The Inca Emerald Part 14

Soon small flocks of plain-colored birds could be seen flying low, with excited twitterings, evidently following the course of some unseen objects on the ground. Then there came a rustling through the underbrush, and, in headlong flight, an army of little animals, reptiles, and insects dashed through the jungle. Long brown wood-rats scuttled past, tiny jumping-mice leaped through the air, guiding themselves with their long tails, while here and there centipedes, small snakes, and a mult.i.tude of other living creatures sped through the brush as if fleeing before a forest fire.

Suddenly, through a corner of the jungle thrust the van of a vast army of black ants. Through the woods they moved in lines and regiments and divisions, while little companies deployed here and there on each side of the main guard. Like a stream of dark lava, the army flowed swiftly over the ground. As with human armies, this one was made up of different kinds of soldiers, all of whom had different duties to perform. Most numerous of all were the eyeless workers, about half an inch in length, armed with short, but keen, cutting mandibles. These acted as carriers and laborers and reserves, and, although blind, were formidable by reason of their numbers. Larger than the workers, measuring a full inch in length, were the soldiers, with enormous square heads and mandibles pointed and curved like pairs of ice-tongs. These soldiers would drive in each mandible alternately until they met in the body of their victim, and when they met they held. Even if the body of the ants was torn away, the curved clinging jaws still clinched and bit. With the soldiers came companies of butchers, whose jaws had serrated teeth which sheared and cut through flesh and muscle like steel saws. Besides these, there were laborers and reserve soldiers by the million.

Pinto told Will that a large ant-army would take twenty-four hours to pa.s.s a given point even when traveling at full speed. As they watched this army, Will saw an exhibition of what it could do. A large agouti in fleeing before them had in some way caught its leg in a tangle of vines and, squealing in terror, tried in vain to escape. Before it could release itself, the rush of the army was upon it, and it disappeared under a black wave of biting, stinging ants, which methodically cut up and carried off every fragment of the animal's flesh, and pa.s.sed on, leaving behind only a picked skeleton.

As Will watched this hurrying, resistless mult.i.tude, although well beyond the path of its advance, he felt a kind of terror, and was relieved when the Mundurucu started back for camp.

"Nothing that lives," said Pinto, as they turned toward the trail, "can stand against the black army."

The next day Jud and Joe joined in the hunt, leaving Hen to nurse the professor. Following a deer trail back from the sh.o.r.e, they came to a patch of swampy woods a mile from the lake. There Will discovered a mound some five feet high made of rushes, rotting moss, leaves, and mold.

"Is that a nest of ants?" he called to the Indian, pointing out to him the symmetrical hillock.

Pinto's face lighted up.

"No," he said, "that a nest of eggs. We dig it out, have good supper to-night."

"It must be some bird," exclaimed Jud, hurrying up, "to make a nest like that. Probably one of them South American ostriches--hey, Pinto?"

"You'll see," was all that the Indian would say as he began to dig into the soft, spongy ma.s.s. The rest of the party followed his example. By the time they had reached the center of the mound, digging with sticks and bare hands, the matted, rotting vegetation felt warm to the touch, and this heat increased as they approached the base of the nest. Down at the very bottom of the mound, arranged in a circle on a bed of moss, they found no fewer than twenty-four white eggs as large as those of a duck, but round and covered with a tough, parchment-like sh.e.l.l.

Pinto hurriedly pouched them all in a netted game-bag which he had made for himself out of palm-fiber.

"Want to see bird that laid those eggs?" he asked Jud.

"I sure would," returned the old trapper. "Any fowl that builds a five-foot incubator like that must be worth seein'."

"Rub two eggs together and she come," directed Pinto, holding out his bag to Jud.

Following the Indian's suggestion, Jud unsuspectingly rubbed two of the eggs against each other. They made a curious, penetrating, grating noise, like the squeal of chalk on a blackboard.

Hardly had the sound died away, when from out of a near-by wet thicket there came a roaring bellow that shook the very ground they stood on, and suddenly the air was filled with the sweet sickly scent of musk. Jud turned as if stung by a fire-ant, to see a pair of green eyes glaring at him above the jaws of a great alligator which had been lurking in the darkness of the jungle. As it lay there like an enormous lizard, the dark gray of its armored hide hardly showed against the shadows. On each side of the fore part of the upper jaw, two cone-shaped tusks showed white as polished ivory, fitting into sockets in the lower jaw. Even as Jud looked, the upper jaw of the vast saurian was raised straight up, showing the blood-red lining of the mouth gaping open fully three feet.

Then, with a roar like distant thunder, the great reptile raised its body, as big as that of a horse, upon its short, squat legs, and rushed through the brush at Jud with a squattering gait, which, however, carried it over the ground at a tremendous rate of speed for a creature eighteen feet long.

It was Jud's first experience with an alligator, and with a yell he ran down the slope like a race-horse. Unfortunately for him, on a straight line downhill an alligator can run faster than a man, and this one began to overtake him rapidly. As he glanced back, the grinning jaws seemed right at his shoulder.

"Dodge him! Dodge him!" yelled Pinto.

At first, Jud paid no attention, but ran straight as a deer will sometimes run between the rails to its death before a locomotive when one bound to the side would save it. At last, as Will and Joe also began to shout the same words over and over again, the idea penetrated Jud's bewildered brain and he sprang to one side and doubled on his trail. His pursuer, however, specialized in doubling itself. Unable to turn rapidly on account of its great length, and seeing its prey escaping, the alligator curved its body and the long serrated tail swung over the ground like a scythe. The extreme end of it caught Jud just above the ankles and swept him off his feet, standing him on his head in a thorn-bush from which he was rescued by Pinto and Will, who had followed close behind. The alligator made no further attempt at pursuit, but quickly disappeared in the depths of a marshy thicket.

"Whew!" said Jud, exhausted, sitting down on a fallen log and mopping his steaming face. "That was certainly a funny joke, Mr. Pinto. About one more of those an' you won't go any further on this trip. You'll stay right here--underground."

The Mundurucu was very apologetic, explaining that he had not intended to do anything worse than startle the old man, while Will and Joe interceded for him.

"He only wanted to see you run," said the latter, slyly. "n.o.body can run like Jud when he's scared."

"No, boy," objected the old trapper, "I wasn't exactly scared. Startled is the right word. It would startle anybody to have a monstrophalus alligator rush out of nowhere an' try to swallow him."

"Certainly it would," agreed Will, gravely. "Anybody could see that you weren't scared, you looked so n.o.ble when you ran."

Peace thus being restored, the whole party returned to camp, where that night Professor Ditson, who was feeling better, gave a long discourse on the difference between crocodiles, alligators, and caymans.

"If that had been a crocodile," he explained "you wouldn't be here now.

There's one species found in South America, and it's far faster than any alligator. Look out for it."

"I most certainly will," murmured Jud.

That night at supper, Pinto proceeded to roast in the hot coals the whole clutch of alligator eggs except the two which Jud had dropped in his excitement. For the first time in a long life, the old trapper refused the food set before him.

"I've et monkeys an' dragons an' cannibal-fish without a murmur," he said, "but I draw the line at alligator's eggs. They may taste all right, but when I think of their dear old mother an' how she took to me, I'm just sentimental enough to pa.s.s 'em up."

CHAPTER IX

THE PIT

For several days the treasure-hunters made their camp near the sh.o.r.es of the great lake, waiting for the slow healing of Professor Ditson's wounds. Here and there, through open s.p.a.ces in the forest, they could see the summits of mountain-ranges towering away in the distance, and realized that the long journey through the jungle was nearly over.

Beyond the lake the trail stretched away along the slopes of the foot-hills, with plateaus and high pampas on one side and the steaming depths of the jungle on the other.

One morning Professor Ditson felt so much better that Hen Pine, who had been acting as his special nurse, decided to start on an expedition after fresh vegetables. Shouldering his ax and beckoning to Joe, for whom the giant black had a great liking, the two struck off from the trail beyond the lake into the heart of the jungle. Before long they saw in the distance the beautiful plume-like foliage of a cabbage-palm outlined against the sky. A full seventy feet from the ground, the umbrella-like ma.s.s of leaves hung from the slim, steel-like column of the tapering trunk, b.u.t.tressed by clumps of straight, tough roots, which formed a solid support to the stem of the tree extending up ten feet from the ground. It took a solid hour of chopping before the palm fell.

When at last it struck the earth, Hen cut out from the heart of the tree's crown a back-load of tender green leaves folded in buds, which made a delicious salad when eaten raw and tasted like asparagus when boiled.

As they turned back, Joe saw something move in a near-by tree. Looking more closely, he noticed a crevice in the trunk, across which was stretched a dense white web. Behind this crouched a huge spider. Covered with coa.r.s.e gray and reddish hairs, its ten legs had an expanse of fully seven inches. The lower part of the web was broken, and in it were entangled two small birds about the size of a field-sparrow. One of them was dead, but the other still moved feebly under the body of the monster. Picking up a long stick, Joe started to rescue the fluttering little captive.

"Look out!" shouted Hen, who was some distance away. "That's a crab-spider and mighty dangerous."

Paying no attention to the other's warning, Joe with one sweep of his stick smashed the web and, just missing the spider, freed the dying bird, so that it fell to the ground. As he whirled his stick back for another blow, the terrible arachnid sprang like a tiger through the air, landing on the upper part of Joe's bare left arm, and, with its red eyes gleaming, was about to sink its curved envenomed mandibles deep in the boy's flesh. Only the instinctive quickness of Joe's muscles, tensed and trained by many a danger, saved him. With a snap of his stick he dashed the spider into the underbrush.

"Did he get you?" shouted Hen, anxiously.

"I think not," said Joe.

"You'd most certainly know it if he did," returned the great negro, examining the boy's arm closely. Although it was covered with loose reddish hairs from the monster, there was no sign of any wound.

"That was a close call, boy," said Hen, carefully blowing the hairs off Joe's skin. "You am goin' to be mighty discomfortable from dese ere hairs; but if he'd done bit you, you might have died."

Hen was a true prophet. Some of the short, hard hairs became fixed in the fine creases of Joe's skin and caused an almost maddening itching which lasted for several days.

The next day, for the first time since his meeting with the puma, Professor Amandus Ditson tried walking again. His left arm was still badly swollen and inflamed and his stiffened and bruised muscles gave him intense pain when he moved, but, in spite of Hen's protests, he insisted upon limping a mile or so down the trail and back.

"If a man gives in to his body," he remarked impatiently, when Hen remonstrated with him, "he will never get anything done."

The second day he walked still farther, and the third day, accompanied by the faithful Hen, who followed him like a shadow, he covered several miles, exploring a path that ran through the jungle parallel with the trail.

"Some one's been along here lately, Boss," said Hen, pointing out freshly broken twigs and marks in the earth.