Lodo could make nothing of it, and looked from the writing back to Bomba with a fierce scowl and a tightened grasp upon his knife.
“You read,” he said, and the cruel point of the knife pricked Bomba’s bare shoulder and brought a tiny trickle of blood. “No fool Lodo.”
Bomba read the words twice under Lodo’s direction, and still the giant was unconvinced. The other bucks patterned their conduct on his and crowded around Bomba, muttering and growling like beasts of the jungle about to close in on a helpless prey.
“You lie!” The point of Lodo’s knife pricked again at Bomba’s shoulder, deeper this time, and a red stream followed it.
Still Bomba did not flinch, giving the sullen Indian look for look without a sign of fear.
“You lie!” again shouted Lodo, working himself into a frenzy of fury. “Braves see Hondura near the hut of Casson, the white medicine man. Hondura not come back to his people. Bomba hide Hondura. Bomba must die!”
His knife was upraised in menace. A shudder of anguish passed through Bomba, but he said no word. A dozen hands reached out to seize him, a dozen knives were pointed at his throat——
“Wait!” A guttural voice came from the doorway of the hut, and Grico, he of the one eye and the split nose, forced his way through the ring of angry Indians. “Let me see writing on the wall. I tell you if Bomba lie.”
Grico was a native of tremendous physical strength. He had for a while lived in one of the towns on the coast, and as a boy had been taken under the care of an English missionary school. Here he had been taught the rudiments of education. But the call of his jungle blood had proved too strong to be resisted, and he had run away and thrown in his lot with the Araos tribe.
There, when he reached manhood, he became known as the swiftest runner and the greatest hunter of them all. He had lost one eye and acquired his split nose in a battle with jaguars, in which he had shown almost superhuman strength and courage.