There was a jungle off to the right somewhere and we could hear the night noises coming from it over the water. Little squeakings, and once a scream like a human being’s, which was probably a monkey, and once, very far away indeed, a snarl that would have made your blood run cold if it hadn’t been muted by the distance.
“Tiger, that,” said Cary hopefully. “Maybe we can get Vetter to let us have some beaters tomorrow and take a shot at him.”
The doctor grunted.
“Breeding season,” he said. “Why not play leap-frog with a locomotive? More healthy. And no beaters will tackle them now.”
“If Vetter tells them to go, they will,” insisted Cary. “He’s got those natives under his thumb. They’re scared to death of him.”
“Paranoiac,” grunted the doctor. “He thinks he’s lord of creation.”
It was curious. You saw that about Vetter the minute you met him. Perhaps he was a little mad on the subject of himself. Perhaps it was Kuramonga that did it, because Kuramonga is the last place on earth that God made, and it was finished up with swamps and malaria and jungles and bad water that couldn’t be worked in anywhere else. They used to send men somebody had a grudge against, to Kuramonga, to drink themselves to death for the glory of la belle France. But Vetter liked it. He was the only white man in a hundred miles, and he had twenty little Annamite soldiers to keep his district in order with. He’d seemed much more anxious to impress us with his wonderful hold over the natives than to talk about anything else. He had said more or less flatly that he was the law and the prophets and most of the religion in Kuramonga. And he gloried in it.
Cary, in white duck trousers and nothing else, reached out of his hammock and gave himself a push to swing a little for a breeze.
“Damned luxurious beggar,” said the doctor enviously. “Get out of that hammock and let somebody else have a chance.”
I rose to tilt him amiably on the deck when I heard a little noise above the lapping of the river waves. Somehow, it sounded furtive, and so it wasn’t a time for fooling.