Tupahn--the Thunderstorm/Chapter 11

HE maloca was very quiet.

Men stared at us, at the two motionless fighters, at the chief. The Bat himself sat hunched up, his dim. eyes fixed on the huddled forms lying beyond the hammock. Now that the fight was ended, it took them a little time to realize fully that the arrogant creature who had been almost their ruler was now only a lump of flesh with a broken neck.

In the silence we raised Senhor Tom and carried him to the other side of the fire. There, beside the girl, we laid him down.

“They sleep together, heramuhm,” said Pedro. “Now let us wake them together, while that one yonder who would have destroyed them sleeps on forever.”

The gaze of the Bat rested on them, and a little smile came again on his sunken lips.

“So shall it be,” he said. “Bring water for these two. Carry that dead dog to his house and let him lie there until the sun rises. Andirah hopes his brother Tupahn is not broken also.”

The staring crowd around us came to life. While water was brought we examined our comrade more carefully. He was battered and bruised and bitten and scratched, his head-wound was torn open and oozing red, and his clothes were ripped half from his body. But nowhere could we find a broken bone.

“He is whole, heramuhm,” Pedro assured the Bat. “Blind though he is, it takes more than a rascally priest to break Tupahn. If his head had not struck that pole he now would be standing before you and roaring for another liar to kill.”

This was good talk for the Indians to listen to, but not very near the truth. Though neither of us was sure of it—and I am not sure of it even now—I thought it might have been the priest's neck, not Senhor Tom's head, which had struck that post so hard. And we both knew well that if our comrade were now on his feet he would be attending to the senhorita, not yelling for more blood. But, as I say, it was just as well to keep the Tucunas in awe of the great Thunderstorm.

The water came; and with it came more than water—a jar of raw Indian rum, which some wise old woman brought up. I gave all my time to Senhor Tom, bathing his head, forcing some of the fiery liquor between his teeth, and bandaging him with a strip of bark-cloth which somebody passed to me. Pedro, who had calmly sat down and taken the girl's head in his lap, worked on her much more successfully than I could have done—for I am shy of women, awake or asleep. Above us the chief squinted downward, eager to see both awake at once.

But it was the girl whose eyes opened first. I heard a gasp and a choking cry—

“Oh, don't!”

Glancing aside, I found her pushing away the rum, with which Pedro perhaps had been too generous. Coughing, she sat up and gazed around as if lost.

“You are safe now, senhorita,” my partner soothed her. “We are here, and these Indians are friends. Do not fear.”

“Oh—oh, it is Pedro!” she cried. “Pedro and—and Lourenço?”

My back was toward her, and she saw only the side of my face.

“Yes, Lady Marion, I am Lourenço,” I told her. “And Senhor Tom too will soon speak to you.”

At that her deep blue eyes widened and she caught her breath.

“Tom? Tom Mack? Why—oh no, Lourenço! It can't be! He is dead—murdered”

Then her voice stopped. She stared at the knee-boots and khaki breeches of the man lying beside her. With a bound she was up and leaning over me, looking down into the yellow-bearded face on my knees.

“Tom!” she cried. “It is true! He is here—he is alive—but I saw him killed! I saw him”

“You saw him shot down from behind, senhorita,” Pedro corrected her, “but not killed. Yet he is not as he was, my lady. The bullet killed his sight. He is blind.”

“O-o-oh!”” she breathed, her voice full of pity. “Blind!”

“It is true,” I nodded, continuing my work on him. “And yet, blind as he is, he brought us”

Before I could say more, Senhor Tom came to his senses. And then for a few seconds I had my hands very full.

He had gone down fighting. He did not yet know his fighting was over. He clutched me, heaved, twisted himself over, and nearly forced me down. But then, as suddenly as he had attacked, he relaxed his hold.

“Lourenço!” he muttered. Shoving himself back, he rested on his knees. His face turned upward to the girl.

“Marion!” he cried out.

“Yes, Tom, it is I,” she answered. “Be careful. The fire is behind you. Give me your hand and let me help. you.”

He stared, blinked rapidly several times, ran a hand across his eyes, stared again. Then he laughed out so wildly that for an instant I thought him mad.

“I can see!” he shouted. “I can see! Lourenço—Marion—Pedro—Indians—fires and hammocks—everything is clear!”

And, wild with joy, he slapped my shoulder so hard he nearly knocked me flat, jumped up, seized the girl, and kissed her.

Almost at once he let her go and stepped back, red to his hair.

“I—shouldn't have done that,” he stammered. “I—I'm sorry. Pardon me if you can, Mari—Miss Marshall. I'm sort of crazy, I guess.”

She made no answer. She stood motionless, a little pale, her wide eyes on his flushed face; and on her own face was an expression I could not read. I could not call it anger or sorrow or joy or pain, though it might have been any or all of them together. It was more like the look of a girl awaking to something she had not known before; as if that sudden kiss had dazed her, yet aroused her at the same instant. At length she turned slowly from him and gazed around the maloca as if seeing nothing at all in it.

“Where is that pajé?” roared Senhor Tom, glaring around as if seeking something to fight. When we told him, he scowled as blackly as before. Pedro chuckled.

“You need not break another neck just because you have kissed a lady,” he teased. “And let me advise you, comrade—after kissing a girl, never tell her you are sorry you did it. That is a poor compliment.”

“Shut up! You poor fish, you don't understand”

“I understand much better than you do,” was the laughing retort. “But if you must roar, roar at Andirah.”

But the old chief, with a toothless grin, spoke first.

“It is as you said, my son: Tupahn looks for another man to kill. Now he is whole again in truth. His eyes see his woman. Is it not so?”

“It is so, heramuhm,” answered Pedro. “His sight is clear and his heart has dropped a heavy load. And now for the first time Tupahn looks on the face of Andirah.”

At the moment Senhor Tom was not looking at Andirah. His gaze rested on the girl. But, hearing Pedro's hint, he turned to the chief.

“Tupahn gives thanks to Andirah,” he said heartily. “The Bat has proved himself truly the friend of the Storm. Tupahn is sorry that in his blindness he thought Andirah not a friend. Let the Bat now tell his brother how that pajé deceived his chief, and what would have been done with this woman if she had not been saved.”

The old chief smiled again, but this time his face held a touch of cruelty. Yet he answered readily enough.

“The dog of a priest brought her before me as a man, knowing my eyes were dim. He called her apuyah—man—and none of those who came with her said a word of a woman. He said the captive was companion of the man killed, and evil as the dead one. So I gave her to the bat-demon of our tribe.

“Tupahn, we are a peaceful people. We make no war. Though many of the Tucuna nation followed Black Hawk, no man of the Bat went with him. We are friends to white men. Yet we are free men of the forest, and when we are used evilly we remember the evil, and if the doer of evil comes again into our hands he goes not out again. Whether his skin be red or white, if his heart be black he had best beware of the vengeance of the Bat.

“Whenever such a one has come back to us he has been accused of his evil and given his chance to speak for himself before me. Then he has been put into the mask of the bat-demon and given over to the pajé for punishment and death. After death his body was used by the wizard for his magic. His skull also was kept for making spells against further evil. On the walls of the house of the pajé those skulls hang.

“That one who was killed beside the water had in days not long past done evil to young women of our tribe. When he was found again near here he was killed at once because he reached for a gun. The one with him—the young woman—was seized and brought here. Because I thought her a man, because she said no word when my pàje called her a companion in evil of the dead one, because he demanded that the bat-demon be given his due, I allowed him to put on her the mask of the bat and take her to his house for punishment.”

He paused. Then firmly he went on:

“Now that the pajé and his demon-mask both are destroyed by Tupahn, there shall be no more punishment of that kind in the tribe of Andirah. When next the sun rises the house of the false pajé shall be burned. With it the pajé also shall burn. And from now until Andirah goes down into the ground with his fathers there shall be no priest among the men of the Bat. Andirah has spoken.”

“Andirah has spoken well,” the Thunderstorm approved. “Let Andirah alone rule his tribe, and it shall be ruled well. Let no priest again twist the words in my brother's mouth and the thoughts in his brain. Yet why did not the men of Andirah tell their chief the truth? Why did they stand mute when the pajé called this woman apuyahe?” 

The old man's eyes narrowed still more. And of the men around him he demanded:

“You hear the words of Tupahn. Why were you dumb?”

The men shifted uneasily and looked at one another. After a short silence one replied:

“We feared the pajé. The woman said no word. Why should we speak when she was silent?”

“She was silent because she knew not your tongue, fool!” Senhor Tom growled. “She knew not what was said or how to answer. She knows only the language of her own land.”

Yet I wondered, and I knew he wondered, why she had said nothing at all before the chief. Even a few words in an unknown tongue would have told the ruler that her voice was that of a woman. But soon we learned that there had been a reason for her silence.

While we men talked she had stood quietly watching, and during the long speech of the chief she had not taken her eyes from his face. Now, in the silence following Senhor Tom's curt reply to the Tucuna, she turned to me. Without a glance at the explorer, she asked me to tell her what all the talk was about.

I let her know most of what had been said, though I left out the fact that the pajé was to be burned—indeed, I neglected to tell her he was dead. Then I asked why she had kept silence after her capture by the Tucunas.

“Because that naked leader of the Indians—the stout man with the red curves painted on his cheeks—told me to be still,” she explained. “He tried to talk to me soon after we left the water, but I couldn't understand. Then he made the rest stand back a little, where they couldn't watch him well, and made many signs. He pointed ahead, put his finger to his lips, shook his head, and did other things to show me that I must say nothing when we came to some place beyond us. He was awfully ugly-looking—and I learned later that he was uglier than he looked—but then he seemed to be trying to be friendly. He gave me the idea that if I talked I should be killed, but that if I said nothing he would get me through safely. And when they brought me in here this old man looked terribly cruel. So I stood as still as I could-and never said a word.”

Senhor Tom growled.

“The swine! He started double-crossing you and the chief before you even got here. You see that now, of course.”

“Yes, of course.”

She looked around her at the crowding faces. Then she asked:

“What has become of him? I haven't seen him since this afternoon, when he threw me into a hole and buried me alive.”

We all had forgotten that she did not know of the fight. I spoke out promptly—too promptly.

“Senhor Tom has just killed him.”

I have never understood women. Knowing that I am ignorant of their minds, I try not to be surprized by anything they do. Yet I was amazed and bewildered at the result of my words.

Only a little while ago our Lady Marion had been a tender, pitying girl who called our comrade “Tom” and tried to help him rise. Even his sudden kiss had not angered her. But now, hearing my abrupt news, she paled and stepped back as if he had become a monster. Into her face came the same look I had seen there when he spoke so carelessly about the death of the man shot in his sleep. Then she turned her back on all of us and walked slowly away, looking down at the ground.