Amazon Nights: Classic Adventure Tales from the Pulps

by Arthur O. Friel

  Then came my chance. The yellow man came up beside me once more—on the left, as before—and jeered at me, and stepped ahead. In a flash I swooped at the revolver, caught its butt, yanked it from his belt. He whirled like a cat. As he faced me I pointed at his body and pulled.

  The hammer snapped down, but no explosion came. I pulled trigger again—and again and yet again. The weapon only clicked. It was empty.

  Then, swift as a striking snake, the Yellow One's rifle-barrel hit my hand and knocked the revolver from it. And the Yellow One burst into a shrill, screeching laugh, and I saw I had been tricked.

  I sprang at him. But he jammed his rifle into my stomach, stopping me in my tracks and knocking out my wind. Four men seized me and held me powerless.

  "So at last you have come to life, my illustrious pack-animal!” he mocked me. “I have been testing you, waiting to see if you would not seize that unloaded weapon which I brought near your hand. You were so slow about it that I began to think you could be trusted to become a Peccary—but you bit at the bait, yes!

  "And now do you remember what I told you, señor—that if you tried treachery you should scream for death long before it came to you? I see you do. And since my conscience is so tender that I could not rest if I failed to keep a promise, I am compelled to see that you receive what I pledged you."

  Though I wrestled and kicked and bit, the men holding me dragged me to a big tree and held me there while their leader went into the bush seeking something. When he came back he carried a double handful of long thorns, as hard and sharp as nails.

  At sight of these the other Peccaries chuckled as if they had seen them used before and knew what was to be done with me. More of them grasped me and held me against the tree so that I could not move at all. They twisted my hands up behind me and around the tree-trunk, and the Yellow One picked up the revolver he had knocked from my fist and held it by the barrel like a hammer. Then he stepped around the tree behind me. A moment later a sharp pain pierced one of my hands.

  Yes, senhores, that is how I received these ugly scars on my hands and arms, at which I have seen you glance more than once, though you were too polite to ask me about them. And these are not all, for there are other scars all down my body and legs, made in the same way. With those thorns the grinning Amarillo nailed me to that tree so that I hung in torment, unable to escape.

  "There, señor, you will not have to carry any more burdens for us,” he jeered when it was done. “You will have nothing at all to do but to hang here and scream curses after us when we are gone. When we come back we will let you watch us eat and drink, for you will have hunger and thirst by that time.

  "Oh no, dear, friend, you will not die before then, for I have been very careful not to break any large blood-vessels, which would let you die too soon. You will last for some days, unless a wandering jaguar should happen to find you. In that case—well, a jaguar must eat; is it not so?"

  And all the Peccaries laughed. But I kept my jaws locked and made no sound. After watching me a minute he added:

  "The thorns hurt, yes? That is very sad. Perhaps I can find something that will take your mind off the thorns for a few hours to come."

  He went away again, and returned with a folded leaf. Keeping it closed, he shook it violently. Then he flipped it open and snapped it at me.

  Out from it flew several ants, maddened by the shaking they had had—and they were the aracaras, the fire-ants whose bite gives keen pain that is felt for hours afterward. The instant they struck my body they bit me, and ran over me biting furiously, until I groaned in unbearable pain.

  Then those beast-men laughed again harshly, and one of them went and caught a couple of tucandeira ants—those terrible black ones which are more than an inch long. He would have thrown these on me too, but the Yellow One struck them from him and destroyed them with his rifle-butt.

  "Fool!” he snarled. “Bitten as this man is already, those black ants would kill him. Would you spoil all the enjoyment we shall have with him in the next few days?"

  The man muttered something and turned away. And after spitting in my face the bandit chief turned away too, saying:

  "We have more important things to do than to stay longer with you, you Brazilian dog. But we shall return, and then you shall have new things to think about."

  And soon they were gone in the bush.

  How long I hung there, senhores, I do not know. It seemed eternity. Burning with the torment of the fire-ant poison and the thorns and my wrenched and twisted muscles, I know I raved and screamed after those men had gone. I know, too, that if it had lasted much longer I should have gone stark mad, and that when the Yellow Man returned he would have found me only a yelling idiot. But before my mind gave way a new thing happened. Without a sound two men suddenly stood before me.

  They were Indians. For an instant I took them for a pair of the Peccary porters who had sneaked back to torture me anew. But then I saw that they were lighter in color, their faces were shaped differently, and they carried big bows.

  They were men of the cannibal tribe in the big maloca where I had once been assistant chief, and their faces showed that they knew me. They had little love for me, I felt, for when the Jaguar and I had been among them we had killed their chief and five others of their men. Still, a quick death at their hands would be a mercy to me now; and as I had learned some of their language during the time I spent among them, I begged them either to kill me or set me free.

  They grunted to each other, and one asked me how I had come there, nailed to that tree. I made them understand that a band of human Peccaries had left me there. At once they flew into a rage, and I knew my guess had been right, and they were of the tribe whose women the beast-men had stolen.

  They gritted their teeth, and beat their chests, and acted as if about to start off in pursuit. But I managed to tell them they were much outnumbered, and their foes had firearms, and so they must have more men before attacking the bandits.

  They scowled, but talked it over between them and agreed that I was right. And then they laid down their bows and set to work taking out the thorns.

  Though they were wild, fierce fighting-men of the jungle and eaters of human flesh, they handled me as gently as they could; and when the thorns were out they laid me down and brought me water in big leaves, and gave me to drink. They did even more; they got certain herbs from the forest, and crushed them, and placed them on my wounds; and before long the cruel pain of those hurts grew less, so that I could lie still and not twist and writhe. Then they swiftly made a crude bed of branches and vines and leaves, and put me on it, lifted it, and started straight away through the bush.

  They marched a long time—so long that once when they paused to drink I asked them what they had been doing so far from their village. They said they were hunters, and had been following a tapir's track. Then they lifted me and were off again.

  It was nearly night when our journey ended at a cleared place, in which stood a great round house about forty feet high, its sides made of palm-trees and its roof of palm-leaves—the maloca where my rescuers and some two hundred other Indians made their home. There my carriers laid me down and left me while they crept through the one low door of the house to report to their chief.

  Men and women and children crowded around me as I lay there, and I thought how different was my first arrival among them. Then I had come fighting, hating and despising them as eaters of men.

  Now, after what I had just gone through, they seemed friends and decent people; for I knew they ate only their enemies, and that the eating was due not so much to savagery as to some obscure religion; and I knew also that they washed themselves daily, and that a man who allowed himself to stink like the Peccaries would quickly be punished or banished. I saw, too, that they seemed sorry for me in my present condition, and felt that they would be kind to me. And it was so.

  Soon the hunters came out again, and with them their chief and two lesser chiefs, painted red and black, and wea
ring blue and red feathers bound on their heads, shoulders, and loins. The chief, who was a powerful young fellow, I did not remember; but one of the sub-chiefs was the crafty old man who once had saved my life, and the only one in all the tribe who spoke any words of my language.

  This old man looked at me and nodded and talked to the other two. And I was lifted again by the hunters and carried in through the little door and put in a hammock, where women soon brought me a gourd of broth that strengthened me much. And then I told my tale to the head men of the tribe.

  They listened in grim silence, except when I told of the murder of the young girl. Then a growl ran among the men around me, and the three chiefs snarled in rage. When I was through I felt sick, and my wounds burned again, and I gave no more attention to the chiefs or anyone.

  But soon an old woman came with two younger ones, and they put a thick, dark liquid on my injuries which stung like fire for an instant, but which soon eased my pain wonderfully; and then they gave me a drink of some sweetish stuff, and before long I fell into a deep sleep.

  When I awoke the sun was glaring down through the big smoke-hole in the roof, and women were cooking at their little fires scattered through the maloca. At once I was offered food by the old woman, and as I ate it I noticed that the tall young chief was gone.

  The old sub-chief was there though, and he came and sat by me and told me that the Peccaries already were being hunted down. The big chief and twenty of his best fighters, with the two hunters to guide them, had taken the trail at the first light of dawn. He added with a frightful grin that tomorrow much peccary-meat would be eaten here, and that if I did not care to taste it I should have the head of the Yellow One to kick about when my legs healed.

  He was not quite right; for the wild men were gone two days instead of one, and when they came they did not bring the head of the yellow demonio nor any other part of him. But they did bring with them the hands and feet of all the rest of that brutal gang—even those of the Indian carriers.

  They had ambushed the raiders in the act of carrying my coronel's rubber to their boats, and in a swift fight had killed them to a man—except the leader. How that cunning devil had escaped they did not know; he had been there, and then he was not there, and they could find no trace of him after that.

  They were angry over this, and all the more so because before he disappeared he shot three of their mates; and the chief asked me to tell them the way to the headquarters of the Peccaries in Peru, so that he could lead a war-party there before the Yellow One should bring his men to attack their maloca with their guns and bullets. This I could not do—I tried, but they could not understand me well. So then I told them that as soon as I could travel again I would lead them there myself, and we would kill all the Peccaries in their own homes.

  At once he became more cheerful, and promised to make me strong as quickly as possible; and he gave orders to the old woman who seemed to know so much about curing hurts, and she nodded. Then everybody prepared for a great feast to celebrate the victory they had already won. All the men, and the women too, painted themselves anew with curving stripes of black and red, and the chiefs put on their finest feathers and squirrel-tail belts, and the others wore necklaces of the teeth of animals. The women took the hands and feet brought back by the fighters, and stripped the flesh from the bones, and fried it in tapir-lard or boiled it in reddish pots.

  Much monkey-meat also was cooked, and parrots, and fish and other things; and all that day there was much eating and drinking, and a sort of ceremony that I could not understand and did not try to. They offered me none of the man-meat, and I was glad, for it angers those people to refuse any of their food. I ate some monkey, and then tried to sleep and forget what they were doing.

  For days I lay there while my hurts healed—and they did heal with surprising swiftness. For the old woman was by me day and night, brewing different things in jars over a little fire and putting some of them on my injuries and giving me others to drink; and I grew strong and well much faster than I could have done otherwise.

  While I was recovering the Indians were not idle. Some got plants with blue blossoms and small pods and yellow roots, and crushed the roots into pulp, and went away into the jungle; and the old sub-chief told me that with that root-pulp they were poisoning all the streams for a long distance around, except those which they themselves used.

  Others went out and made man-traps, such as pits and spring-guns, to kill anyone approaching the maloca. And those who did neither of these things worked on their weapons, fitting new cords to their great bows, or fastening barbed sting-ray bones on three-pronged spears, or testing the sharp jaguar-teeth set in big war-clubs, or dipping arrows and blow-gun darts into that brown poison which swiftly paralyzes and kills anything scratched by it.

  And while this went on the young war-chief sat with me at times and had me tell him about the Peccary village, so that he could get a clear picture of it in his mind and know what to do when we should reach it.

  Then came the time when I was whole again. I asked for weapons, and the war-chief gave a command, and men brought in all the guns and cartridges and knives taken from the Peccaries they had killed. From these I took the best rifle, and two revolvers, and cartridges, and a machete.

  I tried to have other men take the rest of the guns, but the chief would not have it so; for he said they were not skilled in the use of such weapons, and would do the expedition more harm than good with them. They did take the knives and machetes, however, for these they could use. And that night we all slept early, for we knew we had before us a long, hard journey with a death-struggle at the end of it.

  Before we slept, though, the fighting-men painted themselves once more. I noticed that this time they added a new stripe—a broad whitish curve around their chests and collar-bones; and from the way they grinned at it I thought they were not used to it. So I asked the old man what it meant, and learned it was a savage joke.

  Since the Yellow One's band painted themselves like the white-lipped peccaries, he said, the wild men would make themselves peccaries of the other kind—those with the white collars; and they would soon show that their teeth were sharper than those of the stinking pigs of the hills.

  At dawn we were up and away. There were fully sixty of us, all hard, relentless men. I would have turned northward, whence I had come, but the war-chief shook his head and led the way straight to the west. When we should reach the river, he told me, we should find there the Peccaries’ own boats, which the Yellow One had intended for carrying away my rubber, but which now had been brought upstream for us. And when I asked about this he said he had sent men to get the boats, and that they would not fail.

  I found that he spoke truth; for when we did reach the river there were the boats with a dozen more wild men in them—and with bloodstains on the wood which showed what had become of the Peccary boatmen.

  Though we filled those boats dangerously full, we went down the stream swiftly. Neither on the water nor on the Peruvian shore did we meet any man, nor even on our way through the hills to the lair of the beastly men-pigs. It seemed that they never suspected Brazilian Indians would come against them or could find their place.

  Still, we went quietly and carefully, lest we either fall into a trap or allow our enemies to learn we were coming. When at last we did come upon one of the guards they always kept out we were traveling so silently that he did not hear us at all.

  I saw him first, for I was the guide; and I recognized him as one of those who had thrown filthy insults at me when I was a prisoner there. Hot with the memory of those things, I lifted my rifle.

  But the chief, at my heels, caught my arm and shook his head; and I read his thought—that the explosion of the cartridge would be heard. So I lowered the gun, and he whispered something to those behind.

  A bowman crept up to us. His cord twanged. A war-arrow whirred. A gasping groan broke from the outlaw, and he fell on his face. We moved forward again.

  Soon af
ter that I halted, and told the chief we now were near the village. As I have told you, I had described this place to him before we started, and he knew there were three trails to it—one from the east, where we were now; one from the north, by which the robbers’ loot was taken out to some market; and one from the southwest, which they often used in starting on a raid toward the high mountains. Each of these trails was always guarded.

  I knew the chief planned to attack from all three trails at once as well as from the thick jungle around the clearing where the barracãos stood; so that now it was necessary to creep around the town, kill the outposts on the other two trails, and arrange the warriors so that all could sweep into the place at the same time.

  It was late in the day, but there would be time to attack before darkness dropped on us; and the chief quickly divided his forces into three parties. One, which he would lead himself, was to go to the northern trail; another, under the younger sub-chief—for the old sub-chief, unfit for fighting, had stayed at home—would take the southwestern path; and the third division would remain with me.

  Two orders were given—that no man should attack until the chief himself began the fight; and that if the Yellow One was there he must not be killed, but taken alive. For an instant I was angered by that last command, for I had long thirsted to repay that yellow devil for what he had done to me and my mates.

  But then I saw the hard gleam in the chief's eyes, and knew that what I might do to that Peccary would be merciful compared to what the Indian intended. So I determined that neither I nor any other man should kill him quickly if I could help it.

  The chief and the sub-chief went their ways, and we crept forward on our own path. Before long we heard sounds of life that told us we were almost at the edge of the clearing; and after I spied ahead and found the end of the trail clear I sent my men into the bush. Most of them were bowmen and blow-gun men, and I gave them no orders, knowing they well understood what they were to do—stretch out along the edge of the jungle and be ready for action.