Rex Beach

Jaragu of the Jungle

Warsaw 2022

Contents

Chapter 1. Trouble Aloft

Chapter 2. Jaragu

Chapter 3. A Miraculous Escape

Chapter 4. The San Blas Chieftain

Chapter 5. In Hostile Country

Chapter 6. The Poison Cup

Chapter 7. The Buried Box

Chapter 8. A Strange Story

Chapter 9. In Darkness

Chapter 10. The Village of the Dead

Chapter 11. The Bushmaster

Chapter 12. Pursuit

Chapter 13. The El Chico

Chapter 14. Death on the Ledge

Chapter 15. Yellow Riches

Chapter 16. The Attack

Chapter 17. The Siege

Chapter 18. The Way Out

Chapter 19. New Enemies

Chapter 20. Down the River

Chapter 1. Trouble Aloft

Flying blind through the blackness of a wall of tropical rain, the man at the plane’s controls looked grim.

“Now we’re in for it!” he muttered, his tone inaudible above the roar of the storm.

A blinding flash of lightning stabbed the darkness and revealed “Sunshine” Jones, his negro boy companion, looking back at him from the forward cockpit.

“Wh-wh-where is we at?” the colored boy hollered, his eyes as round as saucers.

“Over the San Blas coast,” the pilot answered, grinning behind his rain-drenched goggles.

Sunshine had been brought along as a guide, and now he was asking where he was!

The altimeter showed a thousand feet. The compass indicated a course “east by southeast.” They had been flying two hours since leaving the Colon airport at the Atlantic end of the Panama Canal. According to the pilot’s best reckoning, allowing for a sixty-mile headwind and drift, they ought to be somewhere over that wild and unexplored region along the Caribbean shore of Central America, but just exactly where?

Stories of fabulously rich gold mines had trickled out of this isolated section of the tropics. Captain William Adams was interested in mines–interested enough to go flying in search of one–but this storm was making mine-hunting both difficult and dangerous. Ex-army pilot and mining engineer with a yearning for adventure, Captain Adams had been in many a tight place, but now he felt, quite abruptly, that there would some day be one he could not get out of with a whole skin.

Suddenly and without warning the single motor cut out. Captain Adams had had his dire hunch confirmed.

The pilot instantly set the low-winged plane into a long glide while he struggled to get the motor going again.

A few seconds showed him that it was hopeless.

“Heads up, Sunshine,” he called with contrary cheerfulness. “We’re going down to earth–and we’ll probably land smack on a crocodile!”

As they rushed downward, Captain Adams looked over the side. He had a fleeting glimpse of a wind-swept beach with long combers rolling in from the ocean, and on the beach the lithe brown figure of a young savage with his face upturned at the unfamiliar sight of an airplane swooping low.

Then came the crash.

A sound as of a single clap of thunder echoed through the rain. The airplane quivered like a great bird which had been struck a mortal blow, and then was still.

If anyone had thought that a gigantic denizen of the air had fallen there, he would have been sure that all life had left the huge body.

Chapter 2. Jaragu

The surf was pounding and roaring across the outer reef as Jaragu swung his cayuca, or fishing boat, toward a break in the coral barrier. The cayuca had been hollowed out of a solid piece of mahogany, as were most of the boats used by the San Blas Indians of the region.

The boy wore only a loin cloth. His finely muscled body was the color of bronze. Watching his chance, he drove in on the crest of a wave. A moment later he was moving swiftly toward the second or inner reef.

The water was choppy now, but the swell and roll of the open sea was broken by the outer reef that shelters Puyadas Cay from the storm-swept Caribbean seas. The wind was still howling from offshore. Blinding rain descended with tropical suddenness and with it came the crashing of thunder and forked lightning.

Guided only by sound and a sure sense of direction, the boy steered the light cayuca through a narrow break in the inner reef. From there to shore it was easy going, and he settled back and let the wind carry him along.

In the bow of the boat there was a large tarpon with a hole in its head where the boy’s spear had found its mark. Jaragu looked at the large fish and smiled proudly. He had been far down the coast. His luck had been good. Now he was almost home.

Just as the brown lad sat thinking about these things, his keen ears caught a strange noise. It came from above and sounded like the drone of many, many giant bees.

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