Bomba the jungle boy

Bomba’s exultation subsided somewhat when he recalled the fact that the much-prized weapon had failed to work the last time he had pulled the trigger.

“It is broken and there are no white men here to give me another,” he groaned.

Casson took it in his shaking fingers and examined it. Long years before he had been an expert shot with both rifle and revolver and was thoroughly familiar with their mechanisms.

He broke the stock and examined the chambers.

“This is what is the trouble,” he said, as he saw that the chambers were empty. “It can’t shoot if there’s nothing in there to shoot. You didn’t have it fully loaded.”

“But it was loaded when I left the white man’s camp!” Bomba replied. Then he remembered that he had been tempted to try his marksmanship on a tree the day before and had thus disposed of three of his cartridges.

His relief was great at this solution of the mystery, and he reloaded the weapon forthwith, mentally recording a vow that never again would he go to sleep or sally forth into the jungle without the revolver containing the full five missiles, any one of which might spell the difference between life and death.

A sudden thought occurred to him as he shoved the bodies of the vampires out of the door.

“Perhaps one of them had been here before,” he said to Casson, “and that is what made him come back with others to-night.”

“What makes you think that?” asked the old man, looking at him with some surprise.

“Because you were so weak when I found you in the hut,” replied Bomba. “The bat may have been sucking your blood when you lay asleep. Then the fire came and the smoke frightened the bat away. But he had taken so much of your blood that you had no strength left to get outside the door.”

“I hadn’t thought of that; but it may be so,” replied Casson. “I know I never felt so weak before. I felt as if I could not move hand or foot. And perhaps that is the reason I could not help you to-night. I wanted to. I tried to. I would have given my life to get to your side. But I could not.”

Though he could hardly drag one foot after the other, Bomba went to the stream back of the hut and washed his wounds thoroughly. Then he got out a salve that had great soothing and curative qualities and applied it on every place where he had been bitten. This done, he fell rather than lay down, and reclined there utterly exhausted till the break of day.

It was now that his vitality and perfect physical condition stood him in good stead. Had he been less hardy he might have succumbed, owing to his great loss of blood.

Even as it was, it took several days to restore him to his usual condition. His hunting and fishing had to be given up for a time, as he did not dare to venture into the jungle.

As he grew a little stronger, he busied himself in the rebuilding of the ruined portion of the hut.

The hut, in which they had lived for years, was simple in the extreme, though compared to some of the abodes of the half-breeds and the primitive shelters of the Indians, it was almost palatial.

It had been totally enclosed on all four sides, except for the small opening of the doorway, which let in light and air, whereas many of the huts of the caboclos had only roofs for coverings and were open on all four sides to the vicious fury of tropical storms. Those of the natives, deep in the heart of the jungle, were still more simple, consisting usually of cotton hammocks swung between two trees and a couple of giant palm leaves meeting above for a covering.

There was a wood flooring, laid by Casson years ago, that served to keep out scorpions and the snakes that made their home in the ygapo. It had contained two hammocks, which had been destroyed in the fire, some old boxes with markings on them that had become illegible from time, a chest in which Casson had stored his precious specimens of butterflies and flowers, some scientific books, a few old rusted cooking utensils, and some bits of nicked and broken crockery.

The dress of the inmates of the hut was as primitive as their furniture. Casson wore an old patched pair of trousers and a ragged cotton shirt, which he washed now and then in the river at the back. But Bomba, child of the jungle, preferred the dress of the Indians, the mundiyeh, or short tunic of native cloth, with the addition of the puma skin which helped to keep him warm when he was compelled to sleep out at night.

Bomba worked steadily at the reconstruction of the hut, which he was determined to make stronger than it had been before, in order that it might serve as a fort in case they should be attacked by the head-hunters. He used timbers of lignum vitæ, the toughest and strongest wood of the Amazon jungle. Then he stopped up all the crevices with mud, that under the fierce sun soon assumed the consistency of stone. He wound everything about with stout bush cord, and completed his work by piling mud and stones against the lower part of all four walls.

And always while he worked Bomba pondered the words that had fallen from Casson’s lips when he had heard of the visit of Bomba to the camp of the white men.

“Bartow.” “Laura.” He repeated them to himself perhaps a thousand times. What did they mean? What bearing, if any, did they have on his own life and destiny?

Several times he was on the point of asking Casson for an explanation. But he remembered the terrible paroxysm into which Casson had been thrown the last time he had uttered those words. Bomba was afraid to precipitate another such scene. It might kill Casson. He loved the old man, clung to him. He would not endanger his life by probing him with any further questions.

In a few days the work on the hut was finished. Bomba was proud of his craftsmanship, and even Casson roused himself from his apathy far enough to bestow some words of praise.

But now that his task was done and his strength fully recovered, a great restlessness took possession of Bomba. Casson, a mere shadow of a man, going for hours without speaking a word, responding to questions only in monosyllables, was no companion for the lad.

Bomba longed to be off to the shadowy depths of the jungle. He had enemies there, but he also had friends. He would call these friends to him, Kiki and Woowoo, Doto, the giant monkey, and Tatuc, head of the monkey tribe.

They were the warmest friends he had in that vast tangled wilderness besides Casson. He understood them, and they loved and trusted him. He was scarcely ever lonesome when with them.

It was very bad to be lonesome. That ache was more terrible to Bomba than any tearing of his flesh. He shrank from it as he did from no physical pain. It was really the poignant longing in him for his own kind, but Bomba knew it only as a strange illness, an ache not of his body but of some mysterious part of him of which he had no knowledge.

So now, feeling this sickness creeping over him, he felt irresistibly the impulse to fly from it, to seek forgetfulness among the only friends he knew.

The jungle boy determined to take his harmonica, too. His eyes brightened at the thought. He had now learned to make the instrument emit the sounds he, Bomba, wished. Perhaps the monkeys and parrots would like it. At least they would be surprised and inquisitive.

Bomba had two good reasons to give Casson for his trip. They needed game. They had been living almost altogether upon the eggs of the jaboties, or forest turtles, and even to a jungle palate, easily satisfied, such a limited diet becomes monotonous, if too long continued. Then, too, he wanted to get in contact with some of the more friendly natives and secure from them a couple of hammocks to replace those that had been destroyed in the fire.

When he announced his intention to Casson, the old man merely nodded in an absent manner and went on with what he was doing. So Bomba took his machete, his bow and arrows, his precious fire stick and his harmonica, and plunged into the jungle, not without repeated injunctions to Casson to be on the alert if the head-hunters should come, and, if he had time, to try to escape down the river.

Bomba had not gone far before he began to see among the trees and in the branches the faces of his wild friends peering at him with their bright eyes.

He called to them softly, and they came to him. Kiki and Woowoo, the parrots, perched on his shoulders and pecked affectionately at his face.

Doto, the great monkey, swung from branch to branch close above his head, now and again playfully dropping a bunch of leaves upon him. Bomba felt soothed and comforted.

These wild folk loved and trusted him. He was one of them. He belonged here in the heart of the jungle. It must be so.

Yet all the time some mysterious voice within him whispered that it was not so. He did not belong here. He was no caboclo, no Indian. What was he then? Where did he belong?

Bartow! Laura! He felt that in these words must lie the solution of the enigma. Over and over the words ran through his mind, until it seemed that even the chattering monkeys overhead must hear them.

Feeling the loneliness again creeping over him, Bomba sat down on a log and took out his mouth organ. He would gather his friends around him. They would help him to fight off the sickness that came from nowhere and did not hurt his body—hurt only that mysterious part of him that he did not understand.

But the first weird notes on the harmonica had a queer effect upon the jungle denizens. They had begun to cluster about the boy, as they always did when he appeared among them. But at the wail of the curious thing that Bomba held to his mouth they disappeared. If they had suddenly been sucked down to the muddy bottom of the ygapo, the place could not have seemed more utterly deserted.

Bomba looked surprised for a moment. Then he smiled, his teeth showing dazzling white against his brown skin.

He whistled softly and called:

“Doto! Doto! Where are you?”

There was a slight rustling of leaves in a tree near by, and Doto peered cautiously through the branches. His brow was wrinkled in a scowl that seemed to say he was not at all sure that Bomba was not playing some practical joke on him.

“Look! Nice music! Not hurt Doto!”

Bomba held his mouth organ out to the big monkey, so that he might get a better look at it.

“Nice music,” said Bomba again. “Listen!”

Once more he put the harmonica to his lips and blew a plaintive wail into the reaches of the jungle.

A response came that was as startling as it was unexpected.

There was a thunderous roar, a crashing of the undergrowth, and a great jaguar bounded into view!