A great desire to sleep came over him. Nothing much mattered. A strange peace, the drowsy, drug-like peace of the tropics, lulled him to rest. Now he slept, defenseless in the open trail. And now he woke to journey on. When night came he could not rightly tell. In that gloom there was no day. In time he woke to find all dark about him. Still he struggled on.
The scream of parrots, the senseless chatter of monkeys, the roar of beasts of prey, all were the same to him, for all came faint and indistinct as in a dream.
Once he fought with a great spotted beast. A jaguar, perhaps. Or was that, too, only a dream? He could not tell. He seemed to wake from a horrible nightmare of claws and wild snarls to find his arms and chest torn and bleeding and his knife gone.
“Must have fought with my knife and lost it in the struggle,” was his mental comment.
He did not feel badly about that, nor did he search for it long. Nothing seemed to trouble him. Great waves of dreams swept over him.
His lips were dry and parched. “Fever. Malaria. That mosquito did it,” he told himself. That did not matter, either. Nothing mattered.
He dragged himself to the bank of the stream to cleanse his wounds. He drank long and deeply. A small fish, darting too close, was caught in his hand. This he devoured whole.
Other things of the jungle he ate—strange fruits, nuts and roots. Were they poison? It did not matter. Nothing mattered.
So, every day growing weaker, he came at the end of the third day to something very much like an abandoned clearing. Such it was, but he was too far lost in his drowsy sleep to know it. He had passed half through it when, of a sudden, he came upon a hut, a palm-thatched, forlorn and deserted hut. Yet, to him in his delirium of fever it was something far greater than an abandoned hut.
Throwing himself across the threshold, he fell prone in the dust of the floor.
A great lizard, sleeping in the corner, awoke and darted away; a small bird, whose nest was in the thatch, scolded shrilly. But Johnny heard nothing, saw nothing.
When at last he summoned up strength enough to drag himself to a corner and upon a bed of rotting mats, he murmured again:
In the deserted cabin was dampness, mold and desolation. Only one overwrought by peril and trouble, or made delirious by a burning fever, could have thought of it as home. Home? Here there was neither water, food nor friends.