CHAPTER XVII

A GUEST OF SAVAGES

After a few more minutes’ observation, twenty-five naked savages crawled out of the brush, crept up to Hal’s prostrate body and held a noisy conference. Then they took turns feeling his feverish brow and the irregular heart beats pounding beneath his powerful chest. Suddenly two of the warriors leaned down, one taking his head and the other his feet, and in solemn procession they marched off through the brush, leaving two of their number to skin the jaguar.

Evening came before Hal was conscious of anything. When he opened his eyes he could see the glow of many campfires. A deep gloom seemed to surround him, but sitting on either side were two Indian women, old and wrinkled, watching him with blinking eyes and tightly drawn lips.

He had a bitter taste in his mouth, an herb-like taste, but he felt not so feverish. Also, when he went to raise his right hand he noticed that it was covered with a sort of claylike substance and the swelling was almost gone. His leg, too, felt easier and he saw, as he raised it into the firelight, that it was covered with the same substance that was on his hand.

Gradually he could pick out a row of pillars supporting the roof, and from each of these pillars he noticed a frail crossbar to the outer wall. Between each of these bars he saw Indians sleeping, men, women, and children. Some slept on skins or leaves and some on the bare ground. Before each of these groups a fire burned and Hal decided that each group was a family with their own distinct hearth-fire burning before their apartments. Over all was a vast roof.

It occurred to Hal, then, that he was in an Indian _maloka_, one of those vast houses of thatch which the captain of the boat had told them housed the entire tribe. He was lying in one of the apartments at the rear, for the low, sloping roof he could have touched with his foot if he had had the strength to raise it.

A medley of snores resounded through the vast hut and from time to time he saw the squat figures of warriors replenishing their fires, murmuring to each other for a moment or two, then retiring again to their apartments to sleep.

The Indian women guarding Hal watched him continuously while he was taking stock of his surroundings. Neither one spoke, but he caught a questioning look in the eyes of the older-looking hag and saw her dart behind him, bringing up a huge calabash filled with water.

She held it to his lips and Hal drank it greedily. It was warm and rather too sweet tasting but, nevertheless, water. Never in his life was he so grateful for anything, although he realized that they must have been feeding him water on and off through the day, for he felt not nearly so parched as when he lay under the tree that morning.

When the calabash was empty he looked up at the Indian woman and smiled his most brilliant smile.

“You spiggotty—no?” he asked softly, remembering how often he got some response from Panama Indians by means of that address.

But he might just as well have spoken to a stone statue, for the woman stared at him with the same blinking eyes. After a moment she took the calabash and arose, waddling past the burning fires toward the front of the _maloka_.

Hal turned his eyes to the other Indian woman who was regarding him gravely from under half-closed lids. He used the same alluring smile upon her, but his earnest efforts were all in vain, for she continued to watch him with the same impassivity as before.

He closed his eyes after that and drowsed at intervals. In his waking moments he could feel the presence of his female guardians, but preferred to keep his eyes closed as long as they wouldn’t speak to him. But on the whole, silence reigned in the vast _maloka_ and now and again Hal could hear the night voices from the jungle.

Goatsuckers repeated their monotonous refrain by the hour and several times the eerie plaint of the sloth drifted faintly in on the breeze. The women dozed occasionally, as was evidenced by their sonorous breathing, but the moment Hal opened his eyes they seemed to awaken instinctively.

Then came a long interval when a hush seemed to have fallen over everything. Hal knew the women were dozing but he kept his eyes closed, content to lie quiet and rest. He knew that curiosity would avail him nothing where an Indian was concerned. That much he had learned in Panama.

Consequently, when he heard the muffled scream of a human voice toward dawn, he did not stir. But the women were on the alert immediately, for he could hear them straighten up and lean over him. He feigned deep, even breathing, however, but continued to listen.

Another scream pierced the early morning darkness, echoing and reëchoing about the _maloka_. Suddenly the cry, though muffled, was more intelligible, and Hal was certain that it sounded like someone trying to call “_help_,” though he could not be sure. It was too muffled, too distant for him to distinguish anything definite.

In any event, the cry pierced the air for the third time, and, though it seemed ghostly and unhuman, its poignancy was distressing. Then all was still again, but Hal had been so startled that he found himself up resting on his elbow and staring hard at the women.

The elder of the two women stared back at Hal, then suddenly she got to her knees and with her brown, bony hands made a number of gestures which the young man was at a loss to fathom. After a few moments of continued eerie, cowering gestures, he began to understand what she was trying to explain.

The cries he had just heard were ghostly, not human.