She did not answer, and turned away; but Sheldon knew that the
shaft had gone home.
“That fella boy he sick, belly belong him walk about,” Binu Charley
said, pointing to the Poonga-Poonga man whose shoulder had been
scratched by the arrow an hour before.
The boy was sitting down and groaning, his arms clasping his bent
knees, his head drooped forward and rolling painfully back and
forth. For fear of poison, Sheldon had immediately scarified the
wound and injected permanganate of potash; but in spite of the
precaution the shoulder was swelling rapidly.
“We’ll take him on to where Tudor is lying,” Joan said. “The
walking will help to keep up his circulation and scatter the
poison. Adamu Adam, you take hold that boy. Maybe he will want to
sleep. Shake him up. If he sleep he die.”
The advance was more rapid now, for Binu Charley placed the captive
bushman in front of him and made him clear the run-way of traps.
Once, at a sharp turn where a man’s shoulder would unavoidably
brush against a screen of leaves, the bushman displayed great
caution as he spread the leaves aside and exposed the head of a
sharp-pointed spear, so set that the casual passer-by would receive
at the least a nasty scratch.
“My word,” said Binu Charley, “that fella spear allee same devil-
devil.”
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He took the spear and was examining it when suddenly he made as if
to stick it into the bushman. It was a bit of simulated
playfulness, but the bushman sprang back in evident fright.
Poisoned the weapon was beyond any doubt, and thereafter Binu
Charley carried it threateningly at the prisoner’s back.
The sun, sinking behind a lofty western peak, brought on an early
but lingering twilight, and the expedition plodded on through the
evil forest–the place of mystery and fear, of death swift and
silent and horrible, of brutish appetite and degraded instinct, of
human life that still wallowed in the primeval slime, of savagery
degenerate and abysmal. No slightest breezes blew in the gloomy
silence, and the air was stale and humid and suffocating. The
sweat poured unceasingly from their bodies, and in their nostrils
was the heavy smell of rotting vegetation and of black earth that
was a-crawl with fecund life.
They turned aside from the run-way at a place indicated by Binu
Charley, and, sometimes crawling on hands and knees through the
damp black muck, at other times creeping and climbing through the
tangled undergrowth a dozen feet from the ground, they came to an
immense banyan tree, half an acre in extent, that made in the
innermost heart of the jungle a denser jungle of its own. From out
of its black depths came the voice of a man singing in a cracked,
eerie voice.
“My word, that big fella marster he no die!”
The singing stopped, and the voice, faint and weak, called out a
hello. Joan answered, and then the voice explained.
“I’m not wandering. I was just singing to keep my spirits up.
Have you got anything to eat?”
A few minutes saw the rescued man lying among blankets, while fires
were building, water was being carried, Joan’s tent was going up,
and Lalaperu was overhauling the packs and opening tins of
provisions. Tudor, having pulled through the fever and started to
mend, was still frightfully weak and very much starved. So badly
swollen was he from mosquito-bites that his face was
unrecognizable, and the acceptance of his identity was largely a
matter of faith. Joan had her own ointments along, and she
prefaced their application by fomenting his swollen features with
hot cloths. Sheldon, with an eye to the camp and the preparations
for the night, looked on and felt the pangs of jealousy at every
contact of her hands with Tudor’s face and body. Somehow, engaged
in their healing ministrations, they no longer seemed to him boy’s
hands, the hands of Joan who had gazed at Gogoomy’s head with pale
cheeks sprayed with angry flame. The hands were now a woman’s
hands, and Sheldon grinned to himself as his fancy suggested that
some night he must lie outside the mosquito-netting in order to
have Joan apply soothing fomentations in the morning.
CHAPTER XXV–THE HEAD-HUNTERS
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The morning’s action had been settled the night before. Tudor was
to stay behind in his banyan refuge and gather strength while the
expedition proceeded. On the far chance that they might rescue
even one solitary survivor of Tudor’s party, Joan was fixed in her
determination to push on; and neither Sheldon nor Tudor could
persuade her to remain quietly at the banyan tree while Sheldon
went on and searched. With Tudor, Adamu Adam and Arahu were to
stop as guards, the latter Tahitian being selected to remain
because of a bad foot which had been brought about by stepping on
one of the thorns concealed by the bushmen. It was evidently a
slow poison, and not too strong, that the bushmen used, for the
wounded Poonga-Poonga man was still alive, and though his swollen
shoulder was enormous, the inflammation had already begun to go
down. He, too, remained with Tudor.
Binu Charley led the way, by proxy, however, for, by means of the
poisoned spear, he drove the captive bushman ahead. The run-way
still ran through the dank and rotten jungle, and they knew no
villages would be encountered till rising ground was gained. They
plodded on, panting and sweating in the humid, stagnant air. They
were immersed in a sea of wanton, prodigal vegetation. All about
them the huge-rooted trees blocked their footing, while coiled and
knotted climbers, of the girth of a man’s arm, were thrown from
lofty branch to lofty branch, or hung in tangled masses like so
many monstrous snakes. Lush-stalked plants, larger-leaved than the
body of a man, exuded a sweaty moisture from all their surfaces.
Here and there, banyan trees, like rocky islands, shouldered aside
the streaming riot of vegetation between their crowded columns,
showing portals and passages wherein all daylight was lost and only
midnight gloom remained. Tree-ferns and mosses and a myriad other
parasitic forms jostled with gay-coloured fungoid growths for room
to live, and the very atmosphere itself seemed to afford clinging
space to airy fairy creepers, light and delicate as gem-dust,
tremulous with microscopic blooms. Pale-golden and vermilion
orchids flaunted their unhealthy blossoms in the golden, dripping
sunshine that filtered through the matted roof. It was the
mysterious, evil forest, a charnel house of silence, wherein naught
moved save strange tiny birds–the strangeness of them making the
mystery more profound, for they flitted on noiseless wings,
emitting neither song nor chirp, and they were mottled with morbid
colours, having all the seeming of orchids, flying blossoms of
sickness and decay.
He was caught by surprise, fifteen feet in the air above the path,
in the forks of a many-branched tree. All saw him as he dropped
like a shadow, naked as on his natal morn, landing springily on his
bent knees, and like a shadow leaping along the run-way. It was
hard for them to realize that it was a man, for he seemed a weird
jungle spirit, a goblin of the forest. Only Binu Charley was not
perturbed. He flung his poisoned spear over the head of the
captive at the flitting form. It was a mighty cast, well intended,
but the shadow, leaping, received the spear harmlessly between the
legs, and, tripping upon it, was flung sprawling. Before he could
get away, Binu Charley was upon him, clutching him by his snow-
white hair. He was only a young man, and a dandy at that, his face
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blackened with charcoal, his hair whitened with wood-ashes, with
the freshly severed tail of a wild pig thrust through his
perforated nose, and two more thrust through his ears. His only
other ornament was a necklace of human finger-bones. At sight of
their other prisoner he chattered in a high querulous falsetto,
with puckered brows and troubled, wild-animal eyes. He was
disposed of along the middle of the line, one of the Poonga-Poonga
men leading him at the end of a length of bark-rope.
The trail began to rise out of the jungle, dipping at times into
festering hollows of unwholesome vegetation, but rising more and
more over swelling, unseen hill-slopes or climbing steep hog-backs
and rocky hummocks where the forest thinned and blue patches of sky
appeared overhead.
“Close up he stop,” Binu Charley warned them in a whisper.
Even as he spoke, from high overhead came the deep resonant boom of
a village drum. But the beat was slow, there was no panic in the
sound. They were directly beneath the village, and they could hear
the crowing of roosters, two women’s voices raised in brief
dispute, and, once, the crying of a child. The run-way now became
a deeply worn path, rising so steeply that several times the party
paused for breath. The path never widened, and in places the feet