At times, when the hum of voices ceased and laughter died away, from out of the bush there came the hoarse call of a jaguar, and who could say it was not the “killer?”
Pant had dropped upon a mat at the edge of a group of black men. In the shadows no man could see his neighbor’s face. No questions were asked. The moon, just rising over the edge of the jungle, cast long shadows and sent ghost-like shimmers of light across the patches of mist that rose from the river.
The hum of voices was at its loudest. A black man, close to Pant, was in the midst of a loud guffaw when, of a sudden, the laugh appeared to freeze in his throat. This sound, or sudden cessation of sound, so unusual and so apparently without cause, spread silence like a blanket over the clearing.
Out of that silence there rose a hoarse, high-pitched voice:
“Oh! Look up a-yonder!”
The man who spoke was the one who had so suddenly ceased laughing. His outstretched arm, clad as it was in a white sleeve of cotton stuff, was like a white pointer with a black tip pointing toward the sky.
What Pant saw as he followed the line of that pointer made even his blood run cold and set the hair at the back of his head standing on end. The moonlight playing across the sky had caught something white and faintly luminous that floated on air well above the tree tops. Even as he watched, the thing seemed to assume the form of a white-robed figure. The head began to come out with glimmering brightness. Eyes appeared, and the semblance of a mouth. Then, as the whole company, far and near, lay wrapped in silence, there sounded such a rattling as one may sometimes fancy he hears in passing a graveyard at the dead of night.
“Oh! My Massa!” groaned the black man. “It’s a ghost, the ghost of that white boy Daego drove into the bush. He’s come back to ha’nt us. It’s death an’ destruction! Destruction for Daego; and death for all of us. Oh! My Massa!”
There came a murmuring “Uh-huh” from many voices. Then from a dark corner there rose the chant of the only Carib of the crew. He was singing the native song of his people—the Devil Song that is supposed to drive out evil spirits. Weird and fantastic as his song was, the thing that floated above the tree tops was far more weird.
Over in another corner Pant heard a shuffling of feet. Someone was moving away, going toward the river. Fearing that they might find his dugout and so rob him of his means of returning to his own camp, he went skulking along after them. There were five or six black men in the group. Since they were not approaching his boat, he followed close enough to hear what they were saying. Arriving at the river bank, they pushed a long dugout into the water and with scarcely a sound leaped in and shoved away from the shore. A moment later, keeping to the shadows, the boy heard: