Now for it!
The sea, in that burning sun, almost blinded him; but the jaguar could see far enough across the waves a low line of dark trees, walking, so it seemed, upon the face of the waters—or was it a mirage dancing tauntingly in the heat flurry? Could the jaguar see a mirage anyway?
The big, flat, spotted, brilliant head turned slowly and gazed steadfastly at the excited crowd sweeping down upon him. For a moment he permitted himself a bare-fanged, twisted-lipped, evil snarl—the jaguar’s “blessing”—then waded into the warm, glinting, blinding water and resolutely struck out.
The brute was a fine swimmer. Though he personally had been born and had lived upon the plains all his life, and never crossed anything bigger than a stream, he came of forest ancestors used to dealing with the world’s largest rivers.
He forged ahead grandly, head well up, and with the confidence that comes of conscious ability.
A rifle cracked along the old-gold sand, but the sundance on the water dazzled, and the bullet spat—plup—yards short. Another and another spoke, and the bark of the .30-30 Marlin repeaters came to the swimmer’s ears plainly as the bullets shot up miniature spouts all around him; but the broad, yellow head kept on, and on, and on, steady, straight, untouched, unflurried.
At last one long shot clipped his right ear. It looked like a biscuit from which a piece has been bitten, but even that did not turn or stop him. A last flurry of reports, a last “covey of death” spattering up the surface, and he was out of range—their range anyway.
“Never mind,” said the stockmen to each other. “Guess the sharks’ll get him, fellers. You betcha.”
But the sharks did not get him. They had heard the firing, or felt the concussion of the bullets in the water, or something, and turned their knife-bladed back-fins the other way.
Slowly but strongly the jaguar came to the mangrove forest. It was a remarkably wet, and a lugubrious, dark, noisome, muddy, and smelly place. In fact, it was not like any ordinary forest at all. Dante might have described it.
It was not tall—the sea winds saw to that. It had no true tree trunks—the sea itself saw to that. It was like a forest of pier-piles; a forest of many-headed hydras with hundreds of legs stuck in the mud. And the sea sucked and gurgled in and out among the legs, otherwise roots. Great freak crabs, blue and freakish crabs, red played grimly in and out among the branches that wound and twisted like a thousand snakes.
* * * *
The jaguar—his claws rasped in the wet hollowness—had hauled himself up the roots, high above high tide among the writhing stems and branches, before he discovered that the mangrove forest was a world unto itself—inhabited by its own living beasts and birds, insects and sea folk, beside the crabs.
Wings flapped above, and great herons removed themselves from his company. Some diving bird thing, all wet and shiny, hit the water with a loud plop as it took the sea.
A head, yellow, flat, broad, black-spotted, big and slit-eared, thrust from a tangle of branches and foliage and made evil remarks to his address in a language that—petrified him. It was his own language, the talk of the jaguar people, their swear words.
And the jaguar changed as he stiffened from heavy jaw to padded heel. He contorted into a calamity, ready set for trouble—a cast statue of ferocity. It is a way cats have. Nine times out of ten it is just thrice perfected bluff.
This was the tenth time.
For one thing, the plains jaguar had grown larger; that was fur on end. For another, he had sprouted some height; that was arched back. For another, he moaned, horribly, quietly, and to himself; but it is not quite clear what that was for.
The head remained, like a head in a picture, framed in gnarled stems.
The jaguar did not. He turned half side-wise—to side-leap at need. He stood like a horse hard held with a bearing rein on, champing at air. Then—he faded out, still sidewise, crab-fashion, a step at a time.
But he had seen what human eyes could not have seen—the flick of a thin ear tickled by a fly, two yards to the left of the head among the foliage. And he had smelled what human nostrils most assuredly could not have smelled on the salt breeze—though the bigger cats bear an acrid taint—the odor of not one jaguar, but two, and the other a lady—dux femina facti.
Upon the plains, where the jaguar had lived all his life, the stockmen had seen to it that lady jaguars were rare creatures. Indeed, this plains jaguar had never seen one till that precise psychological moment. If he had, he might not have wandered afar worrying the herders of cattle. As it was—
The return of the jaguar ten minutes later, and flying—at least, he was not touching anything as he came—from the opposite side to that in which he had faded and gone out, was intended as a surprise, and would have been to humans, but not to the other jaguars. Cats do that sort of thing. It is one of their little specialties.
Surprise is the essence of tactics. Meeting it—the art.
The other male jaguar did not show whether he was surprised or not; probably not. He was not there when the plains jaguar landed where his back had been. He left the branch as the other arrived upon it. Also he exploded like a firework benefit in the process. Perhaps he realized what he had missed, or what had missed him.
But both jaguars were so obsessed with each other that they forgot their surroundings. Cats are likely to do that when they squabble, all the world over. There is no health in it, though.
The plains jaguar’s lathy hind-limbs landed upon a crab and a branch; you could hear the claws scrape upon the horny carapace. And he knew nothing about crabs! Then he spun with a startling explosion.
The crab had locked home one pincer to his tail. The jaguar would have acted the same if a baby had touched him from behind with a little finger; his nerves were in that state. He pictured rival male jaguars on every hand. He was all heated up and scorched! But even a jaguar cannot for long chase his own tail on mangrove branches slippery with the green scum of the sea.
A loud and spluttering double splash announced the end of his catherine-wheeling.
The other jaguar, to save himself, had sprung at what seemed to be an inviting wall of foliage he could pull himself up on. It grew, however, like a screen that gave toward the sea.
Thus resulted the picture of one fine male jaguar, very flat-eared, hanging futilely on to some branches of mangrove that swung out and out, and bent down and down, until he realized that there was no sense in hanging on to them any longer. He was already up to his neck in water.
Now, see how Fate lets down those good, scientific, learned ones who dogmatize upon the survival of the fittest.
The water was shallowish at that precise spot. There was mud upon which the mangroves throve in their own peculiar way. As the jaguar turned and struck out for the nearest root-landing his hind legs churned up this mud.
* * * *
There was a flash as of red flame in the depths, a blurry, indistinct outline of something big and long that writhed, and—the jaguar shot upward, pawing wildly, with a blood-curdling roar.
Then he fell back inert, struggled feebly, galvanized to madness again, collapsed and drifted away on the strong tide, swimming feebly, banged his head on a root, spun round, drifted on, hit something else, revolved, and so, in and out among the lugubrious roots, was carried, slowly, surely, drifting from sight.
He did not come back.
He had touched off an electric eel, a nasty, big, brown, compressed thing, with a flaring scarlet throat, from what little could be seen; and it, fearing attack, had given him a shock, perhaps two shocks. A flood must have washed the eel to that unfortunate place.
Meanwhile, the plains jaguar, having shaken off the incubus of the crab, slowly scratched, and scraped, and scrambled his way up the first roots he found that offered a hold.
As he did so his tail came within an inch of the gigantic eel thing, and had that tail touched it, contact would have been effected and the tail would have been as good a conductor as any other part of
the body so far as the resulting shock was concerned. But that is Fate.
Above, among the twisted mangrove branches, the jaguar found the eternal feminine, sitting humped and cynically comfortable, as she had sat all along. She turned her yellow, spotted head and regarded him with cruel, inscrutable eyes.
Then she rose, and, stretching deliberately and insolently, yawned in his face.
The other jaguar had been the finer beast, but—well, he was gone, and meanwhile there was this one purring and blandishing in his place. Enough. She patted at that other a furtive, saucy pat, the sort of pat that would have ripped half his cheek off if he had not dodged unconcernedly as only cats can.
Then the two slouched off to fish for turtles, which is perhaps a more exciting way of spending a honeymoon than fishing for compliments.
MYSTERY ON DEAD MAN REEF, by George Armin Shaftel
CHAPTER I
“What is your real name, lad?” the trader asked.
“Just what I’ve told you! John Gregg.”
“Oh.” DeCourcey chuckled. “I was wondering if that was as phony as the rest of your story.”
The young man stiffened. “Look here—”
“Easy, easy! You jump off Lassen’s trading schooner and swim ashore here, and tell me you were a stowaway and had been kicked off. I talk to Lassen by radio and he tells me you hired him to bring you to Puna-Puka. So what am I to think?”
Gregg shrugged. He fought back the sudden panic tightening his innards and kept his voice cool as he answered.
“I’m broke. I figured you’d give me a job for a while and pay my passage away from here.”
The trader chuckled. A small, plump, gray-haired man, DeCourcey had a kindly way about him.
“So you’re broke. Yet you told Lassen to come by here next week to pick you up, and promised him three hundred dollars.”
DeCourcey’s tone was amused, not accusing. And he spoke on quickly, as if not liking to embarrass young Gregg.
“I told Lassen not to come back here until his next regular trip. That’s six months from now. So I guess you’re marooned here, lad.”
So guess again, John Gregg thought suddenly, staring out to sea, excitement flaring within him.
Gregg and DeCourcey, who was the one trader and white resident of the island, were sitting on a coral boulder out on the reef a couple hundred yards from the Puna-Puka beach. They were fishing for malau, a fat big-eyed red fish of gorgeous flavor. The moon had risen, and the southeasterly trade wind had faded to an amorous sigh.
Along the shore the coconut trees stood stately and mute, gleaming faintly above the white glare of the beach. Behind the palms, a few lights shone in the village beyond the trading station.
Within the reef, the water was smooth. But on the outer edge of the coral barrier, the surf smashed and pounded. Across the reef it swept crabs and lobsters with eyes that shone amazingly in the sun’s glare. It followed hollows on the broad expanse of coral—shimmering pools in which spotted sea eels lay coiled.
It was ceaseless as time, that surf, beating up an eerie glow of phosphorescence as it struck, lashing across the barrier with a crackling hiss and choking down them into coral caverns.
Gregg stared out beyond the surf, out to sea. Keener-eyed than the trader, he saw lights out there. A yacht was heading in toward Puna-Puka.
Marooned, was he? Like hell! Tonight, he’d swing into action. Tomorrow, he’d get away.…
DeCourcey pulled up a fat red fish.
“Enough,” he sighed. “Let’s turn in.”
Gregg waited an hour, lying on his cot on the screened veranda of the trading station. Then he got up. Walked inside.
Moonlight shone on counters and shelves. With poignant homesickness, Gregg was drawn to thoughts of home. For here were those smells of a country general store—of kerosene, of leather goods and dungarees, of tobacco and candy. At the back of the store was DeCourcey’s desk, and iron safe. Between them was his shortwave radio set.
* * * *
Gregg got busy. His lean, rangy figure bent over DeCourcey’s roll-top desk, he searched through ledgers and bills of lading and files of correspondence.
In a pigeonhole, he found photographs. And a medal. On the back of this Croix de Guerre medal he found what he sought: the engraved name, Philip DeCourcey Leroux.
Which meant that DeCourcey was Leroux!
“Don’t move.”
Gregg whirled, and recoiled, blinded by the smack of a flashlight beam into his lean face. He heard a gun being cocked.
“I could shoot you as a thief,” DeCourcey said. “I’d be absolutely justified.”
Unflinchingly Gregg faced him. He was a serious young fellow, Gregg—a high-tempered youngster who turned defiant and reckless when threatened. His lips tightened with panic, but his gray eyes blazed in anger.
“I’m no thief, Leroux!”
“Please keep on calling me DeCourcey.”
“I came here to find you. To take you back to Honolulu!”
The trader swore, his pale forehead knitting in surprise.
“But why?”
“You were the only witness to the DeGroot robbery. You can identify the thief.”
“Yes, that’s so,” the trader admitted.
Gregg’s voice was taut. “Am I the man?” he demanded.
“No. He wasn’t a tall, good-looking youngster like you. He was burly, putting on lard, and gray at the temples.”
“Just the same, the crime’s finally been fastened on me!” Gregg said, and the angry resentment of long months of brooding worry was in his voice. “Look, DeCourcey. If you’d come back and testify, you could save me from going to the penitentiary for fifteen to twenty years!”
DeCourcey sighed, his pallid face regretful.
“Sorry, my boy. But I’m fifty-six, and my heart’s going back on me. It’s a long way to Honolulu—and I’ve no assurance of getting back here. You haven’t the cash to insure that.”
“I’ll borrow it!” Gregg exclaimed.
“A man suspected of the DeGroot robbery borrow money?”
“I’ll get a job and—”
“Maybe.” DeCourcey shrugged. “Chances are I’d be stranded in Honolulu, with my little business here going to ruin. No, I won’t go.”
“But, man alive, you’re sentencing me to the penitentiary!” Gregg pleaded.
“Don’t think I’ve got a brass pump for a heart, lad! I’m damned sorry. Look. Suppose I write out my testimony—”
“They’d say I forged it! You’ve got to appear in person and be identified beyond question.”
DeCourcey sighed again. “Then I suggest, Gregg, that you stay here. Puna-Puka is a paradise. When I die, you’ll have my business.”
“God’l’mighty, I’m young! I’ve got my whole life ahead of me!”
“And I’m old, with but a year or two ahead of me. I’m spending them right here,” DeCourcey said, and his voice was hard. “Go back to bed.”
“Go to hell!” Gregg raged.
And he stalked out of the trading station, strode blindly down the beach.
CHAPTER II
DIRTY WORK
Next morning, that yacht was anchored out in the roadstead off Puna-Puka. The village buzzed with excitement. Arrival of a vessel was a rare event. Every native, from older folk in pareus, naked children, young men in dungarees and slim, comely girls wearing fern leaf girdles, were down at the beach when a boat put off from the yacht and headed through the break in the reef toward the village.
“That party looks like money,” DeCourcey murmured to Gregg as the yacht’s boat reached the beach.
There were four men and two women in the group coming ashore.
“I’m Henry Scanlon.” The leader of the group introduced himself to DeCourcey and Gregg. He was short, thick-set and powerful, this Henry Scanlon. His hair was utterly white and his mustache was white, and his fleshy face was sunburned to a flaming red, out of which keen eyes of a Nordic blue stared with a steel
y directness.
“We’re from Globe Picture Syndicate, and we have permission to land to take pictures. Getting background shots for a South Seas epic, you know. My cameraman, Luke Hawes—”
Hawes was lanky, bald and tough. Obviously he was Scanlon’s Man Friday. He stood with both hands in his coat pockets, feet spread apart, just like Scanlon stood. He stared hard and unwinkingly at you, like Scanlon did. He was the director’s shadow, if you could think of a stocky man throwing a long, lanky shadow.
Gregg didn’t like either of them. The third man, Nigel Rorke, was obviously an actor. His was a professional profile with wavy hair and a petulant mouth and an absorbing interest in his fingernails. The fourth man, Nils Rogg, was the yacht’s skipper—a chunky, bronzed man with hair so metallically black it screamed toupé. He shook hands like a decent guy, Gregg thought to himself.
Gregg looked at the two women—and his pulse leaped.
“My wife,” Scanlon was saying, “and Susan Lanphier, who doesn’t need introduction even here at this tail end of creation. When better stars are found, Susan will still outshine ’em!”
DeCourcey said, “We haven’t any movies here, but never before have I regretted missing them as much as I do now, Miss Lanphier.”
She grinned at him engagingly; and as Gregg was introduced, she stepped forward and shook hands in a friendly, comradely way. But her hand clung to his; and as she looked at him, suddenly she wasn’t smiling. Something very intent and meaningful was in her glance for just a split-wink instant.
She was a tall, shapely girl with reddish brown hair that seemed to burn in the sun, and eyes of so deep a dusky blue they were almost violet, and her skin was tanned to a buoyant golden hue. She wore a play suit, just linen shorts and a sheer waist.
In the landing through the surf, the party had got doused with spray, and Susan Lanphier’s blouse clung revealingly to her body. She moved with grace, lithe loveliness in every line of her slim-hipped figure. Gregg stared at her, his pulse thudding in his ears.
Her hand pressed his meaningfully, and she turned away.
The Adventure Megapack Page 23
