Chapter Seventeen
In the house up in Maryland, Cotter came back from the door with an opened telegram in his hand, and its contents already on his face. “Here’s the answer from the Associated Fruit Line’s San Francisco office. Their ship the Santa Emilia just docked there.”
Fredericks took it and read.
CAPTAIN S.S. STA. EMILIA REPORTS LAWRENCE JONES AND WIFE ACCIDENTALLY LEFT BEHIND AT PUERTO SANTO.
They looked at each other. Long and forebodingly, as they had that day at the steamship office in Baltimore.
“It could happen,” Cotter tried to suggest uncertainly.
“It’s a little too much of a coincidence. Why should it be at just that one particular port of call? It wasn’t Havana. It wasn’t Christóbal. No, it was Puerto Santo. You and I have both seen that place. There’s not enough there to take up half an hour of anyone’s time, much less make them overstay a shore leave. Something happened.”
“You mean—?”
Fredericks nodded curtly. “Yes, I mean. Now the thing is, what’re we going to do about it?”
Cotter eyed him in silence, waiting for him to give the answer himself.
“Just one more thing, to make sure. We’ll communicate direct with the authorities in Puerto Santo. If they’re still accounted for down there, if they’re in full view waiting for the next ship, all right. If they’re not, then we’ll know. I’ll send a radiogram right now.”
The answer came back in seventy-two hours. “It’s in Spanish,” Cotter said when he brought it in. “You better tackle it.”
Fredericks roughed out a running translation on a piece of scratch paper as he read it through.
MR. AND MRS. LAWRENCE JONES UNREPORTED SINCE 12TH LAST KNOWN WHEREABOUTS FINCA LA ESCONDIDA. DISAPPEARED, FEARED TO HAVE STRAYED INTO JUNGLE AND PERISHED.
All Fredericks said, when he’d turned it over to him, was: “Now we know.”
Cotter glanced up and saw him strip the phone with a decisive tweak. “What’re you going to do?”
“Make two reservations on the first plane that we can get to take us anywhere near there.”
Chapter Eighteen
The phantom tribesmen and their captives were going up the mountain now like figures in a dream. And he was one of them. Awake in that dream, yet unable to escape from it. They were going up the way that he and she had ridden so many times in the morning, up toward the spring, up toward the eventual cleft that she had once yearned so to attain.
They went single file, heads low, wending in a long serpentine procession under the night sky. The sky was dark, but the mountainside was white as borax under the starlight, and its sheen was strong enough and clear enough to reveal every changing play of muscle on their naked backs as they went laboring upward, to seam their sculpturesque spinal indentations with fluxing shadow lines. They were so photographically realistic to his fear-taut eyes, they were so unbelievable to his logic-demanding mind. They should have thinned out, faded away in the starlight; instead little stones and pebbles rocked uneasily under their tread, clods of earth were dislodged by their substantial passage and fell back to rest again.
They moved with the terrible, grim silence all war parties afoot had once had, in the days before the wheel was invented and war became explosive. Each one stepped in the same place and along the same way the one before him had trod, with never a variation, never an overlap. A little low-clinging dust spurted out at the sides of their course, like foam tracing backward from the prow of a ship.
The whole thing was horror incarnate. He was gorging on horror. Digesting it, sweating it. But horror had a central point, a focus. Horror wasn’t this long line of softly padding apparitions in whose midst he was being towed along. Horror wasn’t the binding of his hands behind his back. Horror wasn’t the blows he received every time he faltered or tried to get out of line. Horror wasn’t any of those things.
Horror was that palanquin swaying up ahead, and what it held in it. Borne shoulder-high at the very head of the procession, so that even this far back the starlight showed him the white form, the oblivious head nestled within it. A head that did not look back to see where he was. A head that held no thought of him, that did not know him any more. A form that sat content, in passive acceptance of its journeying and of its destination.
That was horror, for him. And every time he looked up there, he groaned.
They were clever. A shrewd, primeval intelligence directed these forays. There were no torches to light their way, to look from a distance like fireflies climbing up the mountainside and betray them to the enemy civilization below and behind them in the lowlands. They hadn’t fired the house, either. When it was come upon again, it would be as it had been last; untouched, unaltered. Only empty. Nothing to show what had happened. Only the stars would know.
A voice suddenly called out to him in English. It came from farther back, from somewhere at the very end of the long, toiling line. A hoarse voice, broken, frightened, just as he knew his own would be if he were to use it like that, rawly naked against the night. English; he’d never known before how beautiful one’s mother tongue could be. He’d never known how much he loved it. It must be hell, he thought, to die and not hear English any more. That must be worse than the fact of death itself.
The call was: “Jones! Jones! Where have they got my little girl? What have they done with Chris?”
And then, before he could answer, he could already hear the vicious blows falling, beating the voice quiet, smothering it to extinction. He knew if he spoke back, that was what he’d get too.
He braced himself, drew in his breath, and let go into the night.
“She’s up front, Mai. They’ve got her by — by that thing they’re carrying. She’s fastened to it, walking along beside it.”
The blows came down like rain — tough, leathery rain — and he went down first on one knee, then on both, then rolled over, but they kept following him like nettles clinging to him. The first few he could hold out against, but the ones that followed added their own pain to the pain of the first, until there was too much pain all at one time, and his voice seemed to break from him in shrill outcry, not through his mouth alone, but at every flaming, stinging pore.
He was dragged erect, thrust forward again, stuffed back into the long line, floundering at first like a weighted sack that threatens to fall first on this side, then on that, until at last he had steadied himself, regained the rhythm of the interlocking, piston-like ascent. He was conscious through it all of only one main thing: That form up there aloft had not shifted, that serenely held head had not turned to look back at the sound of his cries in the aboriginal night.
He groaned deep down inside him, but it wasn’t from the blows he’d just had.
They were traveling steadily upward to meet the sun, which was coming up toward them unseen on the other side of the mountains. The sky along their crests was paling to an electric blue, bright against the eyes. It was like looking at a sheet of smooth gas flame, spread out in curtain form. They began to throw shadows on the ground, the long line of them, where there had been only even darkness before.
Day was coming between two centuries. Breaking on the mountaintop, midway between two ages. And these people in whose hands he was were hurrying back to regain their own, before the day came.
His eyes centered on the heel of the individual directly before him. Coppery red; rising, falling, rising, falling. It had blood on it. It was alive. It left an impress. It was real. Where had it come from? Where was it leading him to?