Amazon Adventure by Willard Price

Author:Willard Price [Price, Willard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2011-10-09T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter16

Bullets at Midnight

A bath of snakes slithered down over the heads of the unwelcome visitors. Bang went the revolver, let off by a nervous trigger finger. The bullet panged into a tree on the island. The men roared with rage and terror, thrashing about violently, trying to free themselves of the uncanny little crawlers. Who was to know that they were not deadly?

The man standing let go of the gunwale of the Ark in order to have both hands free for his battle with the serpents. He had no sooner done so than he lost his balance and went overboard, capsizing the canoe.

‘Hey, I can’t swim,’ blubbered one of the men, but Hal did not tarry to rescue him. The sails were

up in a flash and the men bent to the oars. The pursuing boat also ran up a sail.

Hal noticed that the shouted words of the men following were only rarely in Spanish or Portuguese, but mostly in a wharfside English. Croc might have brought the thugs to South America with him or, more likely, he had picked them up in Iquitos. Along the wharves of Iquitos where ocean liners dock after a voyage of 2300 miles up the Amazon from the Atlantic, there were always plenty of rough characters from North America or Europe who were quite willing to engage in crime for a consideration. Along with such a gang of willing murderers, Croc doubtless had one or two Indians or caboclos who knew the river. Perhaps one of them was sheeting home the sail, for it seemed to be making the best use of every puff of air.

But the men at the oars could not be river men. Perhaps they were more accustomed to the deck of a cargo steamer than to the rower’s post in a montaria. There seemed to be a bank of four oars on each side. Of course they had to work in unison to be successful, but they were continually tangling with each other to the accompaniment of curses that echoed back from the forest wall.

Croc had been forced to pause long enough to pick up the two men dumped from the canoe, right the canoe, and attach the painter to the stern of the larger boat.

‘Good boy, Roger!’ said Hal, seeing the fruit of his brother’s endeavours. Every moment gained might mean the difference between success and failure, life and death.

He felt less cheerful when bullets began to come from the pursuing boat. They zinged by in such a savage hurry that Hal knew they must be coming from powerful rifles of a long enough range to reach them even if they were half a mile away instead of a poor 500 feet.

One struck the stern, one crashed through the toldo, and one crumpled a leg of the helmsman’s platform so that it tipped precariously. Banco abandoned the rudder and came tumbling down to safety. The Ark swung off course. ‘Get back to the helm,’ Hal ordered. Banco replied with a torrent of excited gibberings and huddled down in the shelter of the toldo.

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