For all this, a single mosquito, drifting in from nowhere, alighted on Johnny’s hand and began to drill. He had half finished his task when, without thinking, Johnny crushed him at a blow.
Instantly the boy’s mind was filled with foreboding. He had been bitten by a mosquito! One thing Hardgrave had said to him:
“Johnny, wherever you are, don’t ever lie down to sleep, not even in the daytime, without a mosquito-bar net over you. Malaria. The mosquitos carry it. It’s the only way you can get it.”
In camp they always slept beneath canopies.
“But out here,” Johnny grinned a wry grin, “what’s the chance? Well, if that was a malaria mosquito he’s got me loaded up good and plenty, and there’s no use bothering my mind about it.”
He did not bother his mind, but it bothered him. In his imagination he saw himself delirious with fever, insensible to his surroundings, wandering down narrow trails, tripped by vines, torn at by brambles. Watched from every dark hole and tree top by wild beasts, he saw himself struggle on until burned out by fever, exhausted by aimless, senseless endeavor, he at last lay down to die.
Shaking himself free from the haunting spectre, he threw fresh wood upon the fire.
He slept little that night, and welcomed the dawn less eagerly than he had the day before. He felt a desire to be idle, a dreamy indifference creeping over him.
“It’s the tropics,” he told himself. “Everyone slows up down here. The heat and the humidity makes you want to drag your feet, to loaf, to sit and dream. But I must not! I must act! Act! Now!”
At that he went at the task of building a raft and before noon it was completed.
A crude affair it was, to be sure. Dry logs of different lengths; there was no axe for hewing them. All these, bound clumsily together with tough tie-tie vine, made up the raft that eventually carried Johnny away from the great rocks and swiftly down the river. As far as he could see ahead, branches formed a perfect arch over the water, and at places hung so low that it was necessary for him to lie flat down to avoid being dragged off into the water.
He bade farewell to his rocky home with no regrets, but with some misgivings after all. He was to drift off into the unknown. What awaited him there? Who could tell?