CHAPTER XIV

RODRIGUEZ HAS COMPANY

Hal awakened at the witching hour of midnight to find that he was being deluged in a rainstorm, his fire was out and he couldn’t see anything but the radium-faced dial of his wrist watch.

He jumped up and scurried to the shelter of some near-by trees, shivering in his soaked clothes. Something moved swiftly near by, he heard a rustle of leaves and the patter of slow, velvety footsteps on the soggy ground.

In a second he had delved into his pocket and brought out his package of matches. But they were dry and he had one lighted in an instant—in time to catch a flashing glimpse of a jaguar’s yellowish-brown spots as it leaped across Rodriguez’ temporary bier and disappeared between the trees.

Hal shouted to frighten it and his match burned out. He continued to shout, meanwhile breathlessly seeking for some of the drier pieces of wood which he had stored beneath the trees. The rain stopped then, but still it took him an interminable time to coax a flame out of the damp wood. But at last he succeeded and after he had coaxed the flame into a fairly generous fire he set about drying out the rest of the wood.

From time to time he glanced at the telltale mound in the shadows and each time he shivered. The jaguar incident brought home to him the realization that necessity forced Rodriguez’ last resting place to be in the jungle. Decency forbade a recurrence of that midnight scene and he knew that dawn would bring again the black scavengers of the air in increased numbers. Nothing but a quick, effectual burial would drive them away.

It was the only way out.

Hal spent the remainder of the black hours drying his clothes. His immaculate flannels were now a brownish hue, spotted here and there with mud and wrinkled into a state that defied even the dry cleaner. And his shoes, once so trim and smart looking, were not recognizable because of several layers of clay which had dried upon them.

Just before a new day dawned in the jungle, Hal groped his way through the dark to the scene of the wreck. He built a small fire there to give him light and proceeded to hunt about the framework for something which could be used as a spade. But that availed him nothing, and he was about to give up in despair when he happened to notice the trench which the crippled engine had burrowed as it fell. The propeller, he saw at once, had completely loosed itself in the impact and was lying a few feet distant.

Hal pulled it out of the mud and with it a frightened spider which ran across his hand, leaving a trail of poison which caused not only an intense burning but severe inflammation as well. In point of fact, all of Hal’s jungle trials seemed to begin with that spider’s infection.

He sucked out the poison as best he could and trudged back to the clearing with the propeller. Dawn found him using it as a spade with which to dig a last resting place for José Rodriguez, and if it was rather ineffectual as an instrument, it was none the less fitting that it should be used in preparing an airman’s grave.

The sun was high in the east when Hal had pounded the last bit of mire into place. Solemnly, then, he dug the propeller at its head and left it there as a marker. For a moment he stood glancing at his handiwork, feeling inexpressibly sad and without hope. His hand caused him much pain; he was weary from irregular sleep and his thirst knew no bounds.

The grave seemed to be the final gesture. It was his admission of lost hope and he voiced it aloud. Not a bit of use was there to scan the blue chink of sky. Carmichael was not to be the means of his rescue, he felt it just as surely as he felt thirst. What would be the means of his rescue, if at all, he could not feel. Indeed, the thought itself seemed to be swallowed up in the vague mists of the future.

He turned his back on the lonely grave, wrapped in despair. Nothing mattered much except that he get a drink of water, somewhere, somehow. He turned east, thinking that at least he was facing _Manaos_ and if he was fortunate enough to keep going in that direction he would some day reach there.

“_Some day!_” Hal laughed bitterly. “It’s like tomorrow, I guess—it never comes.”

And as he stepped from the clearing into the trackless maze of jungle, a beautiful yellow-breasted, black-coated bird warbled at his back with an insistence that Hal felt was nothing but mockery. Its cheerful whistling note he could not bear. It was decidedly out of place in that dismal solitude, he thought, as he turned to view the creature.

But he quickly changed his mind, however, when he saw that the silver-throated creature had hopped onto a limb of the tree that shadowed Rodriguez’ grave. The bird seemed to defy all that was sad and with its graceful head to one side it poured out a medley of cheer in the trilling call, _pir-i-pi-pi, pir-i-pi-pi_. And strangest of all, the beautiful little creature seemed to be directing its efforts toward the silent mound beneath it.

Hal turned his back on the clearing for good and all, then. He could do it now with a heart less heavy. At least he would not have that contemptible feeling that he was leaving a fellow being in the eternal solitude of the jungle.

Rodriguez would never be alone.