by Jay Lake
That was sense, and I took the message to the chief while Pedro stayed and watched. I found the tribal ruler now sitting quietly with his leg and shoulder bandaged with pads of bark-cloth, and talking with several of the older men. He agreed that the advice of the white soldier was good, and gave orders to those with him that certain men should be held back for a time. He asked me also whether I would direct the fighting of those men. But I refused, for I wanted nothing to think of but my own work, and I knew his men would understand their own leaders better than me. Then I returned to our hut.
* * * *
A long time dragged past. The sun rolled high and hot in an unclouded sky. We talked little and smoked much—I do not believe I had ever smoked so many cigarettes in one morning. Around the other huts hung the strained silence of tense waiting. At the edge of the jungle no life showed, and from it came no sound. Between houses and bush the only living things were the vultures that had swooped down and were stripping the bones of the dead wild men.
“Ho-hum!” yawned the Trumpeter. “This is the hardest part of war—waiting for the other guy to start something. I’m getting sleepy. Might as well have a little music. Guess I’ll give those roughnecks out yonder the reveille and wake ’em up.”
As his rollicking tune ended Pedro leaned forward, listening. A confused noise, muffled by the bush, sounded and died.
“The barbaros!” I said.
“Perhaps so,” he replied doubtfully. “It seemed like the voices of men shouting together, but I did not think our enemies were so far away.”
Again we listened, but no further sound came. We settled back into waiting.
“Lourenço,” my partner said softly after a time, “do you see something climbing in that tall slim tree over yonder?”
Following the line of his pointing finger, I glimpsed a dark body moving upward at the edge of the bush. The leaves between it and us were so thick that I could notice it clearly, and soon I lost it altogether.
“Yes. I saw it. But I can not see it now.”
“I can. It has stopped and is resting on a limb. Perhaps, Senhor Trumpeter, your music has made the blower of the turé jealous. If that is he, I will play him a tune on this little steel pipe.”
Lifting his rifle, he rested it against the side of the doorway and stood aiming steadily at the thing in the tree. And soon his joking remark proved truth.
Out from that tree broke the bellow of the war-horn. Pedro’s rifle spat. The blare of the turé ended abruptly. The dark form felt crashing down through the branches.
Yells sounded behind our hut. Pedro and I jumped around the corners. A mass of savages was charging straight at us.
As we threw up our guns the mass split into three bodies. One swerved to the right, one to the left, and the third came on. At the head of this middle force ran a huge brute smeared with red paint, wearing a belt of human hair and a necklace of human teeth, howling like a madman and carrying a tremendous club.
We both shot him at the same instant. He pitched on his face and lay quiet. Over his body the others jumped, and we fired so fast that we killed some while they were still in the air. A small heap of corpses grew between us and the dead leader. Other warriors stumbled over these bodies, falling themselves and tripping more men behind them. By the time our guns were empty the force of the rush was broken.
But we got little time to reload. I managed to get two more cartridges into the magazine before the first barbaros reached me, and I fired these straight into their faces. Then I swung my gun, braining one man with the barrel, and dropped the empty weapon. Seizing the warrior I had just killed and holding him up before me as a shield, I pulled my machete and set my back to the wall.
Just what happened after that I can not tell you. It was stab—slash—dodge aside—stab and slash again, always holding that dead man in front and keeping the wall behind. All I can remember is snarling faces, stinking breath, grunts and groans and screeches, blood and brains and entrails. At last, gasping and dizzy with exhaustion and half-blinded with blood from a gash on my forehead, I leaned against the wall and found no man attacking me.
On the ground near me four men were heaving and wrenching, and out of the tangle a red machete rose and fell. By the time I got my wind and stood away from the wall their fight was over. Up from among the bodies rose a half-naked, red-smeared figure which reeled toward me. I lifted my machete to attack it. Then I recognized the bloody man as Pedro.
He stumbled against the wall and slouched there, sick from fatigue and blows. When he could breathe naturally again he twisted his split lips in a grin.
“Drop it!” he wheezed, looking at the dead savage still clutched in my left arm. After a glance at it I dropped it. Its head was no longer a head but a crushed pulp, battered in by club blows aimed at me. Its trunk, too, was full of gaping wounds, and several short spears stuck out from its ribs.
We picked up our guns and reloaded. The cartridges were our last, and so few that neither of us could fill his magazine. We looked at each other and at the fighting around us. And Pedro said—
“We must keep these for our last stand.”
It was so. The townsmen were being beaten down. Near us no man lived, but we knew our turn would come again all too soon, and that then our rifles and machetes would not save us long. The women and children were screaming again, and the yells of the savages spoke brutal exultation. Already some of them had stopped fighting and were butchering the wounded.
Behind us the army rifle cracked twice. Horner still lived. Dimly I remembered hearing him shoot several times while we fought. Now we ran back to the front of the hut, and there we found another fierce fight going on all along the line. The wild men had charged from the bush on this side also, and only the American’s foresight in providing for reserves had prevented them from catching the chief’s men from behind. These men, held back from meeting the rush at the rear, had stopped the one in front. But here too they were being killed faster than they were killing.
The end of all of us was close at hand, and we two stopped at the corners and held our fire for our last fight. But then a pair of red-streaked brutes went plunging into a hut close by, and out from that house a long scream rose high over the other cries around us—the shriek of a woman in an agony of fear. It was too much for me.
I dashed down to that place, shooting down a savage who got in my way, and attacked the murderers inside, who had seized a woman and a child. Two more of my bullets were gone when I came out; but the woman and child still lived, while their assailants did not.
As I left the doorway another wild man came bounding at me. Firing from the hip, I shot him in the body. He fell, writhed, clawed the ground, went limp and was still. The downward yank of my lever brought up only an empty shell. My last shot was gone.
A thrown spear thudded into the wall. Several more barbaros were coming at me. I sprang back into the house, where, with machete drawn, I waited just inside the door. But most of those killers never reached me.
A sudden crash of gunfire ripped out. Two of the charging savages toppled sidewise. The others stopped, faced to their left, poised there staring. At the same instant the wild yelling ceased. It seemed still as the grave.
Crash! Another volley.
One of the wild men before my door doubled in at the middle and dropped. Another fell backward, the top of his head gone. Only one was left standing. He whirled about, looked this way and that, and bolted for the shelter of the hut where I stood. As he came I saw that now his face was drawn with fear.
I stepped aside. As he plunged in at the doorway I swung my machete hard to his throat. He flopped down, his head cut almost off. The woman and child cowering behind me screamed again, but I gave no attention to them. I popped out into the open.
No more volleys came. Instead, the firing now was a steady crackle. Naked men were dropping dead. Other savages were running—some toward the bush, some toward houses, some straight at the place where the shooting sounded.
That place was near the river, and there among the shadows I saw gleaming steel, spurts of flame, yellow shirts and broad hats.
The Trumpeter’s “gorillas” had come back.
Shouting in wild joy, the desperate townsmen sprang again on their confused enemies. With spears, clubs, bare hands, they fought as if suddenly given new life. Then a whistle shrieked, out—one long blast—and at once the firing ceased.
With the end of the shooting, wild men who had taken cover came running out again and rushed toward the yellow shirts. They thought—and so did I—that the bullets were used up. But the riflemen had not stopped fighting. They had only begun.
With a roar they came lunging forward, the long knives on their guns flashing in the sunlight.
Then, while I stood there staring like a fool, I saw what those knives could do in the hands of men trained to their use. I had thought the bayonet must be a slow weapon, but I learned otherwise. Those grim-faced Americans seemed hardly to be really fighting, but only to be jabbing and dancing about; yet the savages swarming at them dropped, dropped, dropped, and the soldiers kept coming on.
But they came more and more slowly, and soon they were stopped. Heaving, hacking, stabbing, spearing, white and brown men were locked in a solid mass. And then, with the barbaros jamming together, the shooting started again.
The shots sounded dull and muffled now. Later I learned that this was because the muzzles were almost against the skins of the barbaros, and also that each of those bullets tore through two or three men. The firing did not last long, but it seemed to blow the wild men off their feet. So many fell dead at once that they blocked and bore down the others, and what had been a tangle of raging warriors became a heap of flesh.
Out of that pile squirmed men yelping with terror, who tried to break loose and run. And into that pile plunged the soldiers, reaching the struggling barbaros with tremendous long thrusts and spearing them like fish. Here and there a savage managed to pull himself out of the welter and run, but none of these ran far. The townsmen cut them off and slew them before they could reach the shelter of the jungle.
“Lourenço! To the rear!” called Pedro’s voice.
I started, looked around, could not see him, and got around the hut quickly. I had forgotten all about the fighters on the other side of the houses. There too I found white men battling hard, and these had not overcome their foes. There seemed to be fewer soldiers and more savages on this side, and the two forces were not locked together but broken up into scattered groups, every white man fighting his own battle against a number of copper-skins.
Pedro, after his shout to me, had thrown himself into this fighting and was swinging his machete on wild men who were swarming on a lone soldier. As I ran I picked another group doing the same thing, and a few seconds later I was hacking at their necks. For a while I was very busy. Then I found a limping townsman helping me with a spear, and between the soldier in front and us two in the rear we cleaned up that group.
Shots cracked around us as the last wild man fell at our feet. New yells rang out. Barbaros ran for the bush. The soldiers and village Indians from the other side of the town had swept in here to finish the battle. With their coming the wild men had bolted, and they found nothing to do but stand and shoot rapidly. When the crackle ceased no living enemy was left in sight.
* * * *
“Hooey! ’Tis a hot day for workin’!” panted the soldier whom I had helped, mopping his broad face with a sleeve and grinning at me. “Thanks for carvin’ up them guys the way ye done. I been gittin’ fat, and me wind ain’t what it was.”
“And I thank you, senhor, and your comrades, for coming when you did,” I said. “My last shot was gone.”
“Was it so? I wouldn’t think ye’d need a gun anyways, feller. Ye sure can sling a wicked knife.”
Then up came another soldier—a long, lean, easy-moving, red-spattered man.
“Howdy, mistuh,” he drawled, looking at me. “Have yuh seen a good-fo’-nothin’ rapscallion named Hawnuh—a li’l cuss with a brass hawn an’ a lot o’ gall?”
“He is in that house, senhor,” I nodded. “My partner and I found him with a broken leg and brought him back here.”
The tall man lifted his brows slightly.
“Laig busted, huh? Reckon we bettuh mosey ovuh an’ see how he come through this li’l pahty. Nawthin’ mo’ to do heah—these town boys will do the moppin’ up. Come on, Mike, yuh fat Dutchman.”
“Dutchman!” snorted the broad-faced man. “Ye slab-sided skeleton of a down-South hookworm, if I’m a Dutchman ye’re a greaser.”
The lean man grinned a slow grin, but made no answer, and we moved toward the Trumpeter’s hut. Other soldiers joined us on the way, looking curiously at me.
“Friend of mine,” said the man Mike, noticing these looks and moving his head toward me. “Who he is I dunno, but he’s there wit’ the rough stuff. Anybody cashed in?”
“All present or accounted for,” answered a stocky soldier with bow legs. “Tim Moran is busted up some, and so are Chicago Tony and Scotty McLeod, but nobody’s gone.”
“Arrugh!” grunted Mike. “Tim and Scotty need a swift kick for mixin’ in at all—they’re both rotten wit’ fever. And that little fightin’ fool of a Chicago wop—Holy Mother! Whaddye know about this!”
We had come around to the front of the house of the Trumpeter, and we stopped and stared. Its doorway was choked by a heap of dead barbaros.
“Hey, you Jack Horner!” some man snapped. “You all right?”
“Sure, I’m all right,” came the Trumpeter’s cool voice. “Kick that stuff out of the door and come on in.”
We threw the dead aside and entered. Horner stood on his one good leg, with the other knee supported by the hammock. His rifle-butt rested on the ground, and the long bayonet sticking up near his shoulder was dyed red.
“Who gave you guys any license to horn in on my party?” he complained. “Here I’m getting a lot of good bayonet practice and you bust in and shoot up the whole works just when I’m going good. What you doing here, anyhow? Did the spiggoties down in Borneo give you the gate?”
“Listen at him, will ye!” rumbled Mike. “Talkin’ like he was a growed-up man! And him blowin’ the guts out of his tin horn a while back, tryin’ to git reinforcements!”
“Not by a jugful!” Horner denied. “I blew the Charge, but I did it just to make a racket and give these boys out here a little pep. Where were you guys, anyway?”
“Upstream a ways. We found it bum goin’, so we turned around and come back. We camped above here last night, and heard ye play taps. When yer Charge come to us this mornin’ we took our foot in our hand and come on. Didn’t ye hear us yell when ye blew reveille?”
“I heard shouting, senhor,” said Pedro. “But we thought it must be barbaros.”
“’Twas a bum guess—there ain’t a barber in the gang,” said Mike. “But now listen here, Kid Horner. We got to slide right along downstream before anymore of the bunch kick off wit’ fever. Eb Peabody, that New England feller, cashed in a couple days ago, and Tim Moran and Scotty are gittin’ bad too. I hear they come ashore here wit’ the rest of the gang and got mauled, and that won’t do ’em no good. So we’ll move as soon as we can git them lousy paddlers back—they was that scairt of the wild guys they beat it acrost the river as quick as we landed. I’ll go git ’em now. When we’re ready we’ll give ye a yell. Slim, stay here and help Jack frog it down to the water. Fall in, the rest of ye.”
He turned and went, followed by all except the lean man with the slow drawl, who stood calmly chewing tobacco and spitting in the eye of a dead savage who lay face upward.
“Yuh li’l hawn-toad, yuh!” said Slim. “Yuh sho’ did tickle these felluhs’ ribs some. Whyn’t yuh jab ’em lowuh down? Yuh might of busted the steel on them rib-bones, an’ then whah’d yuh been?”
“Had to take ’em any way I could get ’em, Slim,” replied Horner. “They rushed the place after Pedro here left,
and if I hadn’t plugged a couple and sort of choked up the door with them they might have got me. Then I jabbed straight and withdrew quick. You can’t do any footwork when you’ve got a dead leg. Ho-hum. I sort of hate to leave this town, it’s so quiet and peaceful.”
Slim grinned, and we laughed. After looking at the dead men a minute Pedro strode out, crossed the clearing, and disappeared into the bush. Soon he returned with a long tube.
“Perhaps you would like a remembrance of the peace and quiet of our Brazilian forests, senhor,” he suggested. “Here is the turé of the barbaros.”
“Say, that’s mighty white of you!” cried the Trumpeter, reaching eagerly for it. After turning it over and examining its wooden barrel and crude mouthpiece he unfixed the bayonet from his rifle and passed the gun to Pedro.
“It’s a fair swap,” he said. “You guys will likely need a gun before you get home, and yours are no good with your ammunition all gone. The gang will give you plenty of shells. I won’t need the gun anymore.”
Knowing we were indeed likely to need a gun before reaching the Javary, we took the weapon thankfully. Then came a yell from the river, and Slim came in, took Horner’s arm around his shoulders, and started with him to the stream. We took down the hammocks and followed.
At the house of the chief we stopped to say farewell, and from him we learned that about a mile down the river we should find a channel which would take us on toward our own country. Then, with a final wave of the hand to the townsmen who had been our hosts and fighting mates, we went on to the water.
There we found two, big ygarités—long canoes with arched cabins—manned by stocky caboclos. And there we found waiting for us another of those heavy army rifles and many of the queer bottle-necked cartridges that went with it. The gun, we learned, was that of the man Peabody who had died of fever, and we were welcome to it. After big Mike had shown us how to work the bolt action and explained what he called a “safe” and a “cut-off,” we got into our own canoe and took up our paddles.