by Unknown
The cloth was burning fiercely, and spilled gasoline caught in mid-air. A fierce and savage flame dropped earthward. Spark on the cloth, and the cloud of inflammable vapor that formed where the leaking tin fell plummetlike, carried the flame down when the wind of its fall would have blown it out.
The following planes saw a flash of light. They saw a swiftly descending conflagration tracing a steep arch toward the tree tops. They saw that flaming vanish among the trees. And then they saw a vast upflaring of fire below. Flames licked upward almost to the tree tops....
Bell looked back from two thousand feet. Wing-tip lights were on, below, and disks of illumination played upon the roof of the jungle above the fire. The three planes were hovering over the spot. But a thick dense column of smoke was rising, now. Green things shriveling in the heat, and dried and rotted underbrush. Altogether, the volume of smoke and flame was very convincing evidence that an airplane had burst into flame in mid-air and crashed through the jungle top to burn to ashes beneath.
* * * * *
But Bell climbed steadily to five thousand feet. He cut out the motor, there, and in the shrieking and whistling of wind as the plane went into a shallow glide, he spoke sharply.
"Paula?"
"I am all right," she assured him unsteadily. "What now?"
"There's a seat pack under you," said Bell. "It's a parachute. You'd better put it on. God only knows where we'll land, but if the motor stops we'll jump together. And I think we'll have to jump before dawn. This plane won't fly indefinitely. There's just one chance in a million that I know of. There'll be a moon before long. When it comes up, look for the glitter of moonlight on water. With the wing-tip lights we may--we may--manage to get down. But I doubt it."
He moved his hand to cut in the motor again. She stopped him.
"If we head south," she said unsteadily, "we may reach the Paraguay. It is perhaps two hundred miles, but it is broad. We should see it. Perhaps even the stars...."
"Good work!" said Bell approvingly. "Nils desperandum! That's our motto, Paula."
He swung off his course and headed south. He was flying high, now, and an illogical and incomprehensible hope came to him. There was no hope, of course. He had had, more than once, a despairing conviction that the utmost result of all his efforts would be but the delaying of their final enslavement to The Master, whose apparent impersonality made him the more terrible as he remained mysterious. So far they seemed like struggling flies in some colossal web, freeing themselves from one snaring spot to blunder helplessly into another.
But the moon came up presently, rounded and nearly full. The sky took on a new radiance, and the jungle below them was made darker and more horrible by the contrast.
And when there were broad stretches of moonlit foliage visible on the rising slopes beneath, Bell felt the engine faltering. He switched on the instrument board light. One glance, and he was cold all over. The motor was hot. Hotter than it had ever been. The oil lines, perhaps the pump itself....
* * * * *
Paula's hand reached back into the glow of the instrument board. He leaned over and saw her pointing. Moonlight on rolling water, far below. He dived for it, steeply. The wing-lights went on. Faint disks of light appeared far below, sweeping to and fro with the swaying of the plane, bobbing back and forth.
It seemed to Bell that there had been nothing quite as horrible as the next minute or two. He felt the over-heated, maltreated motor laboring. It was being ruined, of course--and a ruined motor meant that they were marooned in the jungle. But if it kept going only until they landed. And if it did not....
White water showed below in the disks of the landing lights' glow. It tumbled down a swift and deadly raudal--a rapid. And then--black, deep water, moving swiftly between tall cliffs of trees.
Bell risked everything to bank about and land toward the white water. The little plane seemed to be sinking into a canyon as the trees rose overhead on either side. But the moonlit rapid gave him his height, approximately, and the lights helped more than a little.
* * * * *
He landed with a terrific crash. The plane teetered on the very verge of a dive beneath the surface. Bell jerked back the stick and killed the engine, and it settled back.
A vast, a colossal silence succeeded the deafening noise of twelve cylinders exploding continuously. There were little hissing sounds as the motor cooled. There was the smell of burnt oil.
"All right, Paula?" asked Bell quietly.
"I--I'm all right."
The plane was drifting backward, now. It spun around in a stately fashion, its tail caught in underbrush, and it swung back. It drifted past cliffs of darkness for a long time, and grounded, presently, with a surprising gentleness.
"Do you know," said Bell dryly, "this sort of thing is getting monotonous. I think our motor's ruined. I never knew before that misfortunes could grow literally tedious. I've been expecting to be killed any minute since we started off, but the idea of being stuck in the jungle with a perfectly good plane and a bad motor...."
He fished inside his flying suit and extracted a cigarette. Then he lit it.
"Let's see.... We haven't a thing to eat, have we?"
* * * * *
There was a little slapping noise. Bell became suddenly aware of a horde of insects swarming around him. Smoke served partially to drive them off.
"Look here," he said suddenly, "we could unfold a parachute and cover the cockpits for some protection against these infernal things that are biting me."
"We may need the parachute," said Paula unsteadily. "Does--does that smoke of yours drive them away?"
"A little." Bell hesitated. "I say, it would be crowded, but if I came up there, or you here...."
"I--I'll come back there," she said queerly. "The extra cans of gasoline here...."
She slipped over the partition, in the odd flying suit which looks so much more odd when a girl wears it. She settled down beside him, and he tried painstakingly to envelope her in a cloud of tobacco smoke. The plague of insects lessened.
There was nothing to do but wait for dawn. She was very quiet, but as the moon rose higher he saw that her eyes were open. The night noises of the jungle all about them came to their ears. Furtive little slitherings, and the sound of things drinking greedily at the water's edge, and once or twice peculiar little despairing small animal cries off in the darkness.
* * * * *
The jungle was dark and sinister, and all the more so when the moon rose high and lightened its face and left them looking into weird, abysmal blackness between moonlit branches. Bell thought busily, trying not to become too conscious of the small warm body beside him.
He moved, suddenly, and found her fingers closed tightly on the sleeve of his flying suit.
"Frightened, Paula?" he asked quietly. "Don't be. We'll make out."
She shook her head and looked up at him, drawing away as if to scan his face more closely.
"I am thinking," she said almost harshly, "of biology. I wonder--"
Bell waited. He felt an intolerable strain in her tensed figure. He put his hand comfortingly over hers. And, astoundingly, he found it trembling.
"Are all women fools?" she demanded in a desperate cynicism. "Are we all imbeciles? Are--"
Bell's pulse pounded suddenly. He smiled.
"Not unless men are imbeciles too," he said dryly. "We've been through a lot in the past two days. It's natural that we should like each other. We've worked together rather well. I--well"--his smile was distinctly a wry and uncomfortable one--"I've been the more anxious to get to some civilized place where The Master hasn't a deputy because--well--it wouldn't be fair to talk about loving you while--" he shrugged, and said curtly, "while you had no choice but to listen."
* * * * *
She stared at him, there in the moonlight with the jungle moving about its business of life and death about them. And very, very slowly the tenseness left her figure. And very, very slowly she smiled.
"Pe
rhaps," she said quietly, "you are lying to me, Charles. Perhaps. But it is a very honorable thing for you to say. I am not ashamed, now, of feeling that I wish to be always near you."
"Hush!" said Bell. He put his arm about her shoulder and drew her closer to him. He tilted her face upward. It was oval and quite irresistibly pretty. "I love you," said Bell steadily. "I've been fighting it since God knows when, and I'm going to keep on fighting it--and it's no use. I'm going to keep on loving you until I die."
Her fingers closed tightly upon his. Bell kissed her.
"Now," he said gruffly, "go to sleep."
He pressed her head upon his shoulder and kept it there. After a long time she slept. He stirred, much later, and she opened her eyes again.
"What is it?"
"Damn these mosquitos," growled Bell. "I can't keep them off your face!"
CHAPTER X
For four hours after sunrise Bell worked desperately. With the few and inadequate tools in the plane he took apart the oiling system of the motor. It was in duplicate, of course, like all modern air engines, and there were three magnetos, and double spark plugs. Bell drained the crankcase beneath a sun that grew more and more hot and blistering, catching the oil in a gasoline can that he was able to empty into the main tanks. He washed out innumerable small oil pipes with gasoline, and flushed out the crankcase itself, and had at the end of his working as many small scraps of metal as would half fill a thimble. He showed then to Paula.
"And the stars in their courses fought against Sisera," he quoted dryly. "Any one of these, caught in just the right place, would have let us down into the jungle last night."
She smiled up at him.
"But they didn't."
"No.... God loves the Irish," said Bell. "What's that thing?"
Paula was fishing, sitting on a fallen tree in the cloud of smoke from a smudge fire Bell had built for her. She was wearing the oily flying suit he had found in the shed with the plane, and had torn strips from her discarded dress to make a fishing line. The hook was made out of the stiff wire handle of one of the extra gasoline tins. "Hook and leader in one," Bell had observed when he made it.
* * * * *
He was pointing to a flat bodied fish with incredible jaws that lay on the grass, emitting strange sounds even in the air. It flapped about madly. Its jaws closed upon a stick nearly half an inch thick, and cut it through.
"It is a piranha," said Paula. "The same fish that bit your hand. It can bite through a copper wire fastened to a hook, but this hook is so long...."
"Pleasant," said Bell. Something large and red passed before his eyes. He struck at it instinctively.
"Don't!" said Paula sharply.
"Why?"
"It's a maribundi wasp," she told him "And its sting.... Children have died of it. A strong man will be ill for days from one single sting."
"Still more pleasant," said Bell. "The jungle is a charming place, isn't it?" He wiped the sweat off his face. "Any more little pets about?"
She looked about seriously.
"There." She pointed to a sapling not far distant. "The palo santo yonder has a hollow trunk, and in it there are usually ants, which are called fire-ants. They bite horribly. It feels like a drop of molten metal on your flesh. And it festers afterwards. And there is a fly, the berni fly, which lays its eggs in living flesh. The maggot eats its way within. I do not know much about the jungle, but my father has--had a fazenda in Matto Grosso and I was there as a child. The camaradas told me much about the jungle, then."
Bell winced, and sat down beside her. She had Ribiera's pearl handled automatic within easy reach. She saw him looking at it.
"I do not think there is any danger," she said with a not very convincing smile, "but there are cururus--water snakes. They grow very large."
"And I asked you to fish!" said Bell. "Stop it!"
* * * * *
She hauled the line ashore, with a flapping thing on the end of it. Bell took the fish off and regarded her catch moodily.
"I'd been thinking," he said moodily, "that Ribiera suspects we're dead. I'd been envisioning ourselves as marooned, yes, but relatively safe as long as we were thought to be dead. And I'd thought that if we lived a sort of castaway existence for a few weeks we'd be forgotten, and would have a faint chance of getting out to civilization without being noticed. But this...."
"I will stay," she said steadily. "I will stay anywhere or go anywhere, with you."
Bell's hand closed on her shoulder.
"I believe it," he said heavily. "And--if you noticed--I had been thinking of letting down the Trade. I'd been thinking of not trying to fight The Master any longer, but only of getting you to safety. In a sense, I was thinking of treason to my job and my government. I suspect"--he smiled rather queerly--"I suspect we love each other rather much, Paula. I'd never have dreamed for anyone else. Go over to the plane and don't fish any more. I'll rustle the food for both of us."
She stood up obediently, smiling at him.
"But kill that piranha before you try to handle it," she advised seriously.
Bell battered the savage thing until it ceased to move. He picked it up, then, and sniffed the air. Paula had been in a cloud of acrid smoke. She could not have detected the taint in the air he discovered. He went curiously, saw a broken branch overhead, and then saw something on the ground.
* * * * *
He came back to the plane presently, looking rather sick.
"Give me one of the machetes, Paula," he said quietly. "We brought them, I think."
"What is the matter?"
He took the wide-bladed woods knife.
"A man," he said, nauseated. "He either fell or was thrown from somewhere high above. From a plane. He was United States Secret Service. There's a badge in his clothes. Don't come."
He went heavily over to the spot beyond the smudge fire. He worked there for half an hour. When he came back there were earth stains on his hands and clothing, and he carried a very small brown package in his hand.
"He had a report ready to send off," said Bell grimly. "I read it. It's in code, of course, but in the Trade...."
He set to work savagely on the engine, reassembling it. As he worked, he talked in savage, jerky sentences.
"The Service man at Asunción. One of the seven who vanished. He'd learned more than we have. He was caught--poisoned, of course--and pretended to surrender. Told a great deal that he shouldn't, in order to convince The Master's deputy. The key men in nearly every republic in South America are in The Master's power. Paraguay belongs to him, body and soul. Bolivia is absolutely his. Every man of the official class from the President down knows that he has two weeks or less of sanity if The Master's deputy shuts down on him--and he knows that at the crook of the deputy's finger he'll be assassinated before then. If they run away, they go murder mad. If they stay, they have to obey him. It's hellish!"
* * * * *
He stopped talking to make a fine adjustment. He went on, somberly.
"Chile's not so bad off, but the deputy has slaves nearly everywhere. Ecuador--well, the President and half of Congress have been poisoned. The man I found was trying to get a sample of the poison for analysis. He'd learned it was unstable. Wouldn't keep. The Master has to send fresh supplies constantly all over the continent. That accounts for the deputies remaining loyal. If The Master had reason to suspect them, he had only to stop their supply.... They couldn't stock up on the deadly stuff for their own use. So they're as abjectly subject to The Master as their slaves are to them. No new slaves are to be made in Paraguay or Bolivia, except when necessary. It's believed that in six months the other republics will have every influential man subjected. Every army officer, every judge, every politician, every outstanding rich man.... And then, overnight, South America will become an empire, with that devil of a Master as its overlord."
He lifted one of the oil pumps in place and painstakingly tightened the bolts that held it.
"Picture it," he said grimly. "Be
asts as viceroys, already taking their pleasure. Caligulas, Neros, on viceregal thrones all over the continent.... And every man who shows promise, or shows signs of honor or courage or decency, either killed or sent mad or...."
* * * * *
Paula was watching his face closely.
"I think," she said soberly, "that there is something worse."
Bell was silent for an instant.
"For me," he said bitterly, "it is. Before The Master dares to make his coup public, he must be sure that there will be no foreign interference. So, he must establish a deputy in Washington. A relatively few chosen men, completely enslaved, could hold back our Government from any action. Leaders in Congress, and members of the Cabinet, working, in defense of The Master because his defeat would mean their madness.... He would demand no treason of them at first. He would require simply that he should not be interfered with. But his plans include the appointment of deputies in the United States later on. I don't think he can subdue America. I don't think so. But he could--and I think he would--send whole cities mad. And if you think of that...."
* * * * *
He was silent, working. A long, long time later he swung on the propeller. The motor caught. He throttled it down and watched it grimly. The motor warmed up to normal, and stayed there.
"It will run," he said coldly. "Those two plugs in the crankcase may come out at any time. I've tightened them a little. They'd worked loose from the vibration. But--well.... That Service man was heading for Asunción. He'd been found out. They probably shot him down in mid-air after he'd gotten away. His plane may be crashed anywhere in the jungle within a mile or so. And I've two bearings on the fazenda where Ribiera went, now. One from Asunción through here and one from Rio. I want to go back there to-night and dump burning gasoline on the buildings, to do enough damage to disorganize things a little. Then I'm going to try to make it to a seaport. We can stow away, perhaps."