"No snake ever bites through cloth," he remarked rea.s.suringly. "Now for the Inca Emerald!"
CHAPTER X
SKY BRIDGE
At the end of their next day"s journey the Trail began to swing away from the jungle, and thereafter led ever upward, skirting the foot-hills of the mountain-ranges beyond which lay the lost cities of the Incas.
Three days after Will"s escape from the pit he found himself once more in terrible danger. During the siesta period at noon he had walked away from the rest of the party to see what new birds he might find. Not far from the camping-spot he came to a place where a colony of crested black-and-gold orioles had built long, hanging nests of moss and fiber among the branches of a low tree.
Curious to see whether their eggs looked like the scrawled and spotted ones of the Northern orioles, Will started to climb the tree. Before he was half-way to the nests, a cloud of clamoring birds were flying around his head, and as he looked up he noticed for the first time, directly above him, a great gray wasps" nest. Even as he looked, one of the circling birds brushed against it, and a cloud of enormous red wasps poured out. They paid no attention whatever to the birds, but flew down toward Will, who was already scrambling out of the tree at full speed.
Even as he reached the ground, two of the wasps settled on his bare arm, and instantly he felt as if he had been stabbed by red-hot daggers.
Never in his life had the boy known such agony. Trembling with pain, he brushed the fierce insects off and rushed at top speed toward the camp.
In spite of the heat, a racking chill seized him as he ran. His teeth chattered together and waves of nausea seemed to run over his whole body, dimming his eyes and making his head swim He just managed to reach the rest of the party when he staggered and fell.
"I"ve been stung by some big red hornets," he murmured, and dropped back unconscious.
"It"s the maribundi wasp," said Professor Ditson, looking very grave as he helped Hen undress the boy and sponge his tortured body with cold water. "Three of their stings have been known to kill a man."
By evening Will was delirious. All night long Hen and the scientist worked over him, and by the next day he was out of danger, although still in great pain and very weak. It was several days before he could walk, and then only with the greatest difficulty. At first every step was an agony; but Professor Ditson a.s.sured him that regular exercise was the best way to free his system from the effect of the maribundi venom.
Once again death which had dogged the adventurers" trail for so long peered out at them. They had finished the first stage of their day"s walk, and Will was lying white and sick under a tree, trying to gain strength enough to go on. Ahead of them stretched a wide river, with a ford showing, down to which the Trail led. Suddenly from the depths of the near-by jungle came a horrid scream, followed by a chorus of baying notes something between the barking of a dog and the howl of a wolf. As the travelers sprang to their feet, a shower of blood-red arrows, with saw-edged points and barbs fashioned from flinty strips of palm-wood, dropped all around them. Again the wailing, terrible cry broke the silence.
"It"s the jaguar-scream--the war-cry of the Miranhas," said Professor Ditson quietly. "They are on our trail with one of their packs of wild dogs."
Even as he spoke, from the forest far below them a band of Indians broke into the open. Ahead of them raced a pack of tawny brown dogs nearly as large as the timber-wolves of the North.
Hen unsheathed his great machete, while Jud fumbled with the holster of his automatic.
"No! no!" said Professor Ditson sharply. "We can stand them off better across the river. Hurry!"
Without a word, Hen picked up Will"s limp body and raced ahead of the others around a bend in the trail which hid them all for a moment from the sight of their pursuers. At the river the scientist suddenly halted, after a long look at the rapids which ran deep and swift on each side of the ford.
"Don"t splash as you go through," he said quietly. "I"ll come last."
One by one, the little party, headed by Hen with Will in his arms, waded carefully through the shallow water. As they went Jud thought that he caught glimpses in the river of the squat, fierce forms of the dreaded piranhas, but if they were there they paid no attention to the men, who crossed with the utmost care. Just as Professor Ditson, the last of the party to leave the bank, stepped into the stream, there sounded with startling distinctness the same wild chorus which had come from the jungle. Once or twice in a life-time a hunter in South American forests hears the fearsome screech which a jaguar gives when it is fighting for its life or its mate. It was this never-to-be-forgotten sound which the Miranhas had adopted for their war-cry.
Down the slope not three hundred yards away came the hunting pack. Right behind them, running nearly as fast as they, raced a band of some fifty Miranhas warriors. As the fugitives looked back it was not the nearness of the wild-beast pack nor the fierce band of Indian warriors rushing down upon them which struck the color from the faces of Will and Joe. It was the towering figure of a man with a black bar of joined eyebrows across his forehead and a scar on his cheek which twisted his face into a fixed, malignant grin.
"Scar Dawson!" muttered Will.
"Scar Dawson!" echoed Joe, despairingly.
As they spoke the outlaw seemed to recognize them too, for he waved aloft a Miranha bow which he carried, and shouted hoa.r.s.ely. By the time they reached the other bank, Will lay half-fainting in Hen"s arms.
"Fellows," he whispered, "I"m all in. Hide me in the bushes here, and you go on. There"s no sense in all of you sacrificing yourselves for me."
"We stay," murmured Joe, while Hen nodded his head and Pinto fitted one of his fatal little arrows into his blow-gun.
"Sure, we"ll stay," chimed in Jud, unslinging his automatic, "an"
there"s seven Injuns who"ll stay too unless I"ve forgotten how to shoot.
But what in the world"s the perfesser doin"?" he went on, peering out over the river.
Unheeding the tumult of howls and screeches behind him, or the rush of the fierce hounds and fiercer men toward him, the eminent scientist was picking his way carefully through the ford. At the middle of the river, where the water ran deepest, he rolled up his left sleeve, and with his hunting-knife unconcernedly made a shallow gash through the skin of his lean, muscular forearm. As the blood followed the blade he let it drip into the running water, moving forward at the same time with long, swift strides. Almost in a moment the river below the ford began to bubble and boil with the same rush of the fatal hordes which had so horrified Jud and Will at the Lake of the Man-eaters. As Professor Ditson sprang from the water to the edge of the farther bank, the water clear across the river seemed alive with piranhas. Unmoved, he turned to the rest of the party.
"That ford is locked," he said precisely. "For three hours it can not be crossed by man or beast."
Even as he spoke, the wild-dog pack splashed into the river. As they reached the deeper water and began to swim, the flash of hundreds of yellow-and-white fish showed ahead of them. In an instant the water bubbled like a caldron gleaming with myriads of razor-edged teeth. There was a chorus of dreadful howls as, one by one, the fierce dogs of the jungle sank below the surface, stripped skeletons almost before their bodies reached the bottom of the river. From the farther bank came a chorus of wailing cries as the war-party watched the fate of their man-hunting pack. Then, as if at some signal, the whole band threw themselves on their backs on the ground. Only the towering figure of the giant outlaw remained erect.
"What"s happened to those chaps?" queried Jud, much perplexed. "I"ve been with Injuns nigh on to forty year, but I never see a war-party act that way."
As he spoke, Professor Ditson reached the summit of the slope where the rest of the party were standing, and saw the prostrate band on the other side of the river.
"Hurry out of here!" he said sharply, racing around a bend in the trail, followed by the others.
Their retreat was none too soon. Even as they started, each of the men of their far-away pursuers braced both his feet expertly against the inside horn of his bow, and fitting a five-foot arrow on the string, pulled with all the leverage of arms and legs combined, until each arrow was drawn nearly to its barbed point. There was a deep, vibrating tw.a.n.g that could be heard clearly across the river, and into the sky shot a flight of roving shafts. Up and up they went until they disappeared from sight, only to come whizzing down again from a seemingly empty sky, with such force and accuracy that they buried themselves deep into the ground just where the fugitives had been a minute before.
Jud, who had lingered behind the others, had a narrow escape from being struck by one of the long shafts.
"We"d have all looked like porcupines if we"d stayed there thirty seconds longer," he remarked to Joe, as he joined the rest of the party.
"Them Miranhas are sure the dandy shots with a bow."
"Huh!" returned Joe jealously, "that nothing. My uncle out in Akotan, where I come from, he kill a man with an arrow half a mile away, and no use his feet either."
"That uncle of yours was some performer with a bow," returned Jud cautiously. "Half a mile is good shootin" even with a rifle."
"Some performer is right," chimed in Will weakly. "I learned long ago, when Joe and I were up by Wizard Pond, that that uncle of his held a world record in everything."
"Set me down, Hen," he went on. "I think I can do a mile or so on my own legs."
"From here on Pinto and I have been over this route," announced Professor Ditson. "Ten miles farther on is "Sky Bridge." If we can cross that and cut it behind us, we"re safe."
Two by two, the members of the party took turns in helping Will along the Trail, which soon widened into a stone-paved road.
"This is one of the Inca highways," explained the scientist. "It leads from their first city clear to the edge of the jungle. Once," he went on, "the Incas ruled an empire of over a million square miles, equal to the whole United States east of the Mississippi River; but they never were able to conquer the jungle."
The road sloped up more and more steeply, and the going became increasingly difficult, but Professor Ditson hurried them on remorselessly.
"The Miranhas never give up a chase," he said, "and if they have succeeded in crossing the river above or below the ford, they may even now be hard on our heels."
Before long they were in a wilderness of bare, stern peaks whose snow-covered summits towered high against the horizon. At times the road zigzagged along narrow shelves cut in the faces of precipices and guarded here and there by low retaining-walls built of cut stones laid without mortar, but so perfectly that the blade of a knife could not be thrust between them. The air became colder, and the scientist told them that often the temperature in these mountain-valleys would vary as much as one hundred degrees within twenty-four hours.
As they approached the crest of a great ridge which towered above them, Jud began to find great difficulty in breathing and complained of nausea and a feeling of suffocation.
"It"s the _soroche_, the mountain-sickness," explained Professor Ditson.
"It will pa.s.s soon."