Amazon Nights: Classic Adventure Tales from the Pulps

by Arthur O. Friel

  "No, they will not rob me,” Thomaz answered. “They are honest men. Chico found them honest, and he knows. And Chico will not have anything to do with you, Gomes."

  "That fool monkey?” the yellow man sneered. “You mean that I am not honest because that dirty little beast does not like me? Have care, Ant-Eater! I have had enough of your foolishness. Now get out of my way and give me that gold!"

  His voice was a snarl. The two Indians leaned forward a little, their rifles ready. But Thomas stood unmoved.

  "Whether you are honest or not is something you know better than I,” he said. “But you shall not have one grain of my gold—unless Chico says so. Chico, rascal, come here!"

  He looked upward, and so did the others. We knew the monkey must be up on one of the roof-poles, where we could not see him.

  "Come down, rascal!” coaxed the gray man, “If this be an honest man who can be trusted, come down and show us that you trust him."

  And he pointed at Gomes, holding his finger steady as he talked. For minutes the men stood there in that way. Then Thomaz said:

  "You see, he will not come near you or have anything to do with you. He has gone back into the farthest corner. He knows! So go away, and do not bother us more."

  The yellow man ripped out a string of curses.

  "I will send your monkey to hell, and you too if you interfere!” he yelled.

  His right hand dropped and rose. Flame spat from it. The crash of the revolver-shot made us jump. And down from the roof tumbled poor little Chico.

  He struck the ground near a corner-post and struggled in the dirt. Then he got to his haunches and sat there facing Gomes.

  With one little hand he pushed toward his slayer as if to drive him away. With the other he plucked feebly at his body.

  After a moment he lifted that hand too and held it up for all to see. It was red with blood. And he held it there, senhores, until he crumpled over into a pitiful little heap and lay still.

  I am not a soft-hearted man, but something came up in my throat as I saw that thing. And Pedro growled again and snapped up his rifle.

  "I have got that yellow devil,” he rasped in an undertone. “Cover one of the caboclos!"

  I did so. But, though I too was hot with rage, I whispered:

  "Do not shoot—yet. Wait until they attack Thomaz."

  I heard him grit his teeth, but he did as I said. And there we stood, each covering a man and waiting. But those shots were not fired. For Thomaz Nobrega, good-humored eater of ants, suddenly became another man.

  He stared down at his dead pet. Then he lifted a face that was black as the wrath of God.

  Gomes, looking into that face, stepped back from him. His revolver swung up again and once more he fired—this time at Thomaz. And then things happened so fast that we forgot to shoot.

  With a roaring yell the big gray man jumped at the yellow one. As he jumped his machete flashed out.

  One of the Indians fired his rifle from the hip. A man swayed and fell—but that man was not Thomaz. So swiftly had he sprung past the caboclo that the bullet missed him and struck the other Indian in the heart.

  For an instant the Indian who had fired stood dazed, staring at the mate he had killed. In that instant death came to him. Without even looking aside, the Ant-Eater swung his machete sidewise and backward. It caught the caboclo in the neck. He dropped sprawling, his head chopped nearly from his body.

  Before the dead man struck the ground Thomaz had seized Gomes. He seemed to forget his machete, and to want to crush Gomes to death in his great arms.

  Clinching, they went off their feet, the yellow man's revolver exploding again as they fell. Then on the ground they rolled and fought in a death-grapple.

  Gomes got his gun-hand loose and shot again, but the bullet went wild. We heard him cry out with pain as that frightful grip tightened around him. He dropped his revolver and tore with his free hand at the gray man's eyes. But Thomaz turned his head away and ground his skull into his enemy's face, and Gomes quit that attempt.

  Over they rolled, and somehow Gomes got his revolver back and clubbed Thomaz over the head. The Ant-Eater's grip seemed to loosen. Gomes fought him down under, on his back.

  But Thomaz was not yet senseless. Though he was underneath he still held his enemy fast. As Gomes struggled to get the gun against the head of Thomaz and blow out his brains we saw that Ant-Eater's big right hand, still clutching his machete, rise from the yellow man's back.

  The machete turned downward. It slid between the ribs of Gomes. The yellow man screamed once. Then he grew limp. Both men lay still.

  "Por Deus!" said Pedro, lowering his rifle. “And we thought Thomaz needed protection!"

  We ran to the tambo to see whether the Ant-Eater still lived. We shouted to him, but got no answer. He lay as quiet as the dead men around him.

  And when we tried to lift Gomes from him we could not do so. The terrible grip of Thomaz still held, and our tugs at Gomes only forced the machete farther into his body.

  "This is a true ant-eater, Pedro,” I said. “Just as the ant-bear of the jungle locks his great claws in the body of his enemy and takes him to death with him, so Thomaz has done with Gomes."

  Pedro nodded, but said he thought Thomaz still lived. And after each of us took one of those powerful arms and forced it away from the body of the yellow man we found that this was so.

  Thomaz had lost his senses, and he had been shot through the left side; but the wound was not bad, and when he became conscious he would be in no danger. So we lifted him and carried him into the little creek, where the water washed off the dirt and blood of his fight and revived him at the same time.

  He woke up fighting. He knocked us both down in the creek, and when we reached the shore and stopped coughing up water he stood there staring at us in a puzzled way Then he looked around him, saw what lay in his tambo and remembered.

  Straight to Chico's little body he went. He lifted it tenderly and sat down in his hammock, stroking the soft fur and looking sadly down at the tiny companion whose judgment he had trusted so.

  Big tears rolled down his face, and though he made no sound we saw that he could not have grieved more if Chico had been truly his own flesh and blood. Not knowing what to say, we stood silent.

  After a time he got up, lifted his red machete from the ground and, limping a little from his wound, went out by himself into the bush. When he came back his hands were empty, and on the hilt of his bush knife was fresh dirt. And we knew Chico had been given burial.

  Not until then did he give any attention to the bullet-hole in his side. As I have said, it was not bad, though the muscles were torn so that they would be very painful for a time. We patched him up as well as we could, and then we took out the bodies of the three intruders and put them where they would do no further harm.

  When we returned he still sat in his hammock, looking soberly down at his pile of gold.

  "Did you see what happened?” he asked. We nodded. Slowly he went on:

  "I did not want trouble with Gomes and his men. If Chico had said so I might have given them some gold.

  "But they killed my little baby comrade. And so they had to die."

  And again we were glad we had not shot that monkey ourselves when first we met him, for now we knew we should have had to kill this big simple fellow too.

  "I did not tell Gomes so, but I am almost ready to go out,” he said after a while. “I am not finding much gold now."

  "Then you had better go out at once,” we told him.

  But he shook his head and said that first he wanted to be sure. And so, having nothing else to do, we offered to work his creek for him and see what the prospect was.

  We stayed there several days, searching that little stream while he sat on the bank nursing his sore side and talking to us. And we found he was right, there was no gold left worth staying for.

  So then we packed his gold through the bush to the cachoeira, and there we loaded it into the canoe of the
men who had come to rob him With the canoe, he said, it would be easy for him to reach his home, as it would take him within a day's march of the place where he lived, and he could hide canoe and gold in the bush while he went and got his wife and boys to help carry his treasure.

  We gave him food and cartridges, too, and pushed his boat out into the stream. But he caught a vine and held it.

  "Come and stay with me for a time—I should like to have you live with me forever,” he urged us. “You have done everything for me, and I have done nothing for you except to offer you tanajuras, which you do not like."

  But we laughed and refused.

  "We have the wandering foot, Thomaz,” we told him, “and we have stayed over-long in one place. Now we have decided to ramble on above this cachoeira and see whatever we may see there.

  "So go home, and good luck go with you. And do not offer us any of that gold of yours or you will have a worse fight on your hands than you had with Gomes and his caboclos."

  He grinned and rubbed his thick gray hair as if he did not know just what to say. Then he said only, “Adeos, comrades,” and went away. But before the canoe had gone two lengths he turned and threw two little nuggets of gold at our feet.

  "From me, Thomaz Nobrega, in memory of Chico!” he called.

  And at once he began paddling in a way that must have hurt his side sorely, and quickly he and his treasure were gone around a bend.

  We picked up the nuggets and kept them, as he had said, in memory. See, here is mine. I have smoothed it into the shape of an ant-eater's head, and whenever my fingers touch it I remember the man who was so queer and simple, and yet killed two men to avenge the murder of a monkey.

  Yes, senhores, as I said at the beginning, the ant-bear is a harmless fellow when let alone, and he seeks no trouble with anyone. But if ever you meet with a man who looks and acts like that ant-bear, do not crowd him too far. If you should do so you might not live long enough to be sorry.

  THE JARARACA

  DEEP IN the Javary jungle stands a tree of death. Malevolent, repulsive, bristling with venomous thorns, it towers alone on the slimy clay bank of a nameless ygarapé. Near it grows no other tree; in its branches no monkeys play; nor do parrot nor toucan ever settle on it to rest their wings. It is shunned by all creatures save those hideous things which crawl and coil to strike death into the blood of the cleaner animals which walk on legs above them. Under it lurk only the dread surucucu—poisonous master of the bush—and the deadly jararaca.

  Yet on the grisly trunk of this infernal growth gleams a symbol of hope. In the blazing sun of noonday, in the cool radiance of the midnight moon, this token shines on undimmed by the evil shade of the monstrous branches above. Its golden light strikes into the beady eyes of the serpents below, which rear their heads to hiss and dart forked tongues at it—in vain. Year by year it hangs there, flashing its message to the jungle creatures which see but do not understand; and year by year it shall hang there, until at last the malignant thing to which it clings shall fall in rot. For it is fastened deep and firm: fixed by sharp steel and the strength of a man's good right arm.

  The keen steel still is there, driven far into the wood—the machadinha of a rubber-worker. But the man is there no more. He has gone out among other men, and with him he has taken the tale of the tree and the golden symbol.

  The tree is the assacu—the poison-tree of the Amazon jungle.

  The symbol is a cross of gold, its chain knotted hard around the head and handle of the hatchet. The man is Lourenço Moraes, a broad-chested, steady-eyed seringueiro of the Amazon headwaters. And this is the tale of Lourenço:

  * * * *

  IN THE season of the verao, when the great floods had ebbed and we rubber-workers could return to our labors on the vast seringal of Coronel Nunes, I was called into the office of the coronel himself. He was making up his gangs, which would go out into those parts of the swampy jungle where were rubber areas and toil there through the few months before the next rise of the waters. As I had been in charge of a gang the previous season, I expected another assignment of the same sort. But Coronel Nunes had other ideas.

  "Lourenço,” he said briskly, “you have spent the time of the floods at Remate de Males, growing fat and lazy. Now I shall give you some work which will shrink your belt."

  I blinked. I certainly was not fat, nor had I idled the time away at the Javary town he named. While the floods swept the land I had made two long roving canoe journeys with a comrade of mine, and the pair of us had undergone much hardship and faced death more than once. So now I was puzzled until I saw the twinkle in the black eyes of my employer.

  "It is true, coronel,” I grinned then. “I have done nothing but paddle hundreds of miles, fight head-hunting barbaros and demons with tails, starve on farinha and pirarucu, and suffer from wounds. So of course I am fat."

  He laughed.

  "So I have heard,” he told me. “That is why I have picked you for the work I have in mind. I have plenty of men who can boss gangs in fixed camps, but few who are such jungle-tramps as you. Now you are to take eight men whose names are here—” he tapped a list on his desk “—and scout for new rubber. You know what I want, and you may use your own judgment as to where to go. Your men will pack the supplies tomorrow. That is all."

  But I did not go yet.

  "Who are my men?” I asked.

  He read the list. I shook my head.

  "If you will pardon me, coronel,” I objected, “I do not want all of those men. I do not want half of them. No, I do not want any of them!"

  "Why?” he demanded, frowning. “They are good men."

  "Good workmen, yes. They are of the best—as workmen. But a very good workman may be a very poor bushman. On a long scout into unknown jungle I should be so busy looking after those men that I should have no eyes left to see rubber."

  He still frowned, but it was a frown of thought, not of anger. He had a very friendly feeling toward me because of some dangerous things I had done for him in the past, as well as much faith in my judgment. So now, instead of snapping out that I must obey orders, as he might have done with another man, he sat thinking. After a pause I added:

  "Give me only one man, and let me pick the man. Two men travel more easily than nine, and—"

  "And you will pick that rascal Pedro Andrada, your vagabond companion,” he cut in.

  "The same rascal who, though himself wounded, once saved the life of your son-in-law and afterward tracked down the man who had shot them both,” I reminded him.

  "Ah, yes,” he admitted, his face softening.

  "A stout-hearted, two-handed, merry comrade, and a better bushman than I,” I went on.

  He stared a moment at the list. Then he swiftly tore it in two and crumpled the pieces.

  "As you will,” he said. “That will give me seven more men for the gangs. You two reprobates may go as far as you like. But bring me back samples and reports of something big!"

  "We shall try, coronel,” I promised.

  And out I went, hardly able to keep from singing and shouting. No dull labor in a fixed camp—weeks of prowling the bush with my comrade—permission to go as far as we liked! Senhores, while I hunted for Pedro I nearly burst with my news.

  I found him at the big supply storehouse. With him were three of the men who had been listed to go with me. None of the four was working. Squatting in the shade, the three whom I had already rejected were listening to Pedro, who, with a cigarette between his fingers, leaned against the wall and talked lazily, as if only to pass the time. His back was toward me, and the squatting men were staring at him so fixedly that they neither saw nor heard me approach.

  "At first I thought it must be a great surucucu, that giant snake which all men fear,” Pedro was saying. “But it crept through the air, not along the ground. And then, as the glow of our little fire showed it more clearly, I saw that it had no head. Where a head should have been, comrades, was a great hand! And the thing which had seemed the body
of a huge snake was a great dark arm, reaching stealthily toward that man who now slept.

  "I could not move. I could not cry out. My tongue clung to my teeth and my blood turned to water. And while I lay there frozen, the awful hand closed over the head of that man and lifted him as easily as you or I would lift a frog. It drew him swiftly back into the blackness of the jungle—and we never saw him more.

  "One scream he gave—one horrible groaning scream like that of a man crushed by the surucucu. That was the last sound he made. And though we seized torches and plunged into the bush seeking him after the arm disappeared, we found no sign of him. No, nor even the next day, when we searched every foot of ground—we never found a trace.

  "And I can tell you, friends, I am glad I do not have to go where you are going. I do not want to be within reach of that demon again. The very memory of what I saw makes me cold even now."

  I stood where I had stopped, staring hard at him. We two had roved the bush many times together and seen some terrifying things, but I never had seen this of which he spoke, nor even heard of it. The three who squatted there glanced at one another uneasily, and one of them dropped his cigarette as if it had lost its taste. He let it lie.

  "Does the coronel know of this?” he asked.

  "No,” said Pedro, blowing a cloud of smoke. “We felt that it was as well to keep silent about the matter. I would not tell you of it now, but that I feel you should be on your guard against this thing when you go into that region. Say nothing of it to the others in your gang, Luis, until you are well on your way. If they knew of it sooner some of them might refuse to go."

  "I refuse now,” growled Luis. “I will take my chance against snakes or savages or beasts, but not against such an infernal thing as that—"

  He stopped suddenly as he saw me standing there. Then he stood up in a dogged way.

  "Lourenço, you have heard,” he said. “I shall not go in your band of scouts. I have a wife and children to think of—"