“Johnny,” Pant sat up quite suddenly, his strange eyes gleaming, his tone mysterious. “Johnny, did you ever see a man in one place, just see him a time or two, not know him very well—and then, weeks later did you think you saw him again in a different place thousands of miles away where he couldn’t very well be?”
“No,” Johnny grinned. “There are some things that have never happened to me. That’s one of them. Why?”
“Oh—oh nothing,” Pant settled back. “About this girl now. It was queer, Johnny, downright queer. We’d come to the top of a high ridge. Dawn had come, as it always does in the tropics, with a rush and with the joyous scream of a thousand birds.
“We stood there on the ridge looking down at a sort of barren plateau when some baboons, a whole troop of them, came marching out from the jungle. Huge fellows they were. Powerful beasts with arms a foot longer than mine. Powerful? Johnny, one of them could have grabbed me and broken every bone in my body. But they wouldn’t, Johnny, I knew that well enough. Once, for a whole week, I’d lived in such a place, just to watch them. If I met one on the trail he’d try to bluff me. He’d march straight at me swinging his huge fists and cracking his teeth as if he meant to tear me to bits. When he was twenty feet away he’d stop dead in his tracks. Then I’d laugh at him, laugh big and loud. And the poor old fellow would turn and go slouching away like some huge bully who’s been running a bluff.
“No, they wouldn’t harm us, Johnny, those baboons, but they were interesting to watch. They played a sort of ball game with a cocoanut, tossing it about. They did the leap-frog act better than any boys you’ve ever seen. They had just seated themselves in a circle for some other game, when all of a sudden, a sound from the jungle startled them.”
“A sound?”
“A shot, Johnny, a shot fired close at hand! You may think I wasn’t startled. That big boy with the hooked nose was my first thought. I dragged the girl into the fronds of a low growing palm.
“It wasn’t the big fellow with the hooked nose, Johnny. Worse than that.” Pant rose to take one more prowl about the room. “Wild men, Johnny, a whole troop of them! And were they wild! Such faces! Such bodies! Such weapons!
“Scared, Johnny? Of course I was scared. All these wild men hate whites. All whites looked the same to them. One glimpse of my face and the face of the girl! That’s all that would be needed. They’d get us, those wild men. Worse than a whole drove of those little tropical pigs, these wild men were. They’d sure get us.
“I looked around for some place to hide. Then I glanced back where the wild men were. I saw right away they had troubles of their own. They were looking back and scurrying for shelter all at the same time.