A native chief learns that gold and odd bits of jewelry can be traded for steel knives, hawk’s bells and bright silk scarfs. His kingdom is far away. He sends a band to waylay a trader and bring him from afar, only to at last return him unharmed and laden with rich treasure.
“But that,” the boy told himself, “was very long ago. There’s no use romancing. Dorn and Pompee will be worried about me. Curlie will risk his neck to find me. I must return to camp.”
Some persons are natural scouts. To them an overturned pebble, a bent twig, moss on trees, a thousand simple things, are a sign. Johnny was not of this brotherhood.
Just as night began to fall he found himself descending a gently sloping hillside where the ground was red as a native clay pipe when, upon rounding a curve, he came within sight of a small, square house that gleamed white in the light of the setting sun.
“Good!” he exclaimed. “Now I shall not spend the night alone.”
In this he was mistaken. As he neared the place, no dog came out to bark a warning, no naked native children scurried through the doorway to their mother. The place was silent, deserted, lonely. Yet in the fact that this had once been a home; that children had once played with young goats before the door; that a mother had beaten corn for bread and a father had returned from a day of toil, Johnny found comfort. For this boy Johnny was an exceptional character. Himself a wanderer, he was ever dreaming of home, ever thinking of that time when, with loved ones about him, he would sit before his own hearth fire in a home he called his own.
Having explored the half ruined house and found its roof sound, he brought in dry banana leaves to make a bed on the shelf beneath the rafters.
He found ripe bananas in a little run below the house. Half content with this sparse supply of food, he sat down to listen. Nor did he listen long. From above him, on the sloping hillside which had once been a badly cleared cornfield, there came a sound much like a shrill scream.
Stringing his bow and nocking an arrow, he began scouting away up the hill. Now he peered out from behind a clump of young banana plants. And now a great boulder hid him. Now he crept rapidly over a patch of barren red soil. But ever he moved upward. Now and then to his listening ears came welcome sounds, cries, calls, duckings that told him that the quarry was not far away.
And now, as he lifted his head above a low-growing bush, he caught his breath as he murmured: