Monkeys, fierce black little creatures, chattered from the tallest trees. From the ground sounded many odd grunts, which the boy could not interpret. Coming down the river, like a dimly lighted floating burial procession, were the silent alligators.
“It’s all very strange and—and somewhat spooky,” he told himself.
With a shudder he seized a dully glowing brand and, having fanned it into flame, went boldly forth in search of wood. This time he would gather more substantial material. His fire must last longer, much longer, for somehow he must snatch a little sleep.
Waving his firebrand before him in one hand, he gathered fuel with the other. Some dead ferns and palm branches, the fallen branch of a black tamarind, the half rotted stem of a yamra, some large branches of a tree quite unknown to him, all these would send the light of his fire gleaming out into the night for hours to come.
Soon, with his fire glowing cheerily, he settled down on a chair-like rock crevice and with head bent forward, hands hanging down before him, every muscle relaxed, he tried to induce sleep to come.
It did not come at once. His mind worked on. Across its silver screen there passed a long procession of pictures. The trip up the river, the wild forest, the dark Caribs all about him, the silent black river, Daego seated before the table, money, twenty thousand dollars fluttering before him, the surprised look of the Spaniards as the table tore through the wall, then the jungle, the terrible uncertain jungle with its wild perils and its noisesome nights.
Then, as will happen when half thoughts and half dreams come, the reel changed. He was sitting with old Hardgrave, his friend who had seen sixty-eight summers, twenty-five of them in the tropics. In the cool shade of the hotel porch at Belize the old man was showing him a crudely drawn map and was pointing to a spot on that map.
“If you ever get to that spot,” he seemed to hear him say, “you’ll find Indian gods. I have seen them. Three of them, a black one, a blue one, and one of pure gold. I don’t say you’ll come back to tell anyone about it,” the old man smiled a queer smile. “They say it’s dangerous to go up there and I reckon it is. Truth is, no one knows the way there and back. It’s up in the bush somewhere. That’s all anyone knows. It’s all I know, and I’ve been there once.
“You may be sure I didn’t mean to go there,” he reminisced. “They found me sick with a fever, the Indians did, and carried me to their village in the bush and cured me up. Wanted me to stay on with them. Seemed to sort of take a liking to me. I told them I wouldn’t.
“At first they said I didn’t have any choice in the matter. Took me to see some bones, human bones. White man’s bones I’d say from the size of them. Then they took me back to the village.