Black White/Chapter 5

HREE reports sounded, as fast as a man could work the action of a repeating gun. They came from some place near by, around a turn. After the last shot we heard a cry like that of a man badly hurt. Then came the chunk-chunk-chunk of hard-driven paddles thumping the gunwales of a curial.

My Macos sat frozen. For a moment, so did I. Gunfire up this wild river could mean only one thing—that a man from outside was here. And such fast shooting meant that he was in trouble.

Did I drive my Macos on to help the gunman? I did not. The chances were that he was some tool of Funes, who well deserved killing; and I was not rushing to aid any such man as that. Instead, I took one quick look around, saw what a bad place we were in—walled in by high banks—and, by words and signs, ordered my paddlers to turn and get out of there. They whirled that heavy curial around faster than I had ever before seen such work done, and a few seconds later they were driving like madmen for the Ventuari. Every one of us knew that the approaching canoe must be running from Indians, and that those Indians might be swarming along both the high shores. They would undoubtedly attack us on sight.

Around a bend we surged, and into a long straight stretch with few playas. The Macos stroked so fast that the paddle-beat was a steady drumming. I snatched my gun and bullet-bag from inside the little carroza and stood up, bracing my feet against the sides of the canoe and resting arms and gun on the cabin roof as I faced backward. The steersman made desperate signs to me not to shoot, as the bullets would pass within an inch or two of his head. I nodded and ordered him to keep working.

We were half-way down the straightaway when the other canoe plowed into sight. I saw that it had three naked brownish paddlers, no cabin, and, in the stern, a queer-looking head of bright red with white spots. That strange head swayed in time with the swift paddle-drive; then became still and looked back. Just before we reached the next turn more canoes came driving into view—several of them, crowding one another closely. From them rose a savage yell and a volley of arrows.

One of the paddlers in the fleeing boat slumped down. The red head drooped, hung steady—then out cracked more shots. The first Indian canoe swerved, slowed, and blocked the others. A couple of splashes told me men were falling overboard.

Why I stopped I do not know, unless it was because I hate to run from a fight. But stop I did. I made my paddlers hold the boat at the turn, and there I stood up straight, watching and waiting. The fighting canoe did not slow up at sight of me; the two remaining Indians in it saw my carroza, my straw sombrero, my blue shirt, and knew I was a traveling blanco. That strange red head, though, started to rise, staring at me with huge yellow eyes, and a gun swung toward me.

My Spanish-speaking man, seeing the inhuman-looking thing, gasped—

“El diablo!”

The others moved as if to jump overboard.

I sharply ordered them to remain where they were. At the same time one of the approaching paddlers hoarsely called back at the red thing—

“Amigos!”

The head sank back, and the arms beneath it began to swing in paddle-strokes.

Back at the turn, the dugouts of the savages were straightening out and again beginning to come on. Having more paddlers than the men they hunted, those pursuers certainly would run down their game in the end unless the first had many bullets. The fact that they came on in the teeth of gunfire showed that they were determined to get that red-headed man at any cost.

The red head came on fast. Now I saw that under it was a thin brown shirt, that the hands gripping the paddle were covered by watersoaked gloves, and that the paddle worked clumsily, splashing as if the man was not skilled in its use. The head was red because it was wrapped in bandanna handkerchiefs; the staring yellow eyes were amber goggles. Of the face I could see nothing at all—the bandannas covered it. But I knew this man was a foreigner. No Venezuelan would wear such things on head and hands.

The Indians looked to be Maquiritares; light-skinned, clean-limbed, intelligent-faced. One of them lay still, a long yellow shaft sticking from between his shoulder-blades.

“Quién es?” I called. “Who are you? Maquiritares?”

“Si!” gasped the bowman. “Y americano—and an American. Quién es uste'?"

“Loco León.”

“''Bueno! Fire!'' Shoot!”

The pair were half-dead from fatigue, but on hearing my name their hard-drawn faces stretched a little in a smile.

That brave little smile went straight to my heart, for, as I have said, the Maquiritares are my friends. The American, I knew, must be White, though I could not imagine how he had come here. But the bullets I promptly began pumping at the following canoes were fired not so much for White as for those brown boys who were giving their lives to save him. I would have done the same thing if no white man had been in their boat.

So, though I knew I was killing forever all chance of making friends on this river, I fired fast but steadily, downing a man with every shot. Yells of rage and screams of death broke out as my heavy bullets knocked the pursuers back against their mates or over the side. Arrows chunked into the water around me. But the canoes slowed again.

As the Maquiritares labored past me and I paused to reload, White turned without a word and again opened fire. Now I saw that he was using a short rifle which looked small and light, but which made smashing reports, showing it had terrible power. Also, I saw that in firing six shots from that gun he hit only one man. Shooting backward from a heaving canoe is not easy; but unless I could handle a rifle better than he did I should have been dead years ago.

Then he was gone around the bend, and I was slamming more of my blunt slugs into the naked men behind. When my old repeater again was empty the canoes were stopped, and not an arrow was coming from them. The Indians were crouching behind their dead or lying prone in the bottoms of their dugouts for shelter. As soon as my last shot was out of the barrel I told my Macos to move the curial out of there. They moved it fast.

While they toiled along through the windings beyond the turn, where several sandbars made slow going of it, I watched back ward with gun ready. We had about cleared the sandy section and reached deeper water before the Indians behind us came into sight again. Then they came in a silent, dogged way, much more slowly than before. Seeing that this was the time to stop them for good, I motioned for my steersman to lie down and poured a stream of bullets into those following canoemen.

They could not stand any more of such fire. They worked back in sudden panic and hid beyond the bend.

We did not see them again. But I had no intention of stopping anywhere on this river, even though the fight was over. I had seen that the men behind us were not easy quitters, and knew they probably would not go back to their up-river homes until they had traveled, by water or by land, all the way to the Ventuari and failed to find us anywhere along their stream. By steady paddling we could reach the Ventuari before sundown and make camp in some place a mile or two up, on the far side. And that was what I meant to do.

My four Macos soon overhauled the exhausted Maquiritares. In fact, the red-swathed White told his men to rest as we approached. When we came alongside those yellow glasses were staring hard at me. Then a muffled chuckle came from under the sweat-soaked handkerchiefs.

“Well, say! You’re the blond chap I met in Bolívar!” said a hoarse voice. “Seems like a thousand years ago. What you doing away up here, hombre?”

“Still spying on you, señor,” I retorted.

Then I looked along his canoe, noting that it held only a battered leather case with some loose cartridges on top, a long canvas bag, and his big helmet. There was no sign of food. The canoe itself was an old thin-shelled dugout.

“Say, Mister Man, I wish you’d forget that remark of mine,” he said, as if angry with himself. “You’re a regular fellow. I was sore that night, but”

“Let it be forgotten, then,” I broke in. “Is this curial yours?”

“Nope. Grabbed it from those savages. Had to get out quick, and this was the only chance.”

“Where is the rest of your party?”

“All dead.”

“Then leave that canoe and come into mine.” I reached and caught his gunwale.

But he sat still.

“Oh, I don’t know. Might as well keep it, now that I’ve got it. I need it.”

I wasted no more words on him. His Maquiritares were almost done, and the only way to get them and ourselves out of that river quickly was to put all men in one boat. I told the Indians to get aboard. Without a word or a look at him they staggered up, lifted their dead comrade into my curial, and crawled across the gunwales.

“Say, you!” he blazed. “What d’you think you’re doing? Those men are mine!”

“Not now,” I disagreed. “They are their own men, and their people are my friends. Again I ask you to ride in my boat.”

He growled something. Then he laughed shortly.

“Oh, all right. I’d be a jackass to refuse now.”

And he flung his bag, case, gun, hat, and paddle into my boat and stepped in himself. I shoved his boat away and ordered my men to push on. Then I faced back up-stream, on guard against any further attack, though I expected none.

“If you have hunger, there is food in the carroza,” I told him. “Cassava from San Fernando, cheese from Caicara, roasted danta (tapir), and papelón for sweets. Rough fare, but”

“Rough? Say, hombre, it sounds like Broadway!” he declared. “I ate my last meal last night, and it was rotten.”

With that he crawled inside. The Maquiritares watched him hungrily, but I saw no food come out.

“Feed your men!” I growled.

He muttered something. In a minute or two he began to pass out cassava and meat-chunks to the Maquiritares, who grabbed the food like starved tigres.

It soured me a little, his failure to think of those exhausted men while he himself was eating. Selfish to the core, I thought him. Yet I had to remember that he had asked nothing from me; it had been the Maquiritares who called for my help. He had fought his own fight, hung to his captured canoe until I took his paddlers from him, said nothing of hunger until I invited him to eat. Yes, he was a man, though one who thought of himself first.

For half an hour or more I kept watch behind us. In that time he and his men finished eating, the Maquiritares gained new strength and took up the paddle-stroke of the Macos, and he smoked a cigaret from one of my packets in the cabin. With six paddles going and the current pushing us, we now were fairly rushing down the river and there was little chance of being overtaken. So I let myself down and squatted within the carroza. Then, as I saw what he was doing, I could not help laughing.

I had not expected him to stand and help me keep watch, for the curial was too narrow for more than one man to stand before the cabin, and I was using all the foot-room. But I thought to find him resting at full length on the palm-pole flooring, or inspecting his gun, or looking ahead. Instead, he was intensely interested in his face.

He had hung a little pocket mirror from one of the overhead poles, and, with his bandannas dangling alongside his cheeks and one gloved hand waving away the mosquitoes, he was soberly studying a sore on one cheekbone. It was red and as big as a bolívar—that is, as large as a quarter-dollar of your American money—and I recognized it at once as a bite of the zancudo de noche. The bite of this mosquito, as you señores will learn before you return from the Caroní, makes a very painful sore which later turns rotten, and which leaves a scar long after the flesh has healed. I myself was suffering from two of them at the time, so I knew how his felt.

“You can do nothing for that until it is ripe,” I said. “It is about three days old, yes? Then in three days more it will rot, and you can squeeze out all the matter through the big hole that will form.”

“Does it leave a scar?” he asked quickly.

“Si. Like these.” And I showed him several on my hands.

“The ” he muttered. “I may be marked for life!”

I stared, wondering what to make of him. He had no thought for the desperate fight he had gone through—only anxiety for his looks. I did not know whether to feel admiration for his coolness or contempt for his self-love.

“Is that why you wrap yourself in those hot handkerchiefs?” I asked.

“Sure,” he nodded. “The helmet and net are cooler, but the net’s an infernal nuisance—can’t see so well through it. So I use the handkerchiefs. Can’t let myself get all bitten up by these bugs, of course.”

“Of course not,” I agreed, keeping my face straight. “But now tell me how you come to be on this river. I am much astonished at meeting you here.”

He scowled. For a couple of minutes longer he looked into the little glass, his fingers moving lightly across the hard sore spot as if he could not leave it alone. Yet it seemed to me that the sore was not the only thing in his mind. He looked as if considering how he should answer my question.

Dropping his eyes then to the packet of my cigarrillos which lay open beside him, he picked it up, extended it to me, and, when I had taken one, helped himself. After a few puffs of smoke had driven the mosquitoes from us he spoke out.