Читать книгу Jaragu of the Jungle - Rex Beach - Страница 3
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Chapter 1 Trouble Aloft
Flying blind through the blackness of a wall of tropical rain, the man at the plane’s controls looked grim.
“Now we’re in for it!” he muttered, his tone inaudible above the roar of the storm.
A blinding flash of lightning stabbed the darkness and revealed “Sunshine” Jones, his negro boy companion, looking back at him from the forward cockpit.
“Wh-wh-where is we at?” the colored boy hollered, his eyes as round as saucers.
“Over the San Blas coast,” the pilot answered, grinning behind his rain-drenched goggles.
Sunshine had been brought along as a guide, and now he was asking where he was!
The altimeter showed a thousand feet. The compass indicated a course “east by southeast.” They had been flying two hours since leaving the Colon airport at the Atlantic end of the Panama Canal. According to the pilot’s best reckoning, allowing for a sixty-mile headwind and drift, they ought to be somewhere over that wild and unexplored region along the Caribbean shore of Central America, but just exactly where?
Stories of fabulously rich gold mines had trickled out of this isolated section of the tropics. Captain William Adams was interested in mines—interested enough to go flying in search of one—but this storm was making mine-hunting both difficult and dangerous. Ex-army pilot and mining engineer with a yearning for adventure, Captain Adams had been in many a tight place, but now he felt, quite abruptly, that there would some day be one he could not get out of with a whole skin.
Suddenly and without warning the single motor cut out. Captain Adams had had his dire hunch confirmed.
The pilot instantly set the low-winged plane into a long glide while he struggled to get the motor going again.
A few seconds showed him that it was hopeless.
“Heads up, Sunshine,” he called with contrary cheerfulness. “We’re going down to earth—and we’ll probably land smack on a crocodile!”
As they rushed downward, Captain Adams looked over the side. He had a fleeting glimpse of a wind-swept beach with long combers rolling in from the ocean, and on the beach the lithe brown figure of a young savage with his face upturned at the unfamiliar sight of an airplane swooping low.
Then came the crash.
A sound as of a single clap of thunder echoed through the rain. The airplane quivered like a great bird which had been struck a mortal blow, and then was still.
If anyone had thought that a gigantic denizen of the air had fallen there, he would have been sure that all life had left the huge body.
