Crouched in the whaleboat, the paddlers and Gleason alike stared fearfully about them. The sun rose higher in the heavens. Mosquitoes swarmed about them. The soft and indefinite humming noise of a sunlit jungle arose to the high heavens. And all the coast was busy, looking to see where the white man might have hid.
Toward noon, Gleason saw one warrior. He came down to the water’s edge nearly half a mile upstream, where perhaps the mangroves gave place to a more wholesome growth. He saw him plainly. White circles of moistened lime had been daubed about his eyes. His hair was whitened with the same stuff. His ear-lobes had been stretched incredibly to hold a pleasing assortment of variegated knick-knacks, from a brass curtain ring to slender pig bones which projected at varied angles from his head.
He stood in plain sight for a long time, peering up and down the stream. Even his reflection was mirror-like on the upper water. But he did not move from the spot where he had first appeared. Mangrove swamps remain untrod, even on such occasions as this. Leaving aside the incredible toil traveling in them would entail, and the very real danger of being swallowed up entire, there are such things as mangrove ulcers which came from mangrove mud upon a man’s bare leg.
The warrior peered here and there and everywhere in silence, while Gleason eyed him in stark panic. Suddenly he went depressedly back into the jungle without any sign of interest or triumph, and Gleason nearly whimpered in relief. The drooping branches outside the boat had hidden it effectively.
But all that long, hot, malodorous afternoon he abode in fear. A canoe might slip into the stream at any instant. And the report of a single firearm, or the yell of a single man, would bring swarming hordes of warriors....
At dusk, Gleason’s heart stopped. A canoe did come in. It came in very softly and very quietly. There were four paddlers and one man sitting in the stern. This was in the short, abruptly ending twilight of the tropics. Gleason saw the canoe pass by not more than twenty yards away. Beneath the dropping mangrove roots the whaleboat was not seen, but there was enough light left for Gleason to recognize the man in the stern despite new and barbaric ornamentation. It was Maehoe.
He gazed behind him and seemed satisfied. And suddenly he brought up something from the bottom of the canoe and slipped it on. It was an immaculate white drill jacket. And he removed certain ornaments from about his ears and nose, and wiped the lime-streaks from about his eyes, and spoke to his paddlers.
Gleason could piece out the words from his knowledge of the Pau dialect. But before this he had swung his revolver on the four houseboys he had impressed into service. With his eyes wild and staring, he warned them voicelessly that at their first word he would kill them. The words he pieced together of Maehoe’s talk increased his terror.
Maehoe had his own paddlers under a bond of fear. Henderson’s revolver was in his hand. And Maehoe was demanding if this was surely the waterway that one of the houseboys with Gleason knew of. A man answered, trembling, that it was. Maehoe ordered the paddlers to go on upstream.