CHAPTER VIII

AN UNPLEASANT TRIP

That trip up the Rio Patuca was one of the worst experiences Tom had ever been through, and Bill agreed with him when he said so.

Starting through a narrow inlet, taking advantage of the inflow of the tide, the canoes came into a lagoon; the water was shallow but clear; the banks were lined with the most dense and varied vegetation imaginable; Tom could recognize at a distance, only the cocoanut palms, and the mangroves, with their huge, spreading roots.

The canoes proceeded up the lagoon to a native village, marked by a cluster of coco-palms which seemed to be floating in the water. The whole village turned out to watch the landing of the white men and their young companion and Tom saw that they were as curious about him as he was about them. The young men were clean-limbed and had very fine faces; the girls were almost beautiful, though the older women showed how labor and daily toil aged and furrowed their faces and bent their bodies.

After a stay overnight the canoes set out again, and day after day the routine of paddling, fighting mosquitos, landing for lunch, going forward, finding a place to camp, putting up mosquito bars and trying to prevent them from being filled by the pests before it was too late, was all there was to report.

“They certainly named this country well,” Tom told Bill as they dived under their mosquito netting on the second day of the trip.

The mosquitos were much larger than the Northern species, and were of such a tough, rubbery body that in order to destroy them it was necessary to strike ones-self with great force—“More punishment than relief!” Tom observed, ruefully, as he fought the pests.

“They have to be killed,” replied Bill, “and we’ll have to get our net up earlier at night, because they get worse as we go on, Henry says.”

“Yes,” Tom admitted. “He told me that if anybody stayed out from the protection of his net for an hour at night, he’d be bitten to death!” Bill agreed that it was quite probable.

As they went on, finally reaching and turning into the muddy mouth of the river itself through a narrow channel, Tom and Bill came to the conclusion that their trip had more difficulties in store than the pestilence of the country’s terrible mosquitos. Henry Morgan kept away from them, morose and sullen; when he caught Henry’s eyes bent on him, or on Bill, Tom saw that they were brooding and angry. Henry had long since disposed of his final bottle of “tonic,” and he seemed to be holding and feeding his grudge against Bill and Tom for destroying the other bottle.

He was very hard on his Indians. He yelled at them, drove them, said foul things to them and about them. Tom and Bill, on the contrary, were decent in their attitudes; and, although the Indians were stolid and silent, seldom speaking, almost never smiling, they showed, in little services, that were human and responsive under their stolid exteriors. They often put up Tom’s mosquito bar for him, gave him and his closer companion the best they had, but always without the least flicker of expression.

Henry had to demand help, had to drive and threaten to get anything done; Tom had only to wish for an adjustment of his sleeping couch, of boughs, in a rude camp—and it was done! Perhaps it was because, during the long, humid, tensely hot days, he took the trouble to see that the heavy bough with which he fought mosquitos was used to drive them away from the paddlers as well; also, because he and Bill shared their food when the Indians had little. There seemed to be no open appreciation, but gratitude was evident in many ways, although Henry, seeing them wave their branches to flick the mosquitos from the Indians’ backs, derided them and sneered, saying an Indian had no feelings.

Camping on mud banks, uncomfortable and mean, paddling through muddy waters, past vast jungles and wide, low savannas of lush grass, past wide cane-brakes, they pursued slow but steady, if tedious progress. Tom began to wish the trip were done. Rain, fog and wet, dreary days were far more frequent than dry ones; and this, added to the mud beneath their camps, the small food supply and the mean temper of Morgan, made things more than unpleasant.

In time they reached a small village; the huts were of palmetto stakes, driven into the ground close together, in the shape of an oblong enclosure with rounded ends and a space for a door; roofs were of a thatch of woven reeds or brush. The few Indians were silent, stolid people, but not unkind or cruel in their attitude. At this village, Bill and Henry were informed, they would be left until men came down the river to take them on.

“Do they know we’re here—and in a hurry?” ventured Tom.

The canoeman looked blank and said little.

“They know,” Morgan responded in surly, husky tones. “Indians know when people come.”

“How do they know?” Tom persisted. “Do they send messengers?”

“They know!” snapped Henry and turned away.

Tom made no comment on the rude behavior, but busied himself making friends with a small boy, evidently a child belonging to some one of importance. The youngster, about eight, liked the white boy, some years older, and when his shyness was overcome, he spent hours watching Tom as the white youth demonstrated how a small, bright red magnet he carried would draw and cling to several nails he also had.

The boy, Porfirio, in response, showed Tom many trails across the swamp savannas surrounding the village, and helped him to search for beautiful tropical birds’ eggs, curious stones, and other specimens. Always he begged to be shown the magnet and its power; it fascinated him and, the day that Tom let him, fearfully and timidly, take it and play with it for a while, he looked toward Tom as one might have looked at a master, and from then on, followed him like a dog.

By that time Tom had picked up enough of the village dialect to learn that Porfirio’s father had been slain by one of the jaguars—or, as the natives termed the ferocious cats, tigers, caught on a lonely trail without a weapon, and horribly mangled. Tom felt sorry for the desolate child and did his best to amuse him.

After several wasted weeks, a great canoe arrived from upriver, in which, besides the paddlers, was an old man, bent and wizened and terribly dwarfed; yet he was stronger than any other man—or any two men—among the Indians, and seemed to be greatly respected. He was Toosa, the man they had come so far to see!

Henry at once began to question him, but Toosa paid no heed to him at all. He had come, primarily, to take the child, Porfirio, a great-grandson, to his own village further up the turbid stream.

“We came all the way up here—you recognize me, don’t you?” Henry cried, and when the old man nodded, went on, “we came all the way to find out where——”

Toosa made a gesture, stopping Henry. He had just landed and his young great-grandson ran to greet him. Toosa merely touched his shoulder with a finger and turned back toward the boats after a brief word with one of the natives. But Henry caught his thin, though muscular and wiry arm. Tom, watching, saw a display of a curious power that the old man possessed. He did not move his body or shake Henry off; he simply turned his head and fixed his steady, bright eyes on the impatient white man. Henry, about to speak, seemed to be struck by some invisible message of power, for he closed his lips, holding the grip he had for a moment; then his hand loosened and dropped, and he stood still. Toosa, turning back toward the boats, resumed his way, the small boy trotting at his side.

“We don’t want to let him get away, though, at that,” demurred Tom, but Bill merely gave him a warning glance, and slowly strolled along behind the dwarfed, bent old figure. Henry, after a moment, took up the march, and Tom kept close to Bill, curious and uncertain what was to happen.

“He’s a powerful chief, even if he isn’t the magician that the Indians think he is,” Bill observed quietly to Tom. “He won’t talk to us until he has settled himself in his own village.”

“But how will we get there?” Tom wondered.

He soon found out. As soon as he had settled himself in his great, roughly shaped canoe, made from the trunk of a huge tree, Toosa turned to the three whites on the bank, and beckoned.

“You take us?” asked Bill in slow English. “Good!”

“I take!”

“Did you expect us?” asked Tom, mystified at the Indian’s calm arrangements for them.

“How did you know?——”

“I know!” answered the old man briefly, and said no more. As they took their designated positions the chief took a paddle several times heavier and broader than the rest, made a signal, and the canoe began to glide away from the Indians, watching on the bank.

That huge paddle served well during the trip up the river, and the amazing strength with which the wiry old man used it was a marvel to Tom. There were rapids, and dangerous ones they proved to be. The swift water almost carried the canoe back, but with a strong sweep of that great driver, the Indian caused it to tremble; with a second heave, while the other Indians strove with their smaller paddles, he sent the boat forward, and then guided and drove it between the rocks, over the rough waters, past dangerous whirlpools. Once, only a swift swing of his paddle turned them aside before they were dashed to death in a whirling smother of foaming waters. Again, by exertions that seemed akin to those of a giant, he took the craft forward when one of the lighter paddles broke and the crew was in confusion and terror.

And when, close to nightfall, they landed, he stepped from the canoe as serene and unwearied as if he had been one of the three white passengers. Tom heard from Bill that the oldest Indians in that country claimed that Toosa lived there and was just as they saw him today, when the Indians themselves had been children.

Quartered in a hut, fed and well cared for, at least two of the white travelers obeyed Toosa’s brief order, which Bill understood to be a command that they must not set foot outside the hut. The reason for it seemed plain. It was a precaution against danger. During Toosa’s absence many of the villagers had become demons through drinking the fermented cane-juice which was brewed in a huge trough in the village and from which much had been taken.

The Indians were not only noisy and, in some cases, quarrelsome; they were beyond control.

In spite of their remonstrances Henry Morgan elbowed his way past Tom and Bill, his rifle under his arm.

“He’s going out to mix with them and join in their orgies!” cried Bill. “I hope——”

“He knows them. He’s been here often, he says,” Tom reminded him, “he isn’t in any danger.” Bill shook his head. He was not convinced.

“It’s not him I’m worrying about, or what they’ll do to him,” he said moodily, “it’s what he may tell them about us—remember, he’s nursing a grudge against us, Tom.”

“Yes,” agreed Tom. “That—and cane-juice—make a bad pair!”