He looked again at the swaying spot of gold that was the girl. The girl seemed almost real. Her face was flushed. It would be, if she swayed to music in such a clime. The black woman, like an ebony statue, sat beating the drum as she sang:
Then a sudden thought struck Johnny. The dancing girl was not black; she was not golden-brown like the Indian, not the brown of the Mexican, either. She was white like himself. A very comely white girl she was, too; red cheeks, tossing curly hair, freckles, slightly turned-up nose—a real girl.
“It’s a dream,” he told himself. “A white girl in the heart of this wilderness? I’m dead. This is Heaven. She’s an angel.”
He wanted to laugh at this last, but did not dare. It might break the spell! The girl was too robust, too red-cheeked for an angel. Whoever heard of a freckle-faced angel? But whoever heard of a real white girl in such a spot?
The mats looked real, too. What of those on which he lay? He ran his fingers over them.
“New, too,” he told himself. “How strange!”
Things were coming back to him. He had walked a long way, crept farther, dragged himself to this cabin. Here, after one try at bringing water, he had lain himself down to die.
“Apparently I’m not dead,” he told himself. “These people must have arrived to save me.”
He closed his eyes and tried to think. In the process he fell asleep.
What had happened was this. Having found Johnny dying of fever there in the abandoned hut, the girl, Jean, had insisted upon abandoning all plans for their future except the business of bringing him back to life. To this end the native Carib woman had searched the jungle for such herbs as have long been used by her people for curing a fever. To this same end, brother and sister had searched that same forest for birds that would provide broth and for fruits to supply refreshing drink for the invalid.
The strange music and the rythmic motion that accompanied it was the idea of the Carib woman. Did she attach some wild native religious significance to it? Who can tell? The boy had made the drum from a deer’s skin and a hollow log; the girl had joined in merely to please the Carib woman and satisfy her simple soul.
Native medicine, the jungle’s nourishment, the black woman’s wild music, the white girl’s tender care, all these in their way had helped. When Johnny woke the second time he was well on his way to recovery.