by Zane Grey
The placid stretch of river gave place to a succession of rapids, up which the men had to wade. A downpour of rain joined forces with the stubborn current in hindering progress. The supplies had to be covered with palm leaves; stops had to be made to bail out the canoe; at times the rain was a blinding sheet. Then the clouds passed over and the sun shone hot. The rocks were coated with a slime so slippery that sure footing was impossible.
Manuel found hard wading; and Señor, unaccustomed to such locomotion, slid over the rocks and fell often. The air was humid and heavy, difficult to breathe; the trees smoked and the river steamed. Another chute, a mill race steep as the ingenuity of the voyagers, put them to tremendous exertions. They mounted it and rested at the head, eyes down the glancing descent.
“What jolly sport you’ll have shooting that one!” exclaimed Señor; and he laughed for the first time; not mirthfully, rather with a note that rang close to envy.
Manuel gazed loweringly from under his shaggy brows. This was the second time Señor had spoken of the return trip. Manuel’s sharpening wits divined a subtle import — Señor’s consciousness that for himself there would be no return. The thing fixed itself on Manuel’s mind and would not be shaken. Blunt and caustic as he was, something withheld his speech; he asked only himself, and knew the answer. Señor was another of those men who plunge into the unbroken fastnesses of a wild country to leave no trace. Wanderers were old comrades to Manuel. He had met them going down to the sea and treading the trails; and he knew there had been reasons why they had left the comforts of home, the haunts of men, the lips of women. Derelicts on the drifting currents had once been stately ships; wanderers in the wilds had once swung with free stride on sunny streets.
“He’s only another ruined man,” muttered Manuel, under his breath. “He’s going to hide. After a while he will slink out of the jungle to become like all the others — like me!”
But Manuel found his mind working differently from its old habit; the bitterness that his speech expressed could not dispel a yearning which was new to him.
While making camp on a shelf of shore he was absorbed in his new thoughts, forgetting to curse the mosquitoes and ants.
When the men finished their meal, twilight had shaded to dusk. Owing to the many rapids, travel by night had become impossible. Manuel drooped over one smoky fire and Señor sat by another. After sunset there never was any real silence in the jungle. This hour was, nevertheless, remarkably quiet. It wore, shaded, blackened, into wild, lonely night. The remoteness of that spot seemed to dwell in the sultry air, in the luminous fog shrouding the river, in the moving gloom under the black trees, in the odor of decaying vegetable life.
Manuel nodded and his shoulders sagged. Presently Señor raised his head, as if startled.
“Listen!” he whispered, touching his comrade’s arm.
Then in the semidarkness they listened. Señor raised his head net above his ears.
“There! Hear it?” he breathed low. “What on earth — or in hell? What is it?”
“I hear nothing,” replied Manuel.
Señor straightened his tall form and stood with clenched hands.
“If that was fancy — then—” He muttered deep in his chest. All at once he swayed to one side. And became strung in the attitude of listening. “Again! Hear it! Listen!”
Out of the weird darkness wailed a soft, sad note, to be followed by another, lower, sweeter, and then another still fainter.
“I hear nothing.” repeated Manuel. This time, out of curiosity and indefinable portent, he lied.
“No! You’re sure?” asked Señor huskily. He placed a shaking hand on Manuel. “You heard no cry — like — like—” He drew up sharply. “Perhaps I only thought I heard something — I’m fanciful at times.”
He stirred the camp fire and renewed it with dry sticks. Evidently he wanted light. A slight blaze flickered up, intensifying the somber dusk. A vampire bat wheeled in the lighted circle. Manuel watched his companion, studying the face, somehow still white through the swollen fly blotches and scorch of sun, marveling at its expression. What had Señor imagined he had heard?
Again the falling note! Clearer than the clearest bell, sweeter than the saddest music, wailed out of a succession of melancholy, descending tones, to linger mournfully, to hold the last note in exquisite suspense, to hush away, and leave its phantom echo in the charged air. A woman, dying in agony and glad to die, not from disease or violence, but from unutterable woe, might have wailed out that last note to the last beat of a broken heart.
Señor gripped Manuel’s arm.
“You heard that — you heard it? Tell me!”
“Oh, is that what you meant? Surely I heard it,” replied Manuel. “That’s only the Perde-alma.”
“Perde-alma?” echoed Señor.
“Bird of the Lost Soul. Sounded like a woman, didn’t it? We rubber hunters like his song. The Indians believe he sings only when death is near. But that signifies nothing. For above the Pachitea life and death are one. Life is here, and a step there is death! Perde-alma sings seldom. I was years on the river before I heard him.”
“Bird of the Lost Soul! A bird! Manuel, I did not think that cry came from any living thing.”
He spoke no more, and paced to and fro in the waning camp-fire glow, oblivious to the web of mosquitoes settling on his unprotected head.
Manuel pondered over the circumstance till his sleepy mind refused to revolve another idea. In the night he awoke and knew from the feeling of his unrested body that he had not slept long. He had been awakened by his comrade talking in troubled slumber.
“Lost soul — wandering — never to return! Yes! Yes! But oh let me forget! Her face! Her voice! Could I have forgotten if I had killed her? Driven, always driven — never to find — never—”
So Señor cried aloud, and murmured low, and mumbled incoherently, till at last, when the black night wore gray, he lay silent.
“A woman!” thought Manuel. “So a woman drove him across the seas to the Palcazu. Driven — driven! How mad men are!”
Señor had turned his face from his world, to drift with the eddying stream of wanderers who follow no path and find no peace, to be forgotten, to end in evil, to die forlorn — all for a woman.
In the darkness of this Peruvian forest, Señor lay amid the crawling vermin unconsciously muttering of a woman. Night spoke aloud thoughts deep hidden by day. Señor had a sailor’s eye, a soldier’s mien; he had not shrunk from the racking toil, the maddening insects, the blood-boiling heat; he was both strong and brave; yet he was so haunted by a woman that he trembled to hear the fancied voice of his ghost of love in the wailing note of a jungle bird. That note was the echo of his haunting pain. Señor’s secret was a woman.
Manuel understood now why he had been inexplicably drawn to this man. A ghost had risen out of his own dead years. It rolled back time for Manuel, lifting from the depths a submerged memory, that, like a long-sunken bell, rang the muffled music of its past.
Out of the gray jungle gloom glided the wraith of one he had loved long ago. She recalled sunny Spain — a grassy hill over the blue bay — love — home — dark in his inner eye. And the faint jungle murmuring resembled a voice. Thus after absence of years, Manuel’s ghost of love and life had come to him again. It had its resurrection in the agony of his comrade. For Manuel there was only that intangible feeling, the sweetness of remembered pain. Life had no more shocks to deal him, he thought; that keen ache in the breastbone, that poignant pang could never again be his. Manuel was life worn. He felt an immunity from further affliction, and consciousness of age crept across the line of years.
How different from other mornings in the past was the breaking of this gray dawn! The mist was as hard to breathe, the humidity as oppressive, the sun as hot, and the singing spiteful, invisible, winged demons stung with the same teeth of poisoned fire — all the hardship of jungle travel was as before, yet it seemed immeasurably lessened.
For many years Manue
l had slaved up these smoky rivers, sometimes with men who hated him, and whom he learned to hate. But no man could have hated Señor. In these enterprises of lonely peril, where men were chained together in the wilderness, with life strained to the last notch, there could be no middle course of feeling. A man must either hate his companion and want to kill him, or love him and fight to save him.
So Manuel loved Señor, and laughed at the great white wonder of it, lightening it all; and once again the sealed fountain of his speech broke and flowed. Back in the settlement chicha had always loosed Manuel’s tongue, liberated wild mirth, incited fierce passions; here in the jungle the divining of another’s pain, such as had seared him years before, pierced to the deeps of his soul, and brought forth kind words that came haltingly through lips long grimly set to curse.
In the beginning of that new kinship, Señor looked in amaze upon his changed comrade, and asked if he had fever. Manuel shook his shaggy head. Señor then fell silent; but he listened, he had to listen, and, listening, forgot himself. A new spirit fused the relation of these men.
“Señor, we are hunters,” said Manuel. “I for gold that I do not want and shall easily find, you for—”
“Peace, Manuel, peace, that I ceaselessly want, but will never find.”
Onward the voyagers poled and waded up the blue Palcazu. The broken waters held them to five miles a day. Only giants could have made even so many. The slimy rocks over which floundered the hydra-headed balls of snakes, the stench of hot ponds behind the bars, the rush of current to be fought inch by inch, the torrents of rain, the bailing of the canoe, the merciless heat, and the ever-whirling, steel-colored bands of venomous flies — these made day a hell, rest a time of pain, sleep a nightmare; but the hunters, one grim, the other gay, strengthened with the slow advance.
Often Manuel climbed the banks, to return saying there was cowcha, more than he had seen, yet still not enough. They must go higher, to richer soil. They camped where sunset overtook them. As they sat over the smoky fires or fished in the river or lay side by side under the tent, Manuel talked. He had gone over the vast fund of his wilderness knowledge, experience in that sun-festered world, stories of river and jungle, of fights and fevers. Circling back on his seafaring life, as castaway, mariner, smuggler, he dredged memory of the happenings of those years till he reached the catastrophe that had made him a wanderer.
“What made me a caucho outlaw?” he queried, whipping his big hand through the flying swarm about his face. “A woman! What sends most wandering men down the false trails of the world? What drove you, comrade? Perhaps a woman! Quien sabe? I loved a girl. She had eyes like night — lips of fire — she was as sweet as life. See my hand tremble! Señor, it was years ago — five, maybe ten, I don’t remember — what are years? We were married, and had a cottage on a grassy hill above the bay, where the wind blew, and we could see the white ripples creeping up the sand. Then a sailor came from over the sea; a naval man, Señor, of your country. He had seen the world; lie could fascinate women — and women change their love. She walked with me along the beach in the twilight. The wind tossed her hair. I repeated gossip, accused her of loving this man I had never seen. She acknowledged her love; proudly, I thought bravely; surely without shame. Señor, with these same hands I forced her to her knees, stifled her cry — and slowly, slowly watched the great staring eyes grow fixed and awful — the lips fall wide—”
“You strangled her?” burst from Señor in passionate force.
“I was a fiend,” went on the Spaniard. “I felt nothing except that her love had changed. I fled over the seas. For long my mind was dark, but clearness came, and with it truth. How I knew it I can’t say — these things abide in mystery — but my girl was innocent. Then hell gaped for me. Burning days — endless nights under the hateful stars — no rest — her last cry, like the Perde-alma, Señor — her great, wide eyes — the beat, the beat, the eternal beat of pain, made him you see a thing of iron and stone.
“What was left, Señor? Only a wild life. You see the wanderer with crimes on him thick as his gray hairs. Ah! What I might have done — might have been! I see that in your eyes. What a man might have been! Holy Mercy! A braver part no man ever had chance to play. I could have left her free. I would not have heard the hound of remorse ever baying my trail. I could have hidden like a stricken deer, and died alone. But I was a blind coward. Men see differently after years go by. What is love? What is this thing that makes one woman all of life to a man? Constant or fickle, she is fair to him. Bound or free, she answers to nameless force.
“Where did you — all this happen?” asked Señor hurriedly and low.
“It was at Malaga, on the Mediterranean.”
Señor stalked off into the gloom, whispering.
Manuel did not notice his comrade’s agitation; he was in the rude grip of unfamiliar emotions. His story had been a deliberate lie, yet it contained truth enough to recall the old feeling out of its grave. He thought he had divined Señor’s secret, his sacrifice, the motive behind his wandering in a God-forsaken land. He believed it was to leave a woman free and to forget. He felt the man’s burning regret that he had not spilled blood in vengeance. So he had lied, had made himself a murderer, that by a somber contrast Señor might see in forgiveness and mercy the nobler part.
Deep in Manuel’s bitter soul he knew how he had lied — for that woman of his youth had not been innocent; he had not harmed her, and he had left her free. Señor would believe his fabricated tragedy, and, looking on this hulk of a man, this wandering wretch, haunted by what he might have been, and, thanking God for his clean hands, might yet see the darkness illumined.
More days the hunters poled and pulled up the Palcazu, to enter, at length, the mouth of a deep estuary coming in from the north.
This water was a blue-green reflection of sky and foliage. It was a beautiful lane, winding between laced and fringed, woven and flowered walls. The heavy perfume of overluxuriance was sickening. Life was manifold. The estuary dimpled and swelled and splashed — everywhere were movements and sounds of water creatures. Gorgeous parrots screeched from the trailing vines; monkeys chattered from the swishing branches. Myriads of bright-plumaged birds, flitting from bank to bank, gave the effect of a many-colored net stretched above the water. Dreamy music seemed to soar in the rich, thick atmosphere.
The estuary widened presently into a narrow, oval lake, with a sandy shore on the north. Crocodiles basked in the sun, and, as Manuel turned the canoe shoreward, they raised themselves on stumpy legs, jaws wide, grotesque and hideous, and lunged for the water.
“Cayman! I never saw so many,” exclaimed Manuel, striking right and left with his paddle. “Where I find caymans, there’s always cowcha. Señor, I believe here is the place.”
They ascended the bank, and threaded a maze of wild cane rising to higher ground. The soil was a rich alluvial. Manuel dug into it with his hands, as if, indeed, he expected to find gold there. The ridge they mounted was not thickly forested. Manuel made two discoveries — they were on the borderland of the eastern Andes, and all about them were rubber trees. Whether or not Manuel cared for the fortune represented by one hundredth part of the rubber he could see, certain it was that he ran from one tree to another clasping each in a kind of ecstasy.
“Iquitos will go mad,” he cried. “A thousand tons of cowcha in sight! It’s here. Look at the trees — fifty, sixty feet high! Señor, we shall go in rich, rich, rich!”
They packed the supplies up from the river to escape the sand flies, and built a shack, elevating it slightly on forked sticks to evade the marching ants and creeping insects. Inside the palm-leaf walls they hung the net, fitting it snugly in the cramped space. By clearing away the underbrush and burning the ground bare, they added still more to the utility of their camp site, and, as far as it was possible in that jungle, approached comfort.
A troop of monkeys took refuge in the tops of some palms and set up a resentful chattering; parrots and macaws swelled the unwe
lcoming chorus; a boa wound away from the spot, shaking a long line of bushes; and an anteater ran off into the sitekas.
Manuel caught up his gun, making as if to pursue the beast, then slowly laid the weapon down.
“I’d forgotten. We’re in Cashibos country now. I’ve seen no signs, but we had best be quiet. At that we may have to shoot the jaguars. They stalk a man.”
The rubber hunters worked from dawn till the noonday heat, rested through the white, intense hours, resumed their tasks in the afternoon, and continued while the light lasted. The method of honest rubber hunters was to tap a tree in the evening and visit it the next morning to get the juice. This was too slow a process for Manuel — as it took several days for a flow of a few ounces.
He was possessed with exceeding skill in the construction of clay vessels to catch the milky juice and in extracting rubber. He carried water from the river and fashioned large clay repositories, one for so many rubber trees; also he made small vessels and troughs. These baked hard in the sun. Then he cut the trees so the sap would flow freely. They would die; but that was of no moment to the outlaw. He had brought a number of kettles, in which he made a thick steam by heating palm nuts. Taking a stick with a clay mold on the end, he dipped it first in the milk, and then dried the milk in the stream. From a vessel full of milk, he got one third its weight in rubber.
“Señor,” he said proudly, “I can make a hundred pounds of rubber in a day.”
It was a toil-filled time, in which the united efforts of Manuel and Señor were given to making an immense cargo of rubber. Swiftly the days passed into weeks, the weeks summed months, and the rainy season was at hand. Soon the rubber hunters must expect a daily deluge, a flooded, sticky forest, intolerable humidity, and sun like an open furnace door.
Manuel awoke from his lust for rubber.
“The canoe won’t hold another layer,” he said. “She’ll be loggy enough now. We can rest and drift clear to Iquitos. How good! We must be starting.”
