For the footprints were those of a man who wore shoes!
“Dimmick wasn’t drowned, evidently,” exclaimed Finney. “But why the dickens—”
“Come on you fellows” urged the practical-minded Thurston. “There’s a trail here going into the center of the island. Let’s see if we can follow it.”
Shouting at the top of our lungs every few minutes, we advanced about half a mile on rising ground, the footprints being visible where the surface was soft. Then they disappeared altogether, but there were others. And those others were made by feet that had never wore a shoe!
Though none of us said so at the time, each feared that Dimmick must have fallen into the hands of savages and been murdered, and we felt a common desire to hand out punishment to the natives there. But none appeared until we reached the top of the hill. Suddenly from behind a tree stepped an almost naked black man, and before we had time to realized what he was up to, he hurled a long spear into our midst. It grazed Finney’s shoulder and then became embedded in a tree behind him.
Simultaneously our three revolvers cracked, and the black, with a yell, disappeared. But immediately afterward, two other spears shot through the air, and then half a dozen. By a series of miracles we dodged them and, dropping into the long grass, blazed away at the natives, who showed themselves more freely as soon as we got to earth. Several of them were hit, and the rest, either bewildered by the effect of firearms, took to their heels.
We lay still for a minute or two, wondering what might happen next, when a faint voice reached us. It seemed muffled and distant, but we leaped to our feet, knowing it must be Dimmick. Answering with a roar in concert, we moved away to the right, from which direction the sound seemed to have come. I was at Thurston’s heels, with Finney close up behind, when the doctor gave a cry of warning and, clutching at a sapling, just managed to avoid blundering headlong down into a yawning chasm. He was still balanced perilously when I reached for his coat and pulled him back to safety. As I did so, we heard Dimmick again. He was at the bottom of the chasm.
“Hello!” he called.
“Where are you?” I bellowed back, going close to the edge, and peering down but unable to see far on account of the foliage.
“Can you hear me?” came from Dimmick.
“Yes. How can we get down there?” I replied. There seemed to be no way of descending the edges, which were apparently almost sheer.
“Don’t try,” Dimmick called up. “You’ll have to make a rope somehow. Plenty of vines growing there. Fasten one end to a rock and lower it. You’ll want about sixty or eighty feet.”
Already we were slashing away from the trees close by us long vine stems which were strong enough to lift a horse.
“And say,” Dimmick added in a cheery voice, “if you happen to have a plate of steak and onions handy, you might drop it down now.”
* * * *
It took me the best part of an hour to fashion a cable which I felt sure could be trusted, and when the end was lowered it was just long enough. Dimmick called out that he was beginning to climb, and we waited anxiously until, grunting and panting, he came over the end. We helped him to safety without a word, waiting for him to recover his breath, for it had been a hard fight out of the chasm.
“Did those devils throw you down there?” Finney asked.
“No. The rope I made broke, and so did my neck, nearly, when I fell. Gee, it’s good to see you fellows! When I heard the old Tumbril squeaking though, I thought there was a chance you might find me. Then I heard shots, so I knew you were around and had met my friends the natives. You shouldn’t hurt ’em. They’re not a bad bunch, in a way; they don’t go in for any of this torturing business, I mean. It’s straight-away killing and eating with them. At least that’s what I understood, though they don’t know any beche-de-mer lingo, and I only knew an odd word or two of their dialect. They were saving me up for the full moon feast, I gathered.”
“Well, let’s get out of this.” urged Thurston, “or we’ll be at the feast yet. We’ve got a surprise for you on the Tumbril.”
Dimmick looked up quickly, a wild hope shining in his eyes; but he checked a question that sprang to his lips, for it seemed so futile. Then he smiled somewhat wearily, thinking there was some joke.
“Let me rest a minute or two.” he said. “I’ve had nothing to eat for days.”
“How did you get down there?” asked Thurston.
“Fell down. Didn’t I tell you once! The vines broke.”
“What on earth were you going into that hole for?”
“I’ll tell you,” Dimmick said. “The natives here are heathen. By that I mean they make their own gods—carved wooden things that they stick up in their huts and worship. And they think those little wooden gods are perfectly marvelous, until something goes wrong, such as when the man who carved it breaks his leg or if his new wife turns out a failure. Then he just makes a new god and throws the old one down into this hole. They keep the place sacred to the memory of gods for which they have no further use.
“Well, when you started kicking up a row with the Tumbril’s whistle, all the natives got together and left me kind of lonely and I broke out of the hut they’d fastened me in; and I made a beeline for the gods’ hole—”
As he was speaking, a spear glistened in the sun for a moment in its rapid flight through the air and narrowly missed me. We fired half a dozen shots into the trees.
“See that rock?” said Dimmick, pointing to a jagged peak that appeared above water now the tide was low. “That must be the one I ran into, tearing the bottom out of the boat. I had to swim from it to the beach, and those darned Kanakas wouldn’t come anywhere near. They think it’s full of devil-devils. They hung about till next day and then disappeared. I’d have swam off to the ketch, but there were altogether too many sharks around.”
We were half-way out to the Tumbril by now, and the three of us were bursting to tell Dimmick about somebody who was waiting on board for him, but we intended to save it as a surprise. Dimmick was sitting with his back to the steamer.
“You haven’t told us,” said Thurston, trying to look as if nothing unusual was going to happen, “what in the name of Pete made you bolt into that hole?”
“Oh. I didn’t finish, did I?” he remarked. “These natives take no end of trouble in making their wooden gods, and they finish ’em off with a pair of eyes. I thought maybe if I could get down and dig the eyes out of a few dozen—”
Dimmick dipped into each of his bulging coat pocket, and fetched out two hands full of virgin pearls.
“It was a bit dark down there, and I broke my penknife digging ’em out,” he said, “but I think I got all there were. Aren’t they beauties? Don’t they make your mouth water? I’d never have got away with it, though, but for you fellows, so we’ll share the proceeds.”
The little boat drew alongside the Tumbril, and Dimmick, glancing up, saw leaning over the rail the loveliest specimen of womanhood that ever drew breath in the South Seas.
For half a minute he didn’t speak. Pearls worth a fortune trickled through his fingers and dropped into the bottom of the boat. Then a queer sound came from the back of his throat, and we made way for him as he dashed over the side, up the rope ladder onto the Tumbril, and into the arms of his girl.
THE MINDOON MANEATER, by C.M. Cross
Moung Nay was sitting under the banyan tree in front of the dak bungalow of which he was the caretaker, feeling the edge of the dah he had been sharpening, and gazing thoughtfully at a series of immense tiger footprints that led out from behind the house past where he sat and away into the jungle across the road. There was not a man in the whole Sitang valley who would not have recognized those tracks, and Moung Nay, who had in spite of his scant eighteen, years, justly earned the reputation of being one of the best shirkurs of the district, did not need to be told. They had been made by the Mindoon maneater, the tiger which had terrorized the whole country for fifty miles around during the last six years and dr
iven great number of the farmers from the wilder parts to seek safety in the towns; all, in spite of the thousand-rupee bounty on his skin and a long series of hunts organized to rid the district of the scourge.
Countless had been the escapades of Mindoon since as a young tiger he had first earned his name by forcing the abandonment of the village of Mindoon in a series of uncanny raids, against which no traps, watchfulness, or organized hunts had availed. Men, women, and children had continued to disappear with appalling regularity, until finally the demoralized villagers deserted their rice clearings and fled to the more settled parts of the country.
The only effect of this flight, however, had been to enlarge the field of activity for Mindoon to cover the whole Tavoy district, for he was a brute of no common cunning. Thereafter he never killed twice in succession from the same village. A victim snatched from one settlement almost invariably meant that the next one would be from some place forty or more miles away.
He also developed a predelection for young children, and once he was reported to have entered a house filled with a large sleeping family. He made several peregrinations among them as they lay on the floor, in the course of which he received several kicks from individuals who resented the intrusion of what their semiconscious minds took for one of their big dogs, who were then lying mangled near by in the jungle, and concluded his visit by departing with the plumpest child in the room.
Every possible means had been tried to put an end to his career of slaughter. Spring traps consisting of a poisoned spear so arranged that when the tiger touched a string a bent bamboo would drive it into the brute’s body, which were usually so effective, had failed miserably when tried against Mindoon. Poison proved equally useless. Mindoon never returned to an old kill.
Organized hunts had been able to do no more than cause him a little excitement and enable him to add to his fame by further exploits. Every party that went out after him came back with fresh stories of his cunning and daring. On several occasions, he had entered the camp of the hunters and carried off one of their number. Moung Nay himself had been present when the tiger, disregarding the tethered cow, had shaken a servant-boy from the very tree (or rather the small bush) on which an army officer was keeping watch and made off before the startled soldier could fire a shot.
Small wonder then that Moung Nay had been busy putting an extra edge on the great knife in his hand and was now studying the tracks of the tiger—or devil, as he with the majority of the inhabitants of the district firmly believed.
“Uncle, rice is cooked,” called a child’s voice from the back of the bungalow.
“All right, Sharoo,” answered Moung Nay, rising and making his way to the house to help his ten-year-old nephew in the task of getting the huge earthen chattie off the fire. In a few minutes, the pair were making inroads upon the heaping plates of rice, such as only two hungry Karens can make.
For a time they were too busy to say anything, but at last little Sharoo stopped cramming the rice into his mouth long enough to ask, “Uncle, when will Deputy Commissioner Sahib let you have that rifle he promised you?”
Moung Nay stopped eating and looked out through the door at the tracks. “He says as soon as he gets a permit from Calcutta, which will be next dry season. I wish I had it now.”
Sharoo frowned and was about to say something derogatory about the government forbidding guns to people, but he was prevented by a voice from in front of the house shouting, “Ho, Moung Nay, Moung Nay.”
Moung Nay leaped to his feet, wiping his mouth on the back of his hand, as Muthoo, the Hindu mail-runner, appeared in the doorway holding out a blue envelope with the impressive “On His Majesty’s Service” printed across the top.
Moung Nay stoically took the letter as if he had always been in the habit of receiving such missives regularly, when as a matter of fact this was the first letter of any description that had ever come to him. He tore it open, but after a futile stare at the enclosed sheet, handed it over to Sharoo to see what three years spent at the mission school at Donebu would enable him to do with it. Sharoo grew an inch taller as he rose to the occasion. He was none too enthusiastic about going back to school, but he felt the dignity of his position as he slowly spelled out the following:
Moung Nay:
You are hereby ordered to close the bungalow, and report at once to me at Donebu to assist in hunting down the Mindoon maneater.
C. E. WHITE.
Deputy Commissioner.
Moung Nay turned to the mail-runner. “What is White Sahib thinking of,” he said, “to start after the Mindoon devil at this time when the rains will be here in a day or two at the most. Then it will be like trying to chase an eel in the Papoon Swamp to go after old Mindoon. If I only had a gun, I would have a better chance if I stayed right here. That is, if even a rifle would hurt him. Look at those tracks.”
The letter-carrier, after a respectful survey of the tracks, shrugged his shoulders. “Have you not heard?” he asked. “Only three days ago at the water feast at the Donebu Pagoda, the striped devil entered the Pagoda grounds in broad daylight and took the boy who was carrying the high priest’s fan. White Sahib is very angry. He says, ‘This is too much.’ He is going to slay Mindoon this time if he has to get permits from Calcutta and arm the whole province.”
Moung Nay nodded slowly.
Muthoo continued, “It is very strange how the old fellow always picks out a plump boy if he can. Better look out, Sharoo, you are getting as fat as Ko Bwe’s wife. You may get a ride one of these nights, from which there is no return. He must be hungry tonight, too. He got scared away from Saw Ker’s last night by a pot of water which fell down upon him as he was trying to crawl by the shelf it was sitting on into the house. So be careful, fat one, and keep away from the jungle.”
Sharoo made no answer, and Muthoo went on: “By the way, White Sahib raised the bounty to two thousand rupees yesterday. Much good that will do against a devil.”
“Right,” agreed Moung Nay. “It would do no good now even if old Mindoon were flesh and blood. He had better wait till the dry season. All we will get now is that Daingu fever. By the looks of those clouds in the south, the rains are close upon us now. But I suppose I must go or White Sahib will be very angry, and I shall never get that rifle he promised me. Have you had rice yet?”
The mail-runner smiled, pointed to the red and white cast marks on his forehead, and vanished down the mail road, breaking out as he entered the jungle into a high-pitched squealing chant that was calculated to induce even Mindoon to leave that part of the country at once.
* * * *
Under ordinary conditions, Moung Nay would never have thought of starting until the next day, but the unusual event of the letter showed White Sahib was in a hurry, and White Sahib was a man to be obeyed. Moreover, Sharoo’s school began the day after next in Donebu, and he could take him along and make sure he arrived safely.
Moung Nay and Sharoo therefore lost no time in tying a few necessaries up in a bundle and locking up the bungalow. Nevertheless, it was well past noon before the pair finally set off along a jungle-path which, though untraveled recently on account of old Mindoon, would mean a saving of several miles over the cart-road and would enable them to reach Donebu before night.
For several miles, the path wound along through closely packed clumps of bamboo, the glassy leaves of which formed a most effective sun-shield, but at the same time cut off all view of the heavens. Late in the afternoon, the path entered the more open growth of big mangoes and scrubby trees that characterized the lowlands of the Sittang Valley. Here, for the first time in several hours, the two caught a glimpse of the sky and saw immediately that Moung Nay’s prediction of the coming of the rains was to be speedily realized. Already masses of clouds, driven by the first of the monsoons, was pouring up over the mountain ranges to the south. Donebu was only a matter of three miles away now, and Moung Nay quickened his pace to such an extent that little Sharoo’s short legs were kept on the run most of
the time. Presently there came a flash of lightning, followed by a growl of thunder, and then, with a roar, a squall came driving over the jungle, sending the grub-eaten limbs of mango trees crashing to the ground and following them with a storm of mangoes.
Everything pointed to a miserable, wet night spent in a dripping tree, for it was manifestly impossible to proceed much farther in the gathering darkness and deluge of rain, which experience had taught them was not far off. Suddenly Moung Nay started to run, shouting back: “Come on, Sharoo; we’ll see if we can find Ba Tin’s old house.”
Sharoo’s legs did their best, and he was close behind his uncle when, a moment later, they rushed out from the jungle into an abandoned rice-clearing. The owner’s thatched house was still standing on its frail bamboo posts. With a glad cry, the two Karens rushed forward, climbed the rickety ladder, and pushed through the doorway into the black interior. The rain held off for a minute or two, but then came down in a torrent that blotted out the sight of the jungle, less than seventy-five yards away, with a white wall of drops and threatened to flay the flimsy thatch roof from the house.
Moung Nay and Sharoo, however, were too accustomed to rain and too thankful for a roof over their heads to spend any time worrying about the weather, especially when there was a good supply of boiled rice in their bundle. Night shut down before they had finished eating, and, without more ado, they stretched out on the floor, and were soon sound asleep.
* * * *
The rain proved to be only a passing storm, and three hours after the two Karens had fallen asleep, the tropical moon was pouring a flood of light down on the old hut in the rice-clearing. A barking deer tripped out of the jungle and nibbled its way daintily across the field, and then back again, finally settling down beneath a lone bush midway between the house and the place where the path vanished into the black jungle to chew its cud and listen to the frogs singing their welcome to the rains.
The Adventure Megapack Page 37
