Part 6

But the others came right on, regardless. “Paddle, boys! Make it quick and snappy! They’re closing in on us! Once more ought to knock the fight out of them!” He reloaded hurriedly and fired at the third canoe, the shell exploding in midair right over it. The shouts from five canoefuls of bloodthirsty cannibals surrounding them, foaming up the water with their furious paddles, filled the night with pandemonium. Their situation looked desperate now, for the Outanatas seemed determined upon their recapture and they had lost some of their fear of the curator’s shells.

“Fire, boys! for all you’re worth--I’ll give you light!” he yelled, whipping out his flashlight. “Hold it, Baderoon!” he ordered, as the rays from its parabolic reflector shot over the water.

The automatics began to bark, while the negro crouched behind the gunwales, shivering with fear, yet holding the light steadily on two war canoes bunched close together. The curator aimed a short-range shell right over them, hoping to founder the remaining canoes. The fearful concussion of the T. N. T. knocked their own party sprawling, and, where there had been two canoes, now there was a boiling geyser of water in which they rose like tossed logs, their crews tumbling headlong through the white glare. It proved too much for the remaining three canoes. The flashlight showed them turning tail and paddling away in frantic haste.

“Travel, Nigger, Travel!--that’s what T. N. T. means!” whooped the curator. “Paddle, boys, after ’em--_hard_! I’m going to put the fear of God into these people!”

He aimed the air gun at a high arc, and the shell whistled on its way. High over the three canoes it exploded, with the strength of giant-powder fireworks. Under its glare they could see the paddlers knocked hurtling with the concussion.

Baderoon laughed uproariously. “_Yow-yowri!_ Prenty debbil-debbil, _Orang-kaya!_ Make’m thunder--_Boom! Boom!_”

“Threw a good scare into ’em! That’s the ticket!” grinned the curator. “They’ll swim ashore pretty well gentled, I’m thinking!--Keep after ’em, boys, as hard as you can make her go! They’re gaining on us!”

He raised the air gun to its utmost elevation and the tiny streak of fire of the fuse rose in a high arc. It fell into the bay ahead of the three canoes, and there was a muffled thud which blew the whole bottom out of the bay. A white avalanche of water came roaring toward the three canoes and their bows rose dizzily and then the sterns flipped high in the air. A babel of yells and shouts told of one canoe upset, and then they steadied their own to meet the onrushing wave. It rocked giddily, like a bark canoe in a boiling rapids, and water slapped over her sides in a deluge, but her deep keel held her upright.

“Bail, Dwight--and you, too, Baderoon!” ordered the curator. “Nicky, you and Sadok keep on paddling. Don’t kill yourselves, as we’re out of range of them now. I’m going up to that village and lay down the law to that whole tribe! They’ll let white men alone, after that.”

They followed slowly in the wake of the two fleeing canoes, and finally lay floating idly about a mile out in front of the village. The canoes that had gone across the lagoon and those from upstream had now returned, as they could see by the assembling flares at the landing. Howlings and constant booming of drums came over the water. They dozed on the thwarts, letting the canoe drift and waiting for dawn. The noise on shore kept up throughout the night, but, after an interminable wait, a faint paling in the east, which swiftly grew to daylight over the calm waters of the lagoon, set them to paddling slowly toward the shore again.

As they drew near it was full daylight and the clouds overhead were already aflame with the rising sun. The curator loaded his air gun and stood up in the bow as they approached the landing. A deathlike silence reigned throughout the jungle. The long black canoes lay hauled up in rows, deserted, and not a sign of life appeared in the huts nor in the glades under the coco palms.

As their bow grated on the beach, the curator took careful aim at the largest of the huts and fired. The jungle shook with the sharp detonation as the building was torn asunder in crackling walls of bamboo and rattan which immediately took fire. Runnings and scamperings in the forest--and then all was silent as the grave again.

They stepped ashore in a compact little party, the boys with ready pistols, Sadok’s long sumpitan sweeping every glade for a mark. The curator walked to the center of the clearing and swept the surrounding forest with his arm.

“Pigs!” he pronounced, in the Arfak dialect, waving his arm around comprehensively.

There were rustlings in the jungle, but no native dared show himself.

“Tell them, Baderoon, that white men are peaceful--when let alone. Also, that the white man will not harm any chief if he will step out and talk.”

Baderoon raised his voice, translating the curator’s message. Absolute silence brooded in the jungle.

“Tell them,” said the curator, and his voice rang like iron, “that the white man would be friends. But if they do not make a talk at once he will bring down his thunders and lightnings and utterly destroy this village, their canoes, and their coconut palms. I have spoken it.”

Baderoon translated, and at this a grizzled old sinner with a white mop of woolly hair stepped out trembling from behind a tree.

“If the White Thunderer will only deign not to utterly destroy _us_!” he croaked, shaking all over as Baderoon translated.

“Ye shall call your old men to tow-tow; and ye shall send runners to every village, far and near, lest the thunders descend on them also!” declared the curator, sternly.

“It is agreed,” said the old man, finally, with shaking voice. “Only let the white man not harm us further! Many warriors and many canoes come not back because of him!”

He called into the forest and three other old men came unwillingly forth. They advanced, unarmed, to the edge of the clearing, stooping down and pouring sand on their heads in token of abject submission, but that was as far as they could be coaxed to come.

“It is well,” called the curator, at length, for he had no wish to risk any undue familiarity with them. “Shoot something, Sadok. I want them to fear you, too.”

Sadok looked around for a mark, and his eyes lit on a wandering pig under one of the huts. He poised his sumpitan and the dart flew out of its muzzle. The pig squealed and twitched his tail, and then went on rooting. In another moment he sighed and laid over, dead.

A shiver and a rustling of leaves ran through the underbrush.

“Ye have seen the silent death, also,” said Baderoon, raising his voice at the curator’s prompting. “Do not eat the pig; it is taboo.”

One of the old men took off his boars’-tusk breastplate and stepped forward and laid it on the ground. He testified that it was a present. At a sign from the curator Baderoon fetched it. The scientist examined it curiously. The white tusks were laid in rows, one atop the other, and their ends were bound with fiber network, thickly ornamented with polished red beads. The curator started with astonishment as he looked closely at them.

“Ask him where they get those red beads, Baderoon.”

There was some talk and waving of arms, and then Baderoon turned to the curator. “Him get’m big mountain--down there,” he said, pointing to the south. “Mus’ fight litty hill men for him. Prenty too-much trophy.”

“Tell him the white man is pleased, and will give a present, too.”

The curator undid his red-silk bandanna, and Baderoon bore it over ceremoniously and laid it before the chief. The latter grinned, for the first time, and they could see that he was dying to handle it. He nodded at the curator with beaming eyes and made the pantomime of rubbing noses.

“Nothing doing!” snorted the curator. “That’s where the earlier explorers all lose out! The natives soon find out we’re ordinary, vulnerable human beings, if you let them get too familiar. Tell him, Baderoon, that the white man says to start his runners at once, and never to touch another white man so long as he lives! Farewell!”

He turned to go as Baderoon translated. They walked back to the canoes and picked out a small one, more easy to handle. Shoving off, they paddled down the lagoon, the curator sitting silently in the stern, for he knew that curious eyes were watching him from the jungle. A repressed eagerness shone in his own as he still examined curiously the boars’-tusk breastplate in his hands.

“Well--I guess that’ll hold ’em for a time--eh, boys?” he smiled, raising his eyes from it at length when they had left the village landing far behind. “And--I may have something important to tell you after we reach camp!”

“Some weapon, that air pistol of yours, sir!” said Nicky, admiringly. “How did you ever get such an idea?”

“Oh, that was just a hang-over from the Western Front,” replied the curator. “I’ve been through any number of trench scrimmages, and I learned that it’s not the iron casing of grenades that does the most mischief, but the gas itself. It has far more rending power than that cast-iron shell of the grenade. Remember our old air guns of boyhood? Well, I sent some sketches to the factory and had them make me this pistol on the same lines. These light nickel shells of T. N. T. turned out to be as good as heavy grenades when I tested them. All that is needed is something to throw them with accuracy, so I had this gun made and a lot of shells, timed for eighty, fifty, and thirty yards--which is about as close as you can be to them with any safety. That’s all there is to it. Beats the old dynamite stick that they used to use on the savages of the South Seas all hollow, I’ll say!”

They passed the floating wreckage of the night before as he spoke, and everyone set to work picking up paddles, spears, and arrows, the latter sticking up out of water, point down, like buoys. Then the curator made a grab and hauled aboard a floating shield. It was of the same long, oval type that the war party had carried the day before, and he examined the red paint in the carving minutely with his magnifying glass.

“It’s the same mineral we found in Aru, Dwight,” he declared, after a close scrutiny. “Wait till we get to camp; I’ve got a fine young idea hatching.”

That was all they could get out of him, but the paddles swept on more tirelessly than ever, for both boys were consumed with curiosity over the new mineral.

At length they came to their own headland, with the frowning ramparts of the mountains looming back of them endlessly to the south. Here was the mouth of their creek, and up it they drove the canoe under the green arches of the jungle. After a time it came out at the old coral bank, and the abandoned sail proa showed up ahead, its bow still on the little beach. Sadok and Baderoon jumped ashore and set about getting their fire started, while the boys dove for their provision sacks, for they had had nothing to eat for twenty-four hours and were famished.

But the curator could not wait. He cut off a sliver from the red mineral paint in the shield scrolls and scraped a portion of it into a small test tube which he got out of his mess kit. Filling it with a little water, he went over to Nicky’s alcohol flame and brought it to a boil. Then he opened a tiny bottle of acid and dropped a tear of it into the test tube.

“Gad! boys!” he whooped. “What do you think of _that_?” he cried, holding up the tube, now filled with a cloudy yellow precipitate. “Remember that red stone we got in the channels of Aru, Dwight? Well, this is the same mineral, _cinnabar_, red oxide of mercury, boys! If there’s a mountain of it, as these natives tell us, back in the hills, we’ve _got_ to find it, for, once it is reported, it will change the whole history of this part of New Guinea. The stuff is worth its weight in gold!”

“Three cheers for Exploration!” mumbled Nicky, his mouth stuffed with food. “Have some, Professor!”

VII

CASSOWARY CAMP

“Baderoon, how call-him that place chief-fellah get red paint?” asked the curator, turning to Baderoon from the test tube in his hand.

“Red Mountain!” said Baderoon, promptly.

“Good Lord!” ejaculated the curator. “There can’t be a whole mountain of cinnabar, you know! Why, you could buy out the United States Treasury with it! Might be a stratum of it--but, no; ‘_Red_’ Mountain! If there’s enough of the ore in sight to give it that name, it’s something we’ve got to see and report. Everything else is insignificant compared to this, boys!” he exulted. “I discovered a mountain once, in Mexico, near the top of which was a thick vein of cinnabar. Some day they’ll run a railroad in there and get it out, it’s so valuable. But a whole mountain of it, and right handy to the sea! Why, man, it’ll make Holland the queen of the world again! Think how the world’s mercury is hoarded, for making fulminate, for every primer and every shell fuse that is shot!” he went on, excitedly. “Think of the explosives possible, with unlimited supplies of mercury. T. N. T. isn’t in it, compared with some of the fulminates! The Japs won the Russian war with their new camphor shell, but their supply of camphor is limited. Some day there will be a big war over Red Mountain, take it from me!”

“’Ray for Exploration!” crowed Dwight. “Come on, Mr. Baldwin; here’s some nice wallaby steak!”

The curator grinned as he came back to earth and bit into the succulent meat. “Just the same, boys, we’re going to see that mountain, or die in the attempt. The only thing that worries me is how to handle the pygmies. It’s right in their country, and we’ll have to wade through them to get there. They were peaceable enough with the English expedition, but that was only because they were afraid to start anything. They’re always at war with the Papuans, and there’s a sort of no-man’s land between the jungle and the foothills which cannot be crossed by either side without a fight. However, the first thing for us to do is to jerk the rest of this wallaby meat and each man carry along a bag of pemmican made of it.”

They erected a pole jerky frame that afternoon, and started a small drying fire under it, with long strips of the meat hanging in rows from the poles. Under the hot tropical sun the drying process went on apace, and soon the strips had become hard sticks of meat, greasy to the touch, hard and fibrous as wood. Steadily, also, the collections grew larger, box after box being filled with Dwight’s insects, Nicky’s reptiles, and the curator’s birds, while their big tin of bird skins was filled up and sealed. This main collection was to be a representative one of the whole region, after which only the rarer specimens need be sought for. On the third day the crate of collections boxes was cached, well hidden in a coral cave dug in the thickets.

Meanwhile Sadok set about replenishing his supply of poisoned arrows, as his quiver of them had run low. He cut a quantity of the long thorns of the sago palm, and near the bottom of each he lashed a little cone of the corklike bark, so that it would just fit in the bore of the sumpitan, which was about three eighths of an inch in diameter. For poisoning the points he had a supply of the gummy juice of the upas tree, brought from Borneo and carefully kept in a small bamboo bottle which hung on his belt.

Sadok was grouched. A faint but noisesome odor came from somewhere in the jungle, where his three heads were drying, but here, look you, had been two fights with the Outanatas since, and never a head for his personal collection! He was comforted, however, by the curator telling him that the upas vine, or some other representative of the strychnine family, grew in New Guinea, also, and that there would be plenty of ructions before he ever saw Borneo again.

Their stay at this camp had given them not only a fair idea of the general features of the country, but of the weather as well. Under the west monsoon, its daily changes were as regular as clockwork. A fine cool dawn, followed by several hours of misty and clearing weather when it was good to be up and doing; then the heat of midday, when even the jungle people knew enough to take a siesta; and then, about four o’clock, a tropical thunderstorm of the utmost violence, lasting until eight at night, when the sky cleared off. They soon learned to plan their day according to these weather changes, and at length the party broke camp for the long trek into the mountains. They followed much the same trail as before, to the table-lands along the mountain flank, and stopped for lunch on the pebbly site of their capture by the war party of the Outanatas of the week before.

But with what different feelings now! Then the fear of the unknown, the dread of meeting cannibal savages who would surely regard them as but strangers to be killed and eaten at sight. Now a feeling of confidence replaced all that. They had established the superiority of the white man in all that region, the respect in the native mind that is based only on superior force. Not even a native runner had dared show his face since that punitive expedition of the curator’s. They even felt confident to hunt singly, not too far from the main party. While the others were settling down for the noonday siesta in the heat of midday, Dwight spied a flash of brilliant orange in the greens of the jungle across the creek, and set out alone after the bird, shotgun in hand. The orange spot flew off into the jungle as he drew near it, but Dwight had caught a glimpse of black-velvet plumage, and that flaming fire of orange on the throat, which made him tingle all over with the thrill that it _might_ be the exceedingly rare six-shafted bird of paradise! He followed on through the jungle, his eyes fixed on that small dot of black perched far ahead, high in the tree tops. Moving as cautiously as he could, he worked through the festooned creepers and the huge boles of giant jungle trees toward his prize. But to his chagrin, it flew off again, just as he was about to try the spiteful little twenty-gauge at long range.

The boy’s eyes followed the bird avidly. To bring back a six-shafter! Why, all this expedition had been for just such a prize as this! Nothing is known of this bird save what can be conjectured from the few skins now in the world’s museums. To add one more to that meager collection, each specimen with who knows what story of adventure and privation behind it, seemed to Dwight a corking enterprise. Using all the woodcraft he possessed, he worked silently through the jungle. Experience had taught him to look ahead for a place to plant each footstep, not only to be sure that one did not step on a snake, but also to insure the foot coming down in position to fire instantly. With gun muzzle up, he advanced carefully, praying earnestly that his quarry might linger just a few minutes more.

Again the paradise bird fluttered off, and this time Dwight had but a line on where he had gone, for the last glimpse of him disappeared through the jungle, far off through the tree trunks. He groaned with disappointment, but he was not the boy to give up while there was a ghost of a chance left. Fixing on a tall Erythrina as the last tree past which the bird had soared, he set out as fast as possible. In perhaps half an hour he reached the tree, and, taking the range, set out again, his eyes scrutinizing the leafy foliage of the jungle roof. He had about begun to lose hope now, and, moreover, to realize that he was totally lost in the jungle, far from his companions, when a flutter of wings some distance ahead showed him his siren bird, flitting about and feeding on clusters of blue tropical berries that hung in the foliage of a high tree top that loomed up ahead.

Dwight heaved a sigh of relief. The bird would surely stay there, feeding, and he had plenty of time for a careful stalk. He wormed through the jungle, and at last arrived where an aim could be had, at not more than forty yards. Raising the gun carefully, he fired, and down came his prize, at last!

It was with a sort of breathless wonder that Dwight looked over the six-shafted bird of paradise as he lifted it gently out of the dense undergrowth in which it had fallen. _Why_ did nature lavish such abundant beauty on a bird destined never to be seen by eyes that could appreciate it? Human eyes, that is, for, of course, the bird would be forever a delight to the eyes of that dull-colored little mate of his whose protection demanded something less gorgeously visible. It made him feel how insignificant is man in nature’s world. Man, the animal, as exhibited by the naked savages who inhabited this forest was Nature’s own child; assuredly this bird was not so decorated to please him! Man, the intellectual, civilized man, could feel a thrill of rapture over this creature of Nature’s, admire its intense golden-orange throat scales, its rich, velvety, purple-black plumage, its crown of vivid emerald and topaz colors, with the long wire-haired plumes springing back like a coronet from its head; but Nature cared nothing for intellectual man and his mind, which was not of her doing, and she certainly did not make this bird for him! In fact, we are each one of us two people, Dwight philosophized, amusing himself with these fancies as he examined the paradise bird in his hand--man the animal, the creature of Nature, living very like the animals themselves and dependent on her, like them; and man, the intellectual, a creature of a power that is above Nature, the Being from whom sprang art, religion, philosophy, science, all the things that are above Nature and essentially antagonistic to her. But in the end Nature always has her revenge, for her jungles reclaim proud cities, as in India and Central America, or her deserts isolate them, as Athens and the Parthenon, or her sands bury them, like Egypt and the Sphinx.

“All that sermon from one small tropical bird!” laughed Dwight to himself, carelessly, as his thoughts came back to earth again. “Nature may be irreconcilably hostile to us--but, where am I now, and how am I going to get out? That’s the real question for _this_ man!”

He had no idea how or where his wanderings in pursuit of the paradise bird had taken him. All that was certain was that he had not crossed the creek again, and that he was somewhere east of it. He laid a course west with the compass, and set out, confident that he would sooner or later strike the stream.

But Nature proceeded to show him how utterly insignificant to her is man. The first indication of it was a large plop of her tropical rain which fell on his helmet. Dwight looked up, surprised to see the sky overcast and the thunders of the daily afternoon tropical storm muttering in the mountains. He must have been several hours following this six-shafter! He hurried on back toward the creek, stumbling through the jungle and striving to stifle panicky impulses to run. It was essential to keep his head, and to pick out landmark trees, methodically, ahead on his course, for you cannot steer yourself like a ship with the compass in the jungle. He forced his attention upon this, ignoring the raindrops, the steady patter of which kept up in the tree tops. The wetted undergrowth soon soaked his thin khaki. He now bitterly regretted setting out without his pack. Just a moment to have shouldered it would have been enough, but he had been too eager, too afraid to lose sight of his precious prize.