“Dat’s a nice white man, but more’n half de time his mouf don’t understan’ his mind. Eve’y time I esplained to him whut he wus tryin’ to say, he specify dat wusn’t it!”
Rouke returned to his hotel, opened the door to his room, and found the chair by his typewriter pre-empted by Peter Pellet.
“What’s the grouch, Pete?” Rouke demanded. “You got a pout on your mug like a camel. I bet you can’t walk without stepping on your lip.”
“Oh, sugar, Shirley,” Peter mourned. “I just came in to tell you what a hellarious town this Tickfall is. During the day the men just sit in front of the stores and chew tobacco and kid the niggers. If a dog-fight happens the town gets so excited the doctors are called out to quiet their nerves. At night the whole bunch goes home and goes to bed. If it ain’t so, you may hang my body on a sour apple tree. I asked one of ’em what they did on Sunday and he said they went to church! What do you know about that? Two days of dissipation have dragged me down, Shirley—I’m a faint and feeble frazzle! Fan me with a brick!”
“Aw, can that!” Rouke growled. “Have you been out finding those locations I told you about?”
“You bet!” Peter answered, and now his tone changed to admiration. “These swamps are the real thing, Shirley. I saw a jungle so thick that a raccoon could not crawl through it without scraping all the hair off of his tail. I saw a lake that’s got no bottom, one side of it hot water and the other cold. I saw mosquitoes as big as a daddy longlegs—felt ’em, too; when they bite they feel like a red-hot poker and when you slap ’em you are a murderer with a raw and bleeding corpse upon your hands!”
“I saw a swamp rattlesnake five feet long, big around as my leg, full of fight as Jess Willard or Jesse James, and hungry enough to manifest a carnivorous desire for my acquaintance, but I moved the free lunch about forty feet away before he got a bite. I found a place where you could stick a pole down in the swamp mud, pull it out all dripping with water, and light it like a torch—the mud is so full of gas. I——”
“Get out of here!” Rouke said. “Order that reel from New Orleans to come up to-night and fix it up with the movie man so we can show it to-morrow morning!”
Left alone with his typewriter, Rouke slipped a sheet of paper in the machine and wrote:
THE JEWEL OF THE JUNGLE