CHAPTER XXV

AFTER DINNER

Hal reveled in the luxury of a hammock that long afternoon and slept the sleep of the righteous. He awakened, feeling fresh and stronger than any time since the plane wreck. And to add to his delight, Mr. Pemberton’s favorite Indian, Joaquim, was standing patiently at the door proffering shaving materials and a change of clothes including a worn but clean pair of khaki knickers.

“The Señor Rene’s,” the Indian explained as he held out the knickers. “Señor will fit—no?”

“Yes—sure. Rene’s not so much shorter than I. And I bathe in the river, huh, Joaquim?”

“Yes, Señor. But watch for the electric fish. They send shock and sometimes people die from it.”

“Well, I’ve got enough electricity in me without clashing with those fish, Joaquim. Thanks for the tip, anyway.”

And so he bathed without incident, shaved and dressed, then strolled toward the Pemberton hut, a broad, low structure of mud and thatch. Felice and her grandfather were on hand to greet him.

The building boasted of three good-sized rooms, that is, it was one vast room partitioned off into three. Two of the partitions, Felice explained, were used as bedrooms and the third, a wide room across the front of the hut, was their dining-living room.

That room, into which Hal was ushered, boasted of a fair-sized dining table, a half-dozen rickety chairs, an antique sideboard, and a dilapidated couch. The kitchen, Felice explained, was in Joaquim’s hut and under his own supervision.

They sat down to a nicely set table and Hal perceived that Felice’s slim brown hand had given the extra touches in honor of a guest. A worn but clean tablecloth gleamed under the candlelight, and the silver, he was certain, had graced the table of many generations of Pembertons in Virginia.

Hal ate his fill of chicken, fish, sweet potatoes, cooling pineapple, and two cups of coffee. True, it was rather bitter and was flavored with condensed milk, but coffee had never been so welcome and he sat sipping the second cup with some Brazilian cigarettes which Old Marcellus kept for guests.

The old man was pleasant, and he beguiled Hal with divers tales of his experiences in the Amazon jungle. Now and then a note of bitterness would creep into his feeble voice, but upon looking at Hal’s smiling countenance he would dismiss his subject and begin on another. But always he seemed to come back to the same subject, that of his long missing son.

His days and nights, the whole of his remaining life was spent thinking of that tragic affair. Hal’s heart went out to him and he wondered what his life would have been—what all their lives would have been if that terrible thing hadn’t happened!

Felice had sat quietly through her grandfather’s long recital. Finally she sat up straight in her chair and shook her small, golden head determinedly.

“Now Grandfather,” she said, “Mr. Hal has been hearing our story ever since he came up the river to _Manaos_. Suppose we let him have an end to this Phantom of Death River and change to a lighter vein.”

“Of course, Felice,” said Old Marcellus. “No doubt the young man is terribly bored. I forget myself and talk, talk, talk.”

“Not at all, not at all,” Hal assured them. “I lean toward things like this—I mean toward the supernatural. Of course I don’t take any stock in it that Miss Felice’s father is roaming around and screaming in jaguar form. I don’t believe that at all, but the idea fascinates me.”

“That’s because you’re a romanticist, Mr. Hal,” said the girl. “If you weren’t, you wouldn’t get into a scrape like that plane business. It pays to beware of strangers, especially men like Señor Goncalves. He must be a very cold-blooded man to have devised such a scheme. I’ve told Grandfather how you met him on your way to _Manaos_ and the subsequent events.”

“Granting all that,” said Old Marcellus, “I can’t understand why the Señor should want to take your uncle’s life and your own. Why?”

“That’s what I wanted to ask, but didn’t,” Felice said smiling.

“And I forgot to tell you,” Hal explained. “You are people of honor and I can entrust to you the secret of my uncle’s mission up here. He’s a secret service man and he brought me along with him on the exciting chase of a munition’s smuggler. That is, he’s trying to help the Brazilian Government, in coöperation with our own, to trace the smuggling of munitions to this country. And if we find the man who’s the go-between on this end, we’ll soon learn who the manufacturers are in the U. S.”

“And is the man—_Renan_?” asked Old Marcellus softly.

“Do you know him?” Hal returned eagerly.

Before they could answer, Joaquim appeared in the doorway, gesticulating to his master and looking quite perturbed.