I was already hurrying away when the mention of that great scientist’s name halted me once more.
The little flashy man had been tagging along at my heels, talking cheerfully and volubly all the while; and now, as I halted again, he struck an attitude, legs apart, thumbs hooked in his arm-pits, and his head cocked knowingly on one side.
“Prof,” he said, “if you’d work in the Tyng-Tyng Company, or fix it up with Bunsen to mention his Baby Biscuits as the most nootritious of condeements, there’d be more in it for you an’ me. But it’s up to you.”
“Well I won’t!” I retorted.
“Very well, ve-ry well,” he said soothingly. “Then look over another line o’ samples. No trouble to show ’em — none at all, sir! Now if P.T. Barnum was alive—”
I said very seriously: “The name of that great discoverer falling from your illiterate lips has halted me a second time. His name alone invests your somewhat suspicious conversation with a dignity and authority heretofore conspicuously absent. If, as you hint, you have any scientific information for sale which P.T. Barnum might have considered worth purchasing, you may possibly find in me a client. Proceed, young sir.”
“Say, listen, Bo — I mean, Prof. I’ve got the goods. Don’t worry. I’ve got information in my think-box that would make your kick-in speech the event of the century. The question remains, do I get mine?”
“‘Say, listen, Bo — I mean, Prof. I’ve got the goods.’”
“What is this scientific information?”
We had now walked as far as Riverside Drive. There were plenty of unoccupied benches. I sat down and he seated himself beside me.
For a few moments I gazed upon the magnificent view. Even he seemed awed by the proportions of the superb iron gas tank dominating the prospect.
I gazed at the colossal advertisements across the Hudson, at the freight trains below; I gazed upon the lordly Hudson itself, that majestic sewer which drains the Empire State, bearing within its resistless flood millions of tons of insoluble matter from that magic fairyland which we call “up-state,” to the sea. And, thinking of disposal plants, I thought of that sublime paraphrase— “From the Mohawk to the Hudson, and from the Hudson to the Sea.”
“Bo,” he said, “I gotta hand it to you. Them guys might have got wise if you had worked in the Tyng-Tyng Company or the Bunsen stuff. There was big money into it, but it might not have went.”
I waited curiously.
“But this here dope I’m startin’ in to cook for you is a straight, reelible, an’ hones’ pill. P.T. Barnum he would have went a million miles to see what I seen last Janooary down in the Coquina country—”
“Where is that?”
“Say; that’s what costs money to know. When I put you wise I’m due to retire from actyve business. Get me?”
“Go on.”
“Sure. I was down to the Coquina country, a-doin’ — well, I was doin’ rubes. I gotta be hones’ with you, Prof. That’s what I was a-doin’ of — sellin’ farms under water to suckers. Bee-u-tiful Florida! Own your own orange grove. Seven crops o’ strawberries every winter in Gawd’s own country — get me?”
He bestowed upon me a loathsome wink.
“Well, it went big till I made a break and got in Dutch with the Navy Department what was surveyin’ the Everglades for a safe and sane harbor of refuge for the navy in time o’ war.
“Sir, they was a-dredgin’ up the farms I was sellin’, an’ the suckers heard of it an’ squealed somethin’ fierce, an’ I had to hustle! Yes, sir, I had to git up an’ mosey cross-lots. And what with the Federal Gov’ment chasin’ me one way an’ them rubes an’ the sheriff of Pickalocka County racin’ me t’other, I got lost for fair — yes, sir.”
He smiled reminiscently, produced from his pockets the cold and offensive remains of a partly consumed cigar, and examined it critically. Then he requested a match.
“I shall now pass over lightly or in subdood silence the painful events of my flight,” he remarked, waving his cigar and expelling a long squirt of smoke from his unshaven lips. “Surfice it to say that I got everythin’ that was comin’ to me, an’ then some, what with snakes and murskeeters, an’ briers an’ mud, an’ hunger an’ thirst an’ heat. Wasn’t there a wop named Pizarro or somethin’ what got lost down in Florida? Well, he’s got nothin’ on me. I never want to see the dam’ state again. But I’ll go back if you say so!”
His small rat eyes rested musingly upon the river; he sucked thoughtfully at his cigar, hooked one soiled thumb into the armhole of his fancy vest and crossed his legs.
“To resoom,” he said cheerily; “I come out one day, half nood, onto the banks of the Miami River. The rest was a pipe after what I had went through.
“I trimmed a guy at Miami, got clothes and railroad fare, an’ ducked.
“Now the valyble portion of my discourse is this here partial information concernin’ what I seen — or rather what I run onto durin’ my crool flight from my ree-lentless persecutors.
“An’ these here is the facts: There is, contrary to maps, Coast Survey guys, an’ general opinion, a range of hills in Florida, made entirely of coquina.
“It’s a good big range, too, fifty miles long an’ anywhere from one to five miles acrost.
“An’ what I’ve got to say is this: Into them there Coquina hills there still lives the expirin’ remains of the cave-men—”
“What!” I exclaimed incredulously.
“Or,” he continued calmly, “to speak more stric’ly, the few individools of that there expirin’ race is now totally reduced to a few women.”
“Your statement is wild—”
“No; but they’re wild. I seen ‘em. Bein’ extremely bee-utiful I approached nearer, but they hove rocks at me, they did, an’ they run into the rocks like squir’ls, they did, an’ I was too much on the blink to stick around whistlin’ for dearie.
“But I seen ‘em; they was all dolled up in the skins of wild annermals. When I see the first one she was eatin’ onto a ear of corn, an’ I nearly ketched her, but she run like hellnall — yes, sir. Just like that.
“So next I looked for some cave guy to waltz up an’ paste me, but no. An’ after I had went through them dam’ Coquina mountains I realized that there was nary a guy left in this here expirin’ race, only women, an’ only about a dozen o’ them.”
He ceased, meditatively expelled a cloud of pungent smoke, and folded his arms.
“Of course,” said I with a sneer, “you have proofs to back your pleasant tale?”
“Sure. I made a map.”
“I see,” said I sarcastically. “You propose to have me pay you for that map?”
“Sure.”
“How much, my confiding friend?”
“Ten thousand plunks.”
I began to laugh. He laughed, too: “You’ll pay ’em if you take my map an’ go to the Coquina hills,” he said.
I stopped laughing: “Do you mean that I am to go there and investigate before I pay you for this information?”
“Sure. If the goods ain’t up to sample the deal is off.”
“Sample? What sample?” I demanded derisively.
He made a gesture with one soiled hand as though quieting a balky horse.
“I took a snapshot, friend. You wanta take a slant at it?”
“You took a photograph of one of these alleged cave-dwellers?”
“I took ten but when these here cave-ladies hove rocks at me the fillums was put on the blink — all excep’ this one which I dee-veloped an’ printed.”
He drew from his inner coat pocket a photograph and handed it to me — the most amazing photograph I ever gazed upon. Astounded, almost convinced I sat looking at this irrefutable evidence in silence. The smoke of his cigar drifting into my face aroused me from a sort of dazed inertia.
“Listen,” I said, half strangled, “are you willing to wait for payment until I personally have verified the existence of these — er — creatures?”
; “You betcher! When you have went there an’ have saw the goods, just let me have mine if they’re up to sample. Is that right?”
“It seems perfectly fair.”
“It is fair. I wouldn’t try to do a scientific guy — no, sir. Me without no eddycation, only brains? Fat chance I’d have to put one over on a Academy sport what’s chuck-a-block with Latin an’ Greek an’ scientific stuff an’ all like that!”
I admitted to myself that he’d stand no chance.
“Is it a go?” he asked.
“Where is the map?” I inquired, trembling internally with excitement.
“Ha — ha!” he said. “Listen to my mirth! The map is inside here, old sport!” and he tapped his retreating forehead with one nicotine-stained finger.
“I see,” said I, trying to speak carelessly; “you desire to pilot me.”
“I don’t desire to but I gotta go with you.”
“An accurate map—”
“Can it, old sport! A accurate map is all right when it’s pasted over the front of your head for a face. But I wear the other kind of map inside me conk. Get me?”
“I confess that I do not.”
“Well, get this, then. It’s a cash deal. If the goods is up to sample you hand me mine then an’ there. I don’t deliver no goods f.o.b. I shows ’em to you. After you have saw them it’s up to you to round ’em up. That’s all, as they say when our great President pulls a gun. There ain’t goin’ to be no shootin’; walk out quietly, ladies!”
After I had sat there for fully ten minutes staring at him I came to the only logical conclusion possible to a scientific mind.
I said: “You are, admittedly, unlettered; you are confessedly a chevalier of industry; personally you are exceedingly distasteful to me. But it is useless to deny that you are the most extraordinary man I ever saw.... How soon can you take me to these Coquina hills?”
“Gimme twenty-four hours to — fix things,” he said gaily.
“Is that all?”
“It’s plenty, I guess. An’ — say!”
“What?”
“It’s a stric’ly cash deal. Get me?”
“I shall have with me a certified check for ten thousand dollars. Also a pair of automatics.”
He laughed: “Huh!” he said, “I could loco your cabbage-palm soup if I was that kind! I’m on the level, Perfessor. If I wasn’t I could get you in about a hundred styles while you was blinkin’ at what you was a-thinkin’ about. But I ain’t no gun-man. You hadn’t oughta pull that stuff on me. I’ve give you your chanst; take it or leave it.”
I pondered profoundly for another ten minutes. And at last my decision was irrevocably reached.
“It’s a bargain,” I said firmly. “What is your name?”
“Sam Mink. Write it Samuel onto that there certyfied check — if you can spare the extra seconds from your valooble time.”
II
On Monday, the first day of March, 1915, about 10:30 a.m., we came in sight of something which, until I had met Mink, I never had dreamed existed in southern Florida — a high range of hills.
It had been an eventless journey from New York to Miami, from Miami to Fort Coquina; but from there through an absolutely pathless wilderness as far as I could make out, the journey had been exasperating.
Where we went I do not know even now: saw-grass and water, hammock and shell mound, palm forests, swamps, wildernesses of water-oak and live-oak, vast stretches of pine, lagoons, sloughs, branches, muddy creeks, reedy reaches from which wild fowl rose in clouds where alligators lurked or lumbered about after stranded fish, horrible mangrove thickets full of moccasins and water-turkeys, heronry more horrible still, out of which the heat from a vertical sun distilled the last atom of nauseating effluvia — all these choice spots we visited under the guidance of the wretched Mink. I seemed to be missing nothing that might discourage or disgust me.
He appeared to know the way, somehow, although my compass became mysteriously lost the first day out from Fort Coquina.
Again and again I felt instinctively that we were travelling in a vast circle, but Mink always denied it, and I had no scientific instruments to verify my deepening suspicions.
Another thing bothered me: Mink did not seem to suffer from insects or heat; in fact, to my intense annoyance, he appeared to be having a comfortable time of it, eating and drinking with gusto, sleeping snugly under a mosquito bar, permitting me to do all camp work, the paddling as long as we used a canoe, and all the cooking, too, claiming, on his part, a complete ignorance of culinary art.
Sometimes he condescended to catch a few fish for the common pan; sometimes he bestirred himself to shoot a duck or two. But usually he played on his concertina during his leisure moments which were plentiful.
I began to detest Samuel Mink.
At first I was murderously suspicious of him, and I walked about with my automatic arsenal ostentatiously displayed. But he looked like such a miserable little shrimp that I became ashamed of my precautions. Besides, as he cheerfully pointed out, a little koonti soaked in my drinking water, would have done my business for me if he had meant me any physical harm. Also he had a horrid habit of noosing moccasins for sport; and it would have been easy for him to introduce one to me while I slept.
Really what most worried me was the feeling which I could not throw off that somehow or other we were making very little progress in any particular direction.
He even admitted that there was reason for my doubts, but he confided to me that to find these Coquina hills, was like traversing a maze. Doubling to and fro among forests and swamps, he insisted, was the only possible path of access to the undiscovered Coquina hills of Florida. Otherwise, he argued, these Coquina hills would long ago have been discovered.
And it seemed to me that he had been right when at last we came out on the edge of a palm forest and beheld that astounding blue outline of hills in a country which has always been supposed to lie as flat as a flabby flap-jack.
A desert of saw-palmetto stretched away before us to the base of the hills; game trails ran through it in every direction like sheep paths; a few moth-eaten Florida deer trotted away as we appeared.
Into one of these trails stepped Samuel Mink, burdened only with his concertina and a box of cigars. I, loaded with seventy pounds of impedimenta including a moving-picture apparatus, reeled after him.
He walked on jauntily toward the hills, his pearl-coloured bowler hat at an angle. Occasionally he played upon his concertina as he advanced; now and then he cut a pigeon wing. I hated him. At every toilsome step I hated him more deeply. He played “Tipperary” on his concertina.
“See ‘em, old top?” he inquired, nodding toward the hills. “I’m a man of my word, I am. Look at ‘em! Take ’em in, old sport! An’ reemember, each an’ every hill is guaranteed to contain one bony fidy cave-lady what is the last vanishin’ traces of a extinc’ an’ dissappeerin’ race!”
We toiled on — that is, I did, bowed under my sweating load of paraphernalia. He skipped in advance like some degenerate twentieth century faun, playing on his pipes the unmitigated melodies of George Cohan.
“Watch your step!” he cried, nimbly avoiding the attentions of a ground-rattler which tried to caress his ankle from under a saw-palmetto.
With a shudder I gave the deadly little reptile room and floundered forward a prey to exhaustion, melancholy, and red-bugs. A few buzzards kept pace with me, their broad, black shadows gliding ominously over the sun-drenched earth; blue-tail lizards went rustling and leaping away on every side; floppy soft-winged butterflies escorted me; a strange bird which seemed to be dressed in a union suit of checked gingham, flew from tree to tree as I plodded on, and squealed at me persistently.
At last I felt the hard coquina under foot; the cool blue shadow of the hills enveloped me; I slipped off my pack, dumped it beside a little rill of crystal water which ran sparkling from the hills, and sat down on a soft and fragrant carpet of hound’s-tongue.
After a whi
le I drank my fill at the rill, bathed head, neck, face and arms, and, feeling delightfully refreshed, leaned back against the fern-covered slab of coquina.
“What are you doing?” I demanded of Mink who was unpacking the kit and disengaging the moving-picture machine.
“Gettin’ ready,” he replied, fussing busily with the camera.
“You don’t expect to see any cave people here, do you?” I asked with a thrill of reviving excitement.
“Why not?”
“Here?”
“Cert’nly. Why the first one I seen was a-drinkin’ into this brook.”
“Here! Where I’m sitting?” I asked incredulously.
“Yes, sir, right there. It was this way; I was lyin’ down, tryin’ to figure the shortes’ way to Fort Coquina, an’ wishin’ I was nearer Broadway than I was to the Equator, when I heard a voice say, ‘Blub-blub, muck-a-muck!’ an’ then I seen two cave-ladies come sof’ly stealin’ along.”
“W-where?”
“Right there where you are a-sittin’. Say, they was lookers! An’ they come along quiet like two big-eyed deer, kinder nosin’ the air and listenin’.
“‘Gee whiz,’ thinks I, ‘Longacre ain’t got so much on them dames!’ An’ at that one o’ them wore a wild-cat’s skin an’ that’s all — an’ a wild-cat ain’t big. And t’other she sported pa’m-leaf pyjamas.
“So when they don’t see nothin’ around to hinder, they just lays down flat and takes a drink into that pool, lookin’ up every swallow like little birds listenin’ and kinder thankin’ God for a good square drink.
“I knowed they was wild girls soon as I seen ‘em. Also they sez to one another, ‘Blub-blub!’ Kinder sof’ly. All the same I’ve seen wilder ladies on Broadway so I took a chanst where I was squattin’ behind a rock.
“So sez I, ‘Ah there, sweetie Blub-blub! Have a taxi on me!’ An’ with that they is on their feet, quiverin’ all over an’ nosin’ the wind. So first I took some snapshots at ’em with my Bijoo camera.
“I guess they scented me all right for I seen their eyes grow bigger, an’ then they give a bound an’ was off over the rocks; an’ me after ‘em. Say, that was some steeple-chase until a few more cave-ladies come out on them rocks above us an’ hove chunks of coquina at me.
Works of Robert W Chambers Page 1162