Then did Bomba’s heart almost misgive him. He could reconstruct now what had happened. The outflung branches of the tree had swept him over the border of the treacherous ygapo near which he had been sleeping.
He lay now, half upon solid ground and half in the swamp. The branches of the tree pinioned the lower part of his body, but his head and shoulders rested in the thick muck. Then, with a thrill of horror, he realized that he was sinking deeper. He knew how readily the ygapo engulfed anything that ventured upon it.
Had his whole body lain in the ooze and had his unconsciousness persisted much longer, he would already have been in so deep that to extricate himself would have been impossible. But the solid ground beneath the lower part of his body gave him a certain purchase, and he strained to the utmost to raise his head and shoulders so as to make their weight as light as possible.
His plight was desperate. The branches of the tree reached to his shoulders. He could manage to use only his left hand and arm, for the right one seemed to be numb. It had no sense of feeling. Bomba knew that it must have received a hard blow, perhaps be broken.
With the free use of his machete he might have hacked a way through to freedom, although even with the aid of the knife it would have been a slow and painful process.
But the machete was in his belt near that right hand that had no sense of feeling. To get at it with his left he would first have to break away the branches that pressed so heavily upon his chest. And to do this with his bare hands seemed impossible.
Bomba tried to hold his head above the ooze, raising it by the sheer strength of his shoulders until the straining muscles could no longer bear the weight. And when, groaning, he let his head sink back, the mud sucked at it gloatingly.
“This, then, is the end of Bomba,” the lad muttered to himself gloomily. “He would have liked to die on his feet, fighting. But he must die here alone like any trapped beast of the jungle.”
The jungle! There lay the nub of his bitterness. Why should he be in the jungle, he a white boy, whose rightful heritage of a life with his own kind had been denied him by a cruel fate? Why did he not have a home like that of Frank Parkhurst, a father who was proud of him, a mother who loved him? Why had he been fated to have his life placed every day in jeopardy? He had been cheated of what belonged to him equally with every other boy of the white race.
“I shall never see Casson now, if he be still alive,” he murmured. “Japazy, the half-breed, will die with the secret that I seek still hidden in his heart.”