They had reached the head of the Para River, the principal mouth of the Amazon, sixty miles above Belem. The plane was thrumming over a gigantic carpet of thickly tufted green, furrowed by a maze of irregular streams.
“The region of the Thousand Islands,” Serbot explained. “Those channels that twist through the solid jungle are called the Narrows. They come from the main course of the Amazon, and most of them are deep enough to be navigable.”
Below, Biff saw an ocean-going freighter working up through a watery passage. It looked like a toy boat from this altitude, and occasionally it was swallowed by the thick foliage that jutted over the channel, only to emerge from the green arcade.
Soon the boat was far behind, and Biff watched the narrow channels widen and merge into a limitless, white-capped sea—the great Amazon itself. Serbot’s purring voice, and the steady drone of the plane’s motors had a lulling effect. Biff’s eyes closed to avoid the glare of the tropical sun; soon he was asleep. He dreamed that he was back at Idlewild, with Mr. Stannart’s voice repeating:
“Guard this letter as you would your life! Guard this letter....”
In the dream, invisible fingers seemed to be plucking the precious envelope, drawing it up and out of Biff’s pocket. With a sudden start, Biff awoke and shot his own hand to his pocket, where it met the crinkle of paper.
The dream had been realistic in one respect. As he dozed, Biff must have kept slumping down into his seat, causing the envelope to work upward every time he hunched his shoulders. A few inches more and it would have fallen from his pocket.
Or was that the answer? What if those phantom fingers had been real instead of mere figments of a dream!
As he thrust the envelope far down into his inside pocket and buttoned his coat for safer keeping, Biff Brewster shot a suspicious glance toward his companion of the plane trip, the smooth-spoken man who called himself Nicholas Serbot.