“A good night for this story, with the wind crying like a lost soul in the night. How I hate that sound! Ah, well!”
There was a moment of silence.
“It was not like this, though, that night when we started up the Amazon. No. Then it was warm and soft, and the stars seemed so near. The air was filled with scent of a thousand tropical blossoms. They grew rank on the shore.
“There were four of us—two natives, myself and Von Housmann. It is of him I am going to tell you. He was a German—and a good man. A great naturalist, and a true friend. He sucked the poison from my leg once, when a snake had bitten me. I thanked him and said I’d repay him some day. I did—sooner than I had thought—with a bullet! I could not bear to see him suffer.”
The man sat there, gazing into the flames—and I listened to the dripping rain fingering the bare boughs and tap-tap-tapping on the roof above.
My friend looked up.
“I was seeing his face in the flames. God help him!... We had traveled for days—weeks—how long does not matter. We had camped and moved on; we had stopped to gather specimens—always deeper into that evil undergrowth. And as we moved on, Von Housmann and I grew close; one either grows to love or hate in such circumstances, and Sigmund was not the sort of man one would hate. I tell you, I loved that man!
“One day we struck into a new place. We had long before left the tracks of other expeditions. We trekked along, unmindful of the exotic beauty of our surroundings, when I saw our native, who was up ahead, stop short and sniff the air.
“We stopped, too, and then I noticed what the keener, more primitive sense of our guide had detected first.”