“It will not be long,” he assured Jean, “before I will be able to do my bit with the paddle, to assist you in going wherever you wish to go.” Where that might be he had not the slightest notion.
One thing puzzled him. As they prepared to leave the cabin, the dugout was loaded fore and aft with food supplies. In the prow, carefully wrapped in green palm leaves, were the carcasses of two young peccaries, killed that very morning. Piled on top of these were three or four dozen ripe cocoanuts. In the stem were casabas (great potato-like vegetables), tree melons, breadfruit, and a basket filled with strange little red tomatoes.
“Rations for a week,” he mused. “How far from home are these people, anyway?”
He was soon enough to know. Hardly had the dugout, with Roderick in the stem as steersman, been pushed from the shore and allowed to take a downstream course, than the girl, turning upon Johnny one of her most wonderful smiles, said:
“I suppose you think we know where we’re going; but we don’t. We only know we’re on our way.”
“Don—don’t know where you’re going!” Johnny gasped in astonishment. “Then you’re—”
“Lost!” The girl’s brow wrinkled for a second, then the smile came back.
“Shake,” said Johnny, solemnly stretching forth a hand. “We’ll go it together.”
For a second their hands met Then, as a swirling eddy set the boat whirling, the girl seized a paddle.
“You see,” she said quietly as they reached more placid water, “we didn’t tell you while you were ill; afraid it would disturb you.”
“It would have,” said Johnny. Quite suddenly something had come to him. “The red lure!” he murmured, quite unconscious of the fact that he spoke out loud. “When will I ever get back to it?”
“What is the red lure?” the girl asked in surprise.
“The red lure? Why, that’s my pet name for mahogany, the prince of priceless woods. If you’ve ever seen the mirror-like gleam of its polished surface, if you’ve seen how like a fire on the hearth at sunset it is, you know what it means.”
“Well,” he went on, “I’ve been given an opportunity to bring down a sample, one boom full, a hundred thousand feet or so of that matchless wood from a forest the value of which can scarcely be estimated. I had made a fine start, too, when I was suddenly driven into the bush. I promptly got myself lost, and here I am.”