Two Gallant Sons of Devon: A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess

by Harry Collingwood

“That’s right, lad,” he heard Stukely’s voice say, as he felt his friend’s encouraging pat on the shoulder. “Feel better, now? That’s capital. Faugh! what a disgusting stench! No wonder it made you sick; I feel almost as bad myself. But I’ll bet a trifle that the brute feels a good deal worse than either of us, for I must have hit him pretty hard; indeed if it had not been for the thick growth that baulked me and hindered my stroke I could have cut his head clean off.”

“Well, you—you—have—saved my life, Phil, and I—” gasped Dick thickly, as he felt for the other’s hand and pressed it convulsively.

“Pooh! nonsense; that’s all rubbish, you know,” interrupted Phil, patting Dick on the back, “I should have cut at the brute just the same, if thou hadst not been there. And now, if you feel all right again, let us get the canoe out and see what she looks like; a nice mess he will have made of her, I expect, making his lair in her; with a murrain on him!”

“You have put something worse than a murrain on him, or I am no judge,” laughed Dick, a trifle hysterically. “The brute will certainly die before morning. Now, then, are you ready? Then—lift!”

With some difficulty they at length extricated the canoe from her hiding-place, to find, a good deal to their surprise, that, apart from two broken paddles, the craft was very little the worse for having been made the lair of a snake so big that he must have practically filled her from end to end. Luckily the mast, yard, and sail had been placed in the bottom of her and so had not been broken, although almost the whole of the boa’s ponderous weight must have rested upon them. So when presently they put her into the water, they were rejoiced to find that although she had been lying dry for three months, so completely had she been shielded from the sun’s rays that her hull was still intact and that she leaked not a drop. This was far better than they had dared to hope for, so, stepping into her, appropriating the paddles of the other craft, and leaving the latter moored to the bank, they joyfully shoved off, and three minutes later were in the main stream, with the canoe’s head pointed up the river.

Meanwhile, the storm still raged as furiously as ever, the flashes of lightning were incessant, the rolling of the thunder was continuous and deafening, and the northerly wind was blowing so fiercely that the surface of the stream was whipped into small, foam-capped waves. But they were not high enough to imperil the safety of the canoe, moreover the wind that roared so savagely aloft among the tree-tops and stripped off the dried leaves and rotten branches in blinding showers was a fair wind for the fugitives, so they stepped their mast, close-reefed their sail, and were presently foaming up the river in midstream—where, although they had a strong current to contend with, they were at least safe from the branches that flew hurtling through the air—as fast as a horse could trot.

Now, all this time the storm had been a dry storm, that is to say, not a drop of rain had fallen from the bosom of the scowling clouds that seemed bursting with it, but it was bound to come, sooner or later, and come it did, with a vengeance, when our friends had been under way about an hour, and just as the canoe had shot into a broad, lagoon-like stretch of the river where it broadened out to about a mile in width, and where consequently the water was shallow and the current scarcely perceptible. And well was it for them that the rain caught them just at that point, for otherwise they must perforce have landed until the worst of it had blown over. For it came down, not in the sober, steady, respectable fashion in which it falls in temperate climates, but literally in sheets, through which it was not possible to see anything more distant than an ordinary boat’s length. With it came more wind, so that the canoe, with the gale right behind her and a close-reefed sail set which, in that condition, was not very much bigger than a man’s shirt, rushed along with the foam boiling up level with her gunwale, and sometimes even in over it. While this state of affairs prevailed, and nothing could be seen beyond the dripping sail glistening in the flash of the lightning, the Englishmen continued their headlong flight up the river, unable to see where they were steering but keeping the boat steadily dead before the wind, confident, from the glimpse they had had just before the rain came on, that so long as they were able to do this they would be running up the centre line of the river and could not come to very much harm.

The first violence of the rain lasted about twenty minutes, and then it settled to a quiet, steady downpour for about an hour, during which the thunder and lightning gradually subsided until the thunder became a mere muttering in the extreme distance, and finally died away altogether. But the sheet lightning continued to play intermittently, low down on the northern horizon for some time longer, affording light enough for the fugitives to see where they were going, and as the wind still continued to blow strongly they held on, hour after hour, making the most of the splendid opportunity thus afforded them to make good their escape, so that when at length the morning came and the wind died down with the rising of the sun, they were far beyond the reach of pursuit by the Mayubuna.

Now ensued a month of comparative uneventfulness, during which the two dauntless young Englishmen forced their way up that great river which, where it falls into the Amazon, is named the Maranon, while in its higher reaches it is called the Ucayali, and higher still, the Quillabamba. But although their journey up this magnificent stream may be fitly described as comparatively uneventful, it must not be inferred therefrom that they met with no adventures at all; on the contrary, there was scarcely a day when they did not meet with an adventure of some sort, but it was scarcely of a sufficiently notable character to justify amplification in these pages, being merely the sort of occurrence that is inevitable in a river journey through wild country in the tropic zone. For example, there were frequent rapids and cataracts to be negotiated, food to be sought for and obtained, in the course of which search many strange creatures were seen, many curious and wonderful sights witnessed, and occasionally savage animals encountered. Also Indians began to be met with at frequent intervals, some of whom proved friendly while others were hostile and would fain have disputed the right of the white men to be in the country at all—thanks to the tyrannical treatment which they had experienced at the hands of the Spaniard; and once they encountered a tribe of genuine Amazons, women who had turned the usual order of things upside down, having usurped the functions of the men, such as fighting, hunting, and fishing, while their men folk were compelled to cultivate the land, care for the cattle, cook the food, look after the children, and so on! Then there was the gradual change in the nature of the vegetation and the character of the scenery as the travellers worked their way upward from the level of the great plains, or pampas, into the mountainous region toward Cuzco, with the ever-increasing difficulties of the navigation, which at length became so great that the canoe had to be abandoned altogether, and the journey continued by land, although they still followed the course of the river as closely as possible, in order that they might always be able to get water, and also because it served them as a guide.

But it was not until they had been journeying a full month, after their escape from the Mayubuna, that their next really important adventure befell. They had by this time climbed upward out of the low, hot, tropic forest region, and had attained an altitude at which the climate might almost be described as temperate, where, while the days were still distinctly hot, the nights were cool, sometimes even to the extent of sharpness, and where dense morning-fogs were frequent at that particular period of the year. Those fogs were the cause of much inconvenience and delay to the pair; for they could neither hunt nor travel in a fog, the result being that they were frequently obliged to remain in camp until eight or nine o’clock in the morning, instead of resuming their journey at daybreak, as had heretofore been their custom.