Turning, he hurried down a logging road to the edge of a broad creek. There the white bulk of a large flat-bottomed boat greeted him.
“They didn’t take the _Maria Theresa_, anyway.” There was a comfort in that. “Fellow’d sure be up against it a hundred miles from the coast without a boat.”
Even as he thought this, his ears caught the steady dip-dip of pit-pan paddles.
Again there came no answer. Even the paddles, if paddles there had been, were silent.
He turned and walked slowly back to camp. There he groped about until he had found a bench. This he leaned against the side of a cabin, and burying his back in the soft cohune nut thatch, pressed his brow with both hands in an endeavor to think sanely and clearly.
Time passed. The coals on the cooking platform growing dimmer and dimmer, at last blinked out. The darkness appeared to grow more intense, the night more silent.
“They said it couldn’t be done,” he muttered at last, “and perhaps it can’t. But there was the red lure. The red lure,” he repeated softly.
The red lure! He had heard of it first in a little cabinetmaker’s shop in Chicago. In that shop an old man wrought wonders with precious woods—rosewood and ebony and mahogany. Strange tales this old man had to tell, and he told them as he worked. Tales they were of tropical isles, of green rivers and dense forests.
One day as he put the last touch to a bit of wood that gleamed red as a western sunset, he had exclaimed:
“The red lure, Johnny! The red lure! That’s what’s beckoned men on, and times enough to their death!”
Then, after laying the bit of wood down as gently as if it had been a priceless porcelain top, he had added:
“And, Johnny, I know where the lure ends. Far up a tropical river, a big black river. It’s there, Johnny, and unscarred by the hand of man.”
“Why?” Awed by the old man’s tones, Johnny had whispered the word.
“That’s it, Johnny.” The old man had half closed his eyes. “That’s what the owner of that land would like to know. Three times he has sent men in boats up the Rio Hondo. Three times they came back empty handed; that is, the ones that came back at all. Why? Who knows. Who can solve all the mysteries of the tropics? Who can guess the trickery and intrigue that lies hidden in a Spaniard’s mind? The red lure is still there. Men have died for it; but there it stands. The red lure, Johnny. The red lure!”
