A vast, a colossal silence succeeded the deafening noise of twelve cylinders exploding continuously. There were little hissing sounds as the motor cooled. There was the smell of burnt oil.
"All right, Paula?" asked Bell quietly.
"I—I'm all right."
The plane was drifting backward, now. It spun around in a stately fashion, its tail caught in underbrush, and it swung back. It drifted past cliffs of darkness for a long time, and grounded, presently, with a surprising gentleness.
"Do you know," said Bell dryly, "this sort of thing is getting monotonous. I think our motor's ruined. I never knew before that misfortunes could grow literally tedious. I've been expecting to be killed any minute since we started off, but the idea of being stuck in the jungle with a perfectly good plane and a bad motor...."
He fished inside his flying suit and extracted a cigarette. Then he lit it.
"Let's see.... We haven't a thing to eat, have we?"
There was a little slapping noise. Bell became suddenly aware of a horde of insects swarming around him. Smoke served partially to drive them off.
"Look here," he said suddenly, "we could unfold a parachute and cover the cockpits for some protection against these infernal things that are biting me."
"We may need the parachute," said Paula unsteadily. "Does—does that smoke of yours drive them away?"
"A little." Bell hesitated. "I say, it would be crowded, but if I came up there, or you here...."
"I—I'll come back there," she said queerly. "The extra cans of gasoline here...."
She slipped over the partition, in the odd flying suit which looks so much more odd when a girl wears it. She settled down beside him, and he tried painstakingly to envelope her in a cloud of tobacco smoke. The plague of insects lessened.
There was nothing to do but wait for dawn. She was very quiet, but as the moon rose higher he saw that her eyes were open. The night noises of the jungle all about them came to their ears. Furtive little slitherings, and the sound of things drinking greedily at the water's edge, and once or twice peculiar little despairing small animal cries off in the darkness.
The jungle was dark and sinister, and all the more so when the moon rose high and lightened its face and left them looking into weird, abysmal blackness between moonlit branches. Bell thought busily, trying not to become too conscious of the small warm body beside him.
He moved, suddenly, and found her fingers closed tightly on the sleeve of his flying suit.
"Frightened, Paula?" he asked quietly. "Don't be. We'll make out."
She shook her head and looked up at him, drawing away as if to scan his face more closely.
"I am thinking," she said almost harshly, "of biology. I wonder—"
Bell waited. He felt an intolerable strain in her tensed figure. He put his hand comfortingly over hers. And, astoundingly, he found it trembling.
"Are all women fools?" she demanded in a desperate cynicism. "Are we all imbeciles? Are—"
Bell's pulse pounded suddenly. He smiled.
"Not unless men are imbeciles too," he said dryly. "We've been through a lot in the past two days. It's natural that we should like each other. We've worked together rather well. I—well"—his smile was distinctly a wry and uncomfortable one—"I've been the more anxious to get to some civilized place where The Master hasn't a deputy because—well—it wouldn't be fair to talk about loving you while—" he shrugged, and said curtly, "while you had no choice but to listen."
She stared at him, there in the moonlight with the jungle moving about its business of life and death about them. And very, very slowly the tenseness left her figure. And very, very slowly she smiled.
"Perhaps," she said quietly, "you are lying to me, Charles. Perhaps. But it is a very honorable thing for you to say. I am not ashamed, now, of feeling that I wish to be always near you."
"Hush!" said Bell. He put his arm about her shoulder and drew her closer to him. He tilted her face upward. It was oval and quite irresistibly pretty. "I love you," said Bell steadily. "I've been fighting it since God knows when, and I'm going to keep on fighting it—and it's no use. I'm going to keep on loving you until I die."
Her fingers closed tightly upon his. Bell kissed her.
"Now," he said gruffly, "go to sleep."
He pressed her head upon his shoulder and kept it there. After a long time she slept. He stirred, much later, and she opened her eyes again.
"What is it?"
"Damn these mosquitos," growled Bell. "I can't keep them off your face!"
CHAPTER X
For four hours after sunrise Bell worked desperately. With the few and inadequate tools in the plane he took apart the oiling system of the motor. It was in duplicate, of course, like all modern air engines, and there were three magnetos, and double spark plugs. Bell drained the crankcase beneath a sun that grew more and more hot and blistering, catching the oil in a gasoline can that he was able to empty into the main tanks. He washed out innumerable small oil pipes with gasoline, and flushed out the crankcase itself, and had at the end of his working as many small scraps of metal as would half fill a thimble. He showed then to Paula.
"And the stars in their courses fought against Sisera," he quoted dryly. "Any one of these, caught in just the right place, would have let us down into the jungle last night."
She smiled up at him.
"But they didn't."
"No.... God loves the Irish," said Bell. "What's that thing?"
Paula was fishing, sitting on a fallen tree in the cloud of smoke from a smudge fire Bell had built for her. She was wearing the oily flying suit he had found in the shed with the plane, and had torn strips from her discarded dress to make a fishing line. The hook was made out of the stiff wire handle of one of the extra gasoline tins. "Hook and leader in one," Bell had observed when he made it.
He was pointing to a flat bodied fish with incredible jaws that lay on the grass, emitting strange sounds even in the air. It flapped about madly. Its jaws closed upon a stick nearly half an inch thick, and cut it through.
"It is a piranha," said Paula. "The same fish that bit your hand. It can bite through a copper wire fastened to a hook, but this hook is so long...."
"Pleasant," said Bell. Something large and red passed before his eyes. He struck at it instinctively.
"Don't!" said Paula sharply.
"Why?"
"It's a maribundi wasp," she told him "And its sting.... Children have died of it. A strong man will be ill for days from one single sting."
"Still more pleasant," said Bell. "The jungle is a charming place, isn't it?" He wiped the sweat off his face. "Any more little pets about?"
She looked about seriously.
"There." She pointed to a sapling not far distant. "The palo santo yonder has a hollow trunk, and in it there are usually ants, which are called fire-ants. They bite horribly. It feels like a drop of molten metal on your flesh. And it festers afterwards. And there is a fly, the berni fly, which lays its eggs in living flesh. The maggot eats its way within. I do not know much about the jungle, but my father has—had a fazenda in Matto Grosso and I was there as a child. The camaradas told me much about the jungle, then."
Bell winced, and sat down beside her. She had Ribiera's pearl handled automatic within easy reach. She saw him looking at it.
"I do not think there is any danger," she said with a not very convincing smile, "but there are cururus—water snakes. They grow very large."
"And I asked you to fish!" said Bell. "Stop it!"