THE BOY EXPLORERS IN
DARKEST NEW GUINEA

[See page [205]

ALL THE GENEROUS INSTINCTS OF YOUTH ROSE UP IN
HIM AT THE SIGHT, AND WITHOUT THINKING FURTHER
HE RAISED HIS PISTOL AND FIRED AT THE NEAREST PYGMY

THE BOY EXPLORERS SERIES

THE BOY EXPLORERS
IN
DARKEST NEW GUINEA

BY
WARREN H. MILLER

With Illustrations by
FRANK SPRADLING

HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
NEW YORK AND LONDON

The Boy Explorers in Darkest New Guinea
Copyright, 1921, by Harper & Brothers
Printed in the United States of America

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

THE BOY EXPLORERS IN
DARKEST NEW GUINEA

THE BOY EXPLORERS IN
DARKEST NEW GUINEA

I
ARU

“LAND HO! fellows—yonder to the east. Can you make it out?”

The two youths beside the tall man who had spoken shaded their eyes from the tropical glare and searched the cloud banks on the horizon of the blue Banda Sea.

“I think I see it, sir,” said Dwight. “Part of those clouds seem to have faint white lines in them.”

“I see it!” exclaimed Nicky, peering through his glasses. “It’s developing out like a camera plate—high, jungly mountains that seem to be floating in the clouds. I see dark spaces now, with streaks of sunlight edging the outlines of the hills. Hurrah for Aru!”

“That’s not Aru; that’s Ke’,” returned the man. “Aru is too low and flat to be seen yet. It lies to the east of Ke’. Our bungalow is on Kobror, the southernmost of the Aru Islands; we ought to pass the port of Dobbo in a few hours.”

The three white men were standing before a small palm-thatched deck house which was their home on the Malay proa Kuching. Curator Baldwin of the National Museum was their leader. He was a tall, rangy giant of a man, his sinewy frame clad in tropical khaki, with the inevitable puttees of the East accentuating the muscular leanness of his long legs. One placed him easily—mining engineer or leader of a scientific field party, captain of his team in college days, most likely, that commanding sort of man to whom exploration in dangerous out-of-the-way places is all in the day’s work.

And the choleric blue eyes that looked a man in the eye from under his pith helmet, the sunburnt face with its gray mustache and firm chin, warned the casual stranger that here was the last man in the world to trifle with.

The two youths beside him were scarcely less noteworthy. Their resolute, weather-tanned young faces bespoke the hardy outdoorsmen, of the same breed, but younger, as the curator. Dwight was tall and spare, with a keen hatchet face and merry gray-green eyes that twinkled at one when he talked, yet they could grow hard and cold as ice in time of peril. Nicky was stout; habitually good-humored, habitually chuckling over the least joke, and always finding one and making himself the butt of it on every occasion. They were a great team; always “joshing” each other, always differing on every conceivable subject, yet devoted to each other and to the curator, whom they adored as an athlete and admired as a scientist. For two years they had been his assistants on expeditions in Africa and in British Guiana. He had picked them for this trip because of their tried and proven resourcefulness in facing conditions as they found them in wild lands. As unlike, physically, as two boys could be, they were alike in one thing—their sturdy independence of character. Original in everything they did, they copied no one, neither in their outdoor equipment nor in their ways of living when in the jungle.

The Malay proa on which the party was sailing bore the house flag of the museum floating from the end of her seventy-foot foreyard. In these days of interisland steamers you will not see so many of her type, once the most common craft of the Banda Sea. Her sails were huge mats of palm-fiber; her masts tripods of bamboo; and her body, built on Ke’ by the greatest boat builders of the Malay Archipelago, was of hewn logs, doweled together along their edges and secured by ribs of teak bent in and lashed with rattan to projections on her planks. There was not an iron nail or a spike in her anywhere, but the curator had chartered her for the museum’s field expeditions among the islands as the best ship for the purpose, for her crew of Javanese and Bugis cost but their rations of rice and fish, with a small wage, and she could sail anywhere and be repaired at any island with native palm and rattan.

Over the smooth rollers of the Banda Sea she bowled southward on the east monsoon, steadily rising the low hills of Aru to the east. By midafternoon she had come off Dobbo, the principal pearl port of the Aru Islands, and the captain altered her course slightly, heading for the coast of Kobror, the wildest of the two great mainlands of Aru.

Out of the coral reefs that surround the harbor of Dobbo put forth a long, black canoe. Her crew of naked blacks foamed up the water in spats of spray with their paddles, singing and shouting as they came. Up in her high carved prow sat a white man, dressed in the cottons of the equatorial tropics, with a Japanese-bowl hat sheltering his head from the sun. He rose and waved them a greeting as his canoe drew near.

“Proa ahoy! I say, are you there, Baldwin?” he shouted. “I’m going on to Kobror with you.”

“Hello, Bentham! That’s fine, old man! Come right aboard and we’ll have tiffin.... Did you get my letter? These mail steamers only touch Aru about once in a dog’s age, they tell me. How are you, old new-chum?” greeted the curator, grasping Bentham’s hand as the canoe shot alongside and her crew of mop-haired Papuans leaped aboard to mingle with their own crew.

“How am I, dea-rr man? My word! Rippin’! Yes, I got your letter, doncherknow. Have a bungalow for you; I fancy it’s more or less done in, but it’s out in the jungle, as you wanted,” he replied, shaking hands heartily.

“It was mighty good of you, Bentham!” thanked the curator. “We’ll fix it up and make it our headquarters while down here. We’re stopping on Kobror a day or so after paradise birds.”

He turned to introduce Dwight and Nicky, who had been studying Bentham curiously. The bold, independent swagger of the Australian was written in every line of his sunburnt face. He was the representative of the Aru pearl company, the curator had told them, sole white man in a whole group of islands peopled by native black savages.

They led the pearl trader to their house on deck, where the Javanese cook served tiffin. It was a cozy little retreat, about ten feet square by perhaps six high, and was built of bamboo arches thatched with palm-leaf attap. Its floor was raised some six inches above the wet deck by springy bamboo poles laid side by side, and the thatch walls were lined with fragrant sandalwood boxes, which also served for bunks.

Bentham was pathetically glad to see them, eager to talk and talk of the war and the world’s doings, with all the pensive loneliness of a white man condemned to months and months of existence with no other associates than Papuan natives and Chinese traders. The curator and the boys filled him up with news to his heart’s content. Just to hear their voices in the good old mother tongue once more, to feel their keen minds sympathetic with his own, was pleasure enough, and Bentham basked luxuriantly in it.

“Where to next, after Kobror, Baldwin?” he asked, after a pause in the flow of news.

“Dutch New Guinea,” puffed the curator. “That’s our main drive this time. Our proa sails for there in a day or so.”

“Dutch New Guinea!” The trader’s face grew suddenly grave. “My word, man! Have you read Captain Rawling’s report of the British expedition up the Mimika? Or about the Dutchman, Lorentz’s, dash to peak Wilhelmina in the Snow Mountains? He’s the only one who has got to them, so far.”

“Sure! We’re familiar with all that. But I can say this to you, Bentham, you being an Australian: the trouble with the British, and with the Dutch, too, is that they can’t get away from the safari idea. Get me? Every one of their expeditions failed because of it. Your Englishman must have his tub and his champagne, his big tents and heavy camp furniture, his tinned sweetmeats and what not, and it takes an army of porters to carry it all. He learned the safari idea in Africa; but it won’t work in New Guinea, because you can neither move a safari through the jungle nor live off the country with it. The British were a year and a half on the Mimika, and they never got within forty miles of the Snow Mountains. It took them five weeks to cut a safari trail three miles long. All that country, from the Great Precipice to the sea, is a flat, dense jungle, with the rivers running through it so swiftly that they are impossible to ascend. They contented themselves with plane-table surveys made from a clearing in the jungle, and before long their army of porters died like flies of beriberi.

“We are going to try the American idea,” he continued, “going light—‘pigging it,’ the British call it—but it gets you somewhere. We’ll take our own light, concentrated foods along, and live off the country on wallabys and wild pig for fresh meat. There’ll be plenty for us.”

“But, man dea-rr—the danger!” objected Bentham. “These Aru niggers, here, had the fear of God dynamited into them some forty years ago, and they’ll jolly well never touch a white man again! But it’s different in Dutch New Guinea. They’re cannibals and head hunters, and most of them have never even seen a white man. The English territory is somewhat policed, but, my word! the Dutch have only two small posts six hundred miles apart on the whole west coast! You’ve heard of the Tugeri head hunters? Many a time our soldiers have chased them over the border—where they stay, to raid us again whenever they feel like it—as jolly a bunch of cannibals as ever cut a throat. And the pygmies of the mountains! My word! Your little party would be massacred the first step ashore. What could you do against fifty of them, or a hundred?”

“Oh—we’ll manage!” twinkled the curator, mysteriously.

“Man dea-rr, it’s foolhardiness! Here, let me give you some dynamite sticks, anyway. It’s plain suicide to go ashore without it. Our expedition, with its army of porters, was all right—but you!”

“Say, Bentham, there’s been a war, you know!” laughed the curator, “and I was in it—lieutenant of a trench-bombing detail. Dynamite is old stuff, now. I’ve brought a few grenades along, if we have any trouble.”

“You’ll need ’em for those blighters!” exclaimed Bentham. “So you were in France, eh?” The regret in his own tones told how keenly it galled him to have been stuck down here out of it all. The talk went back to the war again, of which he could never get enough.

“Yes, we’re going to try a new tack in a new way,” said the curator, when they got back to the expedition again. “We’re going to land in that long lagoon at the head of Dorgo Bay. No white men have ever been in that way. The mountains come right close to shore there, and we can get on high ground right off and avoid that swampy jungle. Then, southward along the ridges above the Great Precipice for ours, and we’ll see what we’ll see.”

“Well!” said Bentham, shaking his head, “good luck to you! But the pygmies or the Outanatas will get you sure! You’ll have to wade through dynamite the whole way!”

“Oh, we’re not exactly unprepared, you know,” demurred the curator. He showed him a curious pistol that the boys had often speculated over. It looked like a foreign automatic, only its barrel was a mere shell of steel, like a shotgun, and it had no hammer or firing mechanism.

“I had this made. Sort of shell thrower, you know. It’s rather effective at moderate ranges—shoots T. N. T. shells. It pays to look ahead in these expeditions and try to meet conditions as you imagine them likely to turn out. Force, and plenty of it, is the only thing the savage really understands, so we’re fixed to defend ourselves if we have to.”

Bentham looked relieved. “But suppose you get captured and tied up?” he questioned. “Those beggars will eat you, sure—like you all the better if you are white.”

“I’ve been tied up before. Mundurucus, up the Orinoco. But I didn’t stay tied long.”

He twirled a ring on his right hand with his thumb as the others looked at him questioningly.

“Picked this up from an old guru up in the Himalayas. Came out of some Indian palace, most likely. I bet it’s got a history!” He pressed the monogram of the ring with his thumb tip as they watched. It was all done with one hand, but out of its base a tiny, two-edged steel knife stuck up from the base of the monogram. “You twist your wrist, with that ring knife inside, you see, and you’d be surprised to see how easy it is to cut a thong around your wrists with it,” he exclaimed.

Shouts on deck interrupted the boys’ exclamations of astonishment and brought them running out of the cabin. The mainland of Kobror lay off not a mile to windward. The crew were tacking ship, and all was shouting and confusion.

“I guess we’d better get our outfits ready, boys,” said the curator. “Call Sadok and Baderoon, so we can muster the party and see that they have everything.”

Presently Dwight returned, followed by Sadok and Baderoon. The former was a hill Dyak, the “star” bird hunter of their party. He came up, completely armed, with his long sumpitan, or blowgun, of Borneo in hand, and on his left arm was a conical shield of bamboo. A steel parang-ihlang hung at his belt, and over his shoulder was suspended the bamboo quiver of darts for the blowgun. His muscular brown arms and shoulders glistened in the sunlight which glinted on the gold and silver threads of his gorgeous chawat and the dull jewels that studded his jacket.

“What have you got for a sleeping rig in the jungle, Sadok?” inquired the curator as the Dyak stood waiting inspection.

Sadok turned him around, exposing the tightly rolled cadjan, or native mat, hung on his back. Unrolled, it would be about four feet square, and it was house, blanket, mattress, and umbrella in one to him, for one corner of it was sewed into a pocket, so that he could wear the thing over his head when it rained.

“You’ll do, Sadok. Mr. Bentham, here, will assign you some black boys to carry up our stuff when we land. You’ll take charge of them.”

“A’right, Orang-kaya!” grinned Sadok, and went forward among the crew again.

“Baderoon next!” called the curator. “What you-fellah got to take ’long beach?”

Baderoon burst into boisterous Papuan merriment and did a handspring on deck. All he owned in the world was the long bow in his hand and a string about his middle, with a quiver of arrows dangling from it. His dress hardly needed taking off at night. There was a brass ring around one arm, with some tufts of human hair ornamenting it, whose owner had been eaten long ago—details obscure if you asked Baderoon!—and there was a three-pronged comb stuck into the long frizzles of his mop of hair. Then, he wore a small tin mirror hanging by a string from his nose, and when Baderoon had put on that prized possession he had said the last word in dandyism!

“Here, Baderoon-fellah, catch’m blanket!” said the curator, tossing him a spare one. “And mind you don’t wear it about your neck, the way the Wanderobos did when the English forbade them to come into town without a blanket to cover their nakedness!”

Baderoon exploded in a gust of merriment and tied the blanket decorously about his waist. At a sign of dismissal he went forward to rejoin Sadok. The proa was now tacking in through the coral reefs. A fleet of black canoes came out from the village on shore to meet her. The paddlers scrambled aboard and immediately surrounded the white men, pointing and gesticulating with unslaked Papuan curiosity. Their long noses hooked at them like parrots’ beaks as they cackled boisterously, fingering freely and unabashed the clothing and equipment of the whites.

In a final reach the proa ran hard aground on the white sand beach, and everyone prepared to jump ashore over her bow.

“So long, for the present, Baldwin,” said Bentham, shaking hands. “I’ve got some pearl business to attend to here with the chief, and I sha’n’t see you again. These rotters will carry up your luggage as your man directs. Send for me if you need anything.”

He nodded cordially and was off into the village of Wamba, which straggled along the shore under lines of coco palms. They landed and went up its one street, followed by a long line of black porters, each with a single article balanced on his head. The veranda of their bungalow peeped out of the jungle on a low hillside at the end of the street. Bamboos hovered over it thickly, their nodding willow-leaved foliage almost hiding its thatched roof from view. Here all their outfit was set down and the curator began settling like an old campaigner.

The boys sat out on the veranda, looking down on the main street of Wamba with the keenest interest. The tall peaked gables of the thatch houses lined both sides of the sandy road. Each house was made of long bamboo poles, laid up A-shaped like a wedge tent and lashed with rattan at their tops. Every foot of the street seemed covered with busy people, for everybody’s business was being transacted out in the main road, in everyone’s way. There were mop-headed Papuan natives, strolling around with bundles of sugar cane over their shoulders; Javanese sailors in their conical straw hats, buying parrots from turbaned Mohammedan Bugis; Chinese merchants buying sago bread from more naked natives, who carried it by a yoke and two slings like a pair of Dutch pails; more Javanese, repairing a proa plank with native adzes; and a constant stream of Aru hunters and fishermen, coming in with fowl, trepang, mother-of-pearl shells, birds, and coconut shells in baskets. For domestic pets there were pigs, kangaroos, goats, tame bobos (pelicans), and parrots everywhere, wandering at will about the street or swinging from a perch under the thatch porches.

Then a native hunter came wandering by, with a spotted cuscus, or native opossum, hanging by its tail, and him the curator snared, to buy the specimen from him and engage the man for a guide to the blakangtana, the jungle hinterland, next day.

Tiring of the noisy scene at length, Dwight went inside and lay down on a cool rattan lounge, leaving Nicky to help sort collection boxes with the curator. After reading awhile, he lay down the book with a sigh of content and looked idly up into the thatch that was thickly woven through the poles of their roof. Indolently gazing, he noticed a dark mass overhead, seemingly buried in the thatch. Examining it more carefully, he could see yellow and black marks, and concluded that it must be a tortoise shell that some one had left there. But the thing still fascinated him, and every little while he would look up at it again, while the others went on with the business of settling the house. Then a slight rustle in the thatch attracted him, and, gazing up at it steadily again, it suddenly resolved itself into a large snake, compactly coiled up in a kind of knot! Dwight’s jaw dropped as he detected the head and its bright eyes in the very center of the folds.

“Good Lord, fellows!” he called out, jumping to his feet, “here’s a boa constrictor, a python!—up in our roof!”

The curator jumped up the steps of the veranda in a bound. “Where! Show me him!” he demanded.

“Right up there!” laughed Dwight, quivering with excitement. “And making himself at home just as nice as nice!”

Sadok started to draw his parang, but the curator stopped him.

“Wait!” he commanded. “We don’t want to spoil his skin.”

Baderoon came running in. “Me kill’m! Me catch’m tailie! Me kill plenty snake on Bouru!” he yelled, begging the curator for permission to show them.

The latter smiled quietly. “Clear out, boys—and watch the fun!” he said, picking up the lamp off the table and sweeping a lot of small things out of the way. “Ever see a native kill a python? I guess the house will stand it! Go get’m Baderoon-fellah!”

Baderoon jumped for the rafters, and there was a violent commotion in the thatch as he dropped down with the tip of the boa’s tail in both hands. He and Sadok tugged away at it, soon ripping down about ten feet of the writhing coils, while the others ran laughing for the door. The commotion inside increased, and then there was a heavy thump and the crash of chairs and tables upset and flying about, and then Baderoon emerged, running down the steps with about thirty feet of snake behind him, twisting and lashing with its thick coils. The python swept everything with him and made a last stand with its neck hooked about a veranda post, while the boys yelled and catcalled with glee. Then Baderoon tore him loose and, running fast, flew with him toward the jungle, where, stopping suddenly, he snapped the snake’s long body like a whiplash and smashed his head against a tree.

“Whee!” yelled Nicky, delightedly, from the veranda. “Me for the next one! Gee! I’d like to try that stunt!”

But the python was not nearly dead yet, and he started to squirm off into the cane. Baderoon was on him like a flash, and, grabbing the tail, he snapped him against the tree again. Nicky, prancing down from the veranda, dashed in and fumbled at the writhing coils, to try it himself; but with a quick twist the powerful tail fastened itself around his ankle, and a huge, thick loop of the snake rose and curled itself tight around his waist. The boy gasped, crushed breathless, and it looked serious for a time as Dwight and the curator rushed down to the rescue, but suddenly there was a bright flash of steel, and Sadok’s parang met the next loop coming down over the boy’s head and clove it nearly in two.

“Me sorry, Orang-kaya,” said Sadok, as the snake collapsed and Nicky squirmed free of the aimless coils. “Me spoil’m specimen?”

“You did just right, Sadok!” said the curator, heartily. “He could have crushed Nicky to death, even in his last throes—”

“Him plenty debbil-debbil!” interrupted Baderoon, coming up from freeing Nicky. “White boy nebber, nebber let snake-fellah catch’m first! Mus’ run with him-a tailie—fast!” he explained, earnestly.

“Well,” said the curator, after the Fat One had been guyed to everybody’s satisfaction, “le’s go in for a look-see. Perhaps some more interesting creatures are camping out in our bungalow!”

They explored every nook and cranny of the hut, dislodging a few kangaroo mice, which were captured and added to the collections after hilarious chases, but no larger visitors were found, and no poisonous snakes, rare throughout the archipelago, were discovered. The curator set the lamp on a table out on the veranda, after supper, and they sat around it, collecting the rare moths and beetles attracted by its light. As a nightcap, the brilliant and wonderful clear-winged moth came fluttering in, and the curator snatched at it avidly with his net.

“Cocytia d’urviller!” he gasped, taking the gorgeous prize from the net. “Boys, we are in luck! There are not five of these in all the museums of America! I guess that will be about all for to-night!”

The party turned in, and long before dawn were awakened by the native hunter at the veranda steps. Gulping some hot coffee and downing a rasher of bacon and eggs, they slung on their knapsacks, grabbed their guns, and followed him to the boat for a trip to the mainland in the mighty jungles of Aru, where dwelt the great bird of paradise.

II
INTO THE JUNGLE

THE jungle of the mainland of Aru came down to the very water’s edge. A narrow strip of sandy beach, lined with nodding palms, was strewn with fallen trees, bare and sun dried, and whole colonies of hermit crabs on the beach told of the teeming life of tropical nature pushed to the very verge of the sea. Their party landed from the village key of old coral growth, and stepped ashore at the end of a native path that was a mere tunnel through the undergrowth. Never had they seen palms in such profusion or so tall and magnificent, the bare trunks rising through lesser growths a hundred feet high, where the great fronds of leaves spread green umbrellas far overhead. The tree ferns, their first in this Papuan land, rose feathery and beautiful, with stems thirty feet high, above which shot up the lacy fronds, giant replicas of our northern hot-house varieties. The ubiquitous banana was everywhere, growing wild in the forest, generally in the open glades of pandanus palms, whose scraggly trees twisted high in the misty air, with spikes of leaves like century plants at their branch tips. And every now and then, through the dim vistas of vine and creeper, they could note a dense thicket where a giant fig tree grew, surrounded by its own forest of aërial root shoots a hundred feet in diameter.

Down on the jungle floor scuttled millions of silent hermit crabs, or great orange-and-red land crabs popped down their holes. One had but to look an instant to realize that the jungle was alive with lizards, black, green, and gray, all motionless on limb or root, staring at the explorers with bright beady eyes—to flash into a green streak of movement at the first motion to catch them.

It was early, with the faint light of dawn hardly penetrating the green depths all about them as they went silently along in single file, listening to the chorus of bird life in the tree tops. The shrill scream of lories and parakeets, the hoarse cry of the tree pigeons, and the incessant chirrup of smaller birds awoke the jungle with the voices of the bird world. Then the sun shot up in a flaming fire into the pale tropical heavens, and its rays lit up the glades, showing huge yellow-and-black spiders on thick ropy webs swung in every open spot, and gorgeous butterflies in metallic blues and greens sailing through the sunlit vistas, causing many a stop and chase.

A cry rang startlingly through the tree tops. “Wawk! Wawk! Wawk!—Wok, wok wok!” it said, remarkably like the caw of our northern crow.

The curator stopped and listened, his hand to ear to locate the direction of the sound. “The great bird of paradise, boys!” he exclaimed, exultingly.

“Why, it sounds exactly like a crow flying through our home woods!” cried Dwight.

“Sure! It’s the tropical crow. They all belong to the crow family, only this is what Nature can do with the crow when you give her plenty of heat and sunlight!” retorted the curator. “There he goes again, off to the left!”

“Him go-stop sacaléli tree,” put in Sadok, who had been listening, fumbling at the cover of his dart quiver.

“Yes? The sacaléli, the plumage dance,” agreed the curator. “They meet in some large tree, where the males dance and show off their plumes before the females. Baderoon, ask’m hunter-fellah if we go catch’m sacaléli tree, all right,” he said, turning to the negro.

There were a few grunts between the Papuan and the Aru hunter, who nodded stolidly and led on. The party quickened their pace as the path led upward through the hills. Then Sadok stopped and raised his long ironwood sumpitan. It poised for an instant, pointing up into a wide-branched bamboo clump, and, before their eyes could pick out the mark, came the soft plop! of the dart as it left the sumpitan like a streak of light. Followed the fall of a reddish bird, tumbling down through the leaves, and Baderoon dashed into the thicket to retrieve it. He brought back a jewel of fluttering fire in his hands. Of an intense metallic red, its throat was of deep orange, and from under the wings jutted out two little fronds of gray aigrettes tipped with broad bands of lustrous metallic green.

“The king bird of paradise!” cried the curator, holding the feathered beauty in his hands and examining it admiringly. “Great business, Sadok! What a wonderful bird!”

“Rare, too, isn’t it?” asked Dwight.

“You’re dead right it is! We’ll be lucky if we get two of them this expedition!” said the curator.

Just then Nicky, who had come back from a foray with his hands full of lizards and crabs, had a flash of inspiration. “Put him on a twig, quick!” he yelled. “I’ll get a colored photo of him!”

“Good idea, kid!” smiled the curator. “That will be something new.”

The bird was alive yet, only partly paralyzed by the poison, and his eyes were bright and open, and the little tufts on his breast still erect. He sat quietly on a twig in the sunlight, while Nicky set up a folding steel tripod and took three color plates as fast as he could change holders.

“That’ll be about worth the whole trip to me!” he cried. “Wait till the director of the Museum sees that print, eh, Mr. Baldwin?” he chuckled.

The curator grinned indulgently. He loved Nick’s intense enthusiasms, particularly when they led to something of scientific value. Sadok wrapped the prize carefully in a cone of pandanus leaf and they started out again. After about an hour’s travel they came to a high plateau where the creepers and hanging vines were less abundant and one could see for some distance under the forest floor. A grove of tall tree trunks loomed up ahead, with bare, scant-leaved branches. Each had a sort of leaf hut, built far up in the fork.

They skirted the grove, silently, the curator explaining how the native hunters secured paradise birds by lying in wait for them under the hut, aiming with a blunt-headed arrow at the males during the dance. Their own hunter paid no attention to the grove, but led on for a mile farther across the plateau. Then he stopped and pointed up into the trees. Here was a similar grove, but much smaller, and buried far deeper in the jungle. Evidently it was his own secret hunting ground. Grunting a few words to Baderoon, he undid the belt of woven fiber about his waist and made a loop of it around the tree. Then, alternately walking up it and shifting the belt, he ascended the bare trunk to the leaf screen built in its fork, and disappeared.

“Him stop, go-shoot’m goby-goby,” explained Baderoon in a stage whisper. “We-fellah go-hide and catch’m spec’men when he drop.”

They all sought hiding places in the underbrush and waited. After a time came a distant, “Wawk! Wawk! Wawk!” answered by another bird farther off in the jungle, and then by still another. Like a flock of crows calling to the assembly, the boys could hear the paradise birds gathering. Then, like a flash of shimmering light, a great golden bird, eighteen inches long, came dropping down from over the tree tops. He lit in the tree farthest off from the hunter’s, preened himself awhile, and then lifted up his voice in the call of his kind. An answering cry heralded the approach of another one, and soon he too dropped down and joined the other.

“That’s bad—they’re gathering in the wrong tree,” whispered Nicky to Dwight, who lay by his side.

“Wait,” cautioned his chum. “We can shoot and get a few, if worse comes to worst. I’d far rather get a nest or an egg. There’s not one in any museum in the world, the curator tells me. Look—there’s a female!”

Nicky looked up to see a dull, coffee-colored bird perch down quietly on a near-by branch. The two males at once began to ruffle and preen their long golden plumes. Peering through his glasses, Dwight could even see the pale-blue beak, the delicate straw yellow of head and neck, and the rich, scaly feathers of metallic emerald green on the throat. From under the wings came the long two-foot plumes of intense glossy orange-brown color, and they ruffled and spread in the breeze as the male bird shook them for the admiration of the female. A glorified crow, a crow raised to the most unimaginable hues of bottled sunlight and all the vivid splendor of the tropics, was the great bird of paradise! As Dwight looked, he began to dance, hopping up and down on the limb, each motion spreading the glorious plumes and letting them fall like down. His rival was dancing also, and three more males and another female joined them.

Dwight crawled over to the curator, who was watching the whole performance avidly through his glasses.

“Our native hunter’s out of luck, sir!” he muttered. “He’ll never be able to hit them from his tree, and if he misses one the whole flock will fly off. What’ll we do—shoot?”

“Presently,” whispered the curator. “Go get Nicky, and we’ll each pick a bird and fire. They may fly over to the hunter’s tree yet, but I can see that they’re all as suspicious as our own crows. The tree they are in seems to suit them all right.”

Another male flew in as he spoke, and the whole tree top was filled with hopping, flashing flames of golden color, a sight in itself that was worth traveling many miles to see. Dwight soon returned, with Nicky crawling behind him, and the three lay and watched the birds, far overhead.

“Well, boys, I guess we’d better fire,” said the curator, at length. “That native may try to shoot from his tree and spoil the whole thing. Dwight, you pick a female, and Nicky and I will each get one of the males, and then we’ll do what we can with the other barrel.”

They raised their guns and were about to shoot, when one of the male birds silently loosed his hold and came tumbling down!

“Wait! Sadok!” whispered the curator, restraining them energetically. “I’d quite forgotten about him and his sumpitan!” Another bird fell. Somewhere, deep in the jungle, that silent, deadly blowgun in Sadok’s hands was bringing them down. At long intervals two more birds fell, and then there was a slight tock! in the branches and they could see through the glasses the short dart sticking in the bark. The other birds raised alarmed cries at it and prepared to fly.

“Now!” cried the curator. “Get a couple of females!” The guns barked as the startled birds took wing, while two dull-colored hen birds and another male came tumbling down. Then they all rushed over to pick up the specimens.

The native hunter came dropping hurriedly down out of his tree, gave them one wild look of terror, and bolted incontinently into the forest, shrieking an unintelligible gibberish as he ran. Baderoon burst into a yell of laughter and tumbled on the ground with merriment.

“Now what in the dickens ails him?” grinned the curator, looking after the flying native from the bird in his hand. “Call him back, Baderoon.”

“Taboo! Yow-yowri! Bewitched! Debbil-debbil!” gasped Baderoon from the ground. “Him see plenty debbil-debbil! Bird, he go-dead—no see um arrow, no hear gun! Him no come back!” he cackled, squirming in an agony of mirth.

“Get up, fool! Go catch’m!” ordered the curator, sternly, kicking the helpless negro to his feet. Baderoon ran off, still howling with delight.

“He’ll never catch that coon in ten thousand years!” chuckled Nicky. “Sadok’s blowgun scared all the hair off his head. But—how are we going to get out of the jungle without him, though?”

“We’ll camp right here,” declared the curator. “It’s always home wherever we are, and there’s lots to do.”

“All right, and, as I have no camp to make, I’m going to find a nest or an egg if it takes all day!” declared Nicky. “I haven’t really begun to study this jungle yet, you know!”

“Not a bad idea,” agreed the curator, heartily. “Take Sadok along with you, so that you’ll turn up sometime,” he laughed. “Dwight and I will make camp and skin out the birds.”

The grove was an excellent one to camp in, clear and open under the great trees, and Dwight started his camp at once. Their system was an original and elastic one, each man for himself, each one eating or sleeping when and where he pleased. They had long ago discarded the old-fashioned camp where one man cooked for the crowd and all had to be in at mealtimes. Such a system was too rigid and conventional for such diverse tastes and occupations as these three.

Dwight opened his pack and unlimbered his steel pickax, driving down into the lava rock with its point to make holes for tent pegs and clear out rocks on his sleeping site. He chose a spot covered with small bushes like huckleberries, filled with a windfall of dried leaves. Here he spread out his sleeping bag, and over it went a light tent fly, on a rope stretched over two forked stakes. From the rope he hung a mosquito screen, with a small ring of cane cut in the jungle and bent into a hoop a foot in diameter, so as to hold the net gauze clear of his face. This hoop was tied inside the square of net about a foot below the central peak from which it hung, and the folds of the net draped over the head of the bag. Dwight’s sleeping bag was waterproof and insectproof, so that, with the net hung over his face and the fly over that, forming a sun and rain shade, he was well protected from insects and wet weather on very little weight—about five pounds all told for tent and bedding.

In front of his camp the lad built a small stone fireplace, with a row of his little food sacks hung handy around it on cross poles. He set about making a batter of flour, corn meal, dried egg powder, dried milk, and baking powder, and soon had cooked himself a pile of flapjacks. With the body of a paradise bird grilling on a forked stick, and a tin of tea steeping on the hearth, he was as well fed and comfortable as anywhere else in the world. After lunch he seized his pickax and went collecting for insects and beetles in the forest, the sharp pick point digging and prying into the bark of prone trees, where many a new form of jewel-bodied tropical beetle came to his collection box.

The curator had silently melted into the jungle, whence soon appeared the brown glint of sunlight from the tent fly spread over his hammock. A great bag of netting enveloped the latter, and it could be drawn in tight by a string after he had gotten inside. A handful of rockahominy washed down with a drink from his canteen and a bite of grilled bird satisfied him for lunch. After skinning out the paradise birds and hanging them in a row from a line stretched between two trees to keep them from the ants, he disappeared into the jungle on his favorite occupation of studying bird life.

Dwight found a bewildering world of new entomology awaiting him. His pickax, net, and magnifying glass were busy every moment, and the boy quivered with excitement, rushing hither and yon through the jungle, now after a leaf-winged butterfly, which would disappear with maddening legerdemain; now stooping to watch a fight between two male Brenthidæ, long armored beetles with fighting jaws at the end of a slender proboscis like a spear; now urged to frantic pursuit of the rare horned deer fly. The mystery of the leaf-winged butterfly was solved when he had examined a bush on which it lit more closely. One of the leaves turned out to be the creature itself, with wings folded, motionless on the stem, the under surface of its wings so closely resembling the leaves that only the closest scrutiny could detect the difference.

By late afternoon he returned to camp by compass, his box full of new and wonderful insects.

“Look at the day’s plunder, Mr. Baldwin!” cried the youth, enthusiastically. He drew out the cork slabs from his carrying tin, covered with the heterogenous collection impaled on pins.

“These horned flies are a real find!” exclaimed the curator, interestedly, after examining the butterflies and beetles. “They go to prove a great scientific fact—first propounded as a theory by Mr. Wallace, the English naturalist—that Aru was once part of New Guinea. Those little flies can be explained in no other way. Common in New Guinea, it would be impossible for them to travel the hundred and fifty miles from the New Guinea coast to Aru. To-morrow, if Nicky does not come back, we’ll go on a trip to see another curious phenomenon, the salt-water channels that divide the islands of Aru. They are true rivers, yet have no flow other than the tide at their mouths. How do you explain that, Dwight?”

The boy confessed that he could not. “Come to think of it, sir, these are the only islands in the world that have such channels,” he cried out over the novelty of it.

As Nicky did not put in an appearance that night, they set out next morning northward, leaving Baderoon to skin out birds in camp. The curator did not worry over Nicky. In his rucksack the lad had carried his odd nightgear, of an old bathing suit with the armholes sewed up to pull over his bed, a pair of extra socks to cover his arms and another for his feet. So dressing up to go to bed, Nicky would turn in on a leaf patch, secure from insects and snakes, and, with Sadok to guide him, would be abundantly able to care for himself.

After several hours’ travel to the north the going became more rocky and the vegetation sparse and thorny. Soon open skyline appeared ahead, and then they came upon the rocky cliffs of basic limestone that border the south bank of the river Majkor, which separates the Aru mainlands of Maykor and Kobror. The north bank was high jungle, and up and down its reaches it was a true river, a deep, narrow channel winding through the jungle as far as the eye could reach. Yet its waters were salt.

“That’s really wonderful, sir!” cried Dwight, enthusiastically, when he had grasped the full significance of it. “Lots of small islands like England, for instance, have rivers; but they are true rivers, rising in the mountains somewhere. Others have salt straits dividing them from the mainland, like Staten Island, at home. This channel can’t be a fissure, for it winds and turns just like a river. What is Wallace’s theory, Mr. Baldwin?” he asked, giving it up.

“The true one, I think,” replied the curator. “The west coast of Aru is deep water; the east, a shallow pearl sea, clear over to New Guinea. That sea was undoubtedly formed by gradual subsidence of the sea bottom. It is only three hundred feet deep; so that would not take long for geology to accomplish. The coast of New Jersey is rising two feet a century. At no very distant date, then, New Guinea and Aru were one big continent, with all the sea between lowlands—very like those that extend now back from the coast to the Great Precipice over where we are soon going. The rivers, then, like the Outanata and the Mimika, must have flowed through those lowlands, and these channels of Aru were part of them, emptying into the sea on the west coast of Aru. Can’t you see how important this little trip of ours is, now? This river can tell us something of the mineralogy of the unexplored interior of New Guinea! And without our ever going there, for that matter!”

“Sure it can—if we had a long line and a grappling hook to dredge with!” said Dwight, practically.

“We have the former!” smiled the curator, producing out of his rucksack a hank of strong green Banks line, “and we’ll make a grappling.”

Near by grew a tree of the Erythina family, its profuse scarlet blossoms a grand note of color against the gray cliffs. Thousands of swallows swooped about the latter, and the curator eyed them absorbedly.

“Eh?” he exclaimed. “Dwight, you cut a length from that Erythina, with a whorl of branches at one end, and make a grappling, while I go on a look-see.”

Dwight drew his pickax and fashioned a wooden grappling hook with its keen hatchet blade. When he got through the curator had returned from the cliffs, bearing a gelatinous bird nest.

“Here is the edible bird nest of China!” he exclaimed. “I heard that they got them on Aru, as well as in the cliff caves of Borneo. These banks must be the Aru collecting ground. Ever eat one?”

“No!” shuddered Dwight.

“Not half bad. We’ll have this one for dessert, to-day. And now le’s see that grappling.”

He bound on the end of the cod line, and they found a dead trunk which would form a tolerable raft. Dropping the grappling, with a heavy stone lashed to it, they waited for a short drift, paying out line, and then began to haul. It soon struck something solid. Pulling it in, a great frond of fan coral came to the surface, and attached to its roots was the stone it grew on. The curator cleaned it and examined its structure avidly.

“First news of New Guinea!” he chuckled. “This stone formed part of the river drift, long ago. It is—slate!” he barked, joyously. “And here is a small bit of fossil on one surface. See it? That means coal measures! It confirms my idea that an island three hundred miles wide and fourteen hundred miles long can’t be all volcanic, or all coral! There must be stratified, geological formations in the interior, coal measures, iron ore—all that civilization needs. Try again!”

The next two casts brought up sea ferns, with more chunks of limestone and slate, but the third gave them a yellowish, heavy stone, sandy and streaked with brown.

“Ore! Iron ore!” yelled the curator, before even the mud was washed off it. “Regular li’l’ scientific expedition of our own, eh, Dwight!”

The boy took the next cast. He brought up a heavy, reddish stone that the curator examined with the greatest interest. “That’s cinnabar, red oxide of mercury, unless I miss my guess. It may be red iron ore, but seems too crystalline for that. We’ll keep this, Dwight, until I can get back to the bungalow and make some chemical tests.”

“Is it valuable?” asked the boy, curiously.

“Very!” replied the curator, abstractedly. He was off on one of his mental explorations—explorer’s dreams for the future welfare of the world that come to him who opens up new territory for mankind. His very silence awakened a strange presentment of wonders to come in the boy’s mind. Gee! it was great to delve into the world’s secrets, where no white man had ever been before! He longed for the time for the New Guinea trip to come. A few days more on Aru, and then—into a wild and dangerous country, in search of new discoveries that might prove of the greatest value to the civilized world. It was wonderful to be part of this expedition!

III
PIRATE VISITATIONS

MEANWHILE Nicky and Sadok had been exploring into the untracked jungle to the southward. The low hills of Aru grew more rocky, and the rank jungle gave way to sparse open growth, with rocky soil and wild grass swales here and there. It was hot, out here in the sun, and their canteens were in frequent use. Presently a wild brush turkey jumped from cover and ran cackling and gobbling through the bush growth. He went like a deer, as Nicky whipped out the Officer’s Colt and fired on the run. At the same time Sadok’s sumpitan coughed and its dart flashed across the grass tops.

“Doubled!” shouted Nicky, as the turkey tumbled and lay kicking stiffly. They ran out to retrieve it. Only the dart of the sumpitan stuck in its side.

“Missed, by hookey!” laughed Nicky at himself. “Judged by Dyak standards, I’m a mere swine, I suppose. Eh, Sadok? Say, what poison are you using now?” he exclaimed suddenly. “That turkey fell over like a shot. The upas-tree stuff takes some time—three hours for a man, they tell me.”

Sadok held up the little pot of bamboo for him to smell. “Upas vine, Orang-kichil” (little chief), he explained. “Him different tree. Red bark. Ver’ quick!”

“Smells like strychnia to me,” said the boy, wonderingly. “Beats all how nature has provided a specimen of that family of trees all over the tropics throughout the world. India, the nux vomica; South America, the wourali; here, some new one that I don’t know. I’ll ask the curator some day.”

They broiled two great steaks from the breast of the turkey for the midday meal, for the poison from the darts does not reduce the edibility at all, and Sadok stowed the legs for further food. After the lunch they set out in a generally southeasterly direction, as Nicky knew it would bring them at length to another of those odd channels that divide Aru, and he wanted to see something of Vorkai, the southernmost island. A large screw pine came in sight. Its almost bare branches twisted high into the bright sunlight, and the spikes of daggerlike leaves growing in clusters at the branch tips drew an exclamation of pleasure from Sadok, for he was nearly out of pandanus leaf to wrap “spec’mens” in. They went over to it.

“Hi!” called Nicky. “Look who’s here!”

A large brown animal was climbing around up near the tops.

“Tree kangaroo. Get him! The curator will want one!” cried the boy, drawing his revolver. He aimed carefully, and at the report the animal flinched, but seemed to maintain its hold in the branches. He fired again, with the same result. The tree kangaroo now moved sluggishly toward another branch.

“Shoot, Sadok! I must have hit him, but he sure can carry a lot of lead!”

Sadok raised the blowgun to his lips and held his cupped fist over his mouth. Filling his lungs, he blew a full breath. The dart soared up into the tree top and they saw it sticking from the animal’s side. Presently his limbs grew limp and he partly fell, but his long, hooked claws caught in the branches and hung. He made no further move.

“Dead as a mackerel, but I’ll have to swarm up after him!” declared Nicky, emphatically. He was a fearless climber, and he shinned the trunk and was soon in the branches. Worming up one of them, he reached the tree kangaroo. It was like its cousins, the wallaby of New Guinea and the great gray kangaroo of Australia, but with heavy, coarse fur and long, hooked claws especially adapted to climbing.

“Hit him both times, myself,” he called down: “Gorry! but he’s tenacious of life!” He detached the animal from its hold and dropped it down. It weighed some sixty pounds. They were an hour skinning it, after which Sadok put away some of the choicest meat, for he never let an opportunity for food go by in the jungle.

Then Nicky spied a great blue butterfly, the Papilio ulysses, soaring through the tops of the screw pine overhead. They set off in hot pursuit, with the skin of the kangaroo hanging to his belt.

“Dwight will want this fellow!” urged Nicky, stumbling through thickets and over stony and coralline ground. Hermit crabs scuttled out of their way in the underbrush; lizards of every shade streaked across under their feet, but still the lad kept his eyes on that magnificent prize which persistently flew high. At length it came down and alighted on a moist spot in the earth, evidently thirsty. He crept up and dropped his helmet over the great metallic-blue beauty.

“Hooray! What a prize for Dwight! How in thunder am I ever going to carry it, though?” He started to pin it to his helmet, but Sadok shook his head.

“Him all tore, in bushes,” he objected. “Me show’m.” Searching the jungle awhile, he presently came back with a broad, flat cactus leaf which he was busily paring of thorns as he walked. Then he slit it open with his kriss and gouged out a recess for the body of the butterfly in its pulpy interior. Lining it with flat pieces of pandanus, he was ready for Papilio ulysses, who was forthwith spread out, flat winged, and then securely bound in his green prison with thongs of rattan.

“Some sandwich!” grinned Nicky as it was slipped into the map pocket of his rucksack. “Worth about fifty dollars just as it stands! Won’t I have some fun with old Dwight, with it, though!”

They abandoned collecting for the time, as the canteens were running low and water was getting to be a problem unless they expected to live on what could be poured from the air plants that grew profusely in the dry jungle. A small ravine running downhill looked promising, and they climbed down into it. After half a mile it grew swampy, and soon a small, clear stream of fresh water developed. They were filling the canteens at the nearest hollow when voices came through the jungle, the chatter of a child and the deep cackle of an old man, both speaking Papuan. Sadok and Nicky waited. Presently both appeared, coming down to the brook. The man was an almost naked, mop-haired Aru native, carrying a bow and quiver; the pickaninny wore only a string around his fat middle, and had a tiny bow in his hands. Both jumped and dashed back into the jungle, with grunts and squeals of fear, at sight of Nicky.

The latter laughed and called after them reassuringly. Presently the pickaninny appeared, climbing a sapling trunk like a small tree frog. He stopped, peering around the trunk at them curiously, his feet dug into the bark with bunched-up toes, his sinewy little hands wound around the trunk, while his inquisitive face looked at them with a half-fearful expression.

Nicky smiled at him and dug into his pockets. He fished out a small bag of beads and held out a few of the sparkling trinkets in his palm. The youngster’s eyes snapped. They could see the old man peering at them through the underbrush, arrow on bow, afraid to come out at all.

Nicky beckoned to the boy and motioned to give him some. He finally descended the tree, and with many advances and retreats ventured out to clutch the beads in his small paw. Then he dashed back into the jungle, where a childish yell and the sound of a slap told that the old man had seized him and rifled him of his beads.

Nicky called out the pickaninny and gave him more. Then the old man poked his head out, and Sadok spoke to him in Malay. He knew that tongue enough to talk, and presently they were exchanging news. With much coaxing he was finally got out where Nicky could pour him quite a handful of the green, blue, red, and yellow trinkets. Much impressed, he jerked his thumb over shoulder and invited them to visit their village, which, he said, lay a short distance on.

They followed up what appeared to be something of a trail, and soon the jungle cleared and a blue arm of the sea lay before them, with a large island offshore. Nicky took it to be Varkai, but his attention was soon called to the village itself. It was of two palm huts, built on piles about seven feet above the ground, and the place was crowded with natives, most of whom gave one astonished look at Nicky and then bolted for the jungle.

The old man called them back, and presently the orang-kaya, or chief, came toward him, holding out his hand for more beads. It was not long before Nicky was the center of an excited throng of chattering Papuans, who fingered his clothing and pranced around him with characteristic native merriment. Nicky was a whole circus in himself, he began to appreciate. Men, women, and children never seemed to tire of standing and gazing at him, after which they would usually do a somersault or roll on the ground with explosions of boisterous laughter. To them he and his clothes were the funniest thing they had ever looked at.

As it was growing late, Sadok arranged for a night’s lodgings. A space about ten by twenty feet at the end of one of the huts was cleared off and turned over to their use. Here they laid down their few belongings and sat down on mats to watch the strange life around them. A clay floor behind a partition served for a fireplace, where Sadok set about cooking the kangaroo meat. The rest of the hut was jammed with natives talking and laughing incessantly, only ceasing when their eyes were fully occupied in staring at him.

In the midst of it all, a yell, “Bajak! Bajak!” (“Pirates! Pirates!”) arose, and everyone tumbled out of the hut and poured down to the beach. Great guard fires piled up along shore were lit, and their lurid glare lighted up the whole scene; the proas of the natives hauled up on the beach, the warriors dancing along the shore, brandishing their bows and spears and yelling defiance, and the two huts back a short distance, with the black wall of the jungle behind them, made a wild picture that long remained vivid in Nicky’s memory.

Nicky and Sadok had come down, eager to be in the fray, and it seemed to the boy that never had he been in so savage a spot on the earth as in this forgotten corner of Aru, with native warriors around him and a pirate ship from the New Guinea coast somewhere out there on the sea.

Presently he made her out a long double proa, or catamaran, with one big lateen sail; a small lakatoi, with at least fifty warriors in her, the orang-kaya told him. She came on swiftly, under both paddles and sails, and, when some fifty yards off the beach, opened fire with the flash and bang of Singapore muskets loaded with black powder.

Bows twanged all about Nicky, javelins flew through the air, Sadok’s sumpitan coughed. Some of the younger warriors turned to run at the sound of gunfire, but the older men held steady, for their homes and ships would be plundered if defeated. Nicky drew his revolver and opened fire in return. The heavy thunder of its .38 special cartridges, close at hand, made all the warriors near him jump and run, but the fact of six flashes along shore and the execution it evidently did among the pirates caused them to stop paddling and haul in sheet as the lakatoi swung around.

“Now, then, Sadok, launch one of those proas and after ’em and we’ll have ’em on the run!” barked Nicky, seizing the psychological moment to attack. Sadok called on the orang-kaya, and he and a dozen warriors sprang to the nearest proa and launched her, Nicky reloading swiftly. As she put out for the pirate lakatoi he opened up with a second burst of pistol shots. The pirate was now making all sail out to sea, the few flashes from her native muskets showing that most of her crew were paddling hard away from them. Presently her mat sail came down and she paddled into the eye of the wind, where their own proa could not follow. Nicky shot a third burst after them as the range widened out of bow shot.

“Gee! the curator told me that New Guinea pirates still attacked the villages in the wilder part of Aru, but I couldn’t have believed it!” he muttered to himself. “Now I’ve been in it—and we drove them off! Must be a fine country we’re going to, what Sadok!”

“Plenty bad mans ober dere!” agreed Sadok. “Mus’ shoot all time.”

They picked up a few dead men out of the dark waters. Hideously streaked with white clay, they wore long white boars’ tusks through their noses, and had a peculiar breast guard, made of rows of boars’ tusks one above the other, woven in a kind of net of palm-fiber. A keen, flat bamboo knife floating in the water gave Nicky a clew as to the tribe.

“Tugeri!” he exclaimed. “Head hunters. They were after heads and loot, Sadok! A sudden attack and a quick getaway is their style. Last year they appeared suddenly inside the barbed wire of the Dutch fort at Merauke and decapitated six Javanese and got away before the garrison could get out after them. We’ll have a time, with either them or the Outanatas!”

The proa returned to shore amid the shouts and rejoicings of all the village capering about the beach. Nicky and Sadok, utterly weary, retired to their portion of the hut to sleep, after the first burst of enthusiasm had died down. But the natives made an all-night orgy of it. Nicky put on his bathing suit headgear and his night socks over his arms and wrists, and turned in on a palm-fiber mat, while mosquitoes hummed about him and the noise and shouting and laughter on shore dulled away in his drowsy ears.

Next day they bade good-by to the chief. He had a present to make, it seemed, in return for the white man’s services in repelling their visitors of the night before. Out of a fetish bag, that held evidently the treasures of the entire village, he took a parcel carefully wrapped in cotton. Unwinding it, he drew out the skin of a bird of more than ordinary interest. Reverently he unwrapped the last of its bindings, and handed it to Nicky with a smile of grateful pleasure.

“Gorry!” muttered the boy, as he received the present before the whole tribe. “If I’m not wrong, that’s the rarest of the rare—the magnificent bird of paradise! Won’t the curator be tickled, though!”

It was a small bird, but brilliant in the extreme of plumage. The head was covered with small, brown, velvety feathers, but back of its neck arose a fan-shaped ruffle of the most brilliant yellow, backed by a second fan of intense metallic orange. The whole of the breast was rich, deep green, in changeable hues of peacock and purple. The tail was formed of two curved plumes of delicate metallic brown, which curved in airy spirals—a feathered gem as rich in coloring as the vividest-hued humming bird, but far larger.

“The only one!” managed the chief, in Malay, as Nicky bowed his thanks.

“I’ll bet it is! But two have been found in all New Guinea. This is the first reported from Aru. Had it long, Chief?”

“Many years. No more. White man welcome!” grinned the old fellow, gratefully.

They bade them all good-by and set out by compass for the neighborhood of camp. How to find it was something of a poser, but after a morning’s march the lay of the hills began to seem familiar once more and Sadok led them in to the very jungle of tall trees where they had first seen the great birds of paradise.

Dwight was in camp, and overjoyed at Nicky’s present of the Papilio ulysses, which was so rare a treasure that he at once set about pouring a plaster-of-Paris mold for it and getting it under glass without delay.

“I wish I had a trade-last for you, old scout,” said Dwight as he mounted the specimen, “but I haven’t. The curator and I have been mineralogizing since you were gone. We found out a lot about the interior of New Guinea—”

“New Guinea!” echoed Nicky, amazedly.

“Yes, New Guinea,” retorted Dwight, and he told Nicky of the source of the channels that divide Aru.

“And didn’t you get a single sea snake, down there?” asked Nicky, regretfully. “The shallow sea’s full of ’em, all highly venomous, you know—”

“I didn’t!” shivered Dwight, recalling the hours they had spent unprotected on the raft. “That’s more in your line. Real sea serpents, eh?”

“Yep. I still believe in the sea serpent,” laughed Nicky. “There are plenty of small ones among the New Guinea coasts and up the lagoons. They have a broad, finny tail like an eel, but are true serpents. They swim up near the surface and live on fish, but have poison fangs just like many of the land snakes. That’s why I am still convinced that there may be a larger species, sometimes seen far at sea by ships. They have been too often reported to be a myth. But these islands are too dry and rocky for anything but lizards. Where’s the curator gone?”

“He went after a black cockatoo which came through the grove awhile ago. I heard his gun recently.”

A little later the curator returned, carrying a specimen of the great black cockatoo, a rare find, but it was nothing to his delight over the magnificent bird of paradise that Nicky sprang on him unawares.

“Man dear, where did you get that!” he yelled, examining it avidly. “That’s the big prize of the expedition, so far. I guess we can go on to New Guinea, now!”

On the next day camp was broken and the party steered out of the jungle by compass and hunter’s paths, arriving back at the bungalow by nightfall. The following two days were mighty busy, for Nicky, as “snakeologist” of the expedition, had a large assortment of reptile skins to prepare, and the curator, as ornithologist, likewise; and all of them had to be packed in ant-proof tin receptacles before leaving. Dwight, as entomologist, mounted his specimens in flat, glass-covered wooden boxes, which could be packed a dozen at a time in tin cases.

That evening the curator hunted up the captain and crew of the proa and they warped her out into the harbor, for they were to sail for New Guinea the next morning. They all slept aboard once more, and at dawn stood out of the coral reefs and headed around Kobror for the hundred-mile run across to the coast of Dutch New Guinea. Two mornings after, the lofty chain of the Charles Louis Mountains, as the northern end of the Snow Mountains has been named, jutted out of the sea under banks of clouds. Navigators have measured the height of these mountains at six to nine thousand feet, taking observations from the decks of passing vessels, while the higher peaks of the Snow Mountains to the south rise to sixteen thousand feet. The mouths of a few rivers in that country have been noted on the map; but the hinterland remains a mystery to the world. Even the South and North Poles are better known.

By afternoon, the mainland had become quite visible, jungly foothills rising ridge on ridge to the base of the Great Precipice, which stretches south for two hundred miles, the greatest precipice in the world. Above it towered the snowy peaks far back in the mainland. They came to realize how utterly unknown and impenetrable it all is, when they awoke next morning to find the proa at anchor in a deep bay, with the jungly mountains all around them and a lagoon thirty miles long stretching back into the hinterland. Mangrove swamps lined the shore in an unbroken line. Here and there a dent in them told of the mouth of a stream. No living human was in sight, but the smoke of signal fires rose from points along shore, and scouting parties of native savages could be made out through the glasses already watching them, swinging through the trees over the mangroves like troops of monkeys. Now and then a long black canoe, with high carved prow, would cross the upper lagoon, driven by lines of paddling blacks. The very haste of them spelled danger, the passing of the word through the villages that a strange proa was here. A short raid on shore, a few miles into the jungle at most, unless attempted by a whole regiment of soldiers, would be certain to end in ambush and murder. As for those dense jungles and towering mountains back a day’s march into the interior—Unexplored! Danger! Pygmies! Head hunters! was written all over them!

They were examining the shore curiously, with a sense of the utter hopelessness of the undertaking oppressing them, when a huge black lakatoi, or native catamaran, jutted its prow around the point of a cape to seaward. Everyone turned to watch it, and with chatterings and gesticulations the crew sprang to life.

“Lakatoi, Orang-kaya!” sang out Sadok, pointing to seaward. She towered like a castle out of the sea. A single mast rose out of her amidships, carrying one long triangular mat sail with deeply incurved ends. Around the mast was a wooden platform, a sort of fighting deck with rails around it, and it was held down on the two log canoes which floated the structure by long bamboo arches like the backs of a bridge. The lakatoi was crowded with warriors whose spears and bows and clubs could be made out jutting up through the serried ranks like tiny black jackstraws.

“Bajak! Bajak!” (“Pirates! Pirates!”) rose the excited yell forward, and there was a mad scramble of the crew to the waist for weapons.

“Every lakatoi full of natives is a ‘pirate’ to these beggars,” laughed the curator. “They’ll probably prove hostile, though. Look to your guns, boys.”

“Are you going to use the queer pistol, sir?” asked Dwight, curiously, slipping a clip of cartridges into the butt of his automatic.

“Nope. Won’t need to this time,” smiled the curator. “Got to save it for something worse!” He strolled to the deck house and went inside.

Dwight and Nicky watched the lakatoi bowling down toward them. The natives on her were brandishing their bows and spears and did not seem in the least friendly. Their own crew now lined the rails of the proa, armed with a motley collection of Singapore muskets, old repeating rifles of the Spencer vintage, and bows and arrows. They yelled defiance at the approaching catamaran and were evidently eager for a fight.

She came steadily on, while everyone crouched behind the gunwales, peering at her. At about fifty yards a cloud of arrows sailed from her and came swishing and singing aboard, striking the deck house and sticking in the soft planks. Dwight picked up one of them, while the thunder of black-powder guns roared out from their own ship. The arrow was of cane, without nock or feathers, a yard long, and had a point of ebony notched with barbs for a foot back.

“Outanatas!” he exclaimed. “They mean business. Give it to ’em, Nick!” They fired their pistols, hoping to add to the number who had already dropped struggling on the fighting platform. Sadok’s long sumpitan stuck out over the gunwale, and at every cough from its muzzle a yelling, arrow-shooting native would grow livid and fall helplessly among his comrades. Her deck was a shambles, but there were plenty of them left and she came steadily on.

A crash shivered the proa from stem to stern as the lakatoi’s high prows rode up over their gunwale, and twenty blacks leaped aboard, stabbing with their spears over shields that were hideous with the carved scrolls of diabolical faces on them. Parangs flashed out among the crew and a fierce hand-to-hand struggle on deck ensued. The crew charged at the invaders, led by Sadok, whose whirling parang-ihlang swung around his head in red flashes that cleft to the bone where they struck. The boys held off, firing deliberately where a particularly fierce native seemed to be carrying all before him. On and on came the boarders in a living black stream, while the air sang with arrows from those still on the lakatoi. They were outnumbered, three to one. Slowly the crew gave back in the furious mêlée, the struggling mass of brown and black men stabbing and cutting in a writhing heap in the waist. Behind them two tall natives fought toward the masts, armed with blazing torches to set the sail afire. With a fierce burst of pistol shots the boys picked them off.

Then the brown flash of the curator’s long frame leaped out of the deck house. An arrow pierced his helmet as his arm swept over his head in the cricketer’s swing. A brown object like a baseball shot over to the lakatoi, followed by another and another as the arm went on swinging with incredible swiftness.

Brr-aaam! Brr-aam! Brr-aam! The detonation was frightful, riving the lakatoi apart in great splinters of logs and planks as the grenades exploded. Men, sails, and spars were torn apart in livid flashes of blinding light. The concussion knocked down the combatants on their own ship, while a giant, foamy wave leaped out of the sea and engulfed them, the water falling on the fighting men in the waist like a deluge. Terror-stricken, the boarders gave back, falling like flies before the busy parangs, the survivors leaping headlong into the sea. Of the lakatoi there was nothing left but a mass of floating fragments. In a moment more it was all over and the crew stood breathing heavily, looking at the curator with broad grins of delight.

“Welcome to New Guinea!” laughed the curator, grimly, standing with a fourth hand grenade in his grip, its firing mechanism still unarmed. “I guess that will be about all, Captain,” he said to the jurugan, who stood nursing a cut shoulder. “Stop those fellows!” he ordered, for the guns were beginning to bark again at the survivors of the lakatoi swimming in the water. “Let ’em get ashore and tell all about it. Ought to give us quite a rep! How did you make out, boys?” he asked, turning to them coolly. “This was nothing compared with some of our trench parties.”

“Nice souvenir you’ve got, sir!” grinned Nicky, pointing to the long arrow still sticking in the curator’s helmet. “Dwight and I got off easy. They didn’t seem to pay much attention to us. Never saw a firearm before, I suppose. A lot of the crew seem dead or wounded, though, and I saw Baderoon go down.”

“Get hold of Sadok, when you can,” ordered the curator. “I see he’s busy in the waist. And have them bring Baderoon into the deck house.”

Some of the crew were now cleaning up the waist and others were hoisting the anchor by its primitive wooden windlass so as to sail the proa farther up the lagoon. Sadok came up, breathing happily through his wide Malay nostrils.

“Me have’m lov’y fight, Orang-kaya!” he beamed. “Catch’m three head!” He grinned, holding up the gory trophies for them to admire. “But you, Orang-kaya!” His eyes looked adoringly at the curator. “White man debbil-debbil verree strong! Him fight like hell!”

IV
NICK ENCOUNTERS A DEATH ADDER

BADEROON was carried into the deck house, his long, muscular Papuan frame livid and limp. His rattan shield and bow were borne by Sadok, but from his wrist still dangled a long war club captured by him during the fight. It was of stout ironwood, with a head made of a thick disk of a stone like jade. The club was ornamented with rows of boars’ tusks dangling from its handle, alternating with tufts of human hair, and a stout strap held it to the wrist at its handle. Dwight remembered having a glimpse of Baderoon crashing valiantly through the pirate swarm with it, after his arrows were all shot away.

The curator put some brandy to Baderoon’s lips and the “boy” revived. The first thing he felt for was the tin mirror in his nose. Finding this still there, he sank back with a sigh of relief.

“There! That’s fine!” encouraged the curator, holding up the Papuan’s woolly head. “You-fellah come good-fellah soon, Baderoon! He’s got quite a rap on the roof and he’s lost a lot of blood from that arrow wound where it got torn out during the scrimmage. Get me my first-aid, quick. He feels a lot better, now that he knows his charm is all right!” he chuckled.

Baderoon opened his eyes and an irresistible grin cracked his thick lips.

“No kai-kai [eat] me-fellah! Orang-kaya him go Boom!—Boom!—All stop!” he grinned weakly, snapping all his fingers to imitate the explosion.

“All right, boy,” beamed the curator. “You-fellah stop, quiet! Will plenty debbil-debbil your arm,” he warned, producing the antiseptics. He shot the iodine into the open wound, while Baderoon set his teeth obediently, enduring the pain as best he could. Then his master wrapped on the gauze and bandages and hung the arm in a sling, and they all went out, leaving the native resting easily on a bench, afraid to touch his bandages under fear of the orang-kaya’s displeasure.

The proa was bowling along up the lagoon, sailing farther and farther in behind the Charles Louis Mountains as they looked about them. A large river flowed in up at the head of the lagoon, they knew, but the curator had decided to take the first creek mouth that looked uninhabited on the mountain shore. Not a sign of a village or even a canoe had they seen, so dense are the mangrove swamps. Finally a dent in them, at the end of a long valley between two of the mountains, came in sight. A careful search of the trees around it with the glasses revealed no more native scouts. The curator judged that they had gotten up to sparsely inhabited country, and the proa was nosed into a little bay with the swift, clear water of the creek running into it. With slack sheet she laid her prow into the mouth of it, the shores slipping by close at hand.

He gave the order to go ashore, and, shouldering their packs, Nicky and Dwight leaped into the jungle, followed by Sadok with a huge crate of empty collection boxes on his back. Baderoon jumped next, able to walk now, and carrying nothing but his bow and shield, a borrowed quiver of arrows, and his captured war club. Then the curator turned to the jurugan.

“Come back here in three weeks, Captain,” he said. “We’ll be here waiting for you—or dead. Good-by, all! Nice fight, wasn’t it!” A flash of grins swept the crew’s faces as he seized his light double shotgun and jumped for the bank. The proa backed off and soon her sails filled and she stood down the lagoon, bound for Aru.

“Well, boys, we’re on our own!” said the curator, cheerfully, joining the rest of the party. “I reckon we can stay alive for three weeks in this country! And we ought to have something to tell about when we get back here. Paradisea superba, the superb bird of paradise, is what we particularly want; also an accurate report on the mineralogy of this region.”

They picked their way up over clinking bits of old broken coral, aiming for the high ground above the source of the stream. Skirting along this for some distance, they soon found that it was a small, flat table-land of some ancient coral growth, back of which was the real jungle. The sparse soil was grown with stunted seaside palms and various species of ironwood and lignum-vitæ. Through it the stream cut on its way from the interior. The curator had about decided to establish camp here until the region could be investigated before going farther, when a cry from Nicky aroused them. It came from farther upstream.

“This way, fellows!” it called; “here’s something interesting!”

They followed the call, to pitch down the coral bank to a small beach by the stream-side, clear of mangroves. An abandoned outrigger sail canoe lay hauled up on the shore. The coral flat had protected it from the moist jungle rot, but its weatherbeaten planks showed that it had been there for several years.

“A crocodile slipped into the water as I came down here, and found—this,” announced Nicky. “It looks like a Ceram or Salwatty boat to me. See the single mast and the two bamboo outriggers.”

She was about twenty-five feet long, with a bamboo platform overhanging the body of the canoe on each side astern, its outer edges guarded with stout bamboo rails. The body was of flat, hewn planks, built up on a wide keel hollowed from a single log. The New Guinea boats were all made of one or more log canoes, hollowed out of a single log, they knew; this canoe came from Ke’ or Ceram, but of its history there was not a trace. The sail, of woven cotton, still lay wrapped around its yards. Two lengths of bamboo, about twenty feet long and six inches thick, formed the floating outriggers, which were lashed to bow-shaped hardwood spars notched across the gunwales. All her rattan lashings were in as good shape as the day she was made.

An involuntary shiver of apprehension went over the party. Others had come—and never returned!

“Some poor devils ventured in here after paradise birds and got eaten, I presume,” said the curator. “It’s a cinch they never got back! We’ll adopt her. We may need her some day! Here’s good water and dry ground, fellows! Let’s camp here and collect within easy distance until we know the lay of the land. And we’ll all keep together for the present, boys,” he ordered, meaningly.

The parangs got busy, and soon a space was cleared in the underbrush where the two tent flys of the boys and the curator’s hammock could be swung. Sadok disappeared into the jungle, whence the sound of his chopper soon came, and presently he returned to camp, bearing a long green pole of bamboo across his shoulders. This he notched with footsteps cut above each joint, and the pole was then laid upright in the fork of a small ironwood tree. Up it the curator climbed, to look out over the country.

“That was some look-see, boys!” he announced, coming down from the pole. “The mountains lie right near us, to the right, with a strip of deep jungle, about half a mile wide, beginning just beyond this table of coral land. We’ll have to go through it with compass and parang. This stream comes down from a notch in the mountains, with some high grass plateaus shelving out from their sides. It’s a great country, and I doubt if anyone finds us for a time yet. I did not see a sign of a hut or a village. It’s safe to collect anywhere on this coral ground, I think. And there are thunderheads coming over the mountains to the west right now, so make your tents secure for the night and cook whatever you’re going to before the rain comes.”

Nicky did not care to eat just then, so he set out on an exploring trip. For some distance he poked along, slowly, above the course of the stream, starting at every rustle of big land crabs scuttling for their holes in the underbrush. The growth of tangled ironwoods was so thick that he had to hack with his parang to get even through the thinnest vistas. He moved slowly along, the thrill of being alone in an unknown land peopled with savage cannibals putting his nerves on edge. He recalled stories of how the Outanatas did not eat a man whole, like the South Sea Islanders, but had a playful way of cutting off a leg and binding up the stump, saving the man for further feasts while they ate the leg before his eyes; and how, last year, six Javanese had been suddenly decapitated by the Tugeri, just inside the barbed wire of the Dutch fort at Merauke, and how—

Brrrrumm!—right behind him! It might have been the grunt of a wild boar: it might have been—anything! Nicky jumped, whirling in the air, electrified with fear, and landed on his feet with gun cocked and staring eyes. Nothing whatever was visible. The dense brush was as silent and inscrutable as the Sphinx. Trying to quiet his pounding heart, the boy began to turn cautiously around, when—Brrrruuumm! right behind him again! He whirled about, angry this time, looking with all his eyes for something to shoot at.

Brruum!—Brrumm! The sound seemed to come from overhead, and, looking up, Nicky saw a large air plant, its blatant flowers in showy profusion—and hovering in front of them was a large tropical humming bird!

The revulsion was too great! The boy threw back his head and yelled with hysterical laughter.

“Frightened to death by a humming bird!” he whooped. “Yow-yowri! Well, it’s time I shoved along and accomplished something!”

He pushed his way through the thickets, defiantly now, hoping that something would turn up worth shooting at. Presently he came to a little open glade grown up with saw grass, with a small pond in the center of it. As he burst through the thicket two animals rose up out of the grass across the pond and went jumping off, sailing over the yellow field in long leaps that carried them twenty feet to the bound. Nicky did not have to be told that they were wallabys, the New Guinea species of kangaroo. He whipped out his long-barreled Officer’s Model and poised its fine sights on the rearmost wallaby. He had learned through long practice that his revolver was as good as a rifle at any range up to seventy-five yards, if well handled, and he depended on it for all big game. As the gun barked, the wallaby pitched down, rolling over and over like a rabbit in the saw grass, its long hind legs kicking convulsively. The other wallaby soared in a frantic series of hops, and reached the jungle before the wavering sights of the revolver could be steadied on it.

Nicky started to dash through the grass around the pond after his prize, but the sudden soar of a small animal like a flying squirrel, but much larger, brought him to a full stop. It had left the topmost branches of a tall thorn tree on the edge of the jungle and had volplaned downward in a long flight across the opening. Nicky’s ready shotgun sprang to shoulder and he covered it in full flight and pulled trigger. The creature fell into the grass as he blew the smoke from his barrel and slipped in another shell. A single step forward developed more life, for a large green grasshopper like a katydid sprang from its depths, made a short flight, and lit near by. It had a peculiar shield like a leaf curved backward over its head. Nicky whipped off his helmet to capture it, for he recognized the great shielded grasshopper of New Guinea and he knew that Dwight would want it.

He crept forward stealthily, when his eye was attracted by the bright flash of orange and black where a medium-sized bird was hopping from branch to branch in the thicket to his right. One glance at the quantity of long feathers of an intense orange hue that adorned its neck told him that it was the rare paradise oriole, closely allied to the true paradise birds and a specimen of the utmost value to the curator.

Nicky raised his gun, embarrassed at all these sudden riches of natural history that surrounded him. It occurred to him that this little pond bore all the aspects of the African water hole, in that it attracted wild life as a sort of center, and that he could spend a long time right here without beginning to exhaust its possibilities. As the gun barked the bird fell tumbling through the thicket and the boy reloaded, wondering what new marvel would develop at his very next step. Then the grasshopper claimed his attention. It had made another short flight. This time the helmet scooped him in. He paused a moment to wonder over the remarkable camouflage that nature had provided for this insect, for the shield resembled a green leaf so closely that a passing hornet or bird, which were its chief enemies, would be completely deceived.

In lieu of a better place to put it, Nicky pinned it on his helmet and then resolutely trailed through the grass to find the small flying creature that he had shot, unmindful of the quantities of insects that he had stirred up, the very number and diversity of which would have driven Dwight into a frenzy.

“Must tell the old scout about this!” muttered the boy. “He’d camp here a week! Ought to be something in my line, too, around this water. Heigho! What in the dickens is this?” he exclaimed, picking up the animal. It looked like an opossum, but it had broad furry membranes extending from fore to hind leg exactly like our own flying squirrel.

“Flying opossum, by ginger!” cried the boy, for he had of course read up on all the natural history of New Guinea that is known. He examined the curious creature with all the sensations of the true naturalist. It is a far different thing to read of these examples of nature’s marvelous diversity, than to actually handle and examine the creatures themselves. Like all but two of New Guinea’s mammals, this was a marsupial, a reminder of that far time when all of Papua, Australia, and the adjacent islands connected by the shallow sea was one vast continent, entirely separated from Asia by deep sea. Why did this continent evolve marsupials in every form of animal life, even the bear and the wolf? Here was the counterpart of our flying squirrel, with the same protective capacity to fly, but a marsupial and by structure most closely allied to the opossums. It was surely a brave conundrum!

He retrieved the paradise oriole and started out to the pond again, but a sharp hiss in the grass stopped him like an electric shock. A black and mottled snake rose threateningly, with steely tongue quivering from its mouth. Nicky recoiled, shielding his eyes with his arm, for he had recognized with a shock of loathing fear the dreaded death adder of Papua, which can spit poison with considerable accuracy for more than six feet. He backed off rapidly, watching the snake narrowly, for he knew that it would attack with great swiftness, blinding his eyes before striking. Then his shotgun sprang to shoulder as the snake moved toward him through the grass, and he pulled trigger as its horned head appeared for an instant over the tubes. Out of the mist of smoke and the confusion of the recoil Nicky had time to realize but one thing—that head was still weaving toward him with the speed of an express train! It would not do to aim the gun again and so expose his eyes. He turned to fly, dropping his gun and tugging frantically at his parang. As it flashed from its wooden sheath he made a swift backhand slash with it, urged by the imminent horror of the snake being close behind him. He felt the parang’s blade cut bone, and at the same instant something soft and wet struck the back of his neck and a hot, irritating pain seared his flesh. Putting up his hand as he ran, he found his fingers covered with a pale yellow fluid that burnt where it touched. Nicky stopped at the thicket and faced about. A violent thrashing of coils in the grass behind him, now flashing up the white belly, now the mottled back, told him that he had beheaded the adder. He went back cautiously, for he appreciated now that the borders of that pond would be alive with snakes. He got to water finally, and began washing strenuously. The pain still kept up, however, and he could feel a large blister raising on the skin of his neck.

“I must get back to camp quickly, where the curator can paint me with iodine!” he muttered to himself. “What would happen if I should faint here in the jungle!”

He found the head of the death adder and wrapped it in his handkerchief and tied it to his belt. The body was about eight feet long. Dragging it over to the thicket, he hung it on a bush and then skirted around, keeping a sharp watch at his feet, and finally came out to the body of the wallaby.

It was very like the great gray kangaroo of Australia, but much smaller and reddish in color. He swung it over his shoulder and retraced his steps to the thicket. Tying the long body of the adder to his belt, he pushed for camp. He felt dizzy and weak, and sick at the stomach, and his neck burnt like a fire. Staggering on, he sought the thinnest openings in the brush and so unconsciously retraced his steps; but the briers tore at him and his burden with maddening tenacity and he steadily grew weaker and weaker. At last the welcome sound of voices and chopping came to his ears, and with a last burst of endurance he drove through the thickets and fell forward limply, just over the edge of their clearing.

The curator dropped his microscope and notebook and ran over, followed by Dwight, who had heard his startled exclamation.

“Man, animal, or reptile?” giggled Dwight, looking down at the odd huddle of wallaby, snake, and boy that was Nicky.

“Cut it, and call Sadok and Baderoon! Quick!” snapped the curator, sharply. “Something has happened to him. Nothing is ever trivial in this jungle, Dwight!” He pulled off the wallaby as he spoke, and his eyes fell at once on the red scar on the back of Nicky’s neck. He examined it carefully, but no sign of fangs was visible.

“Go get the medicine kit!” he barked, as Dwight left on the run. Baderoon came up, and his eyes opened as they lit on the body of the snake.

“Koikoim meten!” he gasped, horror-stricken. “Me go find’m taboo for him—quick! Boy him die!” He dashed off into the jungle. Sadok bent over, shaking his head. The snake was unfamiliar to him and he could do nothing. Dwight returned with the medicine kit and the curator painted the spot with iodine, but it seemed to have no effect. Nicky was in a kind of swoon, from which all efforts, even brandy, failed to arouse him. Faces lengthened as the minutes went by with no improvement. Finally Baderoon emerged from the jungle, carrying a spray of some kind of plant.

“Me find’m taboo!” He grinned cheerfully. He crushed the weed in his hands and rubbed the juice on the spot, kneading it in and crooning a wild Papuan chant the while. After some five minutes of it, which seemed like five weeks to the white men looking on, Nicky opened his eyes.

“Gee! I could—write a—fine story—about this!” he sighed, weakly. “I’ve been conscious all the time,” he went on, more strongly as Baderoon kept up his vigorous kneading, “but for the life of me I could not move anything. Seemed to be kind of paralyzed. Baderoon—you’re a brick!” he cried, grasping the mop-haired Papuan’s horny hand.

“Orang-kichil [little chief] all right? Me make’m koikoim debbil-debbil!” he grinned, kneading steadily and applying more of the pale-green plant juice.

Nicky told them all about it as he steadily grew stronger, and finally he sat up and undid the handkerchief holding the snake’s head. “It’s a fine specimen, all right, though!” he maintained, stoutly. “Baderoon, you fix’m koikoim’s—isn’t it?—koikoim’s head, and we’ll save the whole of him for mounting. Me for a sleep for a thousand years!”

They got Nicky tucked away for the night and his tent fly secured down strongly like a wedge tent, for great plashes of raindrops were beginning to fall and the rolling thunder came nearer and nearer down the mountains. Then came the roar of the rain, and bright, vivid flashes of lightning rent the twilight.

Sadok and Baderoon moved their mats under the curator’s hammock fly, while rain drove in sheets through the tropical night. It was furious while it lasted, but by eight o’clock the storm had died to distant mutterings far back in the interior, and a pitch blackness ensued. Then the stars came out, and in the moist, steaming stillness the camp went off to sleep for their first night in the New Guinea jungle.

V
THE OUTANATAS

FOR the next few days the water hole became a star collecting ground for the entire expedition. Nicky was laid up a day in camp, recovering from the effects of the death adder’s poison, but he soon came to haunt the pond, for it and the stream that flowed past their camp were his main reliance for abundance of reptilian life.

“Here’s where we make the main collection, fellows,” said the curator, as he and Sadok came back to their temporary headquarters loaded with curious hook-billed Macrorhina kingfishers, magnificent crowned pigeons, Manucodia starlings of brilliant hues of plumage, blue flycatcher wrens, and many other species of the abundant bird life of New Guinea.

“We’ll fill the main collection crates with a representative collection in all four divisions of natural history. That will leave us free to concentrate on the rarer varieties during the exploration trip,” he continued. “I vote we have a pig hunt to-morrow. Baderoon tells me he has discovered plentiful rootings down in that mass of high jungle that separates us from the mountain chain. We ought to lay in some fresh meat and cure some bacon before starting into the interior.”

“Me for the hogfest!” crowed Nicky. “I’ve about nailed every lizard, tree frog, and snakelet in this vicinity. What ammunition shall we use, sir?”

“For wild boar I’m inclined to the solid ounce ball in a twelve-gauge shotgun,” grinned the curator. “It’s the only thing that will stop ’em at close range. Beats a high-power rifle all hollow, for it knocks ’em down to stay. I brought along some shells loaded with three-quarter ounce ball for our twenty-gauges, and we’ll serve ’em out to-morrow.”

On the next day the pig hunt was started. The wild pig of New Guinea, Sus papuana, is in several respects peculiar to himself. Armed with those long tusks that the natives use for nose ornaments and breast shields, he is wild, long legged, and speedy as a deer. He has the typical Asiatic screw tail, in place of the long straight one of the wild boar of Europe, but is almost hairless and provided with thick horny shoulder plates under the skin that will turn almost any bullet. Like all pigs, he fights well when cornered, is very tenacious of life, and attacks with a slashing charge of his tusks, attempting to upset a man with his momentum and then turn and rend out his ribs with a powerful stroke of the long, sharp tushes.

Baderoon and Sadok disappeared into the jungle to get above their feeding ground and act as beaters, while the curator and the boys took up vantage points a short distance back from the creek in the swampy bottoms.

Dwight soon found himself alone under the tall foliage, with vines and creepers crisscrossing in front of him and dense undergrowth, making it impossible to see thirty feet away, all around him. Great, slippery roots buttressed out from the tree trunks, crawling over the muddy soil like alligator backs. Nicky and the curator were farther on down the creek, both as silent as the grave, for it was essential to make no noise. Dwight realized that he had been given the post of honor this time, and that it would be he who would bear the brunt of the charge. In spite of himself he found himself shivering with excitement, opening his gun to peer at the shells, setting the safety on and off, and otherwise betraying symptoms that looked very like fear. He had never hunted wild boar before, and he found himself wishing that he had a bayonet or a spear or something to defend himself at close quarters. As it was, he would have to depend entirely on steady nerves and a well-placed bullet.

Then, far up the jungle, he heard the distant noises of the infernal din that Sadok and Baderoon were making, yelling and beating with their spears on their shields. It was followed presently by faint squeals, and later he could hear the grunts, it seemed, of a whole drove of wild boars. They were coming like the wind, the undergrowth crackling under their hoofs, vines tearing and ripping and carrying away bush growth, and then the jungle floor fairly shook, as if locomotives were thundering down on him.

A swishing and waving in the undergrowth showed him that they would pass him about thirty yards off, between him and the creek. Dwight sternly repressed an impulse to hang back and let them go by. To see clearly to shoot, he would have to run forward and plant himself nearly in their path.

“Don’t be a coward! Into this, you boob!” he swore at himself, as he drove forward through the tangle of jungle growth. He ran out on a great prone trunk and peered into the moving bushes. They were going by, grunting and squealing with mixed terror and anger—five of them, and two great big fellows, with long, wicked ivory tushes curling around their snouts. Dwight raised the twenty-bore, followed along back of the shoulder of the nearest, and fired. Instantly a bawl of pain and rage went up as the boar stopped, whirling about a broken foreleg and looking about him red eyed with rage. The rest went thundering on, and a boom from the curator’s gun rang through the jungle. Dwight’s boar spied him and came hitching toward him on three legs, grunting his rage. The boy had opened his gun to slip in another shell, so eager was he to have plenty of shots. In an electric shock of realization, he saw that he had not time to do anything of the sort. Hastily snapping it shut, he drew a wavering bead and fired again. The ball hit somewhere in the shoulder and glanced off, but it put the boar in a frightful rage. He charged the log with a red glare in his eyes and leaped up, his tusks sweeping the upper surface of it. Dwight leaped off and reloaded frantically in the brief breathing space left him. With a leap like a deer, the boar went over the trunk, while Dwight fired both barrels full into his head at six feet, and then turned and dashed into the jungle. A great vine caught under his armpits as the boy crashed into it, and it laid him sprawling in the thick bush growth. He wormed through it desperately, and reloaded, wondering all the time why he had not been gored and trampled to death. His heart pounded so that its rapid beats were audible as he opened his mouth to breathe. Then he realized that the boar had not followed, and, plucking up courage, he stole back to look.

There lay the boar, threshing feebly about beside the log, his life slowly ebbing away. Dwight watched him, afraid to come nearer, scarce daring to hope that he had won. A final convulsion, and the boar seemed to go to sleep as he gave a last little sigh and stretched his great head out on the jungle.

“Whoops! I’ve got him!” yelled Dwight, stepping nearer to prod at the carcass with his gun barrels.

“Had a fat time with him, too, judging by the noise!” laughed the curator’s voice. “I got one, too—nice pig.”

Dwight remembered that the curator had fired but one shot—coolly and carefully placed, no doubt, but he was not ashamed. He had done well, for his first try! Nicky had not fired at all, for the rest of the drove had swerved and crossed the creek in a splash at the two gunshots. He and the curator came over to look at his trophy.

“Ought to cut out those and wear them in your nose, to be really fashionable in New Guinea, Dwight!” laughed Nicky, pointing to the razor-sharp tushes. “I was just coming over to lend a hand to help the curator up a tree when he fired, and the rest of the family beat it across the creek. Out o’ luck, as usual!” he grinned, cheerfully.

After a time Sadok and Baderoon came up and set about butchering the two pigs. The bacon flitches and hams from them were cured over a smoke rack during the next two days, while the party dined on fresh liver, and, later, pork chops, after the game had hung for a day.