CHAPTER XIX
ADORATION SCORNED
Nothing was fresher nor keener than I when again the sun touched the tips of the trees. Asleep one second as soundly as a hibernating squirrel, I was as sharply awake the next as a ferret in a coop. I shook myself and stretched.
“Great Scott!” I exclaimed, “that was a nap!”
Swinging down from my berth I ate of the food which was still on the ground, where the bear had neglected it quite, and then taking my bearings as best I could, from memory of my imaginary map of the lake, I struck off through the jungle for “home.”
Of the hours which it took me to force my way between tangles and around a marsh and over hills and down dales, to accomplish what I thought to be something like two miles on an air line, I have anything but pleasant recollections. That I met with many creatures, flocks of parrots and a troop of apes and monkeys; that I recoiled from a path in which a huge boa-constrictor was gliding, and that I cursed my luck repeatedly for ever having landed in such a place, is all a matter of small account, compared to the fact that I stood at last on a hill and saw our very camp. I came to it then in less than one more hour of hottest work and travel.
An excited yell announced my approach before I had walked ten feet on the slope of our hill. If the Links had been enthusiastic on the morning after my night with the tiger, they were crazy and flabbergasted all at once on this occasion. The whole population came tumbling and running down the slope. They were worse than a pack of great, rough dogs that nearly knock one endways with delight. They made me fairly wild, the idiotic things, for my patience was gone to the winds, after my struggle to win through the jungle, and besides, it was they who had plunged me into all the trouble. I batted them off with rare satisfaction and punched a couple of heads in the bargain, but the fools were more tickled than ever, though I would wager that some of them smarted.
They fell all over one another as they crowded me up the hill, but my temper rather rose than lowered, for I began to pile my accumulated grievances up against them. I wanted the whole outfit to understand that I thought them cowards, for running from a noise, that day in the woods, and that I now owed nothing to any one in the tribe for my whole skin and presence once more in “My village.”
When I arrived inside the walls I was made decidedly more angry to find that Grin had stolen the tiger-skull off my shelter to fasten it up on the one in which he slept at night, and also by the fact that every blessed arrow we owned had been shot away by the fellows, as a lot of inconsequent boys might have done, merely to see them fly and to meddle with the bows. These bows, by the way, were strewn about on the ground where everyone kicked them carelessly and walked on them with utter unconcern.
It took me about one minute to exhibit a bit of temper that scared the creatures so thoroughly that all but Fatty jumped smartly away and stood at a distance, eyeing me painfully, ready to fall dead, if such act could calm me down. Fatty had hastily and exultantly jerked the tiger relic off from Grin’s abode and fetched it over to mine, after which the old idiot clung to me patiently through rain of blows and kicks, content to receive any amount of punishment, but wholly unwilling to leave the region of my feet. I believe he would have smiled affectionately up in my face and refused to run away if I had raised my knife to kill him on the spot.
“You Grin, there,” I snorted in my wrath, “if ever I catch you in another of your beastly, treacherous tricks, I’ll rip you in two and beat the pieces on a rock!”