“Come daylight we’s far down this haunted river.”
“Yea-bo!” came back in answer.
“It’s death an’ destruction. I knowd twa’nt no sense afoolin’ with them thar white ha’nts,” gloomed another.
There was silence after that. The only sound was the dip-lip of paddles, but Pant had heard enough to make his heart glad.
“Johnny’s ghost,” he murmured. “Five men gone already, and more will follow; perhaps many more. Not so bad for a ghost,” and he laughed softly to himself.
CHAPTER X
JOHNNY’S GHOST WALKS
Palms that hung over the silent, swiftly flowing stream murmured and sighed. Their murmuring and sighing was as sad as the voice of pines and hemlocks in a graveyard on a winter’s night. Sadder still was the strange wail of some tropical bird, piping always on the same minor key. On the bed of decaying mats in the abandoned cabin where little lizards ran in and out, Johnny Thompson lay white and motionless.
Came an hour when there fell upon all this gloom a shrill discordant note. The scream of a wild parrot broke the drowsy silence. This was answered by another, and yet another, until all up and down the stream the air was filled with harsh, discordant music.
The innocent cause of all this disturbance was a fantastically painted dugout, all striped and spotted with red, blue, green and white. Its prow and stern rose high out of the water like the ancient crafts of the Vikings.
Forward sat a girl, aft was a boy, and in the middle sat a large native Carib woman. So brown and rugged was the girl that she might easily have been taken for a Spaniard. A second look revealed deep-set freckles, a glow of color, a mass of curly hair, and an indefinable air of confidence and frankness that could belong only to an Anglo-Saxon. This girl, Jean McQueen, was Scotch. The boy was her brother. Just over from England, where he had attended school for years, he had the attire, the manners and the color of a perfect young English gentleman. In his tweed nickers and his smart sport shirt, he seemed quite as much out of place in the wilderness as his sister in her patched and faded khaki suit seemed at home.