He sucked out the poison as best he could and trudged back to the clearing with the propeller. Dawn found him using it as a spade with which to dig a last resting place for José Rodriguez, and if it was rather ineffectual as an instrument, it was none the less fitting that it should be used in preparing an airman’s grave.
The sun was high in the east when Hal had pounded the last bit of mire into place. Solemnly, then, he dug the propeller at its head and left it there as a marker. For a moment he stood glancing at his handiwork, feeling inexpressibly sad and without hope. His hand caused him much pain; he was weary from irregular sleep and his thirst knew no bounds.
The grave seemed to be the final gesture. It was his admission of lost hope and he voiced it aloud. Not a bit of use was there to scan the blue chink of sky. Carmichael was not to be the means of his rescue, he felt it just as surely as he felt thirst. What would be the means of his rescue, if at all, he could not feel. Indeed, the thought itself seemed to be swallowed up in the vague mists of the future.
He turned his back on the lonely grave, wrapped in despair. Nothing mattered much except that he get a drink of water, somewhere, somehow. He turned east, thinking that at least he was facing Manaos and if he was fortunate enough to keep going in that direction he would some day reach there.
“Some day!” Hal laughed bitterly. “It’s like tomorrow, I guess—it never comes.”
And as he stepped from the clearing into the trackless maze of jungle, a beautiful yellow-breasted, black-coated bird warbled at his back with an insistence that Hal felt was nothing but mockery. Its cheerful whistling note he could not bear. It was decidedly out of place in that dismal solitude, he thought, as he turned to view the creature.
But he quickly changed his mind, however, when he saw that the silver-throated creature had hopped onto a limb of the tree that shadowed Rodriguez’ grave. The bird seemed to defy all that was sad and with its graceful head to one side it poured out a medley of cheer in the trilling call, pir-i-pi-pi, pir-i-pi-pi. And strangest of all, the beautiful little creature seemed to be directing its efforts toward the silent mound beneath it.
Hal turned his back on the clearing for good and all, then. He could do it now with a heart less heavy. At least he would not have that contemptible feeling that he was leaving a fellow being in the eternal solitude of the jungle.
Rodriguez would never be alone.