“The key!” he exclaimed at last in disgust. “If only I had the key to it!”
The key to this riddle, if only he could have known it, lay back there in the little bamboo office where Pant had left the note. He had expected Johnny to sit right down beside the portable typewriter and study out the meaning of his strange cipher message.
As it happened, there had not been time for this; a great pity, too, for the message was an important one. Its solving at that moment might have saved Johnny many a heartache. Without the typewriter, however, it was going to be difficult, very difficult indeed. In the end he pocketed the message still unread.
* * * * * * * *
There is only one silence more complete than the silence of the jungle at mid-day. That is the silence to be experienced at the heart of a great banana plantation in the heat of the day. There not a twig drops but its fall is heard. The march of a thousand ants going and coming over their tiny paths gives forth as definite and distinct a sound as the tramp of an army.
Johnny was hearing and watching these toiling ants. He got scant comfort from these observations. Their actions reminded him of three days of painful failure. The North Star was at loading dock No. 1, had been for three days, yet her hold was as empty as the day she had tied up there. There were no bananas at the dock.
“Here there are plenty,” Johnny told himself, glancing up at the three great bunches that hung directly over his head, and away at hundreds on every hand.
Again his attention was drawn by the rustle of rushing ants.
“How strange,” he thought. “It would take a million of these ants to weigh as much as I do, yet they are getting on with the thing they wish done. I have failed.”
He started. The thing the ants were doing was quite like the work he wished to do. They were tearing bits of leaves from a vine and were carrying them away beneath the ground.