“No kai-kai [eat] me-fellah! Orang-kaya him go Boom!—Boom!—All stop!” he grinned weakly, snapping all his fingers to imitate the explosion.
“All right, boy,” beamed the curator. “You-fellah stop, quiet! Will plenty debbil-debbil your arm,” he warned, producing the antiseptics. He shot the iodine into the open wound, while Baderoon set his teeth obediently, enduring the pain as best he could. Then his master wrapped on the gauze and bandages and hung the arm in a sling, and they all went out, leaving the native resting easily on a bench, afraid to touch his bandages under fear of the orang-kaya’s displeasure.
The proa was bowling along up the lagoon, sailing farther and farther in behind the Charles Louis Mountains as they looked about them. A large river flowed in up at the head of the lagoon, they knew, but the curator had decided to take the first creek mouth that looked uninhabited on the mountain shore. Not a sign of a village or even a canoe had they seen, so dense are the mangrove swamps. Finally a dent in them, at the end of a long valley between two of the mountains, came in sight. A careful search of the trees around it with the glasses revealed no more native scouts. The curator judged that they had gotten up to sparsely inhabited country, and the proa was nosed into a little bay with the swift, clear water of the creek running into it. With slack sheet she laid her prow into the mouth of it, the shores slipping by close at hand.
He gave the order to go ashore, and, shouldering their packs, Nicky and Dwight leaped into the jungle, followed by Sadok with a huge crate of empty collection boxes on his back. Baderoon jumped next, able to walk now, and carrying nothing but his bow and shield, a borrowed quiver of arrows, and his captured war club. Then the curator turned to the jurugan.
“Come back here in three weeks, Captain,” he said. “We’ll be here waiting for you—or dead. Good-by, all! Nice fight, wasn’t it!” A flash of grins swept the crew’s faces as he seized his light double shotgun and jumped for the bank. The proa backed off and soon her sails filled and she stood down the lagoon, bound for Aru.
“Well, boys, we’re on our own!” said the curator, cheerfully, joining the rest of the party. “I reckon we can stay alive for three weeks in this country! And we ought to have something to tell about when we get back here. Paradisea superba, the superb bird of paradise, is what we particularly want; also an accurate report on the mineralogy of this region.”
They picked their way up over clinking bits of old broken coral, aiming for the high ground above the source of the stream. Skirting along this for some distance, they soon found that it was a small, flat table-land of some ancient coral growth, back of which was the real jungle. The sparse soil was grown with stunted seaside palms and various species of ironwood and lignum-vitæ. Through it the stream cut on its way from the interior. The curator had about decided to establish camp here until the region could be investigated before going farther, when a cry from Nicky aroused them. It came from farther upstream.
“This way, fellows!” it called; “here’s something interesting!”
They followed the call, to pitch down the coral bank to a small beach by the stream-side, clear of mangroves. An abandoned outrigger sail canoe lay hauled up on the shore. The coral flat had protected it from the moist jungle rot, but its weatherbeaten planks showed that it had been there for several years.
“A crocodile slipped into the water as I came down here, and found—this,” announced Nicky. “It looks like a Ceram or Salwatty boat to me. See the single mast and the two bamboo outriggers.”