Читать книгу Tiger River - Arthur Olney Friel - Страница 11

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Gripped again by the current of the Marañon, the long river boat and its trio of canoes floated downstream. It traveled slowly, however, for McKay had ordered the paddlers to rest. Meanwhile a council of war proceeded in the cabin.

"We have to get rid of this garretea and its crew," stated McKay. "May as well drift until we figure out how. It won't take us long to go back upstream, and it's as well to get away from San Regis and that snooping trader. Now what'll we do with this cumbersome craft?"

Frowns of thought ensued. The big boat had become a veritable elephant on their hands. It was José who suggested a solution of the problem.

"Perhaps this may do, capitán. Send boat and crew to Iquitos, and with them a note to a man I know, telling him to pay off the crew and hold the boat for us. I have a friend there—oh yes, even an outlaw has friends—who will do this if I write the letter. The boat is worth as much as the wages of the paddlers, is it not so? Then he will lose nothing if we never come to get it.

"Promise the Indians more pay if they reach there by a certain time, and they will travel fast enough to keep ahead of that spying Maldonado, who surely would question them if he overtook them. Still, perhaps he travels up, not down. I wish I knew what is in his garretea."

"I can tell ye that," volunteered Tim. "I got tired standin' on board, so I rambled over and peeked at his cargo. It's heavy stuff—copper kittles and hardware and crockery——"

"Ah! Está bien! He goes upstream. If he were down bound he would be carrying straw hats, sarsaparilla, sugar, and such things, for the down-river trade. Then we need not care how much time these paddlers take. Only give them the letter, explain to the popero, and let them go. Is the plan good, capitán?"

"Why not pay 'em off ourselves?" Rand demurred. "We've got lots of trade-cloth——"

"If you pay them they will go straight back home as soon as we are out of sight," José interrupted. "Let us make a good start up the Tigre Yacu before anyone learns of our journey. Not that many will dare to follow, but——"

"José has the right idea," clipped McKay. "That looks like a good cove over yonder. May as well transfer our stuff there. Popero! Adentro! Inland, over yonder!"

The puzzled steersman obediently swung his rudder and growled at the paddlers. The flotilla veered, plowed into a gap in the bank, bumped to a stop against the shore. At once began the work of transshipment.

The paddlers, much mystified, found themselves stowing in the two newly acquired canoes the sealed kerosene tins—which held not oil but reserve rations, cartridges, and such necessities, soldered tight to keep out moisture and thievish hands—and other paraphernalia of their patrones. Meanwhile the Peruvian, equipped with paper and pencil by Knowlton, laboriously composed a brief note which he signed, not with name or initials, but with an undecipherable symbol. When it was done he laughed in derision.

"Look at the miserable scrawl!" he jeered. "When I was a little boy in—a certain town beyond the mountains—I wrote such a hand that the padre used to pat my head. And now—caramba! one would think this note was written with a machete instead of a pencil. Years of the paddle and the gun have destroyed the writing trick. I move the whole arm to make one tiny letter."

"Ain't it the truth?" sympathized Tim. "Me, I never was no hand to write, but till I went to France I could git off some kind of a letter to me girl without tearin' me shirt. Then after I got used to heavin' Fritzies around with me bay'nit I couldn't sling a pen at all, at all. I'd git cramps. So I jest wrote, 'Wait till I git home, kid, and I'll tell ye all about it. So no more from yours truly.' And I let it go at that."

"And what did the girl say, amigo?" laughed José.

"Aw, she gimme a long-distance bawlin' out and then married a guy that was makin' a million a week in a shipyard. I got me another girl toot sweet—one o' them pretty li'l frogs—and saved a lot o' wear and tear on me wrist, to say nothin' o' paper and ink. Hey there, ye wall-eyed Settin' Bull, where ye puttin' that bag? Over there—por allí—allá—oo la la—aw, talk to him, Hozy! I git me French and Spinach mixed when I want to talk fast."

José, chuckling, set the bewildered Indian right with three sharp words and a gesture, and thereafter aided in speeding up the shifting of the equipment. The coppery crew, who knew they would not be kicked or struck by the North Americans, were taking their time in all they did; but when they heard the Spaniard's crackling oaths and found him looming over them in apparent eagerness to decapitate any man who dawdled, they jumped. Under the lash of his tongue they finished the job in half time.

Then, after a final inspection of the garretea to make sure nothing was forgotten, McKay told the men that their ways parted here. Carefully, patiently, he explained just what they were to do, until it was evident that it was understood. The letter he gave to the popero, who took it gingerly and turned it over and over. Then he glanced along the huddle of Indian faces, which stared glumly back at him as if their owners wondered if they were not the victims of some white-man treachery.

"José, you're sure these chaps will be paid in full at Iquitos?" he demanded.

"I am positive, capitán," the Peruvian answered earnestly. "I know that man as I know my right hand, and he will do as I have written. He will pay them their just wage and get them places on some up-bound boat. They will have no trouble in receiving what is due or in returning home."

The captain nodded. In direct, curt, but kindly phrases he pledged them his word that no trick was being put upon them, and that the paper in the hands of the popero would bring them the full reward for their toil. The sooner they reached Iquitos, he pointed out, the sooner they would be paid; they had best not dally on the way, and above all they must not lose the paper or allow anyone to turn them aside from their journey. For a moment they stared back at him, searching his face. Then they stirred and muttered their belief in his words.

"We leave with you," McKay added, smiling a little, "to help you on your way, a little aguardiente. It is here in the cabin. Adios."

The glum faces lit up. Teeth gleamed in joyous grins, and as the captain went over the side they scrambled into the cabin to drink his parting gift.

"Nothing like it to send them away happy," laughed Knowlton, who had suggested the idea of leaving the raw liquor. "Poor fellows, they get little enough pleasure."

And as the three canoes slid out into the river they all looked back and tossed their paddles in response to the shouts of the sons of the western mountains: "Hasta luego, señores! Good-by for a while!"

They were the last cheery words the five were to hear, except from one another, for many a long day.

Into the glare of the westering sun surged the canoes, driven by the powerful strokes of fresh muscles and by the impetus of a new quest. The twin dugouts, built for three men each, held two pairs: McKay and Knowlton in the one, Rand and Tim in the other. José, alone in his smaller craft, slipped along with the careless ease of a tireless machine. Before long, he knew, his four mates would become conscious of hot palms and fatigued shoulders; for weeks of traveling in the confinement of a garretea give men scant chance to keep fit. But he said no word.

San Regis drew near, crept past, and fell away behind without sign that the passage of the little fleet had been observed. Evidently the population of the town was again clustered at the door of the great man Arredondo, listening to every word uttered and watching the progress of their Moyobamba visitor's campaign to get possession of the American double-eagle. The adventurers, remembering the cunning gaze of the trader at the gold-dazed Pablo, had not the slightest doubt that before morning the up-river man would have that coin in his greasy pouch. But that was a matter for Pablo to worry about. They had their canoes—stout boats worth double the price paid—and were on their way.

Soon the one-man canoe drew a little ahead and swung inward. It curved athwart the eddying shore current and glided into the bank, out of sight. The others, following close, slowed beside it and came to a pause. Once more clear water flowed around them. Behind rolled the Marañon. Ahead opened the Tigre.

For a moment, holding their boats steady with slow strokes, the five men gazed around. One last look they took at the tremendous river marching onward in savage power through the wilderness—a grim monster which, even though it now rested between the periods of its engulfing floods, gnawed ceaselessly at its jungle walls and from time to time brought miles of tree-laden shore tumbling down into its insatiable maw; which, already a thousand miles away from its birthplace in little Lake Lauricocha, would sweep on eastward for three thousand miles farther, growing more and more vast, until it hurled its yellow tide two hundred miles out into the Atlantic Ocean; a sullen serpent of waters, malignant, merciless, untamable as the colossal mountains whence it sprang.

Yet the level-eyed voyagers in the hollowed-out log boats gave the monster only the casual look of men who cared no whit for its power. It was the smaller stream that held their searching gaze—the frank, clear water which seemed to hold no evil thing in its limpid depths, yet which lured bold hearts into a dim land of sorcery and there swallowed them utterly or flung them back scarred, mutilated, and mad; the flowing road to mountains of golden treasure, but a road beleaguered by ferocious beasts and by man-demons who belted themselves with human hair and shrunk human heads into leering dolls.

"Once upon a time," said blue-eyed Knowlton, "when I was a little kid, I used to read fairy tales and Arabian Nights yarns about caves where dragons would come out and shoot fire from their noses and broil wayfarers to death; and about ogres who trapped travelers into their castles and stewed them for supper, and one-eyed giants who picked men up by the feet and bit their heads off, and so on. And when I went to bed and the room was dark I could see those things standing in the black corners and glowering at me. Gee, I used to sweat blood!

"Then when I grew older I sneered at myself for ever believing such things. But lately I'm not so sure that I sneered rightly. There isn't much choice, after all, between a fiery dragon and a tiger that tears out your throat, or between a fellow who bites off your head and one who cuts it off and keeps it so that he can spit in your face whenever he feels grouchy."

"Getting cold feet?" smiled McKay, who more than once had seen the former lieutenant plunge recklessly into an inferno of blood and flame among the shell-torn trenches of the Hindenburg line.

"Uh-huh. Numb from the knees down. But, on the level, I'm beginning to wonder if we're not a lot of jackasses to go in here. Seems as if those San Regis bums would have some gold if this river of theirs was gold-bearing."

José spat.

"Bah! Those sons of sloths? If the ground beneath their miserable hovels were full of gold, teniente, they would not have enough ambition to dig it up. And to go up this stream seeking it—not they! They lock themselves into their houses at night for fear of the tigres."

Rand nodded.

"Same way over in the Andes," he said. "Indians, poor as dirt, shivering and lousy, living on top of millions in gold and silver and never digging down to it. Takes a white man to hunt treasure. What's biting you, Tim?"

Tim, who had been twitching his shoulders as if to dislodge something, now lifted a hand and scratched.

"Nothin'—yet. Mebbe it's only me imagination, but I been feelin' crawly since we left that there town. Them folks ain't human. I bet the only time they git a bath is when they git caught in the rain. And—talkin' about dirt, did ye pipe the bare-naked kid eatin' it?"

All shook their heads. But José smiled understandingly.

"'Tis so. He was clawin' up hunks o' clay and chewin' 'em—I seen him swaller the stuff!"

"That is nothing new," José said calmly. "Children who are eaters of dirt are common enough in this country west of the Napo, and east of it, too. But unless we are to go back to San Regis, let us move now and find a place to make camp to-night. The sun swings low."

"Right ye are. Let's go. I'll fight all the head-hunters this side o' Heligoland before I'll go back to that dump."

The water swirled behind the paddles and creamed away from the prows. Three abreast, the canoes surged away up the River of Tigers. They passed the spot where the dead ashes of the Peruvian's noonday fire lay hidden in the grass, and where the mud still held the broad tracks of a cat creature which long before now had been torn asunder by down-river crocodiles. On they swept, gradually growing smaller, until at length they slid out of sight around a turn.

Then, at the edge of the thick growth above the point where they had paused, a man moved. Across his flat, coppery face, expressionless as that of a crude idol, passed a flicker of hatred. One dirty paw, resting on the hilt of a machete dangling down his ragged breeches, tightened as if around the throat of a Spaniard. Beady eyes glancing warily around him, he began silently working his way eastward, down the bank of the Marañon.

He was the Indian whom José had knocked flat on the shore of the port of San Regis. And he was on his way back to the town where waited his master, the Señor Torribio Maldonado.