At that, with the breeze swaying his hammock, he fell asleep.
The sun was sending its first yellow gleams among the palms when he awoke. For a time, with the damp sweet odor of morning in his nostrils, he lay there thinking.
A strange mission had brought him into the jungle. This strange boy had grown up with little or no knowledge of blood relations. His father and mother were but a dim, indistinct memory. They had passed from his life; he did not know exactly how. No cozy home fireside had gleamed for him. He had gone out into the world with an unanswered longing for some one whom he might think of as a kinsman. Bravely he had fought his way through alone. When Johnny Thompson came into his life and remained there to become his inseparable pal, life had been more joyous. Yet ever there remained a haunting dream that somehow, somewhere in his wild wanderings he would come upon one who bore his name, who could give him the traditions of a family and of a past.
Strangely enough, it had been at the edge of the Central American jungle that he came upon this person of his dreams. While walking upon the coral beach he had met a stately, white-haired old man who had the military bearing of a colonel.
In this old man he had found a friend. Little enough was left of the fortunes which from time to time had come to the venerable southerner. But such as he had he shared unsparingly with the young stranger who had come so recently from the land of his birth; for Colonel Longstreet, as the patriarch styled himself, though now for more than sixty years a resident of Central America, had fought valiantly for a lost cause when the Gray stood embattled against the Blue in that long and terrible struggle, the Civil War.
Broken hearted because of the outcome of the war, he had left his native state of Virginia and had come to Central America. His life had been further embittered by the early death of his wife. His only child, a boy of ten, had been sent back to Virginia while he struggled on, wresting a fortune from the jungle.
Life in Central America is one gamble after another. Longstreet had played in every game. He had always won, in the end to lose again. Fortunes in sugar, bananas and mahogany had been his. Sudden drops in prices, a revolution, the dread Panama disease, had cost him all of these. Now he was playing a last, lone card. Influential friends were endeavoring to secure for him a concession for gathering chicle on broad tracts of Government land.
This was the state of affairs when Pant had made his acquaintance. Hardly had their acquaintance ripened into deep friendship when they made the sudden and startling discovery that Pant was the son of the boy who had been sent back by Colonel Longstreet to Virginia, that Colonel Longstreet was none other than Pant’s grandfather. From that time forth the strange boy, who had longed for so many lonely years for one of kin, became the old man’s devoted slave.
There was need enough at the present time for such devotion.
Fortune had seemed to smile at last. Through the influence of his friends, a concession from the British Government for gathering chicle had come from England to Colonel Longstreet.