enormous nippers and a rounded body ending in what looked like a long
+sting. Jud jerked his hand away and gazed in horror at his threatening
+seat-mate.
+
+"I believe I'm stung," he murmured faintly, gazing anxiously at his
+hand. "What is it?"
+
+"It would hardly seem to me," observed Professor Ditson, scathingly,
+"that a man who is afraid of a harmless arachnid like a whip-scorpion,
+and who nearly falls out of a canoe at the sight of a manta-ray
+disporting itself, would be the one to lead an expedition through the
+unexplored wilds of South America. We are going into a country," he went
+on more earnestly, "where a hasty step, the careless touching of a tree,
+or the tasting of a leaf or fruit may mean instant death, to say nothing
+of the dangers from some of the larger carnivora and wandering
+cannibals. I have had some experience with this region," he went on,
+"and if there is no objection, I will outline my plan."
+
+There was none. Even Jud, who had removed himself to another chair with
+great rapidity, had not a word to say.
+
+"I propose that we take a steamer by the end of this week to Manaos, a
+thousand miles up the Amazon," continued the professor. "In the
+meantime, we can do some hunting and collecting in this neighborhood.
+After we reach Manaos we can go by boat down the Rio Negros until we
+strike the old Slave Trail which leads across the Amazon basin and up
+into the highlands of Peru."
+
+"Who made that trail?" inquired Will, much interested.
+
+"It was cut by the Spanish conquerors of Peru nearly four hundred years
+ago," returned the scientist. "They used to send expeditions down into
+the Amazon region after slaves to work their mines. Since then," he went
+on, "it has been kept open by the Indians themselves, and, as far as I
+know, has not been traversed by a white man for centuries. I learned the
+secret of it many years ago, while I was living with one of the wilder
+tribes," he finished.
+
+The professor's plan was adopted unanimously, Jud not voting.
+
+Then followed nearly a week of wonderful hunting and collecting. Even
+Jud, who regarded everything with a severe and jaundiced eye, could not
+conceal his interest in the multitude of wonderful new sights, sounds,
+and scents which they experienced every day. As for Will, he lived in
+the delightful excitement which only a bird-student knows who finds
+himself surrounded by a host of unknown and beautiful birds. Some of
+them, unlike good children, were heard but not seen. Once, as they
+pushed their way in single file along a little path which wound through
+the jungle, there suddenly sounded, from the dark depths beyond, a
+shriek of agony and despair. In a moment it was taken up by another
+voice and another and another, until there were at least twenty
+screamers performing in chorus.
+
+"It's only the ypicaha rail," remarked the professor, indifferently.
+
+Hen Pine, who was in the rear with Will, shook his head doubtfully.
+
+"Dis ol' jungle," he whispered, "is full o' squallers. De professor he
+call 'em birds, but dey sound more like ha'nts to me."
+
+Beyond the rail colony they heard at intervals a hollow, mysterious cry.
+
+"That," explained Pinto, "is the Witch of the Woods. No one ever sees
+her unless she is answered. Then she comes and drives mad the one who
+called her."
+
+"Nice cheery place, this!" broke in Jud.
+
+"The alleged witch," remarked Professor Ditson severely, "happens to be
+the little waterhen."
+
+Later they heard a strange, clanging noise, which sounded as if some one
+had struck a tree with an iron bar, and at intervals from the deepest
+part of the forest there came a single, wild, fierce cry. Even Professor
+Ditson could not identify these sounds.
+
+"Dem most suttinly is ha'nts," volunteered Hen. "I know 'em. You
+wouldn't catch dis chile goin' far alone in dese woods."
+
+One of the smaller birds which interested Will was the many-colored
+knight, which looked much like one of the northern kinglets. His little
+body, smaller than that of a house-wren, showed seven colors--black,
+white, green, blue, orange, yellow, and scarlet, and he had a blue crown
+and a sky-blue eye. Moreover, his nest, fastened to a single rush, was a
+marvel of skill and beauty, being made entirely of soft bits of dry,
+yellow sedge, cemented together with gum so smoothly that it looked as
+if it had been cast in a mold. Then there was the Bienteveo tyrant, a
+bird about nine inches long, which caught fish, flies, and game, and fed
+on fruit and carrion indiscriminately. It was entirely devoted to its
+mate, and whenever a pair of tyrants were separated, they would
+constantly call back and forth to each other reassuringly, even when
+they were hunting. When they finally met again, they would perch close
+to each other and scream joyously at being reunited. Another bird of the
+same family, the scarlet tyrant, all black and scarlet, was so brilliant
+that even the rainbow-hued tanagers seemed pale and the jeweled
+humming-bird sad-colored in the presence of "coal-o'-fire," as the
+Indians have named this bird.
+
+Jud was more impressed with the wonders of the vegetable kingdom.
+Whenever he strayed off the beaten path or tried to cut his way through
+a thicket, he tangled himself in the curved spines of the
+pull-and-haul-back vine, a thorny shrub which lives up to its name, or
+was stabbed by the devil-plant, a sprawling cactus which tries quite
+successfully to fill up all the vacant spaces in the jungle where it
+grows. Each stem of this well-named shrub had three or four angles, and
+each angle was lined with thorns an inch or more in length, so sharp and
+strong that they pierced Jud's heavy hunting-boots like steel needles.
+If it had not been for Hen, who was a master with the machete, Jud never
+would have broken loose from his entanglements. Beyond the cactus, the
+old trapper came to a patch of poor-man's plaster, a shrub with
+attractive yellow flowers, but whose leaves, which broke off at a touch,
+were covered on the under side with barbed hairs, which caught and clung
+to any one touching them. The farther Jud went, the more he became
+plastered with these sticky leaves, until he began to look like some
+huge chrysalis. The end came when he tripped on a network of invisible
+wires, the stems of species of smilax and morning-glory, and rolled over
+and over in a thicket of the plasters. When at last he gained his feet,
+he looked like nothing human, but seemed only a walking mass of green
+leaves and clinging stems.
+
+"Yah, yah, yah!" roared Hen. "Mars' Jud he look des like Br'er Rabbit
+did when he spilled Br'er Bear's bucket o' honey over hisself an' rolled
+in leafs tryin' to clean hisself. Mars' Jud sure look like de
+grand-daddy ob all de ha'nts in dese yere woods."
+
+"Shut up, you fool darky," said Jud, decidedly miffed. "Come and help
+unwrap me. I feel like a cigar."
+
+Hen laughed so that it was with difficulty that he freed Jud, prancing
+with impatience, from his many layers of leaves. Later on, Hen showed
+himself to be an even more present help in trouble. The two were
+following a path a short distance away from the rest of the party, with
+Jud in the lead. Suddenly the trapper heard the slash of the negro's
+machete just behind him, and turned around to see him cutting the head
+from a coiled rattlesnake over which Jud had stepped. If Jud had stopped
+or touched the snake with either foot, he would most certainly have been
+bitten, and it spoke well for Hen's presence of mind that he kept
+perfectly quiet until the danger was over. This South American
+rattlesnake had a smaller head and rougher scales than any of the
+thirteen North American varieties, and was nearly six feet in length.
+Professor Ditson was filled with regret that it had not been caught
+alive.
+
+"Never kill a harmless snake," he said severely to Hen, "without
+consulting me. I would have been glad to have added this specimen to the
+collection of the Zoölogical Gardens."
+
+"Harmless!" yelled Jud, much incensed. "A rattlesnake harmless! How do
+you get that way?"
+
+"He didn't do you any harm, did he?" retorted the professor, acidly. "It
+is certainly ungrateful of you to slander a snake just after he has
+saved your life."
+
+"How did he save my life?" asked Jud.
+
+"By not biting you," returned Professor Ditson, promptly.
+
+A little later poor Jud had a hair-raising experience with another
+snake. He had shot a carancha, that curious South American hawk which
+wails and whines when it is happy, and, although a fruit-eater with weak
+claws and only a slightly hooked beak, attacks horses and kills lambs.
+Jud had tucked his specimen into a back pocket of his shooting-jacket
+and was following a little path which led through an open space in the
+jungle. He had turned over his shot-gun to Joe, and was trying his best
+to keep clear of any more tangling vines, when suddenly right beside him
+a great dark snake reared its head until its black glittering eyes
+looked level into Jud's, and its flickering tongue was not a foot from
+his face. With a yell, Jud broke the world's record for the
+back-standing broad-jump and tore down the trail shouting, "Bushmaster!
+bushmaster!" at the top of his voice. As he ran he suddenly felt a sharp
+pain in his back.
+
+"He's got me!" he called back to Hen Pine, who came hurrying after him.
+"Ouch! There he goes again!" and he plunged headlong into a patch of
+pull-and-haul-back vine, which anchored him until Hen came up.
+
+"Dat ain't no bushmaster, Mars' Jud," the latter called soothingly. "Dat
+was only a trail-haunting blacksnake. He like to lie next to a path an'
+stick up his ol' head to see who's comin', kin' o' friendly like."
+
+"Friendly nothin'!" groaned Jud. "He's just bit me again."
+
+As soon as Hen laid hold of Jud's jacket he found out what was the
+matter. The hawk had only been stunned by Jud's shot and, coming to life
+again, had promptly sunk his claws into the latter's back, and Jud had
+mistaken the bird's talons for the fangs of the bushmaster. Professor
+Ditson, who had hurried up, was much disappointed.
+
+"If you ever meet a bushmaster, you'll learn the difference between it
+and a harmless blacksnake," he observed. "Probably, however," he went on
+thoughtfully, "it will be too late to do you much good."
+
+"Why do all the snakes in South America pick on me?" complained Jud.
+"There don't seem to be nothin' here but snakes an' thorns."
+
+It was Pinto who gave the old trapper his first favorable impression of
+the jungle. They had reached a deserted bungalow in the heart of the
+woods, which Professor Ditson had once made his headquarters a number of
+years before. There they planned to have lunch and spend the night. At
+the meal Jud showed his usual good appetite in spite of his misfortunes,
+but he complained afterward to Hen, who had attached himself specially
+to the old man, about the absence of dessert.
+
+"I got a kind of a sweet tooth," he said. "You ain't got a piece of pie
+handy, have you?"
+
+"No sah, no sah," replied Hen, regretfully. "You's about three thousand
+miles south ob de pie-belt."
+
+"Wait," broke in Pinto, who had been listening. "Wait a minute; I get
+you something sweet," and he led the way to an enormous tree with
+reddish, ragged bark. Some distance up its trunk was a deep hollow, out
+of which showed a spout of dark wax nearly two feet long. In and out of
+this buzzed a cloud of bees.
+
+"I get you!" shouted Jud, much delighted, "a bee-tree! Look out, boy,"
+he went on, as the Indian, clinging to the ridges of the bark with his
+fingers and toes, began to climb. "Those bees'll sting you to death."
+
+"South American bees hab no sting," explained Hen, as Pinto reached the
+wax spout, and, breaking it off, thrust his hand fearlessly through the
+cloud of bees into the store of honey beyond. A moment later, and he was
+back again, laden with masses of dripping honeycomb, the cells of which,
+instead of being six-sided, as with our northern bees, resembled each
+one a little bottle. The honey was clear and sweet, yet had a curious
+tart flavor. While Jud was sampling a bit of honeycomb, Pinto borrowed
+Hen's machete and cut a deep gash through the rough red bark of the
+tree. Immediately there flowed out from the cut the same thick, milky
+juice which they had seen at their first breakfast in South America. The
+Indian cut a separate gash for each one of the party, and they all
+finished their meal with draughts of the sweet, creamy juice.
+
+"It sure is a land flowing with milk an' honey," remarked Jud, at last,
+after he had eaten and drunk all that he could hold.
+
+"This vegetable milk is particularly rich in gluten," observed Professor
+Ditson, learnedly.
+
+"I guess it'd gluten up a fellow's stomach all right if he drank too
+much of it," remarked Jud, smacking his lips over the sweet, sticky
+taste which the juice of the cow-tree left in his mouth.
+
+After lunch, most of the party retired to their hammocks in the cool
+dark of the house for the siesta which South American travelers find an
+indispensable part of a tropical day. Only the scientist and Will stayed
+awake to catch butterflies through the scented silence of the forest
+where the air, filled with the steam and perfume of a green blaze of
+growth, had the wet hotness of a conservatory. When even the insects and
+the untiring tree-toads were silenced by the sun, Professor Ditson,
+wearing a gray linen suit with a low collar and a black tie, was as
+enthusiastic as ever over the collecting of rare specimens, and was
+greatly pleased at Will's interest in his out-of-door hobbies.
+
+Together they stepped into the jungle, where scarlet passion-flowers
+shone like stars through the green. Almost immediately they began to see
+butterflies. The first one was a magnificent grass-green specimen,
+closely followed by others whose iridescent, mother-of-pearl wings
+gleamed in the sunlight like bits of rainbow. On a patch of damp sand a
+group made a cloud of sulphur-yellow, sapphire-blue, and gilded
+green-and-orange. The professor told Will that in other years he had
+found over seven hundred different kinds within an hour's walk from this
+forest bungalow, being more than double the number of varieties found in
+all Europe.
+
+Deep in the jungle, they at last came to a little open stretch where
+the Professor had often collected before and which to-day seemed full of
+butterflies. Never had Will imagined such a riot of color and beauty as
+there dazzled his eyes. Some of the butterflies were red and yellow, the
+colors of Spain. Others were green, purple, and blue, bordered and
+spangled with spots of silver and gold. Then there were the strange
+transparent "glass-wings." One of these, the _Hetaira esmeralda_, Will
+was convinced must be the most beautiful of all flying creatures. Its
+wings were like clear glass, with a spot of mingled violet and rose in
+the center of each one. At a distance, only this shimmering spot could
+be seen rising and falling through the air, like the wind-borne petals
+of some beautiful flower. Indeed, as the procession of color drifted by,
+it seemed to the boy as if all the loveliest flowers on earth had taken
+to themselves wings, or that the rainbow-bridge of the sky had been
+shattered into fragments which were drifting slowly down to earth.
+
+The largest of them all were the swallowtails, belonging to the same
+family as the tiger, and blue and black swallowtail, which Will had so
+often caught in Cornwall. One of that family gleamed in the sunlight
+like a blue meteor as it flapped its great wings, seven inches from tip
+to tip and of a dazzling blue, high above the tree-tops. Another member
+of the same family, and nearly as large, was satiny white in color.
+Professor Ditson told Will that both of these varieties were almost
+unknown in any collection, as they never came within twenty feet of the
+ground, so that the only specimens secured were those of disabled or
+imperfect butterflies which had dropped to the lower levels.
+
+"Why couldn't I climb to the top of one of those trees with a net and
+catch some?" inquired Will, looking wistfully up at the gleaming shapes
+flitting through the air so far above him.
+
+"Fire-ants and wasps," returned the professor, concisely. "They are
+found in virtually every tree. No one can stand the pain of an ant's
+bite, and one sting of a Maribundi wasp has been known to kill a strong
+man."
+
+That night, tired out by their long day of hunting, the whole party went
+to bed early. Will's sleeping-room was an upper screened alcove, just
+large enough to hold a single hammock. Somehow, even after his long hard
+day, he did not feel sleepy. Great trees shadowed his corner, so thick
+that even the stars could not shine through their leaves, and it seemed
+to Will as if he could stretch out his hands and lift up dripping masses
+of blackness, smothering, terrifying in its denseness. From a far-away
+tree-top the witch-owl muttered over and over again that mysterious word
+of evil, "Murucututu, murucututu," in a forgotten Indian tongue. He had
+laughed when Pinto told him a few nights before that the owl was trying
+to lay a spell on those who listened, but to-night in the dark he did
+not laugh.
+
+Then close at hand in a neighborhood tree-top sounded a beautiful
+contralto frog-note slowly repeated. "Gul, gul, gul, gul, guggle, gul,
+guggle," it throbbed. The slow, sweet call gave the boy a sense of
+companionship, and he fell asleep with the music of it still sounding in
+his ears.
+
+Toward midnight he woke with a vague sense of uneasiness. It was as if
+some hidden subconsciousness of danger had sounded an alarm note within
+his nerve centers and awakened him. Something seemed to be moving and
+whispering outside of the screened alcove. Then a body struck the screen
+of mosquito-netting, and he heard the rotten fiber rip. Another second,
+and his little room was filled with moving, flitting, invisible shapes.
+Great wings fanned the air just above his face. There was the faint reek
+of hot, furry bodies passing back and forth and all around him. For a
+moment Will lay thinking that he was in a nightmare, for he had that
+strange sense of horror which paralyzes one's muscles during a bad dream
+so that movement is impossible. At last, by a sudden effort, he
+stretched out his hand and struck a match from a box which stood on a
+stand beside his hammock. At the quick spurt of flame through the dark,
+from all parts of the little room came tiny, shrill screeches, and the
+air around him was black with whirling, darting shapes. Suddenly into
+the little circle of light from the match swept the horrible figure of a
+giant bat, whose leathern wings had a spread of nearly two and a half
+feet, and whose horrible face hovered and hung close to his own. Never
+had the boy believed that any created thing could be so grotesquely
+hideous. The face that peered into his own was flanked on each side by
+an enormous leathery ear. From the tip of the hairy muzzle grew a
+spearlike spike, and the grinning mouth was filled with rows of
+irregular, tiny, gleaming sharp teeth, gritting and clicking against
+each other. Deep-set little green eyes, which glistened and gleamed like
+glass, glared into Will's face. Before he could move, a great cloud of
+flying bats, large and small, settled down upon him. Some of them were
+small gray vampire-bats with white markings, others were the great
+fruit-eating bats, and there were still others dark-red, tawny-brown,
+and fox-yellow. Whirling and wheeling around the little point of flame,
+they dashed it out, and crawled all over the boy until he felt stifled
+and smothered with the heat of their clinging bodies.
+
+Suddenly he felt a stinging pain in his bare shoulder and in one of his
+exposed feet. As he threw out his hands desperately, tiny clicking teeth
+cut the flesh of wrists and arms. The scent of blood seemed to madden
+the whole company of these deaths-in-the-dark, and, although the actual
+bites were made by the little vampire-bats, yet at the sight of them
+feasting, the other night-fliers descended upon the boy like a black
+cloud and clustered around the little wounds, as Will had seen moths
+gather around syrup spread on trees of a warm June night.
+
+The sting of their bites lasted for only a second, and the flapping of
+their wings made a cool current of air which seemed to drug his senses.
+Dreamily he felt them against him, knew that they were draining his
+life, yet lacked the will-power to drive them away. Suddenly there
+flashed into his mind all that he had heard and read of the deadly
+methods of these dark enemies of mankind. With a shriek, he threw out
+his arms through the furry cloud that hung over him and sprang out of
+his hammock.
+
+At his scream, Professor Ditson rushed in with a flash-light, followed
+by Pinto, Hen, and Joe, while Jud slept serenely through the whole
+tumult. They found Will dripping with blood from a dozen little
+punctures made by the sharp teeth of the bats, and almost exhausted from
+fright and the loss of blood. Then came pandemonium. Seizing sticks,
+brooms, machetes, anything that came to hand, while Will sank back into
+his hammock, the others attacked the bats. Lighted by the flash of
+Professor Ditson's electric light, they drove the squeaking, shrieking
+cloud of dark figures back and forth through the little room until the
+last one had escaped through the torn netting or was lying dead on the
+floor.
+
+Twenty-seven bats altogether were piled in a heap when the fight was
+over.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+DEATH RIVER
+
+
+At last their first week in this new world of beauty and mystery came
+to an end. At Belem they boarded a well-appointed steamer and embarked
+for the thousand-mile voyage to Manaos, which is only six degrees from
+the equator and one of the hottest cities of the world. There followed
+another week of a life that was strange and new to the travelers from
+Cornwall. There were silent, steaming days when the earth seemed to
+swoon beneath the glare of the lurid sun, and only at night would a
+breath of air cross the water, which gleamed like a silver
+burning-glass. For their very lives' sake, white men and Indians alike
+had learned to keep as quiet and cool as possible during those fiery
+hours. Only Hen, coming from a race that since the birth of time had
+lived close to the equator, moved about with a cheerfulness which no
+amount of heat or humidity could lessen. At night, when the fatal sun
+had reluctantly disappeared in a mass of pink and violet clouds, the
+life-bringing breeze would blow in fresh and salt from the far-away sea,
+and all living creatures would revive. The boys soon learned that, in
+the mid-heat of a tropical summer, the night was the appointed time for
+play and work, and they slept during the day as much as possible in
+shaded, airy hammocks.
+
+One evening, after an unusually trying day, the night wind sprang up
+even before the sun had set. Here and there, across the surface of the
+river, flashed snow-white swallows with dark wings. As the fire-gold of
+the sun touched the horizon, the silver circle of the full moon showed
+in the east, and for a moment the two great lights faced each other.
+Then the sun slipped behind the rim of the world, and the moon rose
+higher and higher, while the Indian crew struck up a wailing chant full
+of endless verses, with a strange minor cadence like the folk-songs of
+the Southern negro. Hen Pine translated the words of some of them, and
+crooned the wailing melody:
+
+    "The moon is rising,
+        Mother, Mother,
+    The seven stars are weeping,
+        Mother, Mother,
+    To find themselves forsaken,
+        Mother, Mother."
+
+Down the echoing channels, through the endless gloomy forests, the
+cadence of the song rose and fell.
+
+Suddenly, in the still moonlight from the river-bank came a single low
+note of ethereal beauty and unutterable sorrow. Slowly it rose and
+swelled, keeping its heartbreaking quality and exquisite beauty. At the
+sound the men stopped singing, and it seemed as if an angel were sobbing
+in the stillness. On and on the song went, running through eight lonely,
+lovely notes which rose and swelled until there seemed to be nothing in
+the world except that beautiful voice, finally ending in a sob which
+brought the tears to Will's eyes. Then out into the moonlight flitted
+the singer, a quiet-colored little brown-and-gray bird, the celebrated
+solitaire, the sweetest, saddest singer of the Brazilian forest.
+
+After all this music, supper was served. It began with a thick,
+violet-colored drink in long glasses filled with cracked ice. The boys
+learned from Professor Ditson that this was made from the fruit of the
+assai-palm. It was strangely compounded of sweet and sour and had
+besides a fragrance and a tingle which made it indescribably refreshing.
+This was followed by an iced preparation made from the root of the
+manioc, whose juice is poisonous, but whose pulp is wholesome and
+delicious. Before being served it had been boiled with the fruit of the
+miriti-palm, which added a tart sweetness to its taste which the
+Northerners found most delightful. The next course was a golden-yellow
+compound of a rich, nutty flavor, the fruit of the mucuju-palm, which
+has a yellow, fibrous pulp so full of fat that vultures, dogs, and cats
+eat it greedily. For dessert, there was a great basket of sweet lemons,
+mangos, oranges, custard-apples, and other fruits.
+
+After supper they all grouped themselves in the bow and there, in
+comfortable steamer-chairs, watched the steamer plow its way through a
+river of ink and silver. That day, Jud, while in his hammock, had seen,
+to his horror, what seemed to be a slender vine, dangling from one of
+the trees, change into a pale-green snake some eight feet long, whose
+strange head was prolonged into a slender, pointed beak. Even as the old
+man stared, it flashed across the deck not two feet away from him and
+disappeared in another tree. So perfectly did its color blend with the
+leaves that the instant it reached them it seemed to vanish from sight.
+
+"It was the palm-snake," said Professor Ditson, after Jud told them of
+his experience. "It lives on lizards, and, although venomous, has never
+been known to bite a human being. If you had only been brave enough," he
+went on severely, "to catch it with your naked hand, we might even now
+have an invaluable record of the effects of its venom."
+
+"What is the most venomous snake in the world?" broke in Will, as Jud
+tried to think of words strong enough to express what he thought of the
+scientist's suggestion.
+
+"The hamadryad or king cobra," returned the professor. "I once secured
+one over fourteen feet long."
+
+"How did you catch it?" queried Will.
+
+"Well," said the professor, "I came across it by a fortunate accident. I
+was collecting butterflies in India at a time of the year when it is
+especially pugnacious, and this particular snake dashed out of a thicket
+at me. It came so unexpectedly that I had to run for my life. It seems
+ridiculous that I should have done so," he went on apologetically, "but
+the bite of the hamadryad is absolutely fatal. This one gained on me so
+rapidly that I was at last compelled to plunge into a near-by pond,
+since this variety of snake never willingly enters water."
+
+"What happened then?" inquired Will, as the scientist came to a full
+stop.
+
+"When I reached the opposite shore, a quarter of a mile away, and was
+about to land," returned the professor, "out of the rushes this same
+snake reared up some six feet. With the rare intelligence which makes
+the hamadryad such a favorite among collectors, it had circled the lake
+and was waiting for me."
+
+"Snappy work!" said Jud, shivering. "I can't think of any pleasanter
+finish to a good swim than to find a nice fourteen-foot snake waitin'
+for me. What did you do then?"
+
+"I floated around in deep water until my assistant came and secured the
+snake with a forked stick. It is now in the New York Zoölogical Gardens
+at the Bronx," concluded the professor.
+
+Jud drew a deep breath. "That reminds me," he said at last, "of a time
+I once had with a pizen snake when I was a young man. I was hoein' corn
+up on a side hill in Cornwall when I was about sixteen year old," he
+continued. "All on a sudden I heard a rattlin' an' down the hill in one
+of the furrows came rollin' a monstrous hoop-snake. You know," he
+explained, "a hoop-snake has an ivory stinger in its tail an' rolls
+along the ground like a hoop, an' when it strikes it straightens out an'
+shoots through the air just like a spear."
+
+"I know nothing of the kind," broke in Professor Ditson.
+
+"Well," said Jud, unmoved by the interruption, "when I saw this snake
+a-rollin' an' a-rattlin' down the hill towards me, I dived under the
+fence an' put for home, leavin' my hoe stickin' up straight in the
+furrow. As I slid under the fence," he went on, "I heard a thud, an'
+looked back just in time to see the old hoop-snake shoot through the air
+an' stick its stinger deep into the hoe-handle. It sure was a pizen
+snake, all right," he went on, wagging his head solemnly. "When I came
+back, an hour or so later, the snake was gone, but that hoe-handle had
+swelled up pretty nigh as big as my leg."
+
+There was a roar of laughter from Will and Joe, while Jud gazed
+mournfully out over the water. Professor Ditson was vastly indignant.
+
+"I feel compelled to state," he said emphatically, "that there is no
+such thing as a hoop-snake and that no snake-venom would have any effect
+on a hoe-handle."
+
+"Have it your way," said Jud. "It ain't very polite of you to doubt my
+snake story after I swallowed yours without a word."
+
+At Manaos they left the steamer, and Professor Ditson bought for the
+party a _montaria_, a big native boat without a rudder, made of plank
+and propelled by narrow, pointed paddles. Although Hen and Pinto and the
+Professor were used to this kind of craft, it did not appeal at all
+favorably to the Northerners, who were accustomed to the light
+bark-canoes and broad-bladed paddles of the Northern Indians. Joe was
+especially scornful.
+
+"This boat worse than a dug out," he objected. "It heavy and clumsy and
+paddles no good either."
+
+"You'll find it goes all right on these rivers," Professor Ditson
+reassured him. "We only have a few hundred miles more, anyway before we
+strike the Trail."
+
+Under the skilful handling of Hen and Pinto, the montaria, although it
+seemed unwieldly, turned out to be a much better craft than it looked;
+and when the Northerners became used to the narrow paddles, the
+expedition made great headway, the boys finding the wide boat far more
+comfortable for a long trip than the smaller, swifter canoe.
+
+After a day, a night, and another day of paddling, they circled a wide
+bend, and there, showing like ink in the moonlight, was the mouth of
+another river.
+
+"White men call it Rio Negros, Black River," the Indian explained to the
+boys; "but my people call it the River of Death."
+
+As the professor, who was steering with a paddle, swung the prow of the
+boat into the dark water, the Indian protested earnestly.
+
+"It very bad luck, Master to enter Death River by night," he said.
+
+"Murucututu, murucututu," muttered the witch-owl, from an overhanging
+branch.
+
+Hen joined in Pinto's protest.
+
+"That owl be layin' a spell on us, Boss," he said. "Better wait till
+mornin'."
+
+The professor was inflexible.
+
+"I have no patience with any such superstitions," he said. "We can cover
+fully twenty-five miles before morning."
+
+The Mundurucu shook his head and said nothing more, but Hen continued
+his protests, even while paddling.
+
+"Never knew any good luck to come when that ol' owl's around," he
+remarked mournfully. "It was him that sicked them vampires on to Will
+here, an' we're all in for a black time on this black ribber."
+
+"Henry," remarked Professor Ditson, acridly, "kindly close your mouth
+tightly and breathe through your nose for the next two hours. Your
+conversation is inconsequential."
+
+"Yassah, yassah," responded Hen, meekly, and the montaria sped along
+through inky shadows and the silver reaches of the new river in silence.
+
+About midnight the forest became so dense that it was impossible to
+follow the channel safely, and the professor ordered the boat to be
+anchored for the night. Usually it was possible to make a landing and
+camp on shore, but to-night in the thick blackness of the shadowed bank,
+it was impossible to see anything. Accordingly, the party, swathed in
+mosquito-netting, slept as best they could in the montaria itself.
+
+It was at the gray hour before dawn, when men sleep soundest, that Jud
+was awakened by hearing a heavy thud against the side of the boat close
+to his head. It was repeated, and in the half-light the old man sat up.
+Once again came the heavy thud, and then, seemingly suspended in the air
+above the side of the boat close to his head, hung a head of horror.
+Slowly it thrust itself higher and higher, until, towering over the side
+of the boat, showed the fixed gleaming eyes and the darting forked
+tongue of a monstrous serpent. Paralyzed for a moment by his horror for
+all snake-kind, the old man could not move, and held his breath until
+the blood drummed in his ears. Only when the hideous head curved
+downward toward Joe did Jud recover control of himself. His prisoned
+voice came out then with a yell like a steam-siren, and he fumbled under
+his left armpit for the automatic revolver which he wore in the
+wilderness, night and day, strapped there in a water-proof case.
+
+"Sucuruju! Sucuruju! Sucuruju!" shouted Pinto, aroused by Jud's yell.
+"The Spirit of the River is upon us!" And he grasped his machete just as
+Jud loosened his revolver.
+
+Quick as they were, the huge anaconda, whose family includes the
+largest water-snakes of the world, was even quicker. With a quick dart
+of its head, it fixed its long curved teeth in the shoulder of the
+sleeping boy, and in an instant, some twenty feet of glistening coils
+glided over the side of the boat. The scales of the monster shone like
+burnished steel, and it was of enormous girth in the middle, tapering
+off at either end. Jud dared not shoot at the creature's head for fear
+of wounding Joe, but sent bullets as fast as he could pull the trigger
+into the great girth, which tipped the heavy boat over until the water
+nearly touched the gunwale. Pinto slashed with all his might with his
+machete at the back of the great snake, but it was like attempting to
+cut through steel-studded leather. In spite of the attack, the coils of
+the great serpent moved toward the boy, who, without a sound, struggled
+to release his shoulder from the terrible grip of the curved teeth. The
+anaconda, the sucuruju of the natives, rarely ever attacks a man; but
+when it does, it is with difficulty driven away. This one, in spite of
+steel and bullets, persisted in its attempt to engulf the body of the
+struggling boy in its coils, solid masses of muscle powerful enough to
+break every bone in Joe's body.
+
+It was Hen Pine who finally saved the boy's life. Awakened by the sound
+of the shots and the shouts of Jud and Pinto, he reached Joe just as one
+of the fatal coils was half around him. With his bare hands he caught
+hold of both of the fierce jaws and with one tremendous wrench of his
+vast arms literally tore them apart. Released from their death grip, Joe
+rolled to one side, out of danger. The great snake hissed fiercely, and
+its deadly, lidless eyes glared into those of the man. Slowly, with
+straining, knotted muscles, Hen wrenched the grim jaws farther and
+farther apart. Then bracing his vast forearms, he bowed his back in one
+tremendous effort that, in spite of the steel-wire muscles of the great
+serpent, bent its deadly jaws backward and tore them down the sides,
+ripping the tough, shimmering skin like so much paper. Slowly, with a
+wrench and a shudder, the great water-boa acknowledged defeat, and its
+vast body pierced, slashed, and torn, reluctantly slid over the side of
+the boat.
+
+As Hen released his grip of the torn jaws, the form of the giant serpent
+showed mirrored for an instant against the moonlit water and then
+disappeared in the inky depths below. Joe's thick flannel shirt had
+saved his arm from any serious injury, but Professor Ditson washed out
+the gashes made by the sharp curved teeth with permanganate of potash,
+for the teeth of the boas and pythons, although not venomous, may bring
+on blood-poisoning, like the teeth of any wild animal. Jud was far more
+shaken by the adventure than Joe, who was as impassive as ever.
+
+"Snakes, snakes, snakes!" he complained. "They live in the springs and
+pop up beside the paths and drop on you out of trees. Now they're
+beginnin' to creep out of the water to kill us off in our sleep. What a
+country!"
+
+"It's the abundance of reptile life which makes South America so
+interesting and attractive," returned Professor Ditson, severely.
+
+It was Pinto who prevented the inevitable and heated discussion between
+the elders of the party.
+
+"Down where I come from," he said, "lives a big water-snake many times
+larger than this one, called the Guardian of the River. He at least
+seventy-five feet long. We feed him goats every week. My grandfather and
+his grandfather's grandfather knew him. Once," went on Pinto, "I found
+him coiled up beside the river in such a big heap that I couldn't see
+over the top of the coils."
+
+"I don't know which is the worse," murmured Jud to Will, "seein' the
+snakes which _are_ or hearin' about the snakes which _ain't_. Between
+the two, I'm gettin' all wore out."
+
+Then Pinto went back again to his predictions about the river they were
+on.
+
+"This river," he said, "is not called the River of Death for nothing.
+The old men of my tribe say that always dangers come here by threes. One
+is passed, but two more are yet to come. Never, Master, should we have
+entered this river by night."
+
+"Yes," chimed in Hen, "when I heered that ol' witch-owl I says to
+myself, 'Hen Pine, there'll be somethin' bad a-doin' soon.'"
+
+"You talk like a couple of superstitious old women," returned Professor
+Ditson, irritably.
+
+"You wait," replied the Indian, stubbornly; "two more evils yet to
+come."
+
+Pinto's prophecy was partly fulfilled with startling suddenness. The
+party had finished breakfast, and the montaria was anchored in a smooth,
+muddy lagoon which led from the river back some distance into the
+forest. While Will and Hen fished from the bow of the boat the rest of
+the party curled themselves up under the shade of the overhanging trees
+to make up their lost sleep. At first, the fish bit well and the two
+caught a number which looked much like the black bass of northern
+waters. A minute later, a school of fresh-water flying-fish broke water
+near them and flashed through the air for a full twenty yards, like a
+flight of gleaming birds.
+
+As the sun burned up the morning mist, it changed from a sullen red to a
+dazzling gold and at last to a molten white, and the two fishermen
+nodded over their poles as little waves of heat ran across the still
+water and seemed to weigh down their eyelids like swathings of soft
+wool. The prow of the boat swung lazily back and forth in the slow
+current which set in from the main river. Suddenly the dark water around
+the boat was muddied and discolored, as if something had stirred up the
+bottom ten feet below. Then up through the clouded water drifted a vast,
+spectral, grayish-white shape. Nearer and nearer to the surface it came,
+while Hen and Will dozed over their poles. Will sat directly in the bow,
+and his body, sagging with sleep, leaned slightly over the gunwale.
+
+Suddenly the surface of the water was broken by a tremendous splash,
+and out from its depth shot half the body of a fish nearly ten feet in
+length. Its color was the gray-white of the ooze at the bottom of the
+stream in which it had lain hidden until attracted to the surface by the
+shadow of the montaria drifting above him. Will awakened at the hoarse
+shout from Hen just in time to see yawning in front of him a mouth more
+enormous than he believed any created thing possessed outside of the
+whale family. It was a full five feet between the yawning jaws, which
+were circled by a set of small sharp teeth. Even as he sprang back, the
+monster lunged forward right across the edge of the boat and the jaws
+snapped shut.
+
+Will rolled to one side in an effort to escape the menancing depths,
+and although he managed to save his head and body from the maw of the
+great fish, yet the jaws closed firmly on both his extended arms,
+engulfing them clear to the shoulder. The little teeth, tiny in
+comparison with the size of the jaws in which they were set, hardly more
+than penetrated the sleeves of his flannel shirt and pricked the skin
+below, but as the monster lurched backward toward the water its great
+weight drew the boy irresistibly toward the edge of the boat, although
+he dug his feet into the thwarts and twined them around the seat on
+which he had been sitting. Once in the river, the fatal jaws would open
+again, and he felt that he would be swallowed as easily as a pike would
+take in a minnow.
+
+Even as he was dragged forward to what seemed certain death, Will did
+not fail to recognize a familiar outline in the vast fish-face against
+which he was held. The small, deep-set eyes, the skin like oiled
+leather, long filaments extending from the side of the jaw, and the
+enormous round head were nothing more than that of the catfish or
+bullhead which he used to catch at night behind the mill-dam in
+Cornwall, enlarged a thousand times.
+
+Although the monster, in spite of its unwieldy size, had sprung forth,
+gripped its intended prey, and started back for the water in a flash,
+yet Hen Pine was even quicker. In spite of his size, there was no one in
+the party quicker in an emergency than the giant negro. Even as he
+sprang to his feet he disengaged the huge steel machete which always
+dangled from his belt. Hen's blade, which he used as a bush-hook and a
+weapon, was half again as heavy as the ordinary machete, and he always
+kept it ground to a razor edge. He reached the bow just as the great,
+gray, glistening body slipped back over the gunwale, dragging Will
+irresistibly with it. Swinging the broad heavy blade over his head, with
+every ounce of effort in his brawny body, Hen, brought the keen edge
+down slantwise across the gray back of the river-monster, which tapered
+absurdly small in comparison with the vast spread of the gaping jaws. It
+was such a blow as Richard the Lion-hearted might have struck; and just
+as his historic battle-sword would shear through triple steel plate and
+flesh and bone, so that day the machete of Hen Pine, unsung in song or
+story, cut through the smooth gray skin, the solid flesh beneath, and
+whizzed straight on through the cartilaginous joints of the great fish's
+spine, nor ever stopped until it had sunk deep into the wood of the high
+gunwale of the boat itself. With a gasping sigh, the monster's head
+rolled off the edge of the boat and slowly sank through the dark water,
+leaving the long, severed trunk floating on the surface. Reaching out,
+the negro caught the latter by one of the back fins and secured it with
+a quick twist of a near-by rope.
+
+"That's the biggest piraiba I ever see," he announced. "They're fine to
+eat, an' turn about is fair play. Ol' piraiba try to eat you; now you
+eat him." And while Will sat back on the seat, sick and faint from his
+narrow escape, Hen proceeded to haul the black trunk aboard and carve
+steaks of the white, firm-set flesh from it.
+
+"Every year along the Madeira River this fish tip over canoes and
+swallow Indians. They's more afraid of it," Hen said, "than they is of
+alligators or anacondas."
+
+When Hen woke up the rest of the party and told them of the near-tragedy
+Pinto croaked like a raven.
+
+"Sucuruju one, piraiba two; but three is yet to come," he finished
+despondingly. The next two days, however, seemed to indicate that the
+River had exhausted its malice against the travelers. The party paddled
+through a panorama of sights and sounds new to the Northerners, and at
+night camped safely on high, dry places on the banks. On the morning of
+the third day the whole party started down the river before daylight and
+watched the dawn of a tropical day, a miracle even more beautiful than
+the sunrises of the North. One moment there was perfect blackness; then
+a faint light showed in the east; and suddenly, without the slow changes
+of Northern skies, the whole east turned a lovely azure blue, against
+which showed a film and fretwork of white clouds, like wisps of snowy
+lace.
+
+Just as the sun came up they passed a tall and towering conical rock
+which shot up three hundred feet among the trees and terminated in what
+looked like a hollowed summit. Pinto told them that this was Treasure
+Rock, and that nearly half a thousand years ago the Spaniards, in the
+days when they were the cruel conquerors of the New World, had explored
+this river. From the ancestors of Pinto's nation and from many another
+lesser Indian tribe they had carried off a great treasure of gold and
+emeralds and diamonds. Not satisfied with these, they had tried to
+enslave the Indians and make them hunt for more. Finally, in desperation
+the tribes united, stormed their persecutors' camp, killed some, and
+forced the rest to flee down the river in canoes. When the Spaniards
+reached the rock, they landed, and, driving iron spikes at intervals up
+its steep side, managed to clamber up to the very crest and haul their
+treasure and stores of water and provisions after them by ropes made of
+lianas. There, safe from the arrows of their pursuers in the hollow top,
+they stood siege until the winter rains began. Then, despairing of
+taking the fortress, the Indians returned to their villages; whereupon
+the Spaniards clambered down, the last man breaking off the iron spikes
+as he came, and escaped to the Spanish settlements. Behind them, in the
+inaccessible bowl on the tip-top of the rock, they left their
+treasure-chest, expecting to return with the reinforcements and rescue
+it. The years went by and the Spaniards came not again to Black River,
+but generation after generation of Indians handed down the legend of
+Treasure Rock, with the iron-bound chest on its top, awaiting him who
+can scale its height.
+
+Jud, a treasure-hunter by nature, was much impressed by Pinto's story.
+
+"What do you think of takin' a week off and lookin' into this treasure
+business?" he suggested. "I'll undertake to get a rope over the top of
+this rock by a kite, or somethin' of that sort, an' then I know a young
+chap by the name of Adams who would climb up there an' bring down a
+trunk full of gold an' gems. What do you say?"
+
+"Pooh!" is what Professor Amandus Ditson said, and the expedition
+proceeded in spite of Jud's protests.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+SHIPWRECK
+
+
+About the middle of the morning there sounded through the still air a
+distant boom, which grew louder until finally it became a crashing roar.
+Beyond a bend in the river stretched before them a long gorge. There the
+stream had narrowed, and, rushing across a ledge shaped like a
+horseshoe, foamed and roared and beat its way among the great boulders.
+The paddlers brought their craft into smooth water under an overhanging
+bank while they held a council of war. Professor Ditson had never been
+on the Rio Negros before, nor had Pinto followed it farther than
+Treasure Rock. For a long time the whole party carefully studied the
+distant rapids.
+
+"What do you think?" whispered Will to Joe.
+
+The Indian boy, who had paddled long journeys on the rivers and seas of
+the far Northwest, shook his head doubtfully.
+
+"Can do in a bark canoe," he said at last; "but in this thing--I don't
+know."
+
+Pinto and Hen both feared the worst in regard to anything which had to
+do with Black River. It was Professor Ditson who finally made the
+decision.
+
+"It would take us weeks," he said, "to cut a trail through the forests
+and portage this boat around. One must take some chances in life. There
+seems to be a channel through the very center of the horseshoe. Let's
+go!"
+
+For the first time during the whole trip old Jud looked at his rival
+admiringly.
+
+"The old bird has some pep left, after all," he whispered to Will. "I
+want to tell you, boy," he went on, "that I've never seen worse rapids,
+an' if we bring this canal-boat through, it'll be more good luck than
+good management."
+
+Under Professor Ditson's instructions, Pinto took the bow paddle, while
+Hen paddled stern, with Will and Joe on one side and Jud and the
+professor on the other. Then all the belongings of the party were
+shifted so as to ballast the unwieldy craft as well as possible, and in
+another moment they shot out into the swift current. Faster and faster
+the trees and banks flashed by, like the screen of a motion picture. Not
+even a fleck of foam broke the glassy surface of the swirling current.
+With smooth, increasing speed, the river raced toward the rapids which
+roared and foamed ahead, while swaying wreaths of white mist, shot
+through with rainbow colors, floated above the welter of raging waters
+and the roar of the river rose to shout. Beyond, a black horseshoe of
+rock stretched from one bank to the other in a half-circle, and in front
+of it sharp ridges and snags showed like black fangs slavered with the
+foam of the river's madness.
+
+In another second the boat shot into the very grip of these jaws of
+death. Standing with his lithe, copper-colored body etched against the
+foam of the rapids, the Mundurucu held the lives of every one of the
+party in his slim, powerful hands. Accustomed from boyhood to the
+handling of the river-boats of his tribe through the most dangerous of
+waters, he stood that day like the leader of an orchestra, directing
+every movement of those behind him, with his paddle for a baton. Only a
+crew of the most skilled paddlers had a chance in that wild water; and
+such a crew was obedient to the Indian. In the stern, the vast strength
+of the giant negro swung the montaria into the course which the bow
+paddler indicated by his motions, while the other four, watching his
+every movement, were quick to paddle or to back on their respective
+sides. At times, as an unexpected rock jutted up before him in the foam,
+the Indian would plunge his paddle slantwise against the current and
+would hold the boat there for a second, until the paddlers could swing
+it, as on a fulcrum, out of danger. Once the craft was swept with
+tremendous force directly at an immense boulder, against which the water
+surged and broke.
+
+To Jud and the boys it seemed as if Pinto had suddenly lost his control
+of the montaria, for, instead of trying to swing out of the grip of the
+currents that rushed upon the rock, he steered directly at its face. The
+Mundurucu, however, knew his business. Even as Jud tensed his muscles
+for the crash, the rebound and undertow of the waters, hurled back from
+the face of the rock, caught the boat and whirled it safely to one side
+of the boulder. In and out among the reefs and fangs of rock the
+Mundurucu threaded the boat so deftly, and so well did his crew behind
+him respond, that in all that tumult of dashing waves the heavy craft
+shipped no water outside of the flying spray.
+
+In another minute they were clear of the outlying reefs and ledges and
+speeding toward the single opening in the black jaw of rock that lay
+ahead of them. Here it was that, through no fault of their steersman,
+the great mishap of the day overtook them. Just beyond the gap in the
+rock was a little fall, not five feet high, hidden by the spray. As
+Pinto passed through the narrow opening he swung the bow of the boat
+diagonally so as to catch the smoother current toward the right-hand
+bank of the river, which at this point jutted far out into the rapids.
+As he swerved, the long montaria shot through the air over the fall. The
+Indian tried to straighten his course, but it was too late. In an
+instant the boat had struck at an angle the rushing water beyond, with a
+force that nearly drove it below the surface. Before it could right
+itself, the rush of the current from behind struck it broadside, and in
+another second the montaria, half-filled with the water which it had
+shipped, capsized, and its crew were struggling in the current.
+
+It was Hen Pine who reached the river first. When he saw that the boat
+was certain to upset he realized that his only chance for life was to
+reach smooth water. Even while the montaria was still in mid-air he
+sprang far out toward the bank, where a stretch of unbroken current set
+in toward a tiny cape, beyond which it doubled back into a chaos of
+tossing, foaming water where not even the strongest swimmer would have a
+chance for life. Hen swam with every atom of his tremendous strength, in
+order to reach that point before he was swept into the rapids beyond.
+His bare black arms and vast shoulders, knotted and ridged with muscle,
+thrashed through the water with the thrust of a propeller-blade as he
+swam the river-crawl which he had learned from Indian swimmers. For an
+instant it seemed as if he would lose, for when nearly abreast of the
+little cape several feet of racing current still lay between him and
+safety. Sinking his head far under the water, he put every ounce of
+strength into three strokes, the last of which shot him just near enough
+to the bank to grip a tough liana which dangled like a rope from an
+overhanging tree-top. Pinto, who was next, although no mean swimmer,
+would never have made the full distance, yet managed to grasp one of
+Hen's brawny legs, which stretched far out into the current.
+
+"You hold on," he muttered to the great negro; "we make a monkey-bridge
+and save them all."
+
+Hen only nodded his head and took a double turn of the lianas around
+each arm. Professor Ditson was the next one to win safety, for the two
+boys were staying by Jud, who was a most indifferent swimmer. As the
+professor's long, thin legs dangled out into the current like a pair of
+tongs, with a desperate stroke Will caught one of his ankles, and was
+gripped in turn by Joe, and Jud locked both of his arms around the
+latter's knees, while the swift river tossed his gray hair and beard
+along its surface. As the full force of the current caught this human
+chain it stretched and sagged ominously. Then each link tightened up and
+prepared to hold as long as flesh and blood could stand the strain.
+
+"Go ahead, Jud!" gasped Will over his shoulder; "pull yourself along
+until you get to shore; then Joe will follow, and then I. Only
+hurry--the professor won't be able to hold on much longer, nor Hen to
+stand the strain."
+
+"Don't hurry on my account," sounded the precise voice of Professor
+Ditson above the roar of the waters. "I can hold on as long as any one."
+And as he spoke Will felt his gaunt body stiffen until it seemed all
+steel and whipcord.
+
+"Same here!" bellowed Hen, his magnificent body stretched out through
+the water as if on a rack. "Take your time and come along careful."
+
+In another minute the old trapper had pulled his way hand over hand
+along the living bridge until he too had a grip on one of the dangling
+lianas. He was followed by link after link of the human chain until they
+were all safe at the edge of the bank. Hen was the first to scramble up
+and give the others a helping hand, and a moment later all six of the
+treasure-seekers stood safe on the high ridge of the little promontory
+and sadly watched the boat which had borne them so well smash into a
+mass of floating, battered planks among the rocks and disappear down the
+current. Along with it went their guns, their ammunition, and their
+supplies.
+
+Jud alone retained the automatic revolver which he always wore, with a
+couple of clips holding sixteen cartridges, besides the eight in the
+cylinder. Hen also could not be termed weaponless, for he still wore his
+machete; while Will had a belt-ax, Joe a light hatchet, and Professor
+Ditson a sheath-knife. Besides these, the Indian had his bamboo
+tinder-box and flint and steel, which he always wore in his belt. These
+and the jack-knives and a few miscellaneous articles which they happened
+to have in their pockets or fastened to their belts comprised the whole
+equipment of the party.
+
+Before them stretched a hundred miles of uncharted jungle, infested by
+dangerous beasts and wandering cannibal tribes, through which they must
+pass to reach the old Slave Trail. Half that distance behind them was
+the Amazon. If once they could find their way back to that great river
+and camp on its banks, sooner or later a boat would go by which would
+take them back to Manaos. This, however, might mean weeks of delay and
+perhaps the abandonment of the whole trip. As they stood upon a white
+sand-bank far enough back from the river so that the roar of the rapids
+no longer deafened them, it was Pinto who spoke first.
+
+"Master," he said to Professor Ditson, "it is no time for council. Let
+us have fire and food first. A man thinks more wisely with his head when
+his stomach is warm and full."
+
+"I'll say the man is right," said Jud, shivering a little in his wet
+clothes as the coolness of the approaching night began to be felt
+through the forest; "but where is that same fire and food goin' to come
+from?"
+
+Pinto's answer was to scrape shavings from the midrib of a dry
+palm-leaf. When he had a little pile on the white sand in front of him,
+he opened the same kind of tinder-box that our ancestors used to carry
+less than a century and a half ago. Taking out from this an old file and
+a bit of black flint, with a quick glancing blow he sent half a dozen
+sparks against a dry strip of feltlike substance found only in the nests
+of certain kinds of ants. In a minute a deep glow showed from the end of
+this tinder, and, placing it under the pile of shavings, Pinto blew
+until the whole heap was in a light blaze. Hastily piling dry wood on
+top of this, he left to the others the task of keeping the fire going
+and, followed by Will, hurried through the jungle toward the towering
+fronds of a peach-palm, which showed above the other trees. Twisting
+together two or three lianas, the Indian made from them a light, strong
+belt. This he slipped around himself and the tree, and, gripping it in
+both hands, began to walk up the rough trunk, leaning against this
+girdle and pushing it up with each step, until, sixty feet from the
+ground, he came to where the fruit of the tree was clustered at its top.
+It grew in a group of six, each one looking like a gigantic, rosy peach
+a foot in diameter. In a moment they all came whizzing to the ground,
+and the two staggered back to the fire with the party's supper on their
+backs. Stripping off the thick husk, Pinto exposed a soft kernel which,
+when roasted on the coals, tasted like a delicious mixture of cheese and
+chestnuts.
+
+When at last all the members of the party were full-fed and dry, the
+wisdom of Pinto's counsel was evident. Every one was an optimist; and,
+after all, the best advice in life comes from optimists. Even Pinto and
+Hen felt that, now that they had lived through the third misfortune,
+they need expect no further ill luck from the river.
+
+"Forward or back--which!" was the way Professor Ditson put the
+question.
+
+"Forward!" voted Will.
+
+"Forward!" grunted Joe.
+
+Jud seemed less positive.
+
+"I sure would hate to go back," he said, "after old Jim Donegan had
+grub-staked us, an' tell the old man that, while we're good pearlers,
+we're a total loss when it comes to emeralds. Yet," he went on
+judicially, "there's a hundred miles of unexplored forests between us
+and the perfesser's trail, if there is any such thing. We've lost our
+guns; we've no provisions; we're likely to run across bands of roving
+cannibals; lastly, it may take us months to cut our way through this
+jungle. Therefore I vote--forward!"
+
+"That's the stuff, Jud!" exclaimed Will, much relieved.
+
+"Oh, I don't believe in takin' any chances," returned the old man, who
+had never done anything else all his life. "My idea is to always look at
+the dangers--an' then go ahead."
+
+"What about me?" objected Hen. "I ain't a-goin' to cut no hundred miles
+of trail through this here jungle for nobody."
+
+The answer came, sudden and unexpected, from the forests.
+
+"John cut wood! John cut wood! John cut wood!" called some one, clearly.
+It was only a spotted goatsucker, a bird belonging to the same family as
+our northern whip-poor-will, but Hen was much amused.
+
+"You hear what the bird say, you John Pinto. Get busy and cut wood," he
+laughed, slapping his friend mightily on the back.
+
+"All right," said the Indian, smiling, "John _will_ cut wood. Master,"
+he said to Professor Ditson, "if all will help, I can make a montaria in
+less than a week, better than the one we lost. Then we not have to cut
+our way through jungle."
+
+"Pinto," said Professor Ditson, solemnly, for once dropping into slang,
+"the sense of this meeting is--that you go to it."
+
+That night they followed the bank until they found a place where it
+curved upward into a high, dry bluff. There, on soft white sand above
+the mosquito-belt, they slept the sleep of exhaustion. It was after
+midnight when Will, who was sleeping between Professor Ditson and Jud,
+suddenly awoke with a start. Something had sniffed at his face.
+
+Without moving, he opened his eyes and looked directly into a pair that
+flamed green through the darkness. In the half-light of the setting moon
+he saw, standing almost over him, a heavily built animal as big as a
+small lion. Yet the short, upcurved tail and the rosettes of black
+against the gold of his skin showed the visitor to be none other than
+that terror of the jungle, the great jaguar, which in pioneer days used
+to come as far north as Arkansas and is infinitely more to be feared
+than the panthers which our forefathers dreaded so. This one had none of
+the lithe grace of the cougars which Will had met during the quest of
+the Blue Pearl, but gave him the same impression of stern tremendous
+strength and girth that a lion possesses.
+
+All of these details came to Will the next day. At that moment, as he
+saw the great round head of this king of the South American forest
+within a foot of his own, he was probably the worst scared boy on the
+South American continent. Will knew that a jaguar was able to drag a
+full-grown ox over a mile, and that this one could seize him by the
+throat, flirt his body over one shoulder, and disappear in the jungle
+almost before he could cry out. The great beast seemed, however, to be
+only mildly interested in him. Probably he had fed earlier in the
+evening.
+
+Even as Will stared aghast into the gleaming eyes of the great cat, he
+saw, out of the corner of his eye, Jud's right hand stealing toward his
+left shoulder. The old trapper, as usual, was wide awake when any danger
+threatened. Before, however, he had time to reach his automatic,
+Professor Ditson, equally watchful from his side, suddenly clapped his
+hands together sharply, close to the jaguar's pricked-up ears. The
+effect was instantaneous. With a growl of alarm, the great beast sprang
+backward and disappeared like a shadow into the forest.
+
+The professor sat up.
+
+"That's the way to handle jaguars," he remarked. "He'll not come back.
+If you had shot him," he continued severely to Jud, who held his cocked
+revolver in one hand, "he would have killed the boy and both of us
+before he died himself." And the professor lay down again to resume his
+interrupted slumbers.
+
+It was this occurrence which started a discussion the next morning in
+regard to weapons, offensive and defensive.
+
+"I 'low," said Hen Pine, making his heavy machete swing through the air
+as he whirled it around his head, "that I can stop anything I meet with
+this 'ere toothpick of mine."
+
+"Hen," remarked Jud, impressively, "do you see that round thing hangin'
+against the sky in the big tree about fifty yards away?"
+
+"Yassah, yassah," responded Hen, "that's a monkey-pot full of
+Brazil-nuts."
+
+"Well, boy," returned the old trapper, "just keep your eye on it."
+
+As he spoke he raised his automatic to the level of his hip, shooting
+without sighting, with that strange sixth sense of position which some
+of the great revolver-shots of a past generation used to acquire. There
+was a flash, a sharp spat, and the case of nuts about twice the size of
+a man's fist came whizzing to the ground. Hen stared at the old trapper
+with his mouth open.
+
+"You is sure the hittenest shooter ever I see," he said at last.
+
+Joe said nothing, but, drawing from his belt the keen little hatchet
+which he always carried, poised himself with his left foot forward, and,
+whirling the little weapon over his head, sent it hurtling through the
+air toward the same Brazil-nut tree. The little ax buzzed like a bee
+and, describing a high curve, buried itself clear to the head in the
+soft bark. Picking up a couple of heavy round stones, Will put himself
+into a pitching position and sent one whizzing in a low straight peg
+which hardly rose at all and which struck the tree close to Joe's
+hatchet with a smack which would have meant a broken bone for any man or
+beast that it struck; for, as Joe had found out when the two were
+pursued by Scar Dawson's gang, Will was a natural-born stone-thrower,
+with deadly speed and accuracy.
+
+It was Professor Ditson, however, who gave what was perhaps the most
+spectacular exhibition of all. Standing before them, lean and gaunt, he
+suddenly reached to his belt and drew out a keen, bone-handled,
+double-edged sheath-knife. Poising this flat on the palm of his hand, he
+threw it, with a quick jerk, with much the same motion of a
+cricket-bowler. The keen weapon hissed through the air like an arrow,
+and was found sunk nearly to the hilt in the bark between the mark of
+Will's stone and the head of Joe's hatchet.
+
+"When I was a very young man," the professor explained, embarrassed, "I
+attained a certain amount of proficiency with the bowie-knife."
+
+"I'll say you did!" exclaimed Jud, as he worked the knife out of the
+tough bark. "Any cannibal that comes within fifty yards of this party is
+liable to be chopped an' stabbed an' broken an' shot--to say nothin' of
+Hen's machete at close quarters."
+
+Pinto had watched these various performances in silence.
+
+"This evening," he said at last, "I show you a gun that kills without
+any noise."
+
+Borrowing Joe's hatchet, he disappeared into the woods, to come back
+half an hour later with a nine-foot stick of some hard, hollow, light
+wood about an inch in diameter, straight as an arrow, and with a center
+of soft pith. Laying this down on a hard stump, Pinto, with the utmost
+care, split the whole length into halves. Then, fumbling in his belt he
+pulled from it one of the sharp teeth of the paca, that curious reddish
+rodent which is half-way in size and appearance between a hog and a hare
+and which is equally at home on land and in water, and whose two-inch
+cutting-teeth are among the favorite ready-made tools of all South
+American Indians. With one of these Pinto carefully hollowed out each
+section of the stick, smoothing and polishing the concave surface until
+it was like glass. Then, fitting the two halves together, he wound them
+spirally with a long strip of tape which he made from the tough, supple
+wood of a climbing palm, waxed with the black wax of the stingless bees.
+When it was finished he had a light, hollow tube about nine feet long.
+At one end, which he tapered slightly, he fixed, upright, the tiny tooth
+of a mouse, which he pressed down until only a fleck of shining ivory
+showed as a sight above the black surface of the tube. At the other end
+he fitted in a cup-shaped mouthpiece, chiseled out of a bit of light,
+seasoned wood.
+
+By noon it was finished, and Jud and the boys saw for the first time the
+deadly blow-gun of the Mundurucu Indians. For arrows, Pinto cut tiny
+strips from the flinty leaf-stalks of palm-leaves. These he scraped
+until the end of each was as sharp as a needle. Then he feathered them
+with little oval masses of silk from the seed-vessels of silk-cotton
+trees, whose silk is much fluffier and only about half the weight of
+ordinary cotton. In a short time he had made a couple of dozen of these
+arrows, each one of which fitted exactly to the bore of the blow-gun,
+and also fashioned for himself a quiver of plaited grasses, which he
+wore suspended from his shoulder with a strip of the palm tape.
+
+Late in the afternoon he made another trip into the forest, returning
+with a mass of bark scraped from a tree called by the Indians
+_mavacure_, but which the white settlers in South America have named the
+poison tree. This bark he wet in the river, and then pounded it between
+two stones into a mass of yellowish fibers, which he placed in a funnel
+made of a plantain-leaf. Under this he set one of the aluminum cups
+which each of the party carried fastened to his belt. This done, he
+poured in cold water and let the mass drip until the cup was full of a
+yellow liquid, which he heated over a slow fire. When it thickened he
+poured in some of the milky juice of another near-by tree, which turned
+the mixture black. When it had boiled down to a thick gummy mass, Pinto
+wrapped it up carefully in a palm-leaf, after first dipping every one of
+his arrows into the black compound.
+
+So ended the making of the famous urari arrow-poison, which few white
+men indeed have ever seen brewed. When it was safely put away, Pinto
+carefully fitted one of the tiny arrows into the mouthpiece and raised
+the blow-gun to his mouth, holding it with both hands touching each
+other just beyond the mouthpiece, instead of extending his left arm, as
+a white man would hold a gun. Even as he raised the long tube, there
+came a crashing through the near-by trees, and the party looked up to
+see a strange sight. Rushing along the branches came a pale
+greenish-gray lizard, marked on the sides with black bars and fully six
+feet in length. Along its back ran a crest of erect spines. Even as its
+long compressed tail whisked through the foilage, a reddish animal,
+which resembled a lanky raccoon, sprang after it like a squirrel,
+following hard on its trail.
+
+"It's an' ol' coati chasin' a big iguana," muttered Hen, as the pair
+went by. "They're both mighty fine eatin'."
+
+At first, the pursued and the pursuer seemed equally matched in speed.
+Little by little, the rapid bounds of the mammal overtook the swift
+glides of the reptile, and in a tree-top some fifty yards away the
+iguana turned at bay. In spite of its size and the threatening, horrible
+appearance of its uplifted spines, the coati made short work of it,
+worrying it like a dog, and finally breaking its spine. Even as its long
+bulk hung lifeless from the powerful jaws of the animal, Pinto drew a
+deep breath and, sighting his long tube steadily toward the distant
+animal, drove his breath through the mouthpiece with all his force.
+There followed a startling pop, and a white speck flashed through the
+air toward the coati. A second later, the latter, still holding the dead
+iguana, gave a spring as if struck by something, and started off again
+through the tree-tops, the great body of the dead lizard trailing
+behind. Suddenly the coati began to go slower and slower and then
+stopped short. Its head drooped. First one paw and then another relaxed,
+until, with a thud, the coati and iguana struck the ground together both
+stone-dead. The boys rushed over and found Pinto's tiny, deadly arrow
+embedded deep in the coati's side. Less than a minute had passed since
+it had been struck, but the deadly urari had done its work. Fortunately,
+this poison does not impair the food value of game, and later on, over a
+bed of coals, Hen made good his words about their eating qualities. The
+coati tasted like roast 'possum, while the flesh of the giant lizard was
+as white and tender as chicken.
+
+"I feel as if I was eatin' a dragon," grumbled Jud, coming back for a
+third helping.
+
+Followed a week of hard work for all. Under Pinto's directions, taking
+turns with Jud's ax, they cut down a yellow stonewood tree, which was
+almost as hard and heavy as its name. Out of the trunk they shaped a log
+some nineteen feet in length and three feet through, which, with
+infinite pains and with lianas for ropes, they dragged on rollers to the
+water's edge. Then, with enormous labor, working by shifts with Joe's
+hatchet, Jud's ax, and Hen's machete, they managed to hollow out the
+great log. At the end of the fourth day, Jud struck.
+
+"I'll work as hard as any man," he said, "but I got to have meat. If I
+work much longer on palm-nuts I'm liable to go plumb nutty myself."
+
+As the rest of the party felt the same craving, Pinto and Jud were told
+off to hunt for the rest of that day. It was Jud who first came across
+game, a scant half-mile from camp, meeting there an animal which is one
+of the strangest still left on earth and which, along with the duck-bill
+of Australia and the great armadillo, really belongs to a past age,
+before man came to earth, but by some strange accident has survived to
+this day.
+
+In front of him, digging in a dry bank with enormous curved claws, was
+an animal over six feet in length and about two feet in height. It had
+great hairy legs, and a tremendous bushy tail, like a vast plume, curled
+over its back. Its head ended in a long, tapering, toothless snout, from
+which was thrust constantly a wormlike, flickering tongue, while a broad
+oblique stripe, half gray and half black, showed on either side.
+
+"There ain't no such animal," murmured Jud to himself, examining the
+stranger with awe.
+
+Pinto's face shone with pleasure when he came up.
+
+"It giant ant-eater and very good to eat," he remarked cheerfully.
+
+Upon seeing them, the great beast shuffled away, but was soon brought
+to bay, when it stood with its back against the bank, swinging its long
+snout back and forth and making a little whining noise. Jud was about to
+step in and kill it with a blow from his ax, but Pinto held him back.
+
+"No get in close to ant-bear," he warned, pointing to the giant's claws.
+"He rip you to pieces. You watch."
+
+Stepping back, the Indian raised his blow-gun to his mouth. Again came
+the fatal pop, and the next second one of the tiny arrows was embedded
+like a thorn in the side of the monster's snout. For a moment the great
+ant-eater tried to dislodge the tiny pointed shaft with his enormous
+claws. Then he stopped, stood motionless for a while, swayed from side
+to side, and sank dead without a sound or struggle. With the help of
+Jud's ax and his own knife, the Indian soon quartered and dressed the
+great beast and an hour later the two staggered back to camp loaded down
+with a supply of meat which, when roasted, tasted much like tender pork.
+
+"Now," said Jud, smacking his lips after a full meal, "bring on your
+work!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+THE BLACK TIGER
+
+
+Under Pinto's direction the hollow trunk was lifted up so that each end
+rested on a stump. Then a slow fire was kindled under its whole length.
+Pinto tended this most carefully, so that the heat would spread evenly.
+Gradually, under the blaze, the green wood spread out. This was the most
+critical point in this forest boat-building, for if there were too much
+heat at any one point, a crack might start through the log and all the
+work of the week go for nothing. As the great log opened out, the Indian
+moved constantly up and down its length, checking the blaze here and
+there with wet moss where the sides were spreading out too fast. At
+several different points he fitted in straddlers, with wedges made from
+stonewood branches. By skilfully changing the pressure of these and
+varying the heat at different points the hollowed log at last took on a
+graceful curve, with tapered turned-up ends. Green strips of stonewood
+were fitted in for gunwales, and seats and semicircular end-boards put
+in place. Then the long dugout was allowed to cool off gradually all
+through one night. As it contracted, it locked in place gunwales, seats
+and thwarts. Another day was given to fashioning light paddles out of
+palm-wood; and then at last, one week after their shipwreck, these
+latter-day Argonauts were once more afloat upon Black River.
+
+There followed long days, in each of which three seasons were perfectly
+reproduced. The mornings had all the chill of early spring; by noon came
+the blinding heat of midsummer; and the nights, of the same length as
+the days, had the frosty tang of autumn. During the morning of each day
+they paddled, lying by at noon-time in cool, shaded lagoons where they
+slept or fished. At other times they would collect nuts and fruits on
+the shore, under the direction of Professor Ditson, or take turns in
+going with Pinto on short hunting-trips, during which all kinds of
+strange game would fall before his deadly blow-gun.
+
+It was Jud who went with him on the first of these hunts. As they came
+to the bank of one of the many streams that ran into the Black River,
+the old trapper caught sight of a strange animal on the bank which
+looked like a great guinea-pig about the size of a sheep. Its wet hide
+was all shining black in the sunlight, and even as Jud turned to ask the
+Indian what it was, there sounded just behind him the fatal pop of the
+blow-gun, a venomous little arrow buzzed through the air, and a second
+later was sticking deep in the beast's blunt muzzle. Like an enormous
+muskrat, the stranger scrambled to the edge of the stream, plunged in,
+and disappeared in the dark water.
+
+"That was a capybara," Pinto informed Jud.
+
+"Well, you've lost him all right, whatever he was," returned the latter.
+
+"Wait," was all that Pinto would say. A few minutes later, the limp,
+dead body of the capybara, the largest of all aquatic rodents floated to
+the surface. Jud was about to wade into the shallow water and secure it
+when he was stopped by the Mundurucu.
+
+"Never put your hand or foot into strange water," he said. "You may lose
+'em."
+
+Without explaining himself, he cut a long pole and carefully towed the
+dead animal to shore. That night the whole party camped on a high, dry,
+sandy bluff where Pinto and Hen dressed the capybara and roasted parts
+of it on long green spits of ironwood.
+
+Will sampled the dank, dark meat cautiously.
+
+"Tastes like a woodchuck I once tried to eat," he remarked, after one
+mouthful. "You can have my share." And he went back to palm-nuts.
+
+From another trip, Pinto brought back a coaita, one of the
+spider-monkeys which had so affected Will's appetite on the occasion of
+their first meal at Professor Ditson's house. This one had a long, lank
+body covered with coarse black hair, while its spectral little face was
+set in a mass of white whiskers.
+
+Will ate the rich, sweet meat shudderingly.
+
+"It looks just like a little old man," he protested.
+
+"But it tastes better," observed the hardened Jud, passing his bark
+plate for another helping.
+
+It was Jud and Will who accompanied Pinto on the third and most
+eventful trip of all. The boat had been beached at the slope of a high
+bank; and, while the others dozed or slept, Pinto and his two companions
+started through the woods on their hunt for any game which might add
+some kind of meat to their menu. A hundred yards from the bank the
+jungle deepened and darkened. Everywhere the strangler-fig was killing
+straight, slim palms and towering silk-cotton and paradise-nut trees. At
+first, this assassin among the tree-folk runs up its victim's trunk like
+a vine. As the years go by, it sends out shoots and stems around and
+around the tree it has chosen. These join and grow together, forming a
+vast hollow trunk, in the grip of which the other tree dies. Pools of
+black water showed here and there at the foot of the strangled trees,
+and something sinister seemed to hang over this stretch of jungle.
+
+"Feels kind of creepy here," Jud confided to Will. "Looks just the kind
+of a place for some of Hen's haunts," he went on.
+
+Even as he spoke, there sounded among the distant trees ominous grunting
+groans, and here and there among the shadows dark shapes could be seen
+moving about. The fierce moaning grew louder, mingled with a clicking
+noise like castanets.
+
+"Peccaries!" muttered Jud. "I've hunted the little ones down in Mexico.
+They were liable to bite a piece out of you as big as a tea-cup. I'm in
+favor of lettin' these big fellows strictly alone."
+
+"Quiet, quiet!" muttered the Indian, slipping behind a tree and
+motioning his companions to do likewise. "They go by in a minute, and I
+take off the last one with my blow-gun."
+
+Instead of doing this, however, the great herd spread out through the
+woods, grunting and groaning and clattering their sharp tusks. As they
+came closer and closer, each of the peccaries seemed nearly as large as
+the wild boar of European forests, while their lips and lower jaws were
+pure white. The Mundurucu showed signs of alarm.
+
+"Something has stirred them up," he muttered. "If they see us, they
+charge. Better each one choose a tree."
+
+Even as he spoke, the leading peccary, whose gleaming tusks thrust out
+like keen knives from each side of his white jowl, glimpsed the little
+party in the shadows. With a deep groan, he lowered his head and charged
+at full speed, his tusks clattering as he came, while the white foam
+showed like snow against the raised bristles of his back. The whole herd
+followed--a nightmare of fierce heads, gleaming red eyes, and clicking,
+dagger-like tusks. Against such a rush Jud's automatic was as useless as
+Pinto's blow-gun or Will's throwing-stones. There was only one thing to
+do, and, with the utmost promptness all three of the party did it. Jud
+went up the vinelike trunk of a small strangler-fig hand over hand, nor
+ever stopped until he was safe astride the branch of a stonewood tree,
+twenty feet from the ground. Pinto, gripping the rough red bark of a cow
+tree, walked up it Indian fashion until he was safely seated in a crotch
+far above the ground. Will was not so fortunate. Near him was the smooth
+bark of an assai-palm. Twice he tried to climb it, and twice slipped
+back. Then, with every muscle tense, he dodged behind it and sprinted,
+as he had never run before, across a little opening to where a vast
+strangler-fig had swallowed a Brazil-nut tree in its octopus grip. The
+rush of the charging herd was hard on his heels as he reached the tree,
+and he had just time to swerve around its trunk and grip one of the
+vinelike tentacles which had not yet become a part of the solid shell of
+the strangler. Even as he swung himself from the ground, the bristling
+head of one of the herd struck against his feet, and he kicked them
+aloft just in time to avoid the quick double slash of the sharp tusks
+that followed.
+
+Up and up he went, while the whole shell-like structure of the fig
+swayed and bent under his weight and dry dust from the dead nut tree
+powdered down upon him in showers. Finally he reached a safe
+stopping-place, where he could stand with both feet resting in a loop
+which the snakelike fig had made in one of its twisting turns around its
+victim.
+
+For a few minutes the trio in the tree-tops sat and stared in silence at
+one another and the weaving, champing herd of furious beasts below. It
+was Jud who spoke first.
+
+"It's your move, Captain Pinto," he remarked. "What do we do next?"
+
+"Sit still until they go away," returned the Indian despondently.
+
+"How many arrows have you left?" inquired Will from his tree.
+
+"Ten."
+
+"I've got sixteen shots in my locker," observed Jud, from his perch;
+"but there must be nearly a hundred pigs in this herd; an' if these big
+fellows are like the chaps I knew in Mexico, the more you kill, the more
+those that are left will try to kill you."
+
+"The only thing to do is to sit still," repeated the Mundurucu. "Perhaps
+they go 'way before night."
+
+"Perhaps they don't, too," grumbled Jud. "A pig's an obstinate critter
+at his best, an' a peccary's a pig at his worst!"
+
+As time went on, conversation among the besieged flagged and each one
+settled down to endure the wait as best he might. Will amused himself by
+watching the birds which passed him among the tree-tops and listening to
+some of their strange and beautiful songs. At any time of the year and
+in any part of the world, a bird-student can always find pleasure in his
+hobby where unseeing, unhearing people find nothing of interest. To-day
+the first bird that caught his eye looked something like a crow, save
+that it had a crest of curved, hairy feathers, which at times, on its
+perch in a neighboring tree, it would raise and spread out over its head
+like a fringed parasol. From its breast swung a pad of feather-covered
+flesh, and, as it perched, it would every now and then give a deep low
+flute-note, raising its parasol each time in a most comical manner.
+
+"What's that bird, Pinto?" Will inquired, after he had watched it
+delightedly for a long time.
+
+"He umbrella-bird," returned the other, indifferently; "no good to eat."
+For the Mundurucu had a very simple system of ornithology--he divided
+all birds into two groups, those that were good to eat and those that
+were not.
+
+The next bird which passed by aroused the interest even of Jud, who
+cared even less for birds than did the Indian. Through the dim light of
+the sinister forest, above the raging, swinish herd, flitted a bird of
+almost unearthly beauty, a parrot over three feet in length, of a soft,
+hyacinthine blue except around the eyes, where the bare skin showed
+white. As Will watched it delightedly, he recognized the bird as the
+hyacinthine macaw, the largest, most beautiful, and one of the rarest of
+all the parrot family. Even as he looked, the great bird alighted on a
+neighboring Brazil-nut tree and immediately showed itself to be as
+efficient as it was beautiful. Seizing in its great black beak one of
+the tough, thick nut-cases, called "monkey-pots" by the Indians, it
+proceeded to twist off its top and open up a side, although a man finds
+difficulty in doing this even with a hammer and chisel. Drawing out one
+Brazil-nut after another, it crushed them, in spite of their hard, thick
+shells, into a pulp, which it swallowed. Then it flew away, leaving Will
+staring regretfully after it.
+
+As noon approached, the vines and the tree-trunks seemed to hold and
+radiate the heat like boiler-tubes. Gradually it rose and concentrated
+until the forest seemed to throb and pulsate like a furnace. Then a
+cicada began to sound. It began with a low, jarring note, something like
+the creaking of our ordinary katydid. This increased slowly in loudness
+and volume until at last it ended with an almost unendurable
+siren-whistle note which seemed to shake the very leaves of the trees.
+Again and again and again this performance was repeated, until Will,
+deafened and stunned by the noise, dizzy with the heat, and cramped and
+tired of standing on his narrow perch, thought with an almost
+unutterable longing of the dark, cool river and the shaded boat where
+the rest of the party were even now taking their noontide nap.
+
+Suddenly, when it seemed to Will as if his tortured brain absolutely
+could not stand one more repetition of this song, the talented cicada,
+with one farewell screech that surpassed all previous efforts, lay off
+for the day. For a few minutes there was almost complete silence in the
+darkened forest. Many of the guardian herd had laid down, wallowing in
+the soft mold and fallen leaves, while others, although they stared
+redly up into the tree-tops, no longer moved around and around in a
+circle of which the trapped hunters were the center. Suddenly, from the
+depths of a near-by tree, a pure, sweet, contralto voice sounded, as if
+some boy were singing to himself. For a moment it rose and fell, and
+then followed a few plaintive notes almost like those of a tiny flute.
+Then a slow melody began, full of mellow notes, only to be broken off
+abruptly. After a pause, there came a few clicking notes like those made
+by a music-box as it runs down, and the performance was over. Although
+the song came from the dark, glossy leaves of the very next tree, stare
+as he would, Will could gain no sight of the singer. Twice more the same
+thing happened. Each time he listened with a feeling that this time the
+tune would be finished and would be such as no mortal ears had heard
+before; but each time the song would die away in futile clicking notes.
+When at last the silence was again unbroken, Will turned toward the
+Indian.
+
+"What was it, Pinto?" he asked softly.
+
+"That organ-bird."
+
+"What does it look like?"
+
+"Don't know. No one ever see it."
+
+"How do you know it's a bird?"
+
+"Professor Ditson say so," returned Pinto, conclusively.
+
+"That settles it," broke in Jud, jealously, from his tree. "He never saw
+it; nobody ever saw it; but the professor calls it an organ-bird. If he
+said it was an angel, I suppose it _would_ be an angel."
+
+"Yes," returned the Indian placidly.
+
+The argument was suddenly ended for Will in a terrible manner. A sharp,
+burning pain shot through his left shoulder, as if a red-hot coal had
+been pressed there. As he turned, he saw, trickling down the tree-trunk,
+long crimson streams, one of which had already reached him, and he
+recognized, to his horror, a troop of the dreaded fire-ants. Even as he
+looked, the bites of several others pierced his skin, and the pain ran
+like a liquid poison through his veins as each blood-red ant rushed
+forward and buried its envenomed jaws deep into his flesh. Brushing off
+with frantic haste those torturers that had succeeded in reaching him,
+the boy began to slip down the vine toward the ground, for it was no
+more possible to resist this red torrent of poison and agony than it
+would be to stand against a creeping fire or a stream of molten lava.
+
+Old Jud heard the involuntary cry, which the sudden pain had wrung from
+Will, and looked over, only to see the red columns of ants streaming
+slowly, inevitably down the tree, driving Will before them to what
+seemed certain death. The peccary herd, aroused by his movements, had
+gathered around the tree in close-packed ranks, and frothing,
+clattering, and moaning, waited for him, making a circle of gleaming
+tusks.
+
+"Go back!" called out Jud. "Go back! You can't possibly get through
+'em."
+
+
+"I can't!" called back Will. "I'd rather die fighting than be tortured
+to death up here."
+
+As he spoke he slid another yard toward the ground. Jud drew in his
+breath in a gasp that was almost a groan, and, unslinging his ready
+automatic, began to scramble down to the ground."
+
+"What you do?" called out the Indian, aghast, from his tree.
+
+"I'm a-goin' to stand by that kid," said the old trapper, grimly. "I'll
+never go back to the boat alive without him."
+
+"Stay where you are, Jud," shouted Will, desperately, as he gripped the
+keen hatchet which he had borrowed from Joe when he started on this
+ill-omened hunt.
+
+"Come on, boy!" shouted the trapper, unheedingly, as he neared the
+ground. "I'll meet you, an' you fight through them to my tree. The old
+man's a-goin' to be right with you."
+
+His words were punctuated by the deadly pop of Pinto's blow-gun.
+Although the Indian could not attain to Jud's height of self-sacrifice,
+yet he had made up his mind to do all that he could do to save the boy
+with the weapon he had. Again and again and again, as fast as he could
+level, load, and discharge his long blow-pipe, the fatal little arrows
+sped through the gloom and buried themselves in the thick hides of the
+peccaries. Already some of the inner ring were wavering and staggering
+under the effects of the deadly urari poison. The sight of their
+stricken comrades, however, only seemed to drive the herd into deeper
+depths of dumb, unreasoning madness. They pressed closer and closer to
+the tree, trampling their dead and dying comrades unheedingly underfoot,
+and the chorus of moaning grunts and clicking tusks sounded loud and
+louder.
+
+The blood-red stream of fire-ants was half-way down the tree by this
+time, and Will was within a scant ten feet of the ground. The ants were
+very close as he lowered himself another yard, then a foot lower, and a
+foot beyond that, until the tusks of the plunging, leaping peccaries
+beneath him nearly touched his shoes. Bracing his feet against the rough
+trunk, he drew the little ax from his belt, and prepared to spring as
+far out toward Jud's tree as possible, although his heart sank and the
+flesh of his legs and thighs seemed to curl and chill as he looked out
+upon the gleaming ring of sharp, slashing tusks among which he must
+leap. Once downed by the herd, and he would be ripped to pieces before
+he could regain his feet.
+
+Jud by this time was on the ground, and was just about to shoot, in an
+attempt to open a passage through the packed herd, when unexpected help
+came from above.
+
+Out of the dark depths of a near-by silk-cotton tree sprang with silent
+swiftness a great black figure which gleamed in the half-light like
+watered silk.
+
+"Look out! Look out! The black tiger!" shouted Pinto, despairingly,
+from his tree, having shot his last arrow into the frothing circle. Even
+as he spoke, the "tiger," as the Indians call the jaguar, landed full on
+the back and shoulders of the hindmost of the desperate, raging circle.
+As he landed, the great cat struck one blow with that terrible full
+stroke of a jaguar, which has been known to break the neck of an ox, and
+the peccary, with a shrill squeal of terror, went down before the death
+which haunts every peccary herd. At the squeal, the wild swine swung
+away from the tree with an instantaneous rush. A jaguar is to a peccary
+herd what the gray wolf is to the musk-ox of the north and the very life
+of each member of the herd depends upon facing their foe. Upon the
+instant, every peccary left the trees and hurried toward their dying
+comrade.
+
+Unfortunately for the jaguar, the force of his spring, added to the
+impetus of his stroke, carried him too far, and for a moment he whirled
+over in a half-somersault and was entangled among the vines. Those lost
+seconds were fatal, in spite of all his strength and swiftness. Even as
+he recovered his feet in a lithe whirl and flirted over one shoulder the
+body of the dead peccary as a man might toss a rabbit, the death-ring
+formed around him. Two deep, the maddened swine circled him. With a
+deep, coughing roar, the tiger dropped his prey and struck with his
+armed paws lightning-like blows that ripped the life out wherever they
+landed. By this time, however, the peccaries were beyond all fear of
+death, and a score of them dashed in upon him. Jud had involuntarily
+leveled his automatic at the great brute as it struck the ground, but
+lowered it with a grim laugh.
+
+"He's fightin' for our lives as well as his own," he called quietly to
+Will, as the latter reached the ground and slipped unnoticed past the
+heaving, tossing, fighting circle of peccaries. In another minute the
+boy had gained the safety of Jud's tree and gripped the old man's hand
+between his own.
+
+"Let's stay here," said the old trapper, "an' see it out. We can climb
+this tree if they come back, an' you'll never see a fight like this
+again."
+
+Even as he spoke, the circle bent in upon the great cat. With desperate
+leaps, he tried to spring over its circumference; but each time it
+widened out so that always in front and at his back and on both flanks
+was a fence of sharp, slashing tusks. All around him lay dead peccaries
+which had fallen before his incredibly rapid strokes; but now his dark,
+gleaming skin was furrowed and slit with long bloody slashes where the
+tusks of dead and dying boars had gone home. His strength ebbed with his
+blood. Once more, with a deep, despairing roar, he struck with both
+paws, killing a peccary at each blow. Then he staggered forward, and in
+a minute was down!
+
+Time and again his great jaws opened and closed, sinking fierce white
+fangs deep through the skull or spine of some peccary, but at last only
+a black heaving of the furious wild pigs could be seen. At times the
+dark, desperate head of the dying tiger thrust its way out, only to fall
+back, smothered and slashed. Amid a scene of brute rage and fury which
+even Jud, old hunter as he was, had never imagined before, the little
+party slipped shudderingly away and hastened back over the trail along
+which they had come, nor ever stopped until they had reached the refuge
+of the montaria. There they found the rest of the party peacefully
+sleeping through the midday hours under a cool canopy of broad green
+palm-leaves which Hen had thrown together. Professor Ditson was more
+interested in their description of the black tiger than in any of the
+other details of their adventure.
+
+"It was the melanic type of the jaguar and very rare," he said
+regretfully. "It was certainly unfortunate that you couldn't have
+collected this one, for there is no specimen, living or dead, in any of
+the zoölogical gardens or natural-history museums of the world."
+
+"You see, Professor," explained Jud, "we were kind o' busy in keepin'
+some seventy-five peccaries from collectin' us. What does 'melanic' mean
+in American?"
+
+"Any animal may develop either a black or a white type," Explained the
+professor. "When black, it is called 'melanic'; when white, 'albino.'
+You probably have seen black squirrels, muskrats, or skunks. They are
+simply color-variations of the ordinary species. So this 'black tiger'
+was only a jaguar which for some unknown reason happened to have a black
+skin. These black examples," he continued, "are neither fiercer nor
+larger than the ordinary kind, although generally considered so by
+unscientific observers."
+
+"What about some of those peccaries?" remarked Joe, practically. "Can't
+we bring in one or two that Pinto killed for fresh meat?"
+
+"No, sir," returned Jud, emphatically, "I wouldn't go back into that
+black bit of woods for all the fresh peccary pork in South America."
+
+It was Hen Pine who noted that Will had taken no part in the discussion,
+and that he was flushed and feverish and suffering intensely from the
+intolerable pain of the fire-ant bites.
+
+"Honey, you come along with ol' Hen," he said soothingly, "an' he'll fix
+you up so that you won't feel that fire-poison hurtin' any more."
+
+Followed by Will, he led the way along the river-bank until they came to
+a small, round-topped tree with intensely green leaves. With his
+machete, Hen cut off several of the smaller branches. From the severed
+ends a thick, brilliant red sap oozed.
+
+"It's the dragon's-blood tree," he explained "an' its juice makes the
+best balm in the world for burns or stings."
+
+As he spoke he rubbed the thick, gummy liquid gently on the swollen and
+inflamed welts which the venomous bites of the fire-ants had raised on
+Will's shoulders and back. Almost instantly the throbbing, rankling pain
+stopped, and there came such a feeling of grateful coolness that Will
+told Hen it was almost worth the pain of the bite to feel the relief of
+the cure.
+
+On the way back, Hen discovered another tree which brought the rest of
+the party nearly as much pleasure as the dragon's-blood had given to
+Will. It had long, glossy leaves, and a straight smooth trunk as large
+around as a man's body, though it was only about twenty feet high. It
+was loaded down with what looked like huge plums nearly the size of
+muskmelons. Hen told Will that it was the wild papaw tree. The fruit was
+delicious. When they brought back samples to the rest of the party,
+there was a stampede to the place and the boat was soon loaded with the
+luscious fruit.
+
+As they explored the bank farther, Jud noticed that Hen was constantly
+chewing the dark green leaves of the wild cinnamon, which grew
+abundantly and had a spicy, pleasant smell like the well-known bark of
+that name. Without saying anything to Hen, the old man picked several
+and sampled them. Unfortunately for him, it takes prolonged practice to
+be able to chew wild cinnamon with any degree of comfort. As the
+fragrant fiery juice touched Jud's tongue and gums he gasped, the tears
+ran from his eyes as if he had swallowed red pepper, and he spat out the
+burning leaves emphatically.
+
+"You must have a leather-lined mouth," he remarked to the grinning
+negro.
+
+A little later, Hen added insult to the injury of the old trapper. They
+had come to a small tree loaded down with little round, rosy, fruit.
+
+"That what you need, Mars' Jud," Hen assured him.
+
+Thinking that it was perhaps a smaller edition of the papaw tree, Jud
+trustingly sank his teeth into one of the little spheres, only to find
+it bitter as gall.
+
+"What do you mean by tellin' me I need anything that tastes like that,"
+he howled.
+
+"I didn't say for you to _eat_ it," laughed the black giant. "I say you
+needed it. That tree the soap-tree," and Hen pointed to Jud's grimy
+hands suggestively.
+
+"I guess we all need it," interrupted Will, tactfully, before Jud could
+express his indignation further.
+
+Picking handfuls of the little fruit, each one of the party dipped his
+hands into a pool near the river bank. The waxy surface of the rosy
+balls dissolved in a froth of lather which left their hands as clean and
+white as the best of soap could have done.
+
+As the day waned and the coolness of the late afternoon stole through
+the heat, the montaria was again loosed from the bank. All that night,
+under the light of another glorious full moon, they traveled fast and
+far. At last, just as the sun rose, there sounded a distant boom. It
+became louder and louder until the air quivered and the dark surface of
+the river showed here and there flecks and blobs of foam. Then, as they
+swept around a bend in the black stream, there appeared before them a
+sight of unearthly beauty not seen of white men for twice two hundred
+years.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+THE YELLOW SNAKE
+
+
+Over a vast horseshoe of towering crags, with a drumming roar, the dark,
+resistless river rushed in a mass of snowy foam and broken rainbows down
+into the whirling caldron below.
+
+"The Falls of Utiarity," whispered Pinto, as he guided the boat into a
+little bend by the bank just above where the terrible downward glide of
+the river began. Making fast to a tree on shore, the whole party stared
+across at the most beautiful waterfall on earth, as if they could never
+see enough of its beauty. Something seemed to give way in Will's brain,
+and for a long minute he felt as if he were entering a new and strange
+world. Dim, unearthly images seemed to float before him. He thought of
+the great white throne in Revelation--the mystic emerald circled by a
+rainbow and the pavement of a single sapphire-stone. Before him was the
+beautiful water, sinking into the abyss, yet flowing on forever, while a
+great rainbow trembled, faded, then came again through the mist and
+spray like a beautiful spirit walking the waters. With the terror, the
+rush, and the roar of the crashing waters, was a beauty not of earth
+that took away all fear, until he seemed to be gazing into the seventh
+heaven and seeing that which was unlawful for mortal man to look upon.
+
+Only a moment, and once more he was back in the body and found himself
+looking confusedly into the faces of his companions, all of whom had
+felt something of the same uplift. Without a word, the Indian edged the
+canoe along the shore and into the mouth of a deep lagoon, half-hidden
+by overhanging trees. Beyond these it widened out and ended in a high,
+bare bank. Back from this stretched a narrow path, showing like a long
+line through the dark green of the jungle. Its surface was trodden
+ominously hard and smooth, as if crossed and recrossed by many bare
+feet.
+
+"The Trail," said Pinto, softly.
+
+"The Trail," echoed Professor Ditson, as they all stared along the thin
+line which pierced the forest and led away and across the vast basin of
+the Amazon and on and past the guarded heights of Peru until it reached
+the mines from which Spain had dug the gold which enabled her to conquer
+and hold half the world. Only the cruel, fierce, dogged fighters of
+Spain as she was four hundred years ago could have cut this path. Even
+then, when men thought little of life or of accomplishing the
+impossible, the Trail stood forth as a great achievement, every mile of
+which had cost the lives of men.
+
+For a time, the adventurers stared in silence at the brown line athwart
+the green, the sign and seal of an empire long passed away. Then Pinto
+grounded the montaria at the edge of the bank, and, after all of the
+party had disembarked with their scanty equipment, pulled the boat, with
+Hen's help, back of a screen of tangled vines, marked by a slender
+assai-palm, until it was completely hidden from sight.
+
+"If we are successful," remarked Professor Ditson, "we'll never see that
+boat again. If we are driven back along this trail, it may save our
+lives."
+
+There was a silence. For the first time the boys and Jud realized that
+their leader definitely expected perils other than those ever present
+from the wild creatures that guarded the beautiful, treacherous,
+mysterious forests of this southern continent.
+
+"Are the Injuns down here dangerous?" inquired Jud, at last.
+
+"The personal habits of some of them do not commend themselves even to
+the most broad-minded investigators," returned the professor, precisely.
+
+"Such as--" questioned Jud, again.
+
+"Well," replied the scientist, slowly, "for one thing, the wild tribes
+of this part of the Amazon basin invariably eat any captives they make.
+Then--"
+
+"That's enough," broke in Jud. "After I've been eaten I don't care what
+they do next. What might be the names of these gentlemen?"
+
+"The Mayas, I think, are the tribe we shall be most likely to meet,"
+said Professor Ditson, reflectively. "They have no fixed homes, but
+wander through the forest, guiding themselves by the sun, and sleep in
+the tree-tops like monkeys wherever they happen to be when night comes.
+They hunt men, red, white, or black," he went on; "yet, if Indian
+traditions can be depended upon, we do not need to be afraid of them so
+long as we keep to the Trail."
+
+"How's that?" inquired Will, intensely interested.
+
+"Every tribe which refers to the Trail," the scientist informed them,
+"speaks of a custom called the 'Truce of the Trail,' under which
+travelers along that road are safe from attack."
+
+"Does that there truce," interposed Jud, "take in white men, or is it
+only for redskins?"
+
+"That," returned the professor, "is not certain. Some say yes, some say
+no."
+
+"The question is," murmured Jud, "what do the Mayas say?"
+
+"If we pass the Trail in safety," went on Professor Ditson, "we still
+may expect trouble from Dawson after we get into the Peruvian highlands.
+He has great influence with a band of Indian outlaws who call themselves
+the Miranhas, or Killers, and may persuade them to ambush us in order to
+secure the map."
+
+"I sure am lookin' forward to this pleasure-trip of ours," confided Jud
+to Will.
+
+During the first day along the trail, Will, who was next to Pinto, tried
+to pass away the time by learning a few words of Mundurucu. His first
+lessons in that language, however, were somewhat discouraging, since the
+dialects of the South American Indians contain perhaps more syllables to
+a word than any other language on earth.
+
+"Pinto," he began, "I'll point to things, and you tell me what they are
+in Indian, and keep on saying it over and over until I learn it."
+
+"All right," agreed the Mundurucu.
+
+"Professor Pinto," went on Will solemnly, pointing to his hand, "what's
+that?"
+
+"In-tee-ti-pix-tee-e-toke-kee-kee-tay-gaw," clattered Pinto, in a
+breath.
+
+"Hey, hold up there," said Will. "Try it in low."
+
+Half an hour later found him still working on that single word.
+
+"Whew!" he remarked when he finally had it memorized, "I've heard it
+takes eight years to learn Eskimo. It's liable to take me eighty before
+I can talk Mundurucu. What about this one?" he went on, undiscouraged,
+pointing to a curious tree with a mahogany-red bark--which, if he had
+but known it, was a stranger whose seeds had in some way drifted down
+from much farther north.
+
+"E-lit-ta-pix-tee-e-fa-cho-to-kee-not-e," said Pinto, slowly and
+distinctly.
+
+For fifteen minutes Will wrestled with this new word.
+
+"Do you know what he said?" at last interrupted Professor Ditson, who
+had been listening to the lesson.
+
+"He gave me the name for that tree, didn't he?" returned Will, a little
+peevishly.
+
+"Not at all," said the scientist. "He simply said, 'I don't know.'"
+
+"Not so blame simply, either," murmured Jud, who had also been following
+the lesson.
+
+"Our own language is full of similar mistakes imported from native
+dialects," lectured Professor Ditson. "'Kangaroo' simply means 'I don't
+know' in Bushman; so do 'mosquito' and 'quinine' and 'cockatoo' in
+different Indian languages."
+
+"Well," said Will, "I'm going to pass up Mundurucu. Here I've spent the
+better part of an hour in learning two words--and one of them isn't
+right."
+
+"It's a gift, my boy," said Jud, patronizingly. "As for myself, I once
+learned three Indian languages, Apache, Comanche, an' Sioux, in less
+than a month."
+
+"Indeed!" broke in Professor Ditson, cuttingly. "You surprise me. Won't
+you favor me with a few sentences in Apache?"
+
+"Surely," returned Jud, generously. "Ask me anything you like in
+Apache, an' I'll be glad to answer it in the same language."
+
+The appearance of a small pond ahead put a stop to further adventure in
+linguistics, since Pinto had promised to catch some fish from the next
+water they met. As they came to the shore, suddenly, before Jud's
+astonished eyes, a fish about a foot long thrust its head out of the
+dark water, opened its mouth, and breathed like any mammal. A moment
+later it meowed like a cat, growled like a dog, and then went under.
+
+"I'll never dare tell 'em about this in Cornwall," exclaimed Jud,
+earnestly, as the talented fish disappeared. "They'd think I was
+exaggeratin', an' that's one thing I never do. This trip," he went on
+reflectively, "is liable to make me believe blame near anything."
+
+It was Professor Ditson who told them that the strange fish was a
+lung-fish and was a link between the fishes and the reptiles.
+
+A little later, Pinto, with a length of flexible palm-fiber, noosed a
+garpike, that strange representative of the oldest family of fishes left
+on earth, and another link with the reptiles. Its vertebræ had
+ball-and-socket joints like the spine of a snake, and, unlike any other
+fish, it could move its head independently of its body. Armored scales
+arranged in diagonal rows ran down its back, being fastened to each
+other by a system of hooks, instead of lapping over each other like the
+scales of other fishes. This armor was of such flinty hardness that
+Pinto struck a spark from it with his steel, and actually lighted from
+its own scales the fire on which the fish was cooked.
+
+By this pond grew a great orchid with thirty-one flower-stems, on one
+of which Will counted over a thousand beautiful pearl-and-gold blossoms.
+Near the water, too, were many varieties of tropical birds flaming
+through the trees. Among them were flocks of paraquets colored green and
+blue and red; little honey-creepers with black, purple, and turquoise
+plumage and brilliant scarlet feet; and exquisite tiny tanagers like
+clusters of jewels with their lilac throats, turquoise breasts, topaz
+crowns, and purple-black backs shading into ruby red. These were all
+searching for insects, while among the blossoms whirred dainty little
+humming-birds of the variety known as "wood-stars." Then there were
+blood-red macaws with blue-and-gold wings, and lustrous green-black
+toucans with white throats, red-and-yellow tail-coverts, and huge
+black-and-yellow bills.
+
+For the next few days the treasure-hunters followed the narrow,
+hard-beaten path through stretches of dark jungle and thorny thickets,
+or found themselves skirting lonely lakes hidden in the very heart of
+the virgin forest. Everywhere the Trail was omniously clear and
+hard-trodden. Sometimes they all had that strange knowledge that they
+were being watched, which human beings who live in the open acquire as
+well as the wild folk.
+
+At last there came a day when the supplies had run so low that it
+became necessary for Pinto to do some hunting. Will went with him, and
+together they silently and cautiously followed one of the many little
+paths that at irregular intervals branched off from the main trail. This
+one was so hidden by vines and creepers that it seemed improbable that
+any one had used it for a long period of time. It led the hunters into
+one of the patches of open country sometimes found in the forests of the
+Amazon. This particular one was fringed with great trees and crossed by
+another path nearly parallel to the one they were following.
+
+Near the center of the clearing, Pinto managed to shoot two curassows,
+huge, plump birds which looked and tasted much like turkeys. Leaving
+these with his companion, the Indian pushed on ahead for more. Suddenly
+he reappeared among the trees, and Will noticed as he hurried toward
+him, that his copper-colored face showed gray and drawn, while beads of
+sweat stood out on his forehead. As he joined the boy, Pinto placed his
+finger on his lips with a look of ghastly terror and led Will into the
+deepest part of a near-by thicket. From there, though hidden from sight,
+they had a view through the close-set bushes of the other path.
+Suddenly, from far down that trail, sounded a faint, but regular,
+clicking noise. As it became louder and louder, rising and falling in a
+regular cadence, Pinto slipped like a snake deeper into the long
+jungle-grass.
+
+"Lie still for your life," he whispered in Will's ear, so faintly that
+the boy could scarcely make out the words. Then, in an instant, from out
+of the jungle not twenty feet away there strode along the dim path a
+figure of nightmare horror--that of a tall naked man, with gaunt and
+fleshless arms and legs, great knobs of bone marking his knee and
+elbow-joints. His sunken body was painted black, with every bone
+outlined in a chalky white, so that he seemed a living, walking
+skeleton.
+
+Around the black and wasted neck, wrinkled like that of a mummy, hung a
+long string of small bones which, with a thrill of horror, the boy
+recognized by their nails as those of human fingers. It was these,
+striking together, which made the clicking noise that Will had heard.
+The face of the horror was painted black, except the lips and chin,
+which showed blood-red, while out of the holes at the corners of the
+lower lip protruded curved, gleaming peccary-tusks. These ornaments gave
+an indescribably brutish appearance to the countenance that they
+ornamented, while above them two snaky black eyes with an expression of
+implacable cruelty glittered like crumbs of glass from under overhanging
+brows. Like a specter, the shape disappeared among the shadows; but it
+was followed by another and another and another, until a long procession
+of terrible figures had passed.
+
+As the ill-omened clicking died away in the distance Will sprang to his
+feet.
+
+"No!" hissed the Indian. "Our only chance of life is to lie quiet. That
+is a Maya war-party on a man-hunt!"
+
+"They'll meet the others on the Trail," whispered Will.
+
+"Six men can't do any more against fifty than two," returned Pinto,
+practically. "We'll only throw away our lives and not save theirs."
+
+"Stay if you want," returned the boy; "I'll live or die with them!" and
+he sped back at full speed along the path over which they had come. Just
+before he reached the Trail he looked back--and there was Pinto at his
+shoulder.
+
+"Very foolish," the latter muttered, "but--I come too."
+
+Down the Trail the two hurried, and, rounding a bend, burst in suddenly
+upon the rest of the party lying in the shade of the overhanging trees
+awaiting their return.
+
+"Mayas! Mayas!" gasped Pinto.
+
+As he spoke, far down the Trail from around a curve sounded the faint,
+ominous clicking which the two hunters had heard before.
+
+It was then that the old scientist showed that he deserved the right to
+lead which he claimed.
+
+"Stand still!" he said sternly to Pinto, as the latter seemed inclined
+to bolt down the Trail away from the fatal sound. "Put up your gun!" he
+ordered Jud; "the Truce is our only chance."
+
+Then, with quick, decisive commands, he lined the party up so that no
+part of the body of any one of them extended beyond the surface of the
+Trail, and yet a space was left wide enough to allow any others using
+the path to pass. At the head of the line he placed the two Indians, Joe
+and Pinto, so that the Mayas might note the presence in the party of
+members of their own race.
+
+"Show the peace sign," he snapped sharply to Joe, who led the line.
+"Brace up!" he went on, slapping Pinto sharply on his bare back; "don't
+look so scared. No matter what they do," he said, turning to the rest of
+the company, "don't leave the Trail for a second or make any kind of
+attack on them. They will probably try to make us break the Truce of the
+Trail. If any of us do, we are all lost."
+
+"My peace sign," muttered Jud, grimly, "will be an automatic in one
+hand an' this little toothpick in the other," and he opened the
+five-inch blade of the jack-knife with which he had killed old Three
+Toes, the grizzly, as already chronicled in "The Blue Pearl." "If I'm
+goin' to be eaten," he went on, "there'll be eighteen Mayas that ain't
+goin' to have any appetite for the meal"; and he shifted the single clip
+of cartridges remaining, so that he could feed them into the automatic
+if it came to a last stand.
+
+All further conversation was ended by the appearance of the same
+horrible apparition which had so terrified Pinto a short time before. As
+the gaunt painted skeleton of the first Maya showed against the green
+background, surmounted by the black and blood-red face with the grinning
+tusks and implacable eyes, an involuntary gasp went up from the whole
+waiting party. Jud slipped the safety-catch from his revolver; Pinto's
+face looked as if suddenly powdered with ashes; Will's hands stole to
+the hatchet at his belt; while, down at the end of the line, Hen Pine
+gripped his heavy machete until his great muscles stood out like iron
+bands. Two of the party alone showed no sign of any emotion: Joe, the
+descendant of a long line of proud Chippewa chiefs, disdainfully
+stretched out both empty hands palms up in the peace-sign; while
+Professor Ditson's calm face seemed to show only the mild interest of a
+scientist.
+
+As the leading Maya caught sight of the waiting line, he slowed his
+swift stride and the war-party crept up close and closer. Then came the
+tense moment which would decide whether the Truce was to hold. As the
+grim hunters moved up, there was no sign on the face of any of them of
+any acceptance of the peace which Joe had offered. With short, gliding
+steps, they made a complete circle around the little party, closing up
+until their menacing, fearful faces were less than a foot away and the
+reek of their naked bodies was like the hot taint of jaguars of the
+jungle in the nostrils of the waiting six. In their left hands they
+carried bows and quivers of fiercely fanged arrows gummed with fatal
+venom, while from their belts swung curved, saw-toothed knives and
+short, heavy clubs, the heads of which were studded with alligators'
+teeth.
+
+As the Mayas came closer, the waiting line wavered involuntarily before
+the terrible menace of their hating, hateful faces. The Mundurucu
+especially, although no coward, had been taught from earliest childhood
+to dread these man-eaters, the Mayas. It was Professor Ditson who
+noticed that, in spite of their menacing approach, not a single warrior
+had as yet gripped a weapon.
+
+"Steady, Pinto, steady all," he said calmly, "They're trying to stampede
+us. If one of you leaves the Trail, we're all dead men."
+
+He spoke just in time, for already Pinto was looking longingly toward
+the refuge of the forest, forgetting that the woodcraft of those hunters
+of men was superior even to his own. Perhaps even Professor Ditson's
+voice would not have stopped him if it had not been for a sudden
+happening.
+
+As the leader of the Mayas half-circled around Joe, the latter turned
+to face him, still holding out his arms. The motion flung open his
+flannel shirt, unbuttoned to the waist, and showed, tattooed red on his
+brown skin, the curling, twisted totem-mark of intertwined serpents by
+which Joe had claimed the right of his blood in the lodge of the Great
+Chief during the quest of the Blue Pearl. As the Maya caught sight of
+this sign he stopped in his tracks. Little by little the menace died out
+of his fierce eyes, and, as if drawn by a magnet, he crept in closer and
+closer with outstretched neck, staring at the tattoo marks which wound
+down and around Joe's waist. Then, with a sudden gesture, he swept aside
+the ghastly necklace that he wore. There, outlined against his fleshless
+chest just over his heart, showed a similar emblem--crimson
+inter-twining serpents facing in opposite directions, with gaping mouths
+like those of which the totem-pole was made which towered before the
+lodge of the Great Chief in far-away Akotan. The Maya chief stood
+motionless for a moment. Then he stretched both hands out toward Joe,
+palms up, and stood as if waiting.
+
+"Put your hands in his, boy," hissed Jud, from down the line; "he's
+waitin' for the brotherhood sign."
+
+Without a word, Joe clasped hands with the Maya chief, and for an
+instant the two looked into each other's eyes, the spectral cannibal and
+the lithe son of a French trapper and a Chippewa princess. Then,
+disengaging his right hand, the Maya fumbled at his belt and suddenly
+stretched out toward Joe the supple, beautiful tanned skin of a snake,
+such as but one of the party had ever seen before. It was long and
+narrow and of a flashing golden-yellow, thickly flecked with tiny
+red-brown spots. This he wound around the boy's neck, so that it swung
+gleaming against his gray flannel shirt. Once again with outstretched
+hands the strange figure stood as if waiting, encircled the while by
+fierce, impassive faces with tusks gleaming horribly against blood-red
+jaws, and white painted bodies showing like ghosts against the green of
+the forest.
+
+"Give him your tie," dictated Jud. "Don't you know blood-brothers have
+to exchange presents?"
+
+Joe hesitated. He had a weakness, perhaps inherited from both sides of
+his family, for neckties of the most barbaric colors. The one that he
+was wearing was one of Cornwall's best and brightest, a brilliant
+green-and-purple creation which had cost him a whole dollar at White
+Wilcox's store. To give it up would leave him tieless in a great
+wilderness.
+
+"Hurry!" muttered Professor Ditson, as the Maya chief began to lower his
+outstretched hands.
+
+Thus urged, the boy reluctantly pulled a foot of glimmering silk from
+his neck, and the next instant the most brilliant tie that ever graced
+Mr. Wilcox's emporium was gleaming against the gray-white of a necklace
+of human bones.
+
+The Maya received the enforced present with a grunt of undisguised
+pleasure, and, raising both hands above his head with palms
+outstretched, faced his waiting band and began a crooning song filled
+with strange minor cadences. One by one his men took up the strain, and,
+led by him, filed away from the trail like ghosts going back to their
+graves. As the clicking of their necklaces and the notes of their chant
+sounded faint and fainter and at last died away in the green tangle of
+the jungle, a long sigh of relief came unconsciously from every member
+of the expedition. It was Jud who first broke the silence.
+
+"I've always heard," he said, "that Injuns north, south, east, an' west
+belonged to the four main totems, the Bear, the Wolf, the Snake, an' the
+Eagle, but I never believed it before to-day. That old tattoo-mark,
+boy," he went on, turning to Joe, "certainly came in right handy."
+
+"He gone off with my good tie," returned Joe, sorrowfully.
+
+"And a good job, too, I call it," remarked Will, who had never approved
+his friend's taste in neckwear.
+
+It was the Maya's present which most interested Pinto and Professor
+Ditson. The Mundurucu Indian sidled up close to Joe and stared at the
+glittering skin with all his eyes, but without attempting to touch it.
+
+"It's the sacred snake that in the old days only kings and gods could
+wear," he murmured.
+
+"He's right," said Professor Ditson, raising the gleaming, golden skin
+reverently from Joe's neck. "It's the skin of the Yellow Snake which the
+Aztecs used to wind around the forehead of Atapetl, their terrible
+goddess of war. Only her priests knew where to find these snakes, and it
+was death for any one else even to look at the skin except at the annual
+sacrifices of the goddess. This one," he went on, "will be a
+safe-conduct for the whole party all the way to Peru--and ought to be a
+lesson to you," he continued severely, turning to Jud, "never to speak
+against snakes again."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+THE MAN-EATERS
+
+
+Five days later they came to a great lake which seemed to stretch away
+through the depths of the forest interminably, with the trail following
+its winding shores.
+
+At the first sight of the water shining in the sunlight, Pinto showed
+signs of great uneasiness.
+
+"This must be the Lake of the Man-eaters," he said to Professor Ditson.
+"I have heard the wise men of the tribe speak of it many times. All the
+animals around it are eaters of men. See, perhaps there be some of their
+tracks now!" and he pointed to where there showed in the soft sand what
+looked like the paw-prints of a huge cat.
+
+"Pinto," said the professor, severely, "I'm ashamed of you! The sight
+of those Mayas has made your mind run on man-eaters. Don't you know a
+puma's track when you see them, and don't you know that a puma never
+attacks a man?"
+
+"The perfesser's right for once," chimed in Jud. "That's the track of
+what we call a mountain-lion or panther up north, an' they don't never
+hurt nobody."
+
+Pinto was still unconvinced. "Perhaps they do here," he insisted.
+
+"You come along with me," returned Professor Ditson. "We'll explore this
+lake a bit before dark." And, followed by all of the party except Will
+and Jud, whose turn it was to make camp, he disappeared around a bend in
+the shore.
+
+The two who were left behind soon found a high, sandy bank where they
+cleared a space and started a small fire. Just in front of them was a
+tiny bay, connected with the lake by a narrow channel edged by lines of
+waving ferns, while a little beach of white sand curved away to the
+water in front of the camp-site.
+
+"Here is where Judson Adams, Esquire, takes a bath," suddenly announced
+the old trapper, producing a couple of cakes of tree-soap, which he had
+picked along the trail, and slipping out of his clothes like an eel.
+
+"Pinto said never to go into strange water," warned Will.
+
+"Pooh," said Jud. "He was talkin' about rivers where them murderin'
+catfish an' anacondas hide. This pool ain't ten feet across an' there's
+nothin' in it except a few stray minnies"; and he pointed out to Will a
+little school of short, deep-bodied fish which looked something like the
+sunfish which the boys used to catch along the edges of Cream Hill Pond.
+Otherwise no living creature showed in the clear water, nor could be
+concealed along the bright, pebbly bottom.
+
+"Better not," warned Will again. "This ain't your country, Jud. Pinto
+seemed to know what he was talking about. Let's wait until the professor
+gets back."
+
+"Pinto will never win any Carnegie medals, an' I guess I can take a
+bath without gettin' permission from the perfesser," returned Jud,
+obstinately. "However," he went on, "just to show you that the old man
+never takes any chances, I'll poke a stick around in this pool to drive
+out the devil-fish that may be hidin' here."
+
+Nothing happened as the old man prodded the water with a long branch cut
+from a near-by tree, except that the motion of the stick seemed to
+attract more and more of the chubby fish which he had first seen from
+the outer channel into the pool.
+
+"Gee," remarked Jud, "but those fish are tame! I'll bet if I had a hook
+an' line I could flick out a dozen. Better come in with me, Bill," he
+went on. "I promised your family that I'd see that you boys took plenty
+of baths an' kept your hair brushed all through this trip."
+
+"I'll wait till the boss comes back," said Will, laughingly.
+
+That was enough for Jud.
+
+"I'm my own boss!" he remarked indignantly, and waded in with a cake of
+tree-grown soap clenched tightly in one hand.
+
+His first step took him well above his knees. There was a swirl and a
+flash from the center of the pool, and in an instant the whole surface
+was alive with a furious rush of the short, deep-bodied fish toward Jud.
+As they approached, the old man noticed uneasily their staring,
+malignant eyes, and that they had projecting, gaping lower jaws, thickly
+set with razor-edged, triangular teeth.
+
+Suddenly the whole school were upon him, crowding into the shallow water
+where he stood and snapping at his bare legs like mad dogs. Before he
+could stir, two of them had bitten pieces of flesh out of the calves of
+both of his legs. As the blood from their bites touched the surface of
+the pool, the fish seemed to go entirely mad, snapping their fierce jaws
+frantically and even springing clear of the water, like trout leaping at
+a fly.
+
+If they had not been so numerous that they jostled each other, or if
+Jud had not been quicker than most men twenty years younger, he would
+have been terribly mutilated. As it was, when he finally reached the
+safety of the bank, the water which he had just left boiled and bubbled
+like a caldron, and two of the fish followed him so closely that they
+landed, flapping, snapping, and squealing, far up on the white sand.
+
+When Will approached them, the stranded fish tried to spring at him,
+clicking their jaws with impotent, savage fury. A moment later, as he
+tried to hold one of them down with a stick, it drove its keen
+wedge-shaped teeth clear through the hard wood. When the rest of the
+party came back, they found Jud and Will staring as if fascinated at the
+desperate, raging dwellers of the pool.
+
+"I told you strange water not safe," said Pinto, as Professor Ditson
+skilfully bandaged Jud's legs with a dressing of sphagnum moss and the
+thick red sap of the dragon's-blood tree. "Look," and he showed Will
+that a joint of one of his fingers was missing. "Cannibal-fish more
+dangerous than anaconda or piraiba. They kill tiger and eat up alligator
+if it get wounded. Once," he went on, "white man ride a mule across
+river where these fish live. They bit mule and he threw man off into the
+river. When I got there an hour later only skeleton left of mule. Man's
+clothes lie at bottom of river, but only bones inside. You wait a
+little. I pay them well." And he disappeared into the woods.
+
+Professor Ditson corroborated the Indian.
+
+"They are undoubtedly the fiercest and most dangerous fish that swim,"
+he said. "If the water is disturbed, it arouses them, and the taste or
+smell of blood seems to drive them mad."
+
+By the time Jud was patched up, Pinto came back trailing behind him a
+long length of liana, from either end of which oozed a white liquid.
+This vine he pounded between two stones and threw into the pool. A
+minute later the water was milky from the flowing juice, and before long
+was filled with floating, motionless piranhas stupefied by the poisonous
+sap. Pinto fished out several with a long stick, and breaking their
+necks, wrapped them in balls of blue clay which he found along the
+shore, and, first making air-holes, set them to bake in the hot coals of
+the fire. When at last a smell of roast fish went up from the midst of
+the fire, Pinto pulled each ball out and broke the hard surface with
+light taps of a stick. The skin and scales came off with the clay.
+Opening the fish carefully, he cleaned it, leaving nothing but the
+savory white baked meat, which tasted and looked almost exactly like
+black bass. Jud avenged himself by eating seven.
+
+Toward the end of the afternoon, Professor Amandus Ditson left the rest
+of the party reclining in that state of comfort and satisfaction which
+comes after a good meal. Each day the professor devoted all of his spare
+time toward realizing the greatest ambition of his life, to wit, the
+acquirement of one full-grown, able-bodied bushmaster. To-day armed with
+nothing more dangerous than a long crotched stick, he strolled along the
+trail, leaving it occasionally to search every mound or hillock which
+showed above the flat level of the jungle, since in such places this
+king of the pit-vipers is most apt to be found. Two hundred yards away
+from the camp, the trail took a turn, following the curved shore of the
+great lake, and in a few minutes the scientist was entirely out of sight
+or sound of the rest of the party. At last, finding nothing inland he
+turned his steps toward the lake itself. On some bare spaces showing
+between the trail and the edge of the water, he saw more of the
+puma-tracks like those which Pinto had pointed out earlier in the day.
+Remembering the Indian's fear the scientist smiled as he examined the
+fresh prints of big pads and long claws.
+
+"Harmless as tomcats," he muttered to himself.
+
+A moment later something happened which upset both the professor and
+his theories. As he straightened up, a hundred pounds of puma landed
+upon him. The legend of the lake, as far as pumas were concerned, was
+evidently correct. Harmless to man in other places, here, it seemed, the
+great cat stalked men as if they were deer. This one intended to sink
+the curved claws of her forepaws in the professor's shoulders, and, with
+her teeth at his throat, to rake his body with the terrible downward,
+slashing strokes of the catamount clan. Fortunately for himself, he had
+half-turned at the sound which her sudden spring made among the bushes.
+Instead of catching his throat, the panther's fanged jaws closed on the
+upper part of his left arm, while her forepaws gripped his shoulders,
+which were protected by a khaki coat and flannel shirt. Professor Ditson
+promptly caught the animal's throat with his sinewy right hand and held
+the great beast off at arm's length, thus keeping his body beyond the
+range of the deadly sickle-like hind claws. For a moment the puma's
+luminous gooseberry green eyes stared into his, and he could see the
+soft white of her under parts and the long, tawny tail which is the
+hall-mark of her family. As he sank his steel-strong fingers deeper into
+the great brute's throat, Professor Ditson abandoned all hope of life,
+for no unarmed man can hope to cope successfully with any of the great
+carnivora.
+
+"A dozen zoölogists have lied in print!" he murmured to himself,
+indignantly.
+
+Even as he spoke, he tried to wrench his left arm free. He immediately
+found, however, that it was impossible to pull it straight out from
+between the keen teeth. Sinking his fingers deeper into the puma's
+throat, he squeezed it suddenly with all of his strength. Involuntarily,
+as the wind was shut off from her lungs, the gripping jaws relaxed
+enough to allow the scientist to pull his arm through them for a few
+inches sidewise. Again the puma caught the moving arm, a few inches
+lower down. Again, as the man gripped her throat afresh, she relaxed her
+hold, and he gained an inch or so before the sharp teeth clamped tight
+again. Inch by inch, the professor worked the full length of his arm
+through the fierce jaws which, in spite of the khaki sleeve and thick
+shirt beneath, pierced and crushed terribly the tense muscles of his
+arm.
+
+Throughout the struggle the tawny beast kept up a continual grunting,
+choking snarl, while the man fought in utter silence. At last the whole
+length of the professor's left arm had been dragged through, until only
+his hand itself was in the mouth of the puma. Shoving it down her hot
+gullet, he gripped the base of her tongue so chokingly that the
+struggling panther was unable to close her jaws, and, for the first time
+during the fight, the professor was free from the pain of her piercing
+teeth.
+
+In a desperate struggle to release the grip which was shutting off her
+breath, the puma lurched over and fell full length on her back in the
+loose sand, dragging the man down with her, and the professor found
+himself with his left hand deep in her gullet, his right hand still
+clutching the beast's throat desperately, while his knees, with the
+weight of his body back of them, pressed full against her ribs on each
+side. As they struck the ground he sank his elbows into the armpits of
+the puma beneath him, spreading her front legs and pinning them down, so
+that her frantic claws could reach inward only enough to rip his coat,
+without wounding the flesh beneath. Once on the ground, the panther
+struggled fiercely, pitching and bucking in an effort to release herself
+from the man's weight so that she could be in a position to make use of
+the curved scimitars with which all four of her paws were armed. The
+loose sand shifted and gave her no purchase.
+
+As they fought, Professor Ditson felt his strength leaving him with the
+blood that flowed from his gashed and mangled arm. Raising himself a
+little, he surged down with both knees and felt a rib snap under his
+weight and the struggling body relax a trifle. For the first time he
+dared hope to do what no man had done since the cavemen contended with
+their foes among the beast-folk, and to his surprise noted that he was
+beginning to take a certain grim pleasure in the combat. The fury of the
+fight had pierced through the veneer of education and culture, and
+Professor Amandus Ditson, the holder of degrees from half a dozen
+learned universities, battled for his life that day with a beast of the
+forest with all the desperation and fierce joy which any of his
+prehistoric forebears might have felt a hundred thousand years ago.
+
+It had become a question as to which would give up first--the man or
+the beast. Fighting off the waves of blackness which seemed to surge up
+and up until they threatened to close over his head, he fought
+desperately with clutching hands and driving knees, under which the thin
+ribs of the puma snapped like dry branches, until at last, with a long,
+convulsive shudder, the great cat stopped breathing. Even as he felt the
+tense body relax and become motionless under his grip, the blackness
+closed over his head.
+
+There the rest of the party, alarmed by his long absence, found him an
+hour later. His gaunt body was stretched out on the dead panther and his
+right hand was sunk in the long fur, while his left hand and arm were
+buried to the elbow in the fierce gaping mouth and his bowed knees still
+pinned the great cat down. Around the dead beast and the unconscious man
+sat four black vultures. Thrusting forward from time to time their
+naked, red, hooded heads, they seemed about to begin their feast when
+the rescuing party arrived. With his face hidden in the panther's tawny
+fur, Professor Ditson seemed as dead as the beast that lay beneath him.
+It was not until Hen had pried his fingers away from the puma's throat
+and carefully drawn his gashed hand from the beast's gullet that his
+eyes flickered open and his gaunt chest strained with a long, labored
+breath.
+
+"I was wrong," were his first words. "The _Felis concolor_ does
+occasionally attack man. I'll make a note of it," he went on weakly, "in
+the next edition of my zoölogy."
+
+"I was wrong, too," burst out Jud, pressing close up to the exhausted
+scientist and clasping his uninjured hand in both of his. "I thought you
+were nothin' but a perfesser, but I want to say right here an' now that
+you're a _man_."
+
+The danger, however, was not yet over. The scratches and bites of a
+panther or a jaguar, like those of a lion or tiger, almost invariably
+cause death from blood-poisoning if not immediately treated. Under
+Professor Ditson's half-whispered directions, they stripped off his
+clothes, washed away the blood and dirt with clear water, and then,
+using the little surgical kit which he always wore at his belt, injected
+a solution of iodine into every scratch and tooth-mark.
+
+"It is necessary," said the scientist, gritting his teeth as the
+stinging liquid smarted and burned like fire, "but I do not believe that
+life itself is worth so much suffering."
+
+The rest of the party, however, did not agree with this perhaps hasty
+opinion, and persisted in their treatment until every puncture was
+properly sterilized. Then, bandaged with great handfuls of cool sphagnum
+moss and attended by the faithful Hen Pine, the professor slept the
+clock around. While he was asleep, Will and Pinto slipped away together
+to see if they could not bring back a plump curassow from which to make
+broth for him when he finally woke up; while Jud and Joe, with similar
+good intentions, scoured the jungle for the best-flavored fruits they
+might find.
+
+Will and his companion found the birds scarce although they slipped
+through the jungle like shadows. As they penetrated deeper among the
+trees they were careful to walk so that their shadows fell directly
+behind them, which meant that they were walking in a straight line,
+along which they could return by observing the same precaution. As they
+reached a tiny grove of wild oranges, Will's quick eye caught sight of
+something which gleamed white against the dark trunks, and the two went
+over to investigate. There they saw a grisly sight. Coiled in a perfect
+circle were the bones of an anaconda some fifteen feet in length. Every
+vertebra and rib, and even the small bones of the head and the
+formidable, recurved teeth, were perfect, while in all the great
+skeleton there was not a fragment of flesh nor a scale of the skin
+remaining. Strangest of all, inclosed by the ribs of the snake was the
+crushed skeleton of a large monkey, which likewise had been cleaned and
+polished beyond the skill of any human anatomist or taxidermist. Some
+terrible foe had attacked the great snake while lying helpless and
+torpid after its heavy meal and had literally devoured it alive. The
+face of the Indian was very grave as he looked at the gleaming bones
+before him, and he stared carefully through the adjoining thickets
+before speaking.
+
+"Puma bad man-eater," he said at last; "cannibal-fish worse; but
+anicton most dangerous of all. He eat same as fire eats. He kill jaguar,
+sucurucu, bushmaster, alligator, Indian, white man. He afraid of
+nothing."
+
+"What is the anicton?" inquired Will, frightened in spite of himself.
+
+Even as he spoke, from far beyond in the jungle came a strange, rustling
+whisper which seemed to creep along the ground and pass on and on
+through the woods like the hiss of spreading flames.
+
+"Come," said the Indian, briefly, "I show you." And he led Will farther
+out into the jungle through which the menacing whisper seemed to hurry
+to meet them.
+
+Soon small flocks of plain-colored birds could be seen flying low, with
+excited twitterings, evidently following the course of some unseen
+objects on the ground. Then there came a rustling through the
+underbrush, and, in headlong flight, an army of little animals,
+reptiles, and insects dashed through the jungle. Long brown wood-rats
+scuttled past, tiny jumping-mice leaped through the air, guiding
+themselves with their long tails, while here and there centipedes, small
+snakes, and a multitude of other living creatures sped through the brush
+as if fleeing before a forest fire.
+
+Suddenly, through a corner of the jungle thrust the van of a vast army
+of black ants. Through the woods they moved in lines and regiments and
+divisions, while little companies deployed here and there on each side
+of the main guard. Like a stream of dark lava, the army flowed swiftly
+over the ground. As with human armies, this one was made up of different
+kinds of soldiers, all of whom had different duties to perform. Most
+numerous of all were the eyeless workers, about half an inch in length,
+armed with short, but keen, cutting mandibles. These acted as carriers
+and laborers and reserves, and, although blind, were formidable by
+reason of their numbers. Larger than the workers, measuring a full inch
+in length, were the soldiers, with enormous square heads and mandibles
+pointed and curved like pairs of ice-tongs. These soldiers would drive
+in each mandible alternately until they met in the body of their victim,
+and when they met they held. Even if the body of the ants was torn away,
+the curved clinging jaws still clinched and bit. With the soldiers came
+companies of butchers, whose jaws had serrated teeth which sheared and
+cut through flesh and muscle like steel saws. Besides these, there were
+laborers and reserve soldiers by the million.
+
+Pinto told Will that a large ant-army would take twenty-four hours to
+pass a given point even when traveling at full speed. As they watched
+this army, Will saw an exhibition of what it could do. A large agouti in
+fleeing before them had in some way caught its leg in a tangle of vines
+and, squealing in terror, tried in vain to escape. Before it could
+release itself, the rush of the army was upon it, and it disappeared
+under a black wave of biting, stinging ants, which methodically cut up
+and carried off every fragment of the animal's flesh, and passed on,
+leaving behind only a picked skeleton.
+
+As Will watched this hurrying, resistless multitude, although well
+beyond the path of its advance, he felt a kind of terror, and was
+relieved when the Mundurucu started back for camp.
+
+"Nothing that lives," said Pinto, as they turned toward the trail, "can
+stand against the black army."
+
+The next day Jud and Joe joined in the hunt, leaving Hen to nurse the
+professor. Following a deer trail back from the shore, they came to a
+patch of swampy woods a mile from the lake. There Will discovered a
+mound some five feet high made of rushes, rotting moss, leaves, and
+mold.
+
+"Is that a nest of ants?" he called to the Indian, pointing out to him
+the symmetrical hillock.
+
+Pinto's face lighted up.
+
+"No," he said, "that a nest of eggs. We dig it out, have good supper
+to-night."
+
+"It must be some bird," exclaimed Jud, hurrying up, "to make a nest like
+that. Probably one of them South American ostriches--hey, Pinto?"
+
+"You'll see," was all that the Indian would say as he began to dig into
+the soft, spongy mass. The rest of the party followed his example. By
+the time they had reached the center of the mound, digging with sticks
+and bare hands, the matted, rotting vegetation felt warm to the touch,
+and this heat increased as they approached the base of the nest. Down at
+the very bottom of the mound, arranged in a circle on a bed of moss,
+they found no fewer than twenty-four white eggs as large as those of a
+duck, but round and covered with a tough, parchment-like shell.
+
+Pinto hurriedly pouched them all in a netted game-bag which he had made
+for himself out of palm-fiber.
+
+"Want to see bird that laid those eggs?" he asked Jud.
+
+"I sure would," returned the old trapper. "Any fowl that builds a
+five-foot incubator like that must be worth seein'."
+
+"Rub two eggs together and she come," directed Pinto, holding out his
+bag to Jud.
+
+Following the Indian's suggestion, Jud unsuspectingly rubbed two of the
+eggs against each other. They made a curious, penetrating, grating
+noise, like the squeal of chalk on a blackboard.
+
+Hardly had the sound died away, when from out of a near-by wet thicket
+there came a roaring bellow that shook the very ground they stood on,
+and suddenly the air was filled with the sweet sickly scent of musk. Jud
+turned as if stung by a fire-ant, to see a pair of green eyes glaring at
+him above the jaws of a great alligator which had been lurking in the
+darkness of the jungle. As it lay there like an enormous lizard, the
+dark gray of its armored hide hardly showed against the shadows. On each
+side of the fore part of the upper jaw, two cone-shaped tusks showed
+white as polished ivory, fitting into sockets in the lower jaw. Even as
+Jud looked, the upper jaw of the vast saurian was raised straight up,
+showing the blood-red lining of the mouth gaping open fully three feet.
+Then, with a roar like distant thunder, the great reptile raised its
+body, as big as that of a horse, upon its short, squat legs, and rushed
+through the brush at Jud with a squattering gait, which, however,
+carried it over the ground at a tremendous rate of speed for a creature
+eighteen feet long.
+
+It was Jud's first experience with an alligator, and with a yell he ran
+down the slope like a race-horse. Unfortunately for him, on a straight
+line downhill an alligator can run faster than a man, and this one began
+to overtake him rapidly. As he glanced back, the grinning jaws seemed
+right at his shoulder.
+
+"Dodge him! Dodge him!" yelled Pinto.
+
+At first, Jud paid no attention, but ran straight as a deer will
+sometimes run between the rails to its death before a locomotive when
+one bound to the side would save it. At last, as Will and Joe also began
+to shout the same words over and over again, the idea penetrated Jud's
+bewildered brain and he sprang to one side and doubled on his trail. His
+pursuer, however, specialized in doubling itself. Unable to turn rapidly
+on account of its great length, and seeing its prey escaping, the
+alligator curved its body and the long serrated tail swung over the
+ground like a scythe. The extreme end of it caught Jud just above the
+ankles and swept him off his feet, standing him on his head in a
+thorn-bush from which he was rescued by Pinto and Will, who had followed
+close behind. The alligator made no further attempt at pursuit, but
+quickly disappeared in the depths of a marshy thicket.
+
+"Whew!" said Jud, exhausted, sitting down on a fallen log and mopping
+his steaming face. "That was certainly a funny joke, Mr. Pinto. About
+one more of those an' you won't go any further on this trip. You'll stay
+right here--underground."
+
+The Mundurucu was very apologetic, explaining that he had not intended
+to do anything worse than startle the old man, while Will and Joe
+interceded for him.
+
+"He only wanted to see you run," said the latter, slyly. "Nobody can run
+like Jud when he's scared."
+
+"No, boy," objected the old trapper, "I wasn't exactly scared. Startled
+is the right word. It would startle anybody to have a monstrophalus
+alligator rush out of nowhere an' try to swallow him."
+
+"Certainly it would," agreed Will, gravely. "Anybody could see that you
+weren't scared, you looked so noble when you ran."
+
+Peace thus being restored, the whole party returned to camp, where that
+night Professor Ditson, who was feeling better, gave a long discourse on
+the difference between crocodiles, alligators, and caymans.
+
+"If that had been a crocodile," he explained "you wouldn't be here now.
+There's one species found in South America, and it's far faster than any
+alligator. Look out for it."
+
+"I most certainly will," murmured Jud.
+
+That night at supper, Pinto proceeded to roast in the hot coals the
+whole clutch of alligator eggs except the two which Jud had dropped in
+his excitement. For the first time in a long life, the old trapper
+refused the food set before him.
+
+"I've et monkeys an' dragons an' cannibal-fish without a murmur," he
+said, "but I draw the line at alligator's eggs. They may taste all
+right, but when I think of their dear old mother an' how she took to me,
+I'm just sentimental enough to pass 'em up."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+THE PIT
+
+
+For several days the treasure-hunters made their camp near the shores of
+the great lake, waiting for the slow healing of Professor Ditson's
+wounds. Here and there, through open spaces in the forest, they could
+see the summits of mountain-ranges towering away in the distance, and
+realized that the long journey through the jungle was nearly over.
+Beyond the lake the trail stretched away along the slopes of the
+foot-hills, with plateaus and high pampas on one side and the steaming
+depths of the jungle on the other.
+
+One morning Professor Ditson felt so much better that Hen Pine, who had
+been acting as his special nurse, decided to start on an expedition
+after fresh vegetables. Shouldering his ax and beckoning to Joe, for
+whom the giant black had a great liking, the two struck off from the
+trail beyond the lake into the heart of the jungle. Before long they saw
+in the distance the beautiful plume-like foliage of a cabbage-palm
+outlined against the sky. A full seventy feet from the ground, the
+umbrella-like mass of leaves hung from the slim, steel-like column of
+the tapering trunk, buttressed by clumps of straight, tough roots, which
+formed a solid support to the stem of the tree extending up ten feet
+from the ground. It took a solid hour of chopping before the palm fell.
+When at last it struck the earth, Hen cut out from the heart of the
+tree's crown a back-load of tender green leaves folded in buds, which
+made a delicious salad when eaten raw and tasted like asparagus when
+boiled.
+
+As they turned back, Joe saw something move in a near-by tree. Looking
+more closely, he noticed a crevice in the trunk, across which was
+stretched a dense white web. Behind this crouched a huge spider. Covered
+with coarse gray and reddish hairs, its ten legs had an expanse of fully
+seven inches. The lower part of the web was broken, and in it were
+entangled two small birds about the size of a field-sparrow. One of them
+was dead, but the other still moved feebly under the body of the
+monster. Picking up a long stick, Joe started to rescue the fluttering
+little captive.
+
+"Look out!" shouted Hen, who was some distance away. "That's a
+crab-spider and mighty dangerous."
+
+Paying no attention to the other's warning, Joe with one sweep of his
+stick smashed the web and, just missing the spider, freed the dying
+bird, so that it fell to the ground. As he whirled his stick back for
+another blow, the terrible arachnid sprang like a tiger through the air,
+landing on the upper part of Joe's bare left arm, and, with its red eyes
+gleaming, was about to sink its curved envenomed mandibles deep in the
+boy's flesh. Only the instinctive quickness of Joe's muscles, tensed and
+trained by many a danger, saved him. With a snap of his stick he dashed
+the spider into the underbrush.
+
+"Did he get you?" shouted Hen, anxiously.
+
+"I think not," said Joe.
+
+"You'd most certainly know it if he did," returned the great negro,
+examining the boy's arm closely. Although it was covered with loose
+reddish hairs from the monster, there was no sign of any wound.
+
+"That was a close call, boy," said Hen, carefully blowing the hairs off
+Joe's skin. "You am goin' to be mighty discomfortable from dese ere
+hairs; but if he'd done bit you, you might have died."
+
+Hen was a true prophet. Some of the short, hard hairs became fixed in
+the fine creases of Joe's skin and caused an almost maddening itching
+which lasted for several days.
+
+The next day, for the first time since his meeting with the puma,
+Professor Amandus Ditson tried walking again. His left arm was still
+badly swollen and inflamed and his stiffened and bruised muscles gave
+him intense pain when he moved, but, in spite of Hen's protests, he
+insisted upon limping a mile or so down the trail and back.
+
+"If a man gives in to his body," he remarked impatiently, when Hen
+remonstrated with him, "he will never get anything done."
+
+The second day he walked still farther, and the third day, accompanied
+by the faithful Hen, who followed him like a shadow, he covered several
+miles, exploring a path that ran through the jungle parallel with the
+trail.
+
+"Some one's been along here lately, Boss," said Hen, pointing out
+freshly broken twigs and marks in the earth.
+
+"Probably the same hunting-party that we met before," returned the
+professor, indifferently. "They won't--" He broke off his sentence at
+the sound of a little sick, wailing cry, which seemed to come from the
+thick jungle close at hand.
+
+"What's that?" said Hen, sharply, raising his heavy machete.
+
+Without answering, the scientist turned off the trail and, raising the
+bushes, exposed the emaciated body of a little Indian girl about four
+years old. A tiny slit in the side of each nostril showed her to be a
+member of the Araras, a friendly tribe of forest Indians akin to the
+Mundurucus, to whom Pinto belonged. As she looked up at Professor
+Ditson, her sunken face broke into a smile.
+
+"White man!" she whispered, in the Arara dialect which both Professor
+Ditson and Pinto understood. Then, pointing to herself with fingers so
+wasted that they looked like birds' claws, she whispered her own name,
+"Ala," the Indian name for those gentle, beautiful little birds which
+Europeans have christened "wood-stars."
+
+The stern face of the scientist softened to an expression that even Hen
+had never seen there before. In spite of his injured arm, it was
+Professor Ditson who lifted up the little girl and carried her back to
+the camp. There the rest of the party found them when they returned with
+one of the plump curassows which Pinto generally managed to bring back
+from every hunt. From this, Hen Pine hurriedly made hot, nourishing
+broth, with which the professor slowly fed the starved child until she
+dropped off to sleep, holding tightly to one of his long gaunt fingers.
+Several hours later the little girl woke up, seeming at first much
+stronger, and at once began to talk in a little voice faint as the chirp
+of a distant cricket. From her half-whispered sentences the professor
+learned that her father and mother had both been killed in a foray of
+the Muras. Not many months after their death, Ala herself had fallen
+sick of one of the forest fevers so fatal to Indian children, and had
+been abandoned by the tribe.
+
+In spite of her starved condition, Ala was an attractive child. Instead
+of the usual shallow, shiny black eyes of Indian children, hers were big
+and brown and fringed with long lashes, and when she smiled it was as if
+an inner light shone through her wan, pinched little face.
+
+At once she became the pet of the whole party, and although she, in
+turn, liked them all, it was Professor Ditson who always held first
+place in her heart. If he were long away from her, she would call
+plaintively, "_Cariwa! Cariwa!_" the Arara word for white man. Sometimes
+she would sing, in her tiny voice, folk-songs which she had learned from
+her mother, all about the wonderful deeds and doings of armadillos,
+agoutis, and other South American animals.
+
+Before long, however, in spite of careful nursing, she began to sink
+rapidly. Then came days when she sang no more, but lay too weak even to
+taste the fruits which the boys were always bringing in to her from the
+forest. At last one night Professor Ditson, who always slept close
+beside her, heard a little far-away voice whisper in his ear, "White
+man, dear, dear white man!" and felt the touch of her hand against his
+cheek. A moment later, under the light of the setting moon, he saw that
+Ala had gone where there is no more sickness nor pain and where little
+children are safe forever.
+
+Later on, when the rest of the party roused themselves before sunrise
+for another day, they found the scientist sitting grim and impassive in
+the star-shine, still holding the tiny cold hand of the little Indian
+girl in his. When old Jud found that clenched tightly in Ala's other
+hand was the shell of a tree-snail, all white and pink and gold, which
+he had given her days before, the old man broke down and sobbed as he
+looked at the peaceful little figure.
+
+Under the light of Achenar, Canopus, and the other eternal stars which
+flared through the blackness of the tropical night, they buried her deep
+at the foot of a vast paradise tree which had towered above the forest
+hundreds of years before the first white man ever came to South America
+and whose mighty girth will be standing when the last Indian of that
+continent has passed to his forgotten fathers. As Professor Ditson
+repeated over the little grave what part he could remember of the
+Service for the Dead, from the heart of the jungle sounded the deep,
+coughing roar of a jaguar as it wandered restless through the night.
+
+The next day camp was broken and once more the party followed the trail
+through the forest. At first the gloom and grief of the little Indian
+girl's death hung over them all. Then, little by little, the healing of
+the forest began to be felt. The vast waiting trees, the bird-songs, the
+still beauty of the flowers all seemed to bring to them the joy and hope
+and faith which is the portion of wanderers among the solitudes and
+silences of earth.
+
+The trail still ran, a dividing line between the steaming jungle on one
+side and the plateaus and foot-hills on the other. Behind the latter
+towered range after range of mighty mountains, among whose chill heights
+were hidden forgotten Inca cities and the lost treasure-lake of
+Eldorado. On the mountain side of the trail the trees were set farther
+apart and belonged to families from the temperate zone, while here and
+there were small parks covered with short grass, with bare, treeless
+slopes beyond.
+
+It was in such a country, after several days to travel, that Pinto,
+Jud, and the two boys started on a hunt, while the others made camp.
+They had been out less than an hour when the sharp eyes of the old
+trapper spied two strange animals feeding in an open space hedged in by
+thickets. They had long, banded tails, which clanked and rattled as they
+moved. Moreover, they wore armored hides, set with square plates of bone
+and ringed around the middle with nine horny bands, while big pricked-up
+ears, like those of the rabbit, and long sheep eyes made them appear to
+the old trapper as among the strangest animals he had ever met.
+
+"Armadillos," whispered Pinto, delightedly, as he too caught sight of
+them. "Spread out and we'll catch 'em both. Better 'n roast pig to eat."
+
+In a minute the four hunters had made a wide circle around the unwary
+animals. It was not until they were close to them that the pair took
+alarm. Stopping their feeding, they suddenly squatted with their fore
+legs off the ground, much as a woodchuck might do. Instead of curling up
+like porcupines and trusting to their armor for protection, as Jud had
+expected them to do, they suddenly dropped on all fours and rushed and
+rattled down the slope toward the old trapper, like two small armored
+tanks, almost as fast as a rabbit would run. Jud was as much surprised
+as if he had seen a tortoise start to sprint. Going like race-horses,
+they bore down upon the old man.
+
+"Hi! hi! stop! shoo!" bellowed Jud, waving both his arms over his head.
+"What'll I do to stop 'em?"
+
+"Trip 'em up," volunteered Will, from where he stood.
+
+"Catch 'em by the tail!" yelled Joe. "Don't let 'em scare you."
+
+In another minute they were upon him. Dodging his outstreched hands,
+their wedge-shaped heads plunged between his legs. Jud's feet flew up,
+and he sat down with a startling bump, while, rushing and clanking
+through the bushes, both of the armadillos disappeared in the depths of
+the thicket. The old man rose slowly and felt himself all over.
+
+"I'd just as soon try to stop a racing automobile with my two hands as
+to head off a scared armadillo," he observed indignantly. "They got no
+right to run that way. Their business is to curl up an' be caught."
+
+"Never mind, Jud," said Will, comfortingly; "you had the right idea, but
+you tackled 'em a mite too high."
+
+That day, as they rested after lunch, Will wandered up toward the
+mountains, as usual studying his beloved birds. Along the pampas-like
+stretches of the plateaus and up among the hills, he found the bird life
+very different from what it was in the jungle. It was Pinto who taught
+him the bassoon notes of the crested screamer, changing at times to the
+long roll of a drum, and pointed out to him "John o' the mud-puddles,"
+the South American oven-bird, which, unlike the northern bird of the
+same name, builds a mud nest a foot or more in diameter, strengthened
+with hair and weighing several pounds. The birds mate for life, and have
+a quaint habit of singing duets while standing facing each other. Then
+there was another bird which Pinto called the "fire-wood gatherer,"
+which built great nests of sticks in trees, dropping a wheelbarrow load
+of twigs under each nest. Of all the new birds, the boy liked the one
+called the "little cock" the best. These were ground-birds some nine
+inches long, with little tails that stuck straight upward, and bristling
+crests on their heads. Looking like small bantam roosters, they scurried
+around through the brush, following the travelers inquisitively and
+giving every now and then a loud, deep chirp. Whenever Will would chase
+one, it would scurry off, chirping with alarm, but always returned and
+followed him through the grass and brush.
+
+As the days went by, Professor Ditson became more and more uneasy, and,
+when camp was pitched, overtaxed his unrestored strength by hunting
+through dark nooks in the jungle and peering and prying among tangles of
+fallen trees or the rare ledges of rock which showed now and then among
+the waves of green. At last he told the rest of the party the cause of
+his anxiety.
+
+"In a few days more," he said, "we shall begin to climb the foot-hills
+of Peru. Under my contract with Mr. Donegan, we were to collect a
+bushmaster before we began the search for emeralds. So I would suggest
+that we make our camp here and scatter out through the jungle until one
+of us is fortunate enough to discover a specimen of this rare and
+beautiful serpent. Let me beg of you, however," he continued earnestly,
+"to use the utmost care in catching a bushmaster. They are easily
+injured."
+
+Jud's face was a study. "I will," he promised. "I'll bet there isn't any
+one on the continent of South America who will use more care than me."
+
+The next day the first hunt began. Armed with long, forked sticks, the
+six adventurers poked their way painstakingly through the thickest parts
+of the jungle, but without any success so far as bushmasters were
+concerned, although Pinto aroused a fine specimen of a boa-constrictor,
+one of the smaller boas of South America, which flowed through the
+forest like a dark shimmering stream, while Jud scared up another
+hideous iguana, it being a disputed question as to which ran away the
+faster.
+
+Toward the end of the afternoon Will found himself some distance from
+the others, following what seemed a little game trail, which zigzagged
+back and forth through the jungle. At one point it led between two great
+trees, and there Will caught sight of a blaze on either side of the
+path. As he stepped forward to examine the marks more carefully, a
+dreadful thing happened. The ground under his feet suddenly sank away
+without a sound, and the next moment he found himself at the bottom of a
+jug-shaped pit some fifteen feet deep, whose sides curved in so sharply
+that not even a monkey, much less a man, could climb out. The opening
+had been covered over with the stretched skins of animals, stitched
+together and cunningly hidden under turf and leaves.
+
+Although shaken and half-stunned by his sudden fall, the soft earth
+floor of the trap saved him from any serious injury. Far above he could
+see the light streaming in through the irregular hole which his weight
+had made in the covering which masked the pit. All too late Will
+realized that the blazes on the sides of the game path had been warnings
+for human beings to avoid the pitfall which they marked. The neck of the
+great earthen bottle was some five feet in width, but at the base it
+widened into a space fully double that distance across. As the boy's
+eyes became accustomed to the half-light below, he found that he could
+see the sides and the bottom of the pit more and more clearly, and,
+scrambling to his feet, he started to explore its full circumference.
+
+At the first step came a sound which no man born of woman has to hear
+more than once in order to stand stone-still--a fierce, thick hiss.
+Stopping dead in his tracks, Will moved slowly back until he was
+pressing hard against the earthen wall behind him. Even as he stopped,
+from the half-darkness before him, with a dry clashing of scales, glided
+into the center of the pit, with sure, deadly swiftness, the
+pinkish-yellow and black-banded coils of a twelve-foot serpent. From its
+eyes, with their strange oval pupils, a dark streak stretched to the
+angles of the mouth from which a long, forked tongue played like a black
+flame. As the fierce head crested the triple row of many-colored coils,
+Will saw the curious hole between eye and nostril, the hall-mark of a
+deadly clan, and knew that before him was the king of all the
+pit-vipers--the dreaded bushmaster.
+
+He stared into the lidless, fatal eyes of the snake, as they shone
+evilly through the dusk until it seemed as if his heart would stop
+beating and icy drops stood on his forehead, for he knew from talks had
+with Professor Ditson that bushmasters possess a most uncertain temper,
+and he feared that this one might instantly attack him. Once he tried to
+move to a point farther along the circumference of the earthen circle.
+At the first stir of his cramped muscles, the great snake hissed again
+and quivered as if about to strike. Will settled despairingly back,
+resolved to move no more; yet ever his thoughts kept running forward to
+the long, dark hours which were to come, when he would be alone through
+the night with this terrible companion. Then if, overcome by sleep or
+cramp, he should move, he feared horribly to be stricken down in the
+dark by the coiled death that watched him.
+
+Suddenly, as he set himself against making the least stir of a muscle,
+he heard from the jungle through the broken covering of the trap, the
+same far-reaching whisper of death which had sounded when he was hunting
+with Pinto. A moment later, with staring eyes, he saw a black stream
+move sibilantly down the opposite wall of the pit, and realized that the
+blind black ants of the jungle were upon him--and that there was no
+escape.
+
+Slowly the head of the moving column approached the bottom of the pit,
+and Will remembered in sick horror how the ants had torn away shred
+after shred of living flesh from the tortured body of the agouti. As the
+insatiable, inexorable mass rolled toward him, the bushmaster seemed
+either to hear or scent its approach. Instantly its tense coils relaxed,
+and it hurried around and around three sides of the pit, lashing upward
+against the perpendicular walls in a vain attempt to escape. In its
+paroxysm of terror, it came so close to the motionless boy that its
+rough, sharp scales rippled against his legs. Only when the van of the
+ant-army actually reached the floor of the pit and began to encircle its
+whole circumference did the great serpent seem to remember Will's
+presence. Then, as if entreating the help of a human being, it forced
+itself back of him, and, as the ants came nearer, even wound its way
+around Will's waist in an attempt to escape.
+
+For a moment the fearful head towered level with the boy's face.
+Instinctively, Will's hand flashed out and caught the bushmaster by the
+neck. It made no attempt to strike, nor even struggled under the boy's
+choking grip; only the coiled body vibrated as if trembling at the
+approach of the deadly horde. For a moment the advance of the ant-army
+seemed to stop, but it was only because, in accordance with its tactics,
+the head of the column began to spread out until the base of the pit was
+a solid mass of moving ants and the black tide lapped at Will's very
+feet. Half-turning, and placing his ankles instead of his heels against
+the sides of the wall, the boy gained a few inches on the rising pool of
+death that stretched out before him, while the straining body of the
+bushmaster vibrated like a tuning-fork.
+
+By this time, the opposite wall of the pit was covered and the whole
+circle of the base of the cone-shaped pit black and moving, except the
+little arc where Will stood. The ants were so close that he could see
+the monster heads of the leaders, and the pit was full of the whisper of
+their moving bodies flowing forward. Will shut his eyes and every muscle
+of his tense body quivered as if already feeling their ripping, shearing
+mandibles in his flesh.
+
+Just as the front line of the fatal legion touched his shoes, something
+struck him on the head, and he opened his eyes to see a liana dangling
+in front of him, while the light at the entrance of the pit was blurred
+by old Jud's head and shoulders. With his free hand, Will reached
+forward and seized the long vine, to find it ending in a bowline-knot
+whose noose never gives.
+
+"Slip it under your arms," called down the old trapper, hoarsely, "an'
+hang on! We'll pull you up."
+
+It was the work of only a second to carry out the old man's
+instructions. Thrusting the loop over his head and under his arms, the
+boy gripped the tough vine with his left hand and tightened his clutch
+around the unresisting body of the great bushmaster.
+
+"I won't leave you behind for those black devils," he murmured, as if
+the snake understood, and tugged at the liana rope as a signal that he
+was ready to start. In an instant he was hauled aloft, just as the ants
+swarmed over the space where he had stood. Fending himself off from the
+slanting walls with his feet, Will went up with a rush and through the
+opening at the top almost as fast as he had entered it. Close to the
+rope stood old Jud, with face chalky-white as he watched the army of
+ants pouring down into the pit, while Hen, Joe, and Pinto, and even
+Professor Ditson, hauled with all their might on the vine.
+
+Jud had become uneasy at Will's long absence and had tracked him to the
+entrance of the trap just as the army-ants reached it. His shouts had
+brought the rest, and it was Hen Pine who, with his machete, had cut the
+supple liana and knotted the noose which had reached Will just in time.
+Directed by Jud, his rescuers hauled on the vine so vigorously that the
+boy shot out of the pit and was dragged several yards along the ground
+before they knew that he was safe.
+
+Jud hurried to help him up, but promptly did a most creditable
+performance in the standing-back broad-jump.
+
+"Bring your machete here, quick!" he shouted to Hen; "a bushmaster's got
+the kid!"
+
+"No," corrected Will, scrambling to his feet with some difficulty and
+waving off Hen with his unoccupied hand, "the kid's got a bushmaster."
+
+Professor Amandus Ditson was delighted to his heart's core.
+
+"That is the finest specimen of the _Lachesis mutus_," he remarked, as
+he unwound the rough coils from Will's waist, "that has ever been
+reported. Whatever happens now," he went on, relieving Will of his
+burden, "the trip is an unqualified success."
+
+"The man's easily satisfied," murmured Jud, watching from a safe
+distance the professor grip the snake by the back of its neck and push
+it foot by foot into a long snake-bag which he always carried for
+possible specimens. When at last the bag, filled with snake, was tied
+tightly, it looked much like a long, knobby Christmas-stocking. The
+professor swung it carelessly over his shoulder like a blanket-roll.
+
+"No snake ever bites through cloth," he remarked reassuringly. "Now for
+the Inca Emerald!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+SKY BRIDGE
+
+
+At the end of their next day's journey the Trail began to swing away
+from the jungle, and thereafter led ever upward, skirting the foot-hills
+of the mountain-ranges beyond which lay the lost cities of the Incas.
+Three days after Will's escape from the pit he found himself once more
+in terrible danger. During the siesta period at noon he had walked away
+from the rest of the party to see what new birds he might find. Not far
+from the camping-spot he came to a place where a colony of crested
+black-and-gold orioles had built long, hanging nests of moss and fiber
+among the branches of a low tree.
+
+Curious to see whether their eggs looked like the scrawled and spotted
+ones of the Northern orioles, Will started to climb the tree. Before he
+was half-way to the nests, a cloud of clamoring birds were flying around
+his head, and as he looked up he noticed for the first time, directly
+above him, a great gray wasps' nest. Even as he looked, one of the
+circling birds brushed against it, and a cloud of enormous red wasps
+poured out. They paid no attention whatever to the birds, but flew down
+toward Will, who was already scrambling out of the tree at full speed.
+
+Even as he reached the ground, two of the wasps settled on his bare arm,
+and instantly he felt as if he had been stabbed by red-hot daggers.
+Never in his life had the boy known such agony. Trembling with pain, he
+brushed the fierce insects off and rushed at top speed toward the camp.
+In spite of the heat, a racking chill seized him as he ran. His teeth
+chattered together and waves of nausea seemed to run over his whole
+body, dimming his eyes and making his head swim He just managed to reach
+the rest of the party when he staggered and fell.
+
+"I've been stung by some big red hornets," he murmured, and dropped
+back unconscious.
+
+"It's the maribundi wasp," said Professor Ditson, looking very grave as
+he helped Hen undress the boy and sponge his tortured body with cold
+water. "Three of their stings have been known to kill a man."
+
+By evening Will was delirious. All night long Hen and the scientist
+worked over him, and by the next day he was out of danger, although
+still in great pain and very weak. It was several days before he could
+walk, and then only with the greatest difficulty. At first every step
+was an agony; but Professor Ditson assured him that regular exercise was
+the best way to free his system from the effect of the maribundi venom.
+
+Once again death which had dogged the adventurers' trail for so long
+peered out at them. They had finished the first stage of their day's
+walk, and Will was lying white and sick under a tree, trying to gain
+strength enough to go on. Ahead of them stretched a wide river, with a
+ford showing, down to which the Trail led. Suddenly from the depths of
+the near-by jungle came a horrid scream, followed by a chorus of baying
+notes something between the barking of a dog and the howl of a wolf. As
+the travelers sprang to their feet, a shower of blood-red arrows, with
+saw-edged points and barbs fashioned from flinty strips of palm-wood,
+dropped all around them. Again the wailing, terrible cry broke the
+silence.
+
+"It's the jaguar-scream--the war-cry of the Miranhas," said Professor
+Ditson quietly. "They are on our trail with one of their packs of wild
+dogs."
+
+Even as he spoke, from the forest far below them a band of Indians broke
+into the open. Ahead of them raced a pack of tawny brown dogs nearly as
+large as the timber-wolves of the North.
+
+Hen unsheathed his great machete, while Jud fumbled with the holster of
+his automatic.
+
+"No! no!" said Professor Ditson sharply. "We can stand them off better
+across the river. Hurry!"
+
+Without a word, Hen picked up Will's limp body and raced ahead of the
+others around a bend in the trail which hid them all for a moment from
+the sight of their pursuers. At the river the scientist suddenly halted,
+after a long look at the rapids which ran deep and swift on each side of
+the ford.
+
+"Don't splash as you go through," he said quietly. "I'll come last."
+
+One by one, the little party, headed by Hen with Will in his arms,
+waded carefully through the shallow water. As they went Jud thought that
+he caught glimpses in the river of the squat, fierce forms of the
+dreaded piranhas, but if they were there they paid no attention to the
+men, who crossed with the utmost care. Just as Professor Ditson, the
+last of the party to leave the bank, stepped into the stream, there
+sounded with startling distinctness the same wild chorus which had come
+from the jungle. Once or twice in a life-time a hunter in South American
+forests hears the fearsome screech which a jaguar gives when it is
+fighting for its life or its mate. It was this never-to-be-forgotten
+sound which the Miranhas had adopted for their war-cry.
+
+Down the slope not three hundred yards away came the hunting pack. Right
+behind them, running nearly as fast as they, raced a band of some fifty
+Miranhas warriors. As the fugitives looked back it was not the nearness
+of the wild-beast pack nor the fierce band of Indian warriors rushing
+down upon them which struck the color from the faces of Will and Joe. It
+was the towering figure of a man with a black bar of joined eyebrows
+across his forehead and a scar on his cheek which twisted his face into
+a fixed, malignant grin.
+
+"Scar Dawson!" muttered Will.
+
+"Scar Dawson!" echoed Joe, despairingly.
+
+As they spoke the outlaw seemed to recognize them too, for he waved
+aloft a Miranha bow which he carried, and shouted hoarsely. By the time
+they reached the other bank, Will lay half-fainting in Hen's arms.
+
+"Fellows," he whispered, "I'm all in. Hide me in the bushes here, and
+you go on. There's no sense in all of you sacrificing yourselves for
+me."
+
+"We stay," murmured Joe, while Hen nodded his head and Pinto fitted one
+of his fatal little arrows into his blow-gun.
+
+"Sure, we'll stay," chimed in Jud, unslinging his automatic, "an'
+there's seven Injuns who'll stay too unless I've forgotten how to shoot.
+But what in the world's the perfesser doin'?" he went on, peering out
+over the river.
+
+Unheeding the tumult of howls and screeches behind him, or the rush of
+the fierce hounds and fiercer men toward him, the eminent scientist was
+picking his way carefully through the ford. At the middle of the river,
+where the water ran deepest, he rolled up his left sleeve, and with his
+hunting-knife unconcernedly made a shallow gash through the skin of his
+lean, muscular forearm. As the blood followed the blade he let it drip
+into the running water, moving forward at the same time with long, swift
+strides. Almost in a moment the river below the ford began to bubble and
+boil with the same rush of the fatal hordes which had so horrified Jud
+and Will at the Lake of the Man-eaters. As Professor Ditson sprang from
+the water to the edge of the farther bank, the water clear across the
+river seemed alive with piranhas. Unmoved, he turned to the rest of the
+party.
+
+"That ford is locked," he said precisely. "For three hours it can not be
+crossed by man or beast."
+
+Even as he spoke, the wild-dog pack splashed into the river. As they
+reached the deeper water and began to swim, the flash of hundreds of
+yellow-and-white fish showed ahead of them. In an instant the water
+bubbled like a caldron gleaming with myriads of razor-edged teeth. There
+was a chorus of dreadful howls as, one by one, the fierce dogs of the
+jungle sank below the surface, stripped skeletons almost before their
+bodies reached the bottom of the river. From the farther bank came a
+chorus of wailing cries as the war-party watched the fate of their
+man-hunting pack. Then, as if at some signal, the whole band threw
+themselves on their backs on the ground. Only the towering figure of the
+giant outlaw remained erect.
+
+"What's happened to those chaps?" queried Jud, much perplexed. "I've
+been with Injuns nigh on to forty year, but I never see a war-party act
+that way."
+
+As he spoke, Professor Ditson reached the summit of the slope where the
+rest of the party were standing, and saw the prostrate band on the other
+side of the river.
+
+"Hurry out of here!" he said sharply, racing around a bend in the trail,
+followed by the others.
+
+Their retreat was none too soon. Even as they started, each of the men
+of their far-away pursuers braced both his feet expertly against the
+inside horn of his bow, and fitting a five-foot arrow on the string,
+pulled with all the leverage of arms and legs combined, until each arrow
+was drawn nearly to its barbed point. There was a deep, vibrating twang
+that could be heard clearly across the river, and into the sky shot a
+flight of roving shafts. Up and up they went until they disappeared from
+sight, only to come whizzing down again from a seemingly empty sky, with
+such force and accuracy that they buried themselves deep into the ground
+just where the fugitives had been a minute before.
+
+Jud, who had lingered behind the others, had a narrow escape from being
+struck by one of the long shafts.
+
+"We'd have all looked like porcupines if we'd stayed there thirty
+seconds longer," he remarked to Joe, as he joined the rest of the party.
+"Them Miranhas are sure the dandy shots with a bow."
+
+"Huh!" returned Joe jealously, "that nothing. My uncle out in Akotan,
+where I come from, he kill a man with an arrow half a mile away, and no
+use his feet either."
+
+"That uncle of yours was some performer with a bow," returned Jud
+cautiously. "Half a mile is good shootin' even with a rifle."
+
+"Some performer is right," chimed in Will weakly. "I learned long ago,
+when Joe and I were up by Wizard Pond, that that uncle of his held a
+world record in everything."
+
+"Set me down, Hen," he went on. "I think I can do a mile or so on my own
+legs."
+
+"From here on Pinto and I have been over this route," announced
+Professor Ditson. "Ten miles farther on is 'Sky Bridge.' If we can cross
+that and cut it behind us, we're safe."
+
+Two by two, the members of the party took turns in helping Will along
+the Trail, which soon widened into a stone-paved road.
+
+"This is one of the Inca highways," explained the scientist. "It leads
+from their first city clear to the edge of the jungle. Once," he went
+on, "the Incas ruled an empire of over a million square miles, equal to
+the whole United States east of the Mississippi River; but they never
+were able to conquer the jungle."
+
+The road sloped up more and more steeply, and the going became
+increasingly difficult, but Professor Ditson hurried them on
+remorselessly.
+
+"The Miranhas never give up a chase," he said, "and if they have
+succeeded in crossing the river above or below the ford, they may even
+now be hard on our heels."
+
+Before long they were in a wilderness of bare, stern peaks whose
+snow-covered summits towered high against the horizon. At times the road
+zigzagged along narrow shelves cut in the faces of precipices and
+guarded here and there by low retaining-walls built of cut stones laid
+without mortar, but so perfectly that the blade of a knife could not be
+thrust between them. The air became colder, and the scientist told them
+that often the temperature in these mountain-valleys would vary as much
+as one hundred degrees within twenty-four hours.
+
+As they approached the crest of a great ridge which towered above them,
+Jud began to find great difficulty in breathing and complained of nausea
+and a feeling of suffocation.
+
+"It's the _soroche_, the mountain-sickness," explained Professor Ditson.
+"It will pass soon."
+
+"I'm the one that's goin' to pass--pass out," panted Jud.
+
+Soon he became so exhausted that, like Will, he had to be half-carried
+along the trail.
+
+"You an' me are a fine pair to fight Injuns," he whispered to the boy,
+who smiled wanly in reply.
+
+Beyond the ridge the road ran downward toward a vast gorge. From its
+dark depths rose and fell at intervals the hoarse, roaring bellow of a
+river rushing among the rocks a thousand feet below.
+
+"It is Apurinac, the Great Speaker," said Pinto.
+
+As the trail led downward again, Jud began to feel better, and before
+long he was able to walk without any help.
+
+At length, far below them, looking like a white thread against the
+threatening blackness of the cañon, they saw swinging in the wind a rude
+suspension bridge of the kind which travelers had used in these
+mountains ever since the days of the Incas. When Pinto, who knew the
+bridge well, learned that Professor Ditson intended to cross it at once,
+he was much disturbed.
+
+"No one, Master," he protested, "ever crosses it except at dawn before
+the wind comes up; nor should more than one at a time pass over it."
+
+"To-day," returned the scientist grimly, "you are going to see six men
+cross this bridge in the middle of the afternoon, wind or no wind; and
+what's more, they are all going to cross together." And he waved his
+hand toward the road along which they had come.
+
+Against the white side of the mountain which the trail skirted showed a
+series of moving black dots, while down the wind, faint and far away,
+came the tiger-scream of the Miranhas. They had found a way across the
+river, and once more were hard on the heels of the treasure-hunters.
+
+Along the Inca road the little party hurried at breakneck speed. At one
+place it ran between a vertical wall of rock and a dizzy precipice.
+Farther on it led down by rude stairs partly cut in the rock and partly
+built out of stones. At one point it made a sudden turn with a low
+parapet built around it in a semicircle to keep descending travelers
+from slipping off into the depths below from their own momentum. Once
+beyond this last danger-point, the fugitives found themselves before Sky
+Bridge itself.
+
+So deep was the cañon that from the river a thousand feet below the
+bridge seemed on a level with the clouds and to deserve well its name.
+It was made of two thick cables, woven out of braided withes, which
+stretched nearly a hundred yards from bank to bank of the gorge. Between
+and below these ran several smaller cables, fastened to the upper two,
+which served as guard-rails. Sections of cane and bamboo laid
+transversely across the three lower cables, and tied on by strips of
+rawhide, formed the flooring, which swung four or five feet below the
+upper cables.
+
+From far below came the stern roar of the Speaker, and at the bottom of
+the sunless gulf gleamed the white foam of the river as it raged against
+masses of rent and splintered stone. Over the abyss the bridge waved
+back and forth in the gusts which all day long swept through the gorge.
+At times, when the frail structure caught the full force of the wind, it
+swung fully ten feet out beyond its center, hung a second, and then
+dropped back with a jar that threatened to snap the cables or hurl into
+the abyss any human being who was crossing the bridge.
+
+Not for all the treasure of the Incas would any one of the party have
+risked the crossing. The fear of death, however, is a great incentive to
+brave deeds.
+
+"I'll go first," said Professor Ditson suddenly, "and see if it is
+possible to get over. Unless we cross this bridge within the next
+fifteen minutes, we're all dead men."
+
+[Illustration: It showed itself as the great condor of the Andes, the
+second largest bird that flies]
+
+Without further speaking, the scientist stepped out upon the swaying
+bridge and gripped the twisted cables firmly fixed in buttresses of
+stone. At first he shuffled along with short, cautious steps. In front
+of him the footway of bamboo strips sloped away sharply clear down to
+the swaying center of the bridge. From far below, up through the mists
+which half hid the river, soared a bird the size of a pigeon. As it
+circled up through a thousand feet of space, it seemed to grow and grow
+until, by the time it reached the level of the bridge, rocking on mighty
+motionless wings, it showed itself as the great condor of the Andes, the
+second largest bird that flies. From its grim, naked head its cold eyes
+gazed evilly upon the man clinging to the swaying bridge, and then
+turned toward the little group huddled against the side of the
+precipice, as if counting them as additions to its larder of death. As
+the great vulture swept by, blotting out a stretch of sky as it passed,
+the wind hissed and sang through the quills of its enormous wings, taut
+and stiff as steel. Rocking, swaying, perfectly balanced in the rush of
+air that howled down the cañon, the bird circled over the bridge, and
+then, without a flap of its vast wings, dipped down into the depths
+below until, dwindling as it went, it disappeared in the spray of the
+prisoned river. To the travelers, no other sight could so have plumbed
+the depths that lay beneath the bridge. For a moment the scientist, sick
+and giddy, clung to the swaying cables which seemed to stretch tenuous
+as cobwebs across the sheer blackness of the abyss.
+
+"Come back, Master," called Pinto. "No man can cross that bridge!"
+
+"No man here will live who doesn't cross this bridge," returned the
+professor, as the wind brought again to their ears the war-cry of the
+Miranhas.
+
+Bending double and clinging desperately to the ropes woven from tough
+maguey fiber, he edged his way down the swaying slope, while the others
+watched him as if fascinated. At times the full force of the wind as it
+was sucked through the long cañon swung the bridge out so far that he
+had to lie flat and cling for his very life's sake. When, at last, he
+reached the lowest part of the curve, instead of climbing up to the
+safety of the opposite shore, the scientist deliberately turned around
+and, taking advantage of every lull and pause in the sudden gusts which
+bore down upon him, began the long steep, slippery climb back to the
+point from which he had started.
+
+"He's riskin' his life twice to show us the way," said old Jud,
+suddenly. "Come on! I'm more ashamed to stay than I'm scared to cross."
+
+Foot by foot, clinging desperately to the sagging, straining cables,
+Professor Ditson fought his way back. When at last he regained the
+safety of the cliff-side, his face was white and drawn, and he was
+dripping with sweat, while his hands were bleeding from the chafing of
+the ropes; but there was a compelling gleam in his eyes, and his voice,
+when he spoke, was as precise and level as ever.
+
+"I have proved that it is perfectly possible to go over this bridge in
+safety, and I believe that the cables are strong enough to hold the
+weight of us all," he said. "I will go first; Hen will go last. Don't
+look down. Hang on. Watch the man ahead, keep on going, and we'll get
+over--just in time."
+
+He stretched his gaunt arm toward the trail, where now the Miranha band
+was in plain sight not half a mile away!
+
+Again he turned and started out over the bridge, which swayed and swung
+above the death that roared far below. Without a word, but with teeth
+clinched grimly, Jud tottered after him, his long gray beard blowing in
+the wind. Next came Pinto, shaking with fright, but with a habit of
+obedience to his master stronger than his own conviction that he was
+going to his doom. Joe followed; and between him and Hen, who brought up
+the rear, was Will. As the full force of the wind struck the swinging
+structure, now loaded with their united weight, the taut cables and
+ropes creaked and groaned ominously, while now and again some weakened
+fiber would snap with a sudden report like a pistol-shot.
+
+Down and down the first terrible incline crept the little train of
+desperate men. There were times when the bridge would swing so far out
+that only by clinging and clawing desperately at the guard-rope could
+the travelers keep from being tipped into the depths below. When that
+happened, each would grip the one next to him and, with linked arms and
+legs, they would make a human chain which gave and swung and held like
+the bridge itself. At last they reached the low-swung center of the
+bridge, and caught the full force of the wind, which howled down the
+gorge like a wolf. For a long minute they lay flat on their faces as the
+bridge swung forth and back like a pendulum.
+
+As the gust passed, they heard close at hand the tiger-screech of the
+Miranhas rushing at headlong speed down the trail as they saw their prey
+once again escaping. Up the farther slope, crouching low and gripping
+desperately with twining hands and feet, the fugitives pressed on foot
+by foot. At the worst places Will felt Hen's mighty arms holding him
+tight to the swinging ropes, while from ahead Joe risked his life time
+and again to stretch out a helping hand to his friend.
+
+By inches, by feet, by yards, they wormed their way up, until Professor
+Ditson was able to get a firm foothold on the side of the cliff, where a
+narrow path had been cut in the living rock. Even as he struggled to his
+feet, the war-party dashed around the sharp curve that led to the
+entrance of the bridge.
+
+With all their courage and relentless vindictiveness, the Miranha band
+yet hesitated to cross where the white men had gone. As Jud and Pinto
+joined Professor Ditson on the little platform of rock which towered
+above the cañon, they saw their pursuers actually turn their heads away
+from the deep that opened at their feet, after one glance along the
+narrow swaying bridge by which alone it could be crossed. Then, with a
+fierce yell, they dropped their bows and, whipping out long,
+narrow-bladed knives from their belts, fell like furies upon the tough
+woven cables anchored among the rocks. It was Jud who first realized
+that they were trying to cut the bridge.
+
+"Hurry for your life!" he called down to Joe, who, holding on to Will
+with one hand, was slowly hauling himself up the last few feet of the
+steep ascent. Even as he spoke, the taut cables began to quiver and sing
+like violin-strings transmitting with fatal clearness every cut and
+slash and chop of the destroyers at the other end. Will was
+half-fainting with the strain of the crossing, which his weakened body
+was not fitted to endure long. Jud's shout seemed to pierce the mist of
+unconsciousness which was slowly closing over his head, and he struggled
+upward with all his might.
+
+In another minute Joe was near enough to be reached by the party on the
+landing, and three pairs of sinewy arms gripped him and pulled him
+upward, clinging to Will as he rose. Below him, Hen, bracing both feet,
+heaved the boy upward with the full force of his mighty arms. Just as
+Will reached the refuge of the cliff, with an ominous snapping noise the
+bridge began to sag and drop. Hen gave a desperate spring and wound one
+arm around a little pinnacle of rock which stood as a hawser-post for
+one of the cables, while Pinto and Joe gripped his other arm in mid-air,
+and pulled him to safety just as the far end of the bridge swished
+through the air under the knife-strokes of the Indians!
+
+As, doubled by its drop, the full weight of the structure fell upon the
+strained cables, they snapped like threads and cables, ropes and footway
+rushed down into the abyss with a hissing roar which died away in the
+dim depths a thousand feet below.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+THE LOST CITY
+
+
+Hardly had the rumble of the falling bridge passed when Jud slipped his
+arm about Will's shoulders and half-led half-dragged the fainting boy
+around the corner of a great rock.
+
+"Those yellin' devils shoot too straight for us to take any chances," he
+remarked briefly.
+
+The same idea had come to the rest of the party, and they followed hard
+on the old trapper's heels. Here Professor Ditson again took the lead.
+
+"It'll take them some time to get across that river, now the bridge is
+down, if they follow us," he observed with much satisfaction. "We ought
+to reach Machu Pichu to-day and Yuca Valley in two days more. There
+we'll be safe."
+
+"What's Machu Pichu, Chief?" questioned Jud, using this title of
+respect for the first time; for the professor's behavior at the bridge
+had made an abiding impression on the old man's mind. "It was the first
+city that the people of the Incas built," explained Professor Ditson.
+
+"When the Inca clan first led their followers into these mountain
+valleys, they were attacked by the forest-dwellers and driven back into
+the mountains. There they built an impregnable city called Machu Pichu.
+From there they spread out until they ruled half the continent. Only the
+forests and the wild tribes that infested them they never conquered. At
+the height of the Inca Empire," went on the scientist, "Machu Pichu
+became a sacred city inhabited mostly by the priests. After the Spanish
+Conquest it was lost for centuries to white men until I discovered it a
+few years ago."
+
+"Where do we go from Yuca?" questioned Jud again.
+
+"Follow the map to Eldorado," returned the Professor, striding along
+the path like an ostrich.
+
+Beyond the rock, and out of sight of the cañon, gaped the mouth of a
+tunnel fully three hundred yards in length. Narrow slits had been
+chiseled through the face of the precipice for light and air, and
+although cut out of the living rock with only tools of hardened bronze
+by the subjects or captives of forgotten Incas, it ran as straight and
+true as the tunnels of to-day drilled by modern machinery under the
+supervision of skilled engineers. Through the slits the adventurers
+caught glimpses of the towering peak down which they had come, but there
+was no sign of their pursuers. In a moment they had vanished from the
+naked rock-face against which they had swarmed.
+
+Joe stared long through one of the window-slits, while below sounded the
+hoarse, sullen voice of the hidden river.
+
+"I not like their going so soon," he confided at last to Jud. "Perhaps
+that Dawson have another secret way down the mountain, as he did at
+Wizard Pond."
+
+"It's not likely," returned Professor Ditson, who had overheard him.
+"At any rate, the only thing to do is to press on as fast as possible."
+
+"Why didn't my snake-skin make us safe from those people?" inquired Joe,
+as they hurried along.
+
+"Because," explained the scientist, "the Miranhas are an outlaw tribe
+who have no religion and keep no faith. Nothing is sacred to them."
+
+Beyond the tunnel a wide pavemented road led around the rear of the
+mountain and then up and up and in and out among a wilderness of peaks,
+plateaus, cliffs, and precipices.
+
+In spite of the well-paved path along which in the old days the Incas
+had sent many an expedition down into the Amazon Valley, the progress of
+the party was slow. Will became rapidly weaker and for long stretches
+had to be helped, and even carried along the more difficult parts of the
+path.
+
+Hour after hour went by. Once they stopped to eat and rest, but their
+tireless leader hurried them on.
+
+"We're not safe on this side of Machu Pichu," he said.
+
+Will pulled himself to his feet.
+
+"I'm the one who's keeping you all back," he said weakly. "From now on I
+walk on my own legs!" And, in spite of the others' protests, he did so,
+forcing his numbed nerve-centers to act by sheer strength of will.
+Toward the middle of the afternoon the path turned an elbow of rock, and
+in front of them towered a chaos of grim and lonely peaks, spiring above
+cañons and gorges which seemed to stretch down to the very bowels of the
+earth. In the background were range after range of snow-capped
+mountains, white as the clouds banked above them, while in front showed
+a nicked knife-edge of dark rock. The professor's face lightened as he
+looked.
+
+"On that ridge," he said, stretching out his arm, "lies the Lost City!"
+
+The path led downward until, although it was early afternoon, it became
+dim twilight in the depths of dark cañons, and then, twisting like a
+snake, came back to the heights, skirting the edges of appalling
+precipices in a series of spirals. As the way reached the summit of the
+ridge it became narrower and narrower, and at intervals above it stood
+stone watch-towers on whose ramparts were arranged rows of great
+boulders with which the sentinels of the Incas could have swept an
+invading army down to destruction in a moment. The path ended at last in
+a flight of steps cut out of the solid rock, with a wall on each side,
+and so narrow that not more than two could walk up them abreast. It was
+past sunset when the little party reached the last step and stood on the
+summit of the windswept ridge. In the east the full moon was rising
+above the mountains and flooded the heights with light white as melting
+snow.
+
+Before them stretched the city of Machu Pichu, its shadows showing in
+the moonlight like pools of spilled ink. Lost, lonely, deserted by men
+for half a thousand years, the great city had been the birth-place of
+the Incas, who ruled mightily an empire larger than that which Babylon
+or Nineveh or Egypt held in their prime. In its day it had been one of
+the most impregnable cities of the world. Flanked by sheer precipices,
+it was reached only by two narrow paths enfiladed by watch-towers,
+eyries, and batteries of boulders. To-night the terraces were solitary
+and the strange houses of stone and vast rock-built temples empty and
+forsaken.
+
+In the moonlight this gray birth-place of an empire lay before the
+travelers from another age, silent as sleep, and, as they passed through
+its deserted streets, the professor told them in a half-whisper
+thousand-year-old legends which he had heard from Indian guides. At the
+far side stood the great watch-tower Sacsahuaman, guarding the other
+path, which spiraled its way up the slope of a sheer precipice half a
+mile high.
+
+"The Inca who built that," said the professor, "gave the tower its name.
+It means 'Friend of the Falcon,' for the Inca boasted that the hawks
+would feed full on the shattered bodies of any foe who tried to climb
+its guarded heights."
+
+On the summit of a sacred hill he showed them a square post carved out
+of the top of a huge rock whose upper surface had been smoothed and
+squared so that the stone pillar made a sun-dial which gave the time to
+the whole city. Near by lay Sayacusca, the "Tired Stone," a vast
+monolith weighing a thousand tons, which was being dragged to the summit
+by twenty thousand men when it stuck. As the carriers struggled to move
+its vast bulk, it suddenly turned over and crushed three hundred of
+them. Convinced that they had offended some of the gods, the stone was
+left where it fell, and the skeletons of its victims are beneath it to
+this day.
+
+High above the rest of the city was the sacred Sun Rock. From it the sun
+itself was believed to rise, nor might it be touched by the foot of
+bird, beast, or man. At the height of the Inca Empire it was plated all
+over with gold, which the Peruvians believed fell to the earth as the
+tears of the sun, and with emeralds and, except during the Festival of
+the Sun, covered with a golden-yellow veil. To-day its glory had
+departed, and the tired travelers saw before them only a frayed and
+weather-worn mass of red sandstone.
+
+Seated on its summit, the scientist showed them the street where,
+during the Festival of the Sun, the Inca would ride along a pavement
+made of ingots of silver on a horse whose mane was strung with pearls
+and whose shoes were of gold. Beyond the Sun Rock was the Snake Temple,
+which had three windows and whose solid stone walls were pierced with
+narrow holes through which the sacred snakes entered to be fed by the
+priests.
+
+"We might camp there," suggested Professor Ditson. "It would make a
+large, comfortable house."
+
+"No, no," objected Jud shudderingly. "No snake temple for me."
+
+They finally compromised on Sacsahuaman, whose thick walls were slit
+here and there by narrow peep-holes and whose only entrance was by a
+narrow staircase of rock cut out of the cliff and guarded, like most of
+the entrance staircases, by rows of heavy boulders arranged along the
+ledge. Inside were long benches of solid stone, and, best of all, at the
+base of a white rock in the center of the tower trickled an ice-cold
+spring whose water ran through a little trough in the rock as it had run
+for a thousand years. Professor Ditson told them that in the old days it
+had always been kept guarded and munitioned as a fortress where the
+Incas could make a last stand if by any chance the rest of the city
+should ever fall into the hands of their enemies.
+
+That night they kindled a fire within the tower, and ate their supper
+high above the sacred city on the battlements where the guards of the
+Incas had feasted a thousand years before Columbus discovered the New
+World. Afterward they slept, taking turns in guarding the two entrances
+to the city from the same watch-towers where other sentries had watched
+in the days of the beginning of the Inca Empire.
+
+The next morning Will could not move. The stress and strain and exertion
+of the day before had left him too weak to throw off the numbing effect
+of the virus. Professor Ditson shook his head as he looked him over
+carefully.
+
+"There is only one thing to do," he said at last. "We must send on
+ahead and get a horse or a burro for him. He has walked too much as it
+is. Any more such strain might leave him paralyzed for life. Hen," he
+went on, "you know the trail to Yuca. Take Joe and start at once. You
+ought to run across a band of vaqueros herding cattle long before you
+get to the valley. Bring the whole troop back with you. I'll pay them,
+well, and they can convoy us in case the Miranhas are still after us."
+
+A few minutes later Hen and Joe were on their way. Leaning over the
+parapet of Sacsahuaman, the rest of the party watched them wind their
+way slowly down the precipice until they disappeared along the trail
+that stretched away through the depths of the cañon. All the rest of
+that day Jud and Pinto and the professor took turns in standing guard
+over the two entrances to the city, and in rubbing Will's legs and
+giving him alternate baths of hot and cold water, the recognized
+treatment for stings of the maribundi wasp.
+
+That night it was Jud's turn to guard the staircase up which the party
+had come. Once, just before daybreak, he thought he heard far below him
+the rattle and clink of rolling stones. He strained his eyes through the
+dark, but could see nothing, nor did he hear any further sounds. In
+order, however, to discourage any night prowlers, the old trapper
+dropped one of the round boulders that had been placed in the
+watch-tower for just such a purpose, and it went rolling and crashing
+down the path.
+
+Daylight showed the trail stretching away below him apparently empty and
+untrodden since they had used it when entering the city. Tired of
+waiting for Professor Ditson, Jud hurried up the steep slope to the
+fortress, meeting the scientist on the way to relieve him. The old
+trapper was just congratulating Will on being well enough to stand on
+his feet when a shout for help brought all three with a rush to the
+entrance of the tower. Up the steep slope they saw Professor Ditson
+running like a race-horse, while behind him showed the giant figure of
+Dawson, followed closely by half a hundred Miranhas. In another minute
+Professor Ditson was among them.
+
+"They must have hidden during the night around a bend in the path and
+rushed up when we changed guards," he panted. "They were swarming into
+the tower just as I got there."
+
+All further talk was stopped by the same dreadful tumult of war-cries
+that the travelers had learned to know so well.
+
+"Steady, boys," said Jud, instantly taking command, as a veteran of many
+Indian fights. "Four against fifty is big odds, but we've got a strong
+position. Will, you sit by the staircase an' if any one starts to come
+up, roll one of them fifty-pound boulders down on him, with my
+compliments. I'll stay back here where I can watch the whole wall an'
+pick off any one that tries to climb up. Professor, you an' Pinto keep
+back of me, with your ax an' knife handy in case any of them get past
+me. Now," he went on, as the three took their stations, "how about some
+breakfast?"
+
+After the first fierce chorus of yells there was a sudden silence. Led
+by Dawson, the Indians were far too crafty to attempt a direct charge up
+through the narrow gateway. The roofless walls, no longer raftered by
+heavy timbers, as in the Inca's day, were the weak spot in the defense
+of the besieged. If enough of the Miranhas succeeded in scaling them in
+spite of Jud's markmanship, the defenders of the fort could be
+overpowered by sheer weight of numbers. While the little party of the
+besieged were eating breakfast at their several stations, they could
+hear the sound of heavy objects being dragged across the paved street
+without, and the clink and jar of stone against the wall. Always,
+however, the besiegers kept themselves carefully out of the range of
+vision from the tower's narrow loop-holes. At noon Jud insisted that
+Pinto cook and serve dinner as usual.
+
+"Eat hearty, boys," the old Indian-fighter said. "You may never have
+another chance. I dope it out they're pilin' rocks against the walls
+an' when they've got 'em high enough they'll rush us."
+
+It was the middle of the afternoon before Jud's prophecy was fulfilled.
+For some time there had been no sign nor sound from the besiegers. Then
+suddenly, from six different and widely separated points in the
+semicircle of stone, hideous heads suddenly showed over the edge of the
+wall, and, with the tiger-scream of their tribe, five picked Miranha
+warriors started to scramble over and leap down upon the little party
+below, while at the end of the curved line showed the scarred, twisted
+face and implacable eyes of the outlaw from the North.
+
+It was then that the wiry little gray-bearded trapper showed the skill
+and coolness that had made his name famous throughout a score of tribal
+wars which had flickered and flared through the Far Northwest during his
+trapping days. Standing lithe and loose, he swung his automatic from his
+hip in a half-circle and fired three shots so quickly that the echo of
+one blended with the beginning of the next. Hard upon the last report
+came the pop of Pinto's deadly blow-gun. Three of the besiegers toppled
+over dead or wounded, and with a dreadful shout Scar Dawson clawed
+frantically at his shoulder where a keen thorn of death from Pinto's
+tube had lodged. The other two Indians scrambled down in terror, and
+there came a chorus of appalling screams, wails, and yells from the
+other side of the thick wall.
+
+[Illustration: Hideous heads suddenly showed over the edge of the wall]
+
+"I could have got 'em all," remarked Jud cheerfully, polishing his
+smoking automatic on his sleeve, "but I've only got four cartridges left
+an' we're likely to need 'em later. Will," he went on, "you just step
+over to the watch-tower there an' see if there 're any signs of Hen an'
+Joe. A few South American cow-boys would come in mighty handy just about
+now."
+
+"If they don't come before night," stated Professor Ditson calmly,
+"we're gone. The Miranhas are certain to rush us as soon as it gets
+dark."
+
+Even as he spoke, there came from outside a wail, swelling to a shriek
+like the unearthly scream of a wounded horse, yet with a note of triumph
+and anticipation running through it. Pinto started and shivered, while
+Professor Ditson's face showed grim and set.
+
+"You'll have to get us first," he muttered.
+
+"What do they mean by that little song?" inquired Jud coolly.
+
+"It's the hag-cry that the women raise before they torture the
+prisoners," returned the other. "They think they're sure of us as soon
+as the sun goes down."
+
+Will returned just in time to catch the last words.
+
+"There's no one in sight," he said. "Couldn't we slip off ourselves down
+the cliff?" he went on.
+
+"Not a chance," explained the scientist. "They'd roll boulders down on
+us."
+
+"Is there any way of holding them off after dark?" went on Will, after a
+little pause--and had his answer in the pitying silence of the two older
+men.
+
+For a moment he turned very white. Then he set his teeth and threw back
+his shoulders.
+
+"I'm only a kid," he said, "but I've been in tight places before. You
+needn't be afraid to talk plain."
+
+"If they get over when it's too dark to shoot straight," said Jud at
+last, "we 're all in."
+
+Will looked at him unflinchingly.
+
+"Watch the stairs," he said suddenly. "I've an idea." And the boy
+hurried back to the little parapet that overhung the trail that ran a
+thousand feet below.
+
+Beyond and above him, the rim of the setting sun was coming nearer and
+nearer to the snow-capped mountains that cut the sky-line of the west.
+Already their white crests were gleaming crimson in the dimming light.
+As he went, Will fumbled in his belt and pulled out a tiny round
+pocket-mirror, which, with a tooth-brush, a comb, and a few other light
+articles, he had carried all through the trip in a rubber pocket
+fastened to his belt.
+
+During these happenings, miles away, concealed by the intervening range,
+Hen and Joe were riding at the head of a troop of hard-bitten,
+hard-faced vaqueros, the cow-boys of the South, whom they had met at the
+end of their first day's journey. Armed with Mauser rifles, and with
+revolvers and knives in their belts, these riders of the pampas backed
+their wiry little South American horses with the same ease which their
+brethren of the Northern prairies showed.
+
+The leader of the troop had turned out to be an old friend of Professor
+Ditson, who had been with him on an expedition years before. He readily
+agreed to journey with Joe and Hen over the mountains to the Lost City.
+The men had been rounding up half a dozen hardy, tiny burros, those
+diminutive donkeys which can carry their own weight of freight all day
+long up and down steep mountain trails. It was decided to take these
+along for the use of the travelers. With the obstinacy of their breed,
+however, there was never a time throughout the day when one or more and
+sometimes all of the burros were not balking at this long trip away from
+the ranch where food and rest were awaiting them. Accordingly, it was
+late in the afternoon when the party reached the range behind which was
+hidden Machu Pichu.
+
+Suddenly Joe, who with Hen, mounted on spare horses, was piloting the
+little troop, caught sight of a flicker of light across the crest of the
+highest peak of the range ahead of them. At first he thought that it
+came from the rays of the setting sun reflected from a bit of polished
+quartz. Suddenly he noticed, with a sudden plunge of his heart, that the
+light was flickering in spaced, irregular intervals. With Will and
+several of the other boys of his patrol, Joe had won a merit badge for
+signaling in his Boy Scout troop, and his tenacious Indian mind had
+learned forever the Morse code. As he watched now he saw the sun-rays
+flash the fatal S O S. Again and again came the same flashes, carrying
+the same silent appeal, which he knew could come from none other than
+Will behind the range, heliographing with the last of the sun to the
+chum who had stood back of him in many a desperate pinch.
+
+As Joe glanced at the setting sun he realized how short a time was left
+in which to save his friends. With an inarticulate cry, he turned to
+Hen, who was jogging lazily beside him, and in a few quick words told
+him what he had read in the sky. With a shout Hen gave the alarm to the
+troop behind in the rolling Spanish of the pampas, and in an instant,
+hobbling the burros, every man was spurring his horse desperately up the
+steep trail. With the very last rays of the disappearing sun the message
+changed, and the Indian boy sobbed in his throat as he read the words.
+
+"Good-by, dear old Joe," flickered in the sky.
+
+As the golden rim of the sun rolled beneath the horizon, Will strained
+his eyes desperately, hoping against hope to see a rescue-party appear
+against the trail which showed like a white thread against the
+mountain-side. Suddenly, in the dimming light, he saw a few black dots
+moving against the crest of the opposite mountain. They increased in
+number, and, once over the ridge, grew larger and larger until Will
+could plainly make out a far-away troop of riders and glimpse the rush
+of straining horses and the stress and hurry of grim-faced men. With a
+shout he leaned far out over the parapet until in the distance the
+drumming beat of galloping hoofs sounded loud and louder.
+
+Ten minutes later a long line of men with rifles in their hands were
+hurrying up the steep path that led to Sacsahuaman.
+
+The besieged were not the only ones who knew of their coming. Outside
+of the walls of the fort, the Miranha band had understood Will's shout
+when he first saw the distant horsemen. They too had heard the
+hoofbeats, which sounded louder and nearer every minute, and, although
+the path up the precipice could be seen only from the fort, yet from
+without the besiegers could hear the clink of steel against the rocks
+and the murmur of the voices of the climbing men. Just before the
+rescue-party reached the fort, Jud's quick ear caught the sound of
+muttered commands, the quick patter of feet, and through a loop-hole he
+saw a black band hurrying toward the other entrance to the city,
+carrying with them the bodies of their dead and wounded comrades.
+
+Even as he looked there was a shout, and into the little fortress burst
+the rescue-party, headed by Hen, and Joe. In another minute they swarmed
+through the streets of the city; but the enemy was gone. At the foot of
+the other path the last of them were even then slipping into the
+darkening valley.
+
+Of all the band, alive or dead, one only had been left behind. Just
+outside the thick wall of the fort lay a huge motionless form. As Jud
+and Professor Ditson approached it they recognized Scar Dawson, deserted
+by the men whom he had so recently led. As they came close they saw that
+he lay helpless. Only his staring eyes were fixed upon them with an
+expression of awful appeal; yet there seemed to be no wound any where on
+his great body. As they bent over him, Pinto pointed silently to a tiny
+red spot showing at the front of the outlaw's right shoulder--the mark
+made by one of the Indian's fatal little arrows. Jud stared sternly down
+at the helpless man.
+
+"You've only got what was comin' to you," he said. "You'd have tortured
+every one of us to death if you could," he went on but there was an
+uncertain note in his voice. "He's a bad actor if ever there was one,"
+he blustered, turning to the others. "Still, though, I'd hate to see any
+man die without tryin' to help him," he finished weakly.
+
+"He deserves death if any man ever did," said Professor Ditson grimly;
+"yet it does not seem right to let a man die without help."
+
+"Yes," chimed in Will, looking down at the dying man pityingly; "do save
+him if you can."
+
+The professor hesitated.
+
+"Well," he said at last, "I can and I will; but I am not at all sure
+that I ought."
+
+Beckoning to one of the vaqueros, he took from his pouch a handful of
+the brown salt that is part of the equipment of every South American
+cattle-man. Reaching down, he forced open the stiffening jaws of the
+outlaw and pressed between them a mass of salt until Dawson's mouth was
+completely filled with it.
+
+"Swallow that as fast as you can," he commanded.
+
+Even as he spoke, the muscles of the man's great body relaxed as little
+by little the antidote for the urari poison began to work. Fifteen
+minutes later, tottering and white, but out of danger, the outlaw stood
+before them.
+
+"I have saved your life," said Professor Ditson, "and I hope that you
+will make some better use of it than you have done. Your friends went
+down that way," he continued precisely, pointing to the path along which
+the Indians had retreated. "I would suggest that you follow them."
+
+The outlaw stared scowlingly for a moment at the ring of armed men who
+stood around him. Then he turned to Professor Ditson.
+
+"For saving my life I'll give you a tip which may save yours," he said
+thickly. "Don't treasure-hunt in Eldorado--_it's guarded_!" Without
+another word he disappeared down the steep trail.
+
+"I hope I haven't made a mistake," murmured Professor Ditson to
+himself, as he watched Scar Dawson disappear in the distance.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+ELDORADO
+
+
+A day and a night on burro-back brought the treasure-seekers through the
+mountains to Yuca, the loveliest valley in the world, where nine
+thousand feet above the sea it is always spring. There, half a thousand
+years ago, the Incas built their country houses, as of old the kings of
+Israel built in the mountain-valley of Jezreel, and among the ruins of
+stone buildings, beautiful as Ahab's house of ivory, several hundred
+whites and half-breed Indians had made their homes. In Yuca Professor
+Ditson found many old friends and acquaintances, and the party rested
+there for a week and, thanks to Jim Donegan's generous letter of credit,
+which had survived the shipwreck, thoroughly equipped themselves for the
+last lap of the dash to Eldorado.
+
+One morning, before the dawn of what felt like a mid-May day, the
+expedition headed back along the trail mounted on mules, the best and
+surest-footed animals for mountain work. In order to prevent any
+unwelcome followers, the professor allowed it to be supposed that they
+were going back for a further exploration of the sacred city of Machu
+Pichu. When at last they were clear of the valley, with no one in sight,
+he called a halt, and carefully consulted his map at a point where the
+trail led in and out among slopes and hillocks of wind-driven sand.
+
+"Here is where we turn off," he said finally.
+
+Jud suddenly produced two large, supple ox-hides which he had carried
+rolled up back of his saddle.
+
+"So long as we're goin' treasure-huntin'," he remarked "an' Scar Dawson
+is still above ground, I calculate to tangle our trail before we start."
+
+Under his direction, the whole party rode on for a mile farther, and
+then doubled back and turned off at right angles from the trail, Jud
+spreading rawhides for each mule to step on. Their progress was slow,
+but at the end of half a mile they were out of sight of the original
+trail and had left no tracks behind except hollows in the sand, which
+the wind through the day would cover and level.
+
+For the next three days Professor Ditson guided them by the map among a
+tangle of wild mountains and through cañons so deep that they were dark
+at midday. At night their camp-fire showed at times like a beacon on the
+top of unvisited peaks, and again like a lantern in the depths of a
+well, as they camped at the bottom of some gorge. Here and there they
+came upon traces of an old trail half-effaced by the centuries which had
+passed since it had been used in the far-away days when the Incas and
+their followers would journey once a year to the sacred lake with their
+annual offerings. Even although Professor Ditson had been to Eldorado
+before, yet he found it necessary continually to refer to the map, so
+concealed and winding was the way.
+
+On the third day they reached a wide plateau which ranged just above
+the tropical jungles of the eastern lowlands. At first they crossed
+bare, burned slopes of rock, with here and there patches of scanty
+vegetation; but as they came to the lower levels they found themselves
+in a forest of vast cacti which seemed to stretch away for an
+immeasurable distance. Some of the larger specimens towered like immense
+candelabras sixty and seventy feet high, and there were clumps of
+prickly-pears as big as barrels and covered with long, dark-red fruit
+which tasted like pomegranates. Underfoot were trailing varieties which
+hugged the earth and through which the mules had to pick their way
+warily because of the fierce spines with which they were covered. Some
+of the club-cacti were covered with downy, round, red fruit fully two
+inches in diameter, luscious, sweet and tasting much like huge
+strawberries. Jud, who firmly believed that eating was one of the most
+important duties and pleasures of life, nearly foundered before they
+reached the pampas beyond the thorny forest. There they had another
+adventure in South American foods. As they were crossing a stretch of
+level plain, suddenly a grotesque long-legged bird started up from the
+tangled grass and, with long bare neck stretched out horizontally and
+outspread wings, charged the little troop, hissing like a goose as he
+came.
+
+"Don't shoot!" called out Professor Ditson to the startled Jud, who was
+the nearest one to the charging bird. "It's only a rhea, the South
+American ostrich. He'll run in a minute."
+
+Sure enough, the old cock rhea, finding that he could not frighten away
+the intruders by his tactics, suddenly turned and shot away across the
+level plain, his powerful legs working like piston-rods and carrying him
+toward the horizon at a rate of speed that few horses could have
+equaled. In the deep grass they found the nest, a wide circular
+depression containing thirty great cream-colored eggs, the contents of
+each one being equal to about a dozen hen's eggs. The Professor
+explained that the female rheas of each flock take turns laying eggs in
+the nest, which, as a fair division of labor, the cock bird broods and
+guards. After incubation starts the shell turns a pale ashy gray. The
+party levied on the rhea's treasure-horde to the extent of a dozen
+glossy, thick-shelled eggs, and for two days thereafter they had them
+boiled, fried, roasted, and made into omlets, until Jud declared that he
+would be ashamed ever to look a rhea in the face again.
+
+At last, about noon of the fifth day after leaving Yuca, the trail
+seemed to end in a great wall of rock high up among the mountains. When
+they reached the face of this cliff it appeared again, zigzagging up a
+great precipice, and so narrow that the party had to ride in single
+file. On one side of the path the mountain dropped off into a chasm so
+deep that the great trees which grew along its floor seemed as small as
+ferns. Finally the trail ended in a long, dark tunnel, larger and higher
+than the one through which they had passed on the way to Yuca. For
+nearly a hundred feet they rode through its echoing depths, and came out
+on the shore of an inky little lake not a quarter of a mile across, and
+so hidden in the very heart of the mountain that it was a mystery how
+any one had ever discovered it. Although it sloped off sharply from its
+bare white beach, Professor Ditson told them that it was only about
+twenty feet deep in the center. A cloud of steam drifting lazily from
+the opposite shore betokened the presence of a boiling spring, and the
+water, in spite of the latitude, was as warm as the sun-heated surface
+of the Amazon itself.
+
+Leading the way, Professor Ditson showed them, hidden around a bend, a
+raft which he and his party had built on their earlier visit, from logs
+hauled up from the lower slopes with infinite pains. Apparently no one
+had visited the lost lake since he had been there, and a few minutes
+later the whole party were paddling their way to the center of Eldorado,
+where lay hidden the untold wealth of centuries of offerings.
+
+"If I could have dived myself, or if any of the Indians who were with me
+could have done so," remarked the professor regretfully, "we need not
+have wasted a year's time."
+
+"Well," returned Jud, already much excited over the prospect of hidden
+treasure, "I used to do over forty feet in my twenties, when I was
+pearl-divin', an' now, though I'm gettin' toward fifty, I certainly
+ought to be able to get down twenty feet."
+
+"Fifty!" exclaimed Will.
+
+"Fifty!" echoed Joe.
+
+"Fifty!" chimed in Professor Ditson.
+
+"That's what I said," returned Jud, looking defiantly at his grinning
+friends, "fifty or thereabouts. I'll show you," he went on grimly,
+stripping off his clothes as they reached the very center of the little
+lake, and poising his lean, wiry body on the edge of the raft. Suddenly
+he turned to Professor Ditson. "There ain't nothin' hostile livin' here
+in this lake, is there?" he questioned.
+
+"I don't think so," returned the professor, reassuringly. "Piranhas are
+never found at this height, and we saw no traces of any other dangerous
+fish or reptiles when we were here last year."
+
+"Here goes then, for a fortune!" exclaimed Jud, throwing his hands over
+his head and leaping high into the air with a beautiful jack-knife dive.
+His slim body shot down out of sight in the dim, tepid water.
+
+The seconds went by, with no sign of him, until he had been under fully
+three minutes. Just as they all began to be alarmed for his safety, his
+gray head suddenly shot two feet out of the water near where he had gone
+down. Puffing like a porpoise, with a few quick strokes he reached the
+edge of the raft and tossed on its surface something which clinked as it
+struck the logs.
+
+There, gleaming in the sunlight, was a bird of solid gold, which looked
+like a crow, with outspread wings, and which was set thickly with rough
+emeralds as large as an ordinary marble.
+
+With a cheer, Joe and Will gripped Jud's shoulders and pulled him over
+the side of the raft, where he lay panting in the sunlight, while the
+treasure was passed from hand to hand.
+
+It was nearly a foot long, and so heavy that it must have handicapped
+the old man considerably in his dash for the surface.
+
+"Pretty good for a start," puffed Jud happily, as he too examined the
+gleaming bird. "Unless I miss my guess," he went on earnestly, "the
+great emerald that old Jim has got his heart set on is down there, too.
+The bottom is pretty well silted over, but I scrabbled through the mud
+with my hands, an' when I struck this I figured out that I had just
+enough breath left to reach the top; but just as I was leavin', my
+fingers touched somethin' oval an' big as a hen's egg. It was pretty
+deep in the mud, and I didn't dare wait another second, but I'm sure I
+can bring it up next time."
+
+For half an hour Jud rested while Professor Ditson told them
+treasure-stories which he had heard in his wanderings among the Indian
+tribes or remembered from his studies of Spanish archives. He told them
+the story of the galleon _Santa Maria_, which was sunk off the Fortune
+Islands, loaded down with a great altar of solid gold incrusted with
+precious stones; and of the buccaneer Sir Henry Morgan, who sacked
+Panama and burned and sank in the harbor what he thought were empty
+vessels, but which held millions of dollars in gold and jewels in double
+bulkheads and false bottoms, and which lie to this day in the mud of
+Panama harbor. Then, there was the story of the two great
+treasure-chests which Drake of Devon captured from the great galleon
+_Cacafuego_. As they were being transshipped into Drake's vessel, the
+_Golden Hind_, both of the chests broke loose and sank off Caño Island
+on the coast of Costa Rica. Still at the bottom of that tiny harbor,
+thousands of pounds of gold bars and nuggets and a treasure of pearls
+and emeralds and diamonds lie waiting for some diver to recover them.
+Then Professor Ditson launched into the story of Pizarro's pilot, who,
+when the temple of Pachacainac, twenty miles from Lima, was looted,
+asked as his share of the spoils only the nails that fastened the silver
+plates which lined the walls of the temple. Pizarro granted him what he
+thought was a trifling request, and the pilot received for his share
+over two thousand pounds of solid silver.
+
+"That's enough," said Jud, starting to his feet. "Here goes for the
+biggest treasure of all."
+
+Down and down through the dim water he dived straight and true. Hardly
+had he disappeared from sight before great air-bubbles came up and broke
+on the surface, and a few seconds later wavering up from the depths came
+what seemed to be his lifeless body with staring, horrified eyes and
+open mouth.
+
+As his white face showed above the surface, Will and Joe leaped in
+together, and in an instant had him out and on the raft again. In
+another minute the two boys were making good use of their knowledge of
+first aid, which they had learned as Boy Scouts. Working as they had
+never worked for merit badges, they laid Jud on the raft face down, with
+his arms above his head and his face turned a little to one side. Then,
+while Joe pulled his tongue out, Will, kneeling astride his body,
+pressed his open hands into the spaces on either side of his ribs. Then,
+alternately pressing and relaxing his weight as the water ran out of
+Jud's mouth and nose, Will began the artificial breathing at the rate of
+fifteen times a minute, while Joe rubbed with all his might the old
+trapper's legs and body toward the heart. At the end of a couple of
+minutes of this strenuous treatment Jud gave a gasp and at last opened
+his eyes. Half an hour later he was able to tell what had happened.
+
+"I didn't get more than half-way down," he said weakly, "when a great
+greenish-yellow eel, five feet long an' big as my arm, came gliding
+toward me. I tried to pass it but in a second I felt its cold, clammy
+body pressin' against mine. Then came a flash, an' somethin' broke in my
+head, an' the next thing I knew I was up here with you chaps workin'
+over me."
+
+Professor Ditson brought his hands together with a loud clap.
+
+"That is what Dawson meant by saying the lake was guarded," he said.
+"What attacked Jud here was a gymnotus."
+
+"A Jim-what?" queried Jud.
+
+"An electric eel," explained the Professor. "The old priests must have
+brought them up from the lowlands, and they have thrived here in this
+warm water ever since. It carries an electric battery in the back of its
+head, and a big one can give a shock which will stun a strong man. Wait
+a moment," he went on, "and I'll show you every electric eel within a
+radius of fifty yards."
+
+As he spoke he fumbled in his knapsack and pulled out a cylinder two
+feet long, wrapped in waxed paper, with a curious little clockwork
+attachment at one end.
+
+"I brought along two or three sticks of dynamite equipped with
+detonators," explained the professor. "They are really small
+depth-bombs. I thought," he went on, "that if the mud were too deep at
+the bottom of the lake, a stick or so of dynamite exploded there might
+stir things up. I'll set this one to go off half-way down, and the shock
+will stun every living thing in the water for a couple of hundred feet
+around."
+
+Winding and setting the automatic mechanism so as to explode the bomb
+at a ten foot depth, the scientist carefully threw one into the water
+some distance from the raft. Two seconds later there was a dull, heavy
+_plop_, and the water shouldered itself up in a great wave which nearly
+swamped the raft. As it went down, scores of fish of different kinds
+floated stunned on the surface. Among them were a dozen great green-gold
+electric eels. As they floated by, Hen slashed each one in two with his
+machete.
+
+As he finished the last one, Will began to strip off his clothes.
+
+"I can dive twenty feet," he said, "and I'm going to have the next
+chance at the Inca Emerald."
+
+"No," objected Professor Ditson, "Let Hen try it. He's a great swimmer."
+
+Jud also protested weakly that he wanted to go down again; but Will cut
+short all further argument by diving deep into the center of the still
+heaving circle of widening ripples in front of the raft. Even as he did
+so, Hen, who had stood up to take his place, gave a cry of warning; but
+it was too late to reach the boy's ears, already deep under the water.
+Just beyond the circle of the ripples drifted what seemed to be the end
+of a floating snag; yet the quick eyes of the negro had caught the glint
+of a pair of green, catlike eyes showing below the tip of a pointed
+snout which looked like a bit of driftwood.
+
+"It's a big 'gator," he murmured to Professor Ditson, who stood beside
+him.
+
+The latter took one look at the great pointed head and olive-colored
+body, now showing plainly in the water.
+
+"It's worse than that," he whispered, as if afraid of attracting the
+saurian's attention. "It's an American crocodile. The explosion and the
+sight of the dead fish have brought it over from the farther shore."
+
+Without paying any attention to the raft or the men, the great
+crocodile suddenly sank through the water, so close to them that they
+could see its triangular head, with the large tooth showing on each side
+of its closed lower jaw, which is one of the features that distinguishes
+a crocodile from an alligator. Even as they watched, wavering up through
+the smoky water came the white figure of the boy from the depths below,
+swimming strongly toward the surface, his right hand clasped tightly
+around some large object. Even as they glimpsed the ascending body, a
+gasp of horror went up from the little group on the raft. Before their
+very eyes, with a scythe-like flirt of its long, flattened tail, the
+great reptile shot its fifteen-foot body down toward the swimming boy.
+
+Not until fairly overshadowed by the rushing bulk of the crocodile did
+Will realize his danger. Then he tried frantically to swerve out of the
+line of the rush of this terrible guardian of the treasure-horde. It was
+too late. Even as he swung away, the cruel jaws of the great saurian
+opened with a flash of curved keen teeth and closed with a death-grip on
+Will's bare thigh.
+
+With a shout and a splash, the black form of the giant negro shot down
+into the water. Hen had learned to love the happy-hearted, unselfish
+boy, and, desperate at the sight of his danger, had gone to his rescue.
+No man nor any ten men can pull apart the closed jaws of a man-eating
+crocodile. The plated mail in which he is armored from head to tail can
+not be pierced by a knife-thrust and will even turn aside a
+bullet from any except the highest powered rifles. Yet all the
+crocodilians--alligators, crocodiles, gavials, or caymans--have one
+vulnerable spot, and Hen, who had hunted alligators in Florida bayous,
+knew what this was.
+
+Swimming as the onlookers had never seen man swim before, the great
+negro shot toward the crocodile, which was hampered by the struggling
+boy, locked his strong legs around the reptile's scaly body, and sank
+both of his powerful thumbs deep into the sockets of the crocodile's
+eyes. The great saurian writhed horribly as he felt the rending pain.
+Inexorably the thumbs of his assailant gouged out the the soft tissues
+of the eye-sockets until the crocodile reluctantly loosed his grip and
+sought refuge from the unbearable pain by a rush into the deeps beyond
+the raft. As the great jaws opened, Hen unwound his legs from the
+armored body, and, catching Will in his mighty arms, shot up to the
+surface with him.
+
+In another moment the boy, slashed and torn, but conscious, was
+stretched on the raft beside Jud, while Joe and the professor bound up
+the gashes in his thigh, which, although bleeding profusely, were not
+deep enough to be dangerous. As the last knot of the hasty bandages was
+tied, Will smiled weakly and opened his right hand. There, in the
+outstretched palm, gleamed and coruscated the green glory of a great
+oval emerald, cut and polished by some skilful lapidarist perhaps a
+thousand years ago. Lost for centuries, the gem which had been worshiped
+by a great nation had once again come to the earth from which it had
+disappeared.
+
+Three weeks later, Professor Amandus Ditson lay sleeping in a luxurious
+bedroom on the ground floor of the rambling house of a Spanish friend
+whom he was visiting in the beautiful, historic, blood-stained city of
+Lima. In other rooms of the same house slept Will and Jud and Joe. Two
+days later the steamer would sail which was to take them all back north.
+Pinto was already on his way back to his wife and children at Para, and
+Hen was visiting friends of his own in the city and intended to join the
+party on the steamer.
+
+The silence of the night was broken abruptly by a grating, creaking
+noise, and into the room of the sleeping scientist through the veranda
+window stepped a great masked figure. As the electric lights were
+switched on. Professor Ditson awoke to find himself looking into the
+barrel of an automatic revolver.
+
+"Give me the treasure from Eldorado," croaked a voice from behind the
+mask, "if you want to keep on livin'."
+
+The scientist stared steadily at the speaker for a moment before he
+spoke.
+
+"If you will take off your mask, Dawson," he said finally, "I am sure
+you will find it more comfortable. I was positive," he went on, as the
+other obeyed and showed the scarred, scowling face of the outlaw, "that
+I made a mistake in sparing your life."
+
+"I'll spare yours, too," retorted Dawson, "unless you make me kill you.
+I'm goin' to take the treasure an' light out. It would be much safer for
+me to kill you, but I won't unless I have to--just to show you how
+grateful I am."
+
+"I appreciate your consideration," returned the scientist, quietly; "but
+you're too late. The treasure is not here."
+
+"I know better," growled Dawson. "I've had you shadowed ever since you
+got here. It's locked in that leather bag, which never leaves your sight
+day or night, an' I'm goin' to take it right now."
+
+Suiting his action to his words, and still keeping his revolver leveled
+at the professor, the outlaw pulled toward him a big cowskin bag, which,
+as he said truly, the scientist had kept with him night and day ever
+since he purchased it at a shop in Lima the morning of his arrival.
+
+"Dawson," returned Professor Ditson, earnestly. "I give you my word as a
+gentleman that the treasure is now in the safe on the steamer which
+leaves the day after to-morrow, and I hold the receipt of the steamship
+company for it. Don't open that bag. There is nothing in it for you
+but--death."
+
+"I'll see about that," muttered Scar Dawson. "Don't move," he warned, as
+the scientist started up from his bed. "I'll shoot if you make me."
+
+Even as he spoke, he drew a knife from his belt and slit the leather
+side of the bag its whole length with a quick slash, and started to
+thrust in his hand.
+
+As he did so he gave a yell of terror, for out from the opening suddenly
+appeared, wavering and hissing horribly, the ghastly head of the great
+bushmaster which the scientist had carried and cared for all the way
+from the Amazon basin. In another second, half its great length reared
+threateningly before the terrified outlaw. With one more yell, Dawson
+threw himself backward. There was a crash of broken glass, and by the
+time Will and Jud and Joe and their host, aroused by the noise, had
+reached the room, they found only Professor Ditson, coolly tying up the
+damaged bag, into which, by some means known only to himself, he had
+persuaded the bushmaster to return.
+
+To-day, in the world-famous gem collection of Big Jim Donegan, in the
+place of honor, gleams and glows the great Emerald of the Incas. What he
+did for those who won the treasure for him, and how that same party of
+treasure-hunters traveled far to bring back to him that grim, beautiful,
+and historic stone of the Far East, the Red Diamond--well, that's still
+another story.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Inca Emerald, by Samuel Scoville
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 42193 ***