As Johnny’s interest in the red lure lost much of its intensity, Pant’s seemed to grow stronger. He left no stone unturned if its turning would in any way hinder the treacherous Daego and his band.
“Johnny’s ghost is doing much,” he told himself, “but it’s not enough. There must be other ways of annoying him.”
He thought of Daego’s black boats that moved by night and of the stationary engine he had heard pop-popping in the heart of the wilderness.
“I’ll go down there and look into that engine business,” he mused. “There may be something to it, something big. I’ll go down to-night.”
He left camp in his low, black dugout that night and paddled swiftly down the river. For some time he drove straight on; then of a sudden, as his keen eye caught a speck of light that flashed on and then blinked out like a match that is lighted and blown out, he swerved to the shore, threw a rope over the low limb of a mangrove, then sat there motionless, watching the river.
His thoughts were of that Spanish half-caste, Daego. “Isn’t it strange,” he mused. “There’s a man worth millions. If he never made another cent and lived a thousand years he’d never come to want. Yet he’s so greedy that he does crooked things that he may gain more. If someone tries to break into the mahogany or chicle business, instead of helping them in a brotherly fashion as he could well afford to do, he tries to throttle them.
“I suppose,” he said thoughtfully, “it’s all in the start one gets. If he starts out crooked, it doesn’t seem to matter much whether he succeeds or fails, he remains crooked to the end. One would think—”
Of a sudden his musings were cut short off. Something was moving out there in the water. Something like a shadow. Pant scarcely breathed as he watched that long shadow until it had disappeared up a bend in the river.
“That’s no shadow,” he muttered as he sat up. “It’s a pit-pan, one of those dugouts the natives use for coming on long journeys up the river. Must have been sixty feet long. The most marvelous pit-pan that ever was. Those pit-pans they used in other days had at least a dozen men at the paddles. I didn’t see a single man, and still it moved straight on upstream. Seems like I heard a purring sound. Surely here is mystery—a purring shadow.”
“Hardgrave spoke of Daego’s black boats,” he said to himself. “That thing must be one of them. And there’s nothing good about the thing they’re up to. Men don’t go creeping up the river in the silence of the night with an eel-like craft such as that for nothing. If I can find out what it’s all about and can trap one of his pit-pans I’ll be in a way to keep him so busy he won’t so much as have time to find out when our raft starts down the river.”