“And now,” he said, rising, “I think we must go.”
He shook hands solemnly with the boy. His daughter gave Pant a friendly smile. Then they were away over the trail to their boat.
Two hours later Pant might have been found still sitting before his rough slab table, and still he appeared to be in a trance.
He was fighting, fighting an impulse to run away, to dash down the river in his motor boat and away to the Belize radio to flash the tremendous news to a man who had financed their little enterprise up Rio Hondo.
Then, into his mind there came a picture in an old book of fables; a picture of a dog standing on a bridge over a river. In his mouth was a piece of meat. In the river was a reflection of the meat much larger than the meat itself.
“The dog dropped the meat to snap at its reflection, and lost all,” Pant mused. “I hope these concessions are not mere reflections of possible wealth; but I know that our fifty thousand feet of red mahogany logs are not. To-morrow we must get out another five thousand feet.”
Even at that, while he made his way to his bunk, his heart all but failed him. He dreaded the fight he was sure would come, the fight to a finish with Daego’s men.
“If only Johnny were here!” he again repeated. “Where can he be? That black man over in Daego’s camp said Daego had driven him into the jungle. Surely no jungle can hold Johnny Thompson!”
Of this last he could not be sure. A Central American jungle is an awesome and terrible place.
“If he were here,” he went on, “I could tell him the good news of Daego’s undoing and of those wonderful concessions that are all but within our grasp.
“And if only he could lead in the fight that’s sure to come! Daego will fight. It will be a battle to the bitter end. Some have gone down the river, but there are plenty still.
“Oh, well!” he sighed at last. “Johnny may not be here, but his ghost is. He’ll throw terror into the hearts of those blacks yet.”
That night the ghost of the air did strange things; very strange indeed.
Johnny was still in the land of the lost Mayas. The city he and Jean had discovered was not the city of Jean’s dreams, the golden metropolis of long ago, yet there were signs of past glory all about them. Massive ruins that had once been a pyramid, elaborately carved shafts reaching toward the sky, great squares and slabs of stone, all told of the glory that had departed.