Caravans By Night Part 35

And Trent, listening, felt himself drawn back to the night when he stood in the bow of the _Manchester_, in the realm of the stars, and Romance whispered an old, old tale.

The spell did not leave until the boat grated upon a sandbank, close to a dark tangle of forest, and Da-yak sprang out. Then Sarojini Nanjee put away the map, rose and took Trent's hand.

"Your camp is only a short distance beyond the trees," she told him.

As he stepped out of the boat Da-yak made a sound like a night-bird, and a moment later there came an answering cry from the dark thicket.

4

When the juggler--he of the scar and the drooping eyelid--left the alley in the bazaar, it was to follow Da-yak. At the P. W. D. Bungalow he saw a sahib join the Tibetan--which was what he expected. From there he tracked them to the river, and stood upon the high bank watching as they cast off and glided downstream.

When they were well under way he sauntered down to the huddle of boats, and, choosing one, dropped his pack in the bow and kicked the Kachin who lay sleeping in the bottom.

"Wake up, lazy one; I would go to Waingmaw."

The boatman, thus awakened, looked up with unconcealed hostility. Seeing a native, and a ragged one at that, he let go a stream of oaths that, fortunately for him, were not understood by the juggler. However, the latter imagined from the tone in which the words were delivered that he was being neither praised nor glorified.

"This for thy trouble, O boatman," said the juggler, choosing to ignore the oaths and thrusting a banknote within view of the Kachin's eyes.

The boatman, not entirely appeased yet too avaricious to allow a mere insult to stand between him and the banknote, pushed off, and the juggler seated himself in the stern, both to steer and to watch the craft ahead.

"Do not gain on yonder boat," he instructed when they were in midstream, "nor lose. If thou hast a conscience that thou canst smother, then this night will indeed be profitable for thee, Kachin."

The juggler said this knowing well that his every word would be repeated to all the boatmen in Myitkyina, and that, after traveling through devious channels, they would reach the bazaar, greatly magnified en route. For what purpose a juggler with a drooping eyelid had followed a boat down the river could only be surmised--but bazaars surmise much.

"Know you those who are in that boat?" he continued, baiting gossip.

The Kachin grunted--which was intended as a negative answer.

"The boatmen are no friends of thine?"

Another grunt. "The boat belongs to Kin Lo," the Kachin volunteered, chewing on an opium pellet. "But some stranger hired it for the night."

And he added, by way of personal suggestion, "They paid well."

This information pleased the juggler, for he smiled and drew out a cheroot and lighted it.

"Aye!" he growled. "They paid well, did they? Well, why should they not?

Robbers! Sons of swine! Listen, Kachin--in yonder boat is my enemy. From Mandalay I have followed him, and ere the moon sinks I shall avenge the wrongs he committed against my house!"

"A-a-ah!" sympathized the Kachin, forgetting the rude awakening--they are as eager for scandal, these wild men of the hills, as the most polished Englishman who sits beneath a punkah in Rangoon Cantonment.

Whereupon the juggler recited a tale of imaginary woes and wrongs that did justice to his alleged art of story-telling. Myitkyina's lights had long dropped away behind when the juggler saw the leading boat turn, cross the path of moonlight and glide sh.o.r.eward.

"Ah!" he muttered. "See, Kachin, he thinks to elude me, the swine!"

A glance behind showed him another craft--a mere speck on the expanse of the river. For a moment he was undecided what to do, then, with an exclamation of satisfaction, he stripped himself but for a perineal band.

"Listen well, Kachin," he admonished, creeping forward. "It is not wise for my enemy to see me coming ash.o.r.e; therefore I shall swim, like a crocodile. Turn back to Myitkyina. There hurry to the bungalow of Colonel Warburton Sahib--you know where it is? Tell him he is wanted at the landing immediately. He will go."

"But my money," objected the Kachin. "How do I know you will come back?"

"Dost thou not see, O fool, that I have left my clothes and my pack?

Will not I return for them?"

The boatman was not positive of that.

"Well, then, I will give you half now," compromised the juggler, taking a wallet from the inside pocket of his discarded jacket. The Kachin watched with crafty eyes to see if the wallet would be returned to the pocket, but the juggler thrust it carefully under his turban.

"Lend me thy _dah_," he directed. "And do as I said. Thou shalt be well rewarded for thy trouble."

With the knife gripped between his teeth, he slipped over the side into the current. He made no sound as he swam away from the boat; only his moving head and the ripples in his wake told of swift, underwater strokes.

The river was cool--old wine to the muscles--and he made for the bank several hundred feet above the white stretch of sand where the other craft had landed. Not until he was very close to the sh.o.r.e could he touch bottom. There he halted, head above the surface, eyes straining to penetrate the gloom further along. He could make out the faint blur of the boat and a single figure huddled in the stern. A look toward midstream showed him his craft fast being absorbed by the darkness.

Behind it, coming from Myitkyina, was another boat.

He waited for events to mature. When the latter craft, which he could see contained two forms, came abreast of him, midstream, it turned sh.o.r.eward and a few minutes later touched the sandbank near the boat that he had followed. He could dimly make out the two forms as they carried several bulky objects ash.o.r.e and vanished in the jungle--leaving the solitary figure huddled in the rear of one of the boats.

The juggler smiled to himself and struck out, swimming easily with the current. Less than twenty yards from the boat he submerged, propelling himself forward until yellow sparks reeled before him; then he buoyed himself up.

The two country-boats loomed close by. His heart beat a tattoo against his breast as he waited, feet upon the pebbly bottom, to see if his approach had been heard. Apparently it had not, for the man--a native boatman from his appearance--lounged in the rear seat, his body slouched forward.

After a brief hesitation the juggler (his eyelid no longer drooping) took the _dah_ from between his teeth and moved slowly, cautiously to the rear of the boat. It was shallower there; the water barely reached his arm-pits and his chin was level with the back of the craft. The man had not stirred; he was evidently asleep, the juggler thought. The forest that met the sandbank was silent but for the whirr of cicadas.

For a full moment the juggler stood motionless. When he moved it was quickly--and before the native had time to realize what had occurred, he was seized and jerked backward over the stern. If he cried out, the water smothered the sound. But what he failed to do in noise, he made up for in activity. He squirmed and wriggled, his legs and arms thrashing about in vain effort to wrest himself from the grasp of his sudden a.s.sailant. But the juggler had the advantage of surprise--and a firm hold on the native's neck--and he brought the hilt of the _dah_ down upon the latter's skull. The native relaxed--sank with a gurgle.... The juggler lifted him. a.s.sured that he was only unconscious, he dragged him to the sandbank, and there, breathing heavily, sank on his knees.

The native, like the juggler, had a beardless face and was naked but for loincloth and turban. The latter was small, a mere rag twisted around his head. Therefore, the juggler told himself with the darkness as his ally he might easily pa.s.s for the other--for a short while at least. And the defeat of empire has been accomplished in less than an hour.

He quickly stripped the man, then cut his own turban into strips and gagged and bound the unconscious one. When this was done, he caught the fellow under the arms and dragged him several yards down the bank.

There, carefully selecting a spot in the undergrowth where he was not likely to be soon found, he hid him. Retracing his steps to the boat, he sat down in the stern to wait.

Indeed, he reflected, his kismet looked upon him with favor.

CHAPTER IX

FEVER

Like a black wedge driven from Hkamti Long into Upper Burma, its point touching the confluence of the Irrawaddi, lies a strip of territory that on British maps is marked "unadministered." Outposts have been established on either side, from Fort Hertz down to Myitkyina, paltry stations where, in many instances, one white man and less than a company of Gurkhas impose law upon primitive tribes. Thus, walled by civilization yet untouched by it, the people of this black wedge live. A peaceful lot now, this remnant of the once great Tai race.

Copper-skinned men hunt through its cathedral forests with _dah_ and crossbow. Baboons, buffalo and musk deer roam over its hills. Reptiles haunt the green mucous of miasmatic valleys. Fever and pestilence lurk in the purple fungi sp.a.w.ned by dark jungles, in bogs and in swamps where the stench of rotten orchids hangs like a poison-vapor.

Into this black wedge Trent traveled. Late afternoon of the ninth day found his caravan encamped on a spit of sand reaching out into a river, a stream that moved languorously between high canebrake. The man who sat on a collapsible campstool before his tent, smoking, was as little like the Englishman who got off the train at Myitkyina ten days before as possible. His khaki breeches and flannel shirt were streaked with dust; mud was caked upon his boots. The sun had burned him a deeper bronze, and every variety of insect, from sandfly to blood-sucker, had left marks upon him. A nine-days' growth of beard helped to cover tawny fever-stains, but blotches showed on his neck and hands.... The jungle had shown him how she initiates her neophytes.

As he sat there staring at the jade-green river, he went back, in retrospection, over the journey--not that he derived any pleasure from the recollections, but because his brain seemed inclined to reach behind and he was too mentally weary to make any effort to prevent it. To him, now, those nine days were a confused sequence. For many miles beyond the 'Nmai-hka travel was not difficult, along bridle-paths and past villages where Kachin and Maru women, flat-featured, ugly creatures, planted their _taungya_, and men sat outside fiber huts and chewed betel leaves; rugged, undulating country; rivers that flung their torrents over shallow beds and were spanned by rattan bridges, the latter impossible for the mules. Twice, where the water was too deep, Trent had the muleteers construct crude rafts and pole the pack-animals across. The first time they attempted this they lost a mule. Trent would always remember that scene: the shrieking porters on the raft, the look of the beast as the stream wrapped foaming arms about it and dragged it down among sharp-fanged rocks.

That night he had had his first attack of fever. For several hours he lay on his camp-bed, hara.s.sed by ticks and bloodflies, shivering and vomiting at intervals. Then he fell asleep, and when he awakened in the morning, with rain drip-dripping monotonously upon tapering fronds, his back ached and he was a furnace. All day it rained and all day Masein, the Lisu guide, attended him. The following morning he had only a slight temperature--a chronic touch of fever that remained for several days--and he pressed on.