Terry / A Tale of the Hill People

by Charles Goff Thomson

The Macabebe led his charges across the ford, then, worried, returned to Terry's side. Reassured somewhat by the brave smile, he mounted after receiving a final injunction to take Matak in with him if they overtook him. As the Macabebes herded their cowed prisoners into the woods across from where he lay, Terry lay prone in another of the intermittent surges of mounting fever that robbed him of his strength and faculties.

When the wave of fever subsided he rose weakly, took his bearings by the low sun and crossing the ford struck straight into the woods in the direction he knew Dalag to lie. Entrance into the deep woods brought instant twilight. He had covered a mile when a resurgent tide of fever brought him down on the thick carpet of dead leaves that covered the darkening forest floor, and for several minutes he lay gripped in the sickening spasm that rioted through his veins and robbed him of all reason. When it passed he rose dizzily to stumble on under the trees, which reached up toward a sky glorious with the flaming reds and deep pinks that mark the passing of a hot day over the Celebes Sea.

He staggered on, conscious only of the necessity of getting to the doctor and of the agonizing explosions in his head which threatened to rend his skull asunder at each jarring footfall. The sky grayed, darkened. Dusk found him a short quarter-mile further on, where another surge of raging temperature brought him low. Another followed swiftly. When he rose at last, night had wrapped the thick woods in its black mantle, and he was no longer conscious of direction, or of purpose, or of self. He stumbled along dazedly, trying to recall the purpose that had taken him into the woods.

The paroxysms passed. The fever had reached a consistent high level, lending him a singular buoyancy of body and of spirit, but his reason was gone. He walked faster and faster, his vision keen under the dark canopy, his mind racing with disordered ideas, a kaleidoscope of long displaced memories. Often he stopped short, puzzled, vainly striving to stem the fugitive currents of conceits in his efforts to remember what purpose had brought him here. His head throbbed. He kept step with each pulsing ache—it seemed to help. He hurried on through the night.

The way grew steeper, always he traveled up the ascent. Flooded with the hot energy that swept through his arteries, each passing hour seemed to add to the fires that fed his strength.

The gray beams of early dawn, filtering through a now taller vault of forest, found him far up the slope and mounting still steeper grades. He could not quite remember what his mission was ... something that the Governor wanted, he thought, something he, too, wanted to do ... or was it a Christmas present for Deane....

He climbed higher, laughing, singing, talking loudly. Stumbling over a log his burning eyes had not seen, he turned in grotesque humor to offer curtsy and abject apology, then hastened on upward. Later, carroming from a huge tree he had hit head on, he addressed it in grave good humor: "Please keep to the right." His flushed face purple in the green light of the deep woods, he hurried on, again worrying over the nature of his forgotten mission and hysterically impressed with its importance.

The sun rose high overhead but it was twilight in the deep forest through which he clambered, over decayed logs, through rank overgrowth, past little streams of filthy water flowing in sullen silence through channels overgrown with moss. No sounds of forest life challenged the vast silence of the damp and cheerless vault of green, no song of bird or shrill thrumming of insects that makes the tropical forest a palpitant discordance during the hot hours of the day.

His laughter rang mockingly through the shadowed silence, the loud vagaries of his delirium carried far tinder the overhang of tunneled foliage.

"It's all right, Sears ... poor little fox, you won't ... you need not worry about me, Doctor ... on Sunday, too—snowshoes and all.... LOOK OUT MAJOR!... and we need you here, Dick,—Ellis and Susan, Father Jennings, the foreigners—all of us...."