Tiger Lure

Front matter

BY T. S. STRIBLING

A Complete Novelette

THE United Rubber Company has a post at Taos, a structure in old Spanish mission style built of cemented shells. It was once a mission, I believe, then a fort and now a post. It stands naked in a furnace of sunshine in the center of what the mestizos are pleased to call their plaza; that is a space of ground some fifty yards wide beaten perfectly bare and hard by naked feet instead of beaten dusty by shod ones. Beyond the plaza the jungle sets in like the hair on a woman's head, glossy, lush and fragrant.

II

I HAVE no object in making of Señor Monan a mystery, although for several days he was a mystery to me. But no man, I take it, can remain permanently without a confidant. Men have been gregarious for too many millions of years; he has communicated his thoughts and emotions for too many epochs for any individual in this era of grace to place a seal upon his heart.

During the evenings, Señor Monan and I played at cribbage or dominoes and sometimes his daughter L'wanna sat in our games or made lace near us at another table. Very slowly the señor began to unfold himself, a little bit at a time, until within perhaps a week of evenings, I discovered why he had hesitated to receive me into his home—an extraordinary thing amid the uniform hospitality of Venezuela.

Señor Monan was implicated in some sort of political trouble in Caracas, an emeute, an uprising, I never understood the details. His followers had lost, and now any day he was expecting arrest and a long imprisonment or even severer punishment. I had known that Venezuela was one of the most unquiet of South American states, but it seemed odd in this somnolent village to find an insurrectionist. Before this fiasco, it seemed, he once held a consulship to England. Now he confined himself to this plantation of moriche walks which belonged to a friend in Caracas and where he hoped to escape suspicion and elude arrest.

The señor explained all this with the detachment Of a third person, but L'wanna, after the manner of weeping girls, wiped her black eyes on the least possible corner of her handkerchief that would serve, then silently went on with her lace-making.

At other times I saw L'wanna in the patio snipping roses for her jar or trying to make friends with the butterflies. An endless variety of these insects floated over the adobe into the flower plot; heliconias, silver-wings, and half a dozen other species I did not know. Once I saw her persuade a brilliant blue Morphos to poise on the tip of her finger and suck a drop of honey.

She was but a child on the dewy side of sixteen, and her face! Sometimes I think Catholic mothers, when praying to the Holy Virgin with their tiny ones asleep beneath their hearts—I think, may be, the grace of Our Lady of Sorrows must be kissed upon those dawning features. I don't know, but standing in my window, I have laid down the snares and gins of my profession and tried to explain so vivid and so pure a loveliness.

The avi-fauna of Venezuela opened a larger field to me than I had expected. It contains fifty-odd species of humming-birds alone. One day as I was constructing some close-meshed cages to receive my catch of these exquisite little creatures, Señor Monan and L'wanna came into my workshop.

The girl watched me curiously and finally asked me how I caught the birds. I explained the different traps, snares, limes and nooses. As she considered each article, she pressed her full lips together and with a little shudder declared that they reminded her of the racks and thumbscrews and pillories in the museum at Caracas and that she would look at them no more.

She would have left the room, but her father reminded her that she was my hostess and I her guest. She remained a few moments longer, looking about my shop with such an air of repressed horror that it embarrassed me in my work. Finally she made some excuse and went out into the patio.

Señor Monan was distressed over the slight occurrence.

"I suppose I am to blame for it," he told me. "When L'wanna was a tiny thing, she wanted a bird and a cage. I explained to her the cruelty—I mean the cruelly it would have been for pleasure," he corrected tactfully, "not cruelty for scientific purposes. I suppose she remembers it." Then he added, "Her great grandfather on my mother's side was Simon Bolivar. Somehow our family have never been able to endure prisons or prisoners."

With the completion of the cages I began collecting specimens. A remarkable trapping-ground lay before me in the jungle around Señor Mohan's palm walks. Birds were everywhere. They ranger! from little tyrant fly-catchers that snapped mosquitoes along the pathside to flocks of flamingoes moving in a red line against the green wall of the distant jungle. Yellow cassiques and lavender jays glinted among the palm crests; macaws, toucans, parakeets screamed through the forest. Yet with this fullness of life I was strangely unfortunate.

I laid a course of traps extending from the Rio Tigre some mile and a half back into the jungle. Twice a day I made the round—in the cool mornings and afternoons. After trapping two days without a specimen, I began to wonder seriously what was wrong with my gins. One morning I reset them very carefully and determined to revisit them at noon notwithstanding the oppressive heat.

SO AFTER luncheon, during siesta, I slipped away from the sleeping household and set out for the river. I was almost to the water's edge when I saw something brilliantly red moving slowly through the undergrowth. I hurried forward as quietly as possible, slipping through lianas, bamboo and saw grass, when I saw through an interstice that it was Jesu Diabolo carrying in his hand the wings of a scarlet ibis. He was just stepping into a native buugo to put out into the river, but at my call he looked about and waited.

When he caught sight of me struggling through the vines he lifted his sombrero. "I was just thinking of you. señor."

"You ought to be," I declared, suddenly understanding the disappearance of my catch.

"How go the birds?" he asked impudently.

"Fast enough," I returned, looking pointedly at the flaming wings in his hands.

"Do you catch a great many?" His assurance made me angrier every moment.

"More than I collect!" I snapped.

"Perhaps something robs your traps, señor," he suggested with composure.

I looked at the fellow wondering how much further he would carry his effrontery.

"What price do you get for ibis wings?" I asked, trying to keep the temper out of my voice.

He glanced negligently at the beauties in his hand.

"Five pesos."

"To me," I said smoothly, "they are worth twenty-five pesos, and a living scarlet ibis is worth a hundred pesos. In the future, my good Jesu, if you will kindly leave my birds in my traps, I'll pay you your five pesos as a bounty or tax or blackmail, whatever you please to call it—but let my birds alone!"

I hardly know what I expected Jesu Diabolo to do, but he surprized me by laughing immoderately until tears dripped down the side of his nose from his one good eye.

"Ah, you American wits!" he gasped. "Such dry jokes! Such droll sayings! I have heard how amusing you were, but I never thought, I n-never d-dreamed2"

He sputtered into laughter again, then presently sobered and continued:

"Unfortunately, señor, it would do you no good to pay me blackmail or tariff or tax. I cut these wings from a bird which I used to bait a camoudie trap." By this time he had become entirely sober and now looked at me with his habitual craft. "Suppose I go around with you. I might suggest something. A skunk or a sloth or a lynx may rob your traps. A tree-trap might stop them."

Now I did not want the fellow with me at all, but that lying amenity which society instills into all of us caused me to stay my steps for him, and we went on together.

As we pushed our way through the steaming undergrowth he told me that for some time he had intended to call upon me.

"It would be agreeable to you," he proceeded delicately, "if I should take the liberty of calling?"

"Charmed," I agreed out of custom.

Diabolo turned to look at me with his one pale eye.

"Will you really admit me, señor?"

"Why—y-yes," I assented in surprize.

"And sav nothing about it?"

"Why not?" I asked still [at a loss.]

"Is it possible you [illegible] happiness?" cried illegible} one in Taos.

"I have [illegible]

"The [illegible] away some gnats that gathered about his dirty flap. "Señor Monan fires at me point-blank the moment I appear within range of his mansion. He is an unsocial fellow. Bah!"

The half-breed shrugged his shoulders with Latin carelessness.

With a crawly feeling I recalled the Maxim silencer and the little nick in my helmet. I wondered if on my first day in Taos, Jesu had led me deliberately under fire? I turned and stared at the man's queer face with its detestable bluish flap. It reminded me of a rattlesnake that had moulted everything except an eye-scale.

"Why is Monan so pointed in his discouragement of your society?" I inquired at last.

The Diabolo shrugged again.

"Merely because I tried to steal his daughter, señor, that is all. It is a custom among my mother's people, the Arawaks. We steal our wives. And a fine custom it is, señor, swift, dramatic, the ambush, the sudden rush."

"You—tried to steal L'wanna?" I cried with a slack jaw.

"Such a voice!" exclaimed the half-breed impatiently. "I was not trying to steal a dog or a pig or a bird wing, señor, nothing of value!" he defended sharply.

"But L'wanna!" I cried with a sinking heart. "Why, man, she's but a child!"

"Child!" scoffed Jesu. "Madre de Dios! What would you call a woman—one in the grave? She is sixteen—" He whistled. "She ought to be a grandmother."

There was an ophidian fascination in the half-breed's face as he went on.

"I would be a good husband to the little pantheress, but no—this proud don—no, he is angry if I woo her as the Arawaks, and behold he will not allow me to woo her as Spaniards do. If I sing a song in her hearing, out he jumps with his rifle like a jack-in-the-box! As to talking through the bars of her window, I might as well talk to the stars!" He clenched his slender brown hands in nervous tension. "Unless—unless2"

He bent upon me a pale evil look [illegible]

[illegible]

His voice retreated to a dry whisper even in the silence of the sleeping jungle.

IT SUDDENLY struck me, as I I stared at him, that a serpent crawling toward a dove's nest is moved by no immoral impulse. It acts from a simple powerful desire without any complication of conscience. To Jesu Diabolo, obtaining L'wanna was no more a question of morals than plucking a mango. She was difficult to reach, that was all.

Yet queer to say his unmorality filled me with a greater loathing than if he had shown a comprehending contumacy. But he was as innocent as a dagger.

I don't know what—perhaps something about the pallor of my face, my unsteady breathing, suggested to the half-breed that I sympathized with him in his mania. Or perhaps Jesu Diabolo, like Señor Monan, was a lonely man, isolated from his kind by the ridicule of the village. At any rate, through clay-colored lips, the Indian began a molten outpouring in my ear.

"Dios, one mistake, señor, one little mistake and a man regrets it forever. I lie awake all night when the moon is full, thinking of what might be if I only had her, if only I had clung to her when I gripped her in my arms! Oh, she could spit in my face, stab me, burn me with fire2"

Little drops of sweat stood out on Jesu's face and moistened the edge of his bluish flap so that he had to shake off the gnats. His face was gray.

"Señor," he went on, and the force of his heart-beats shook his tones, "when a man loses the greatest quarry of all. he thinks of it forever. He thinks how he might have saved his game, might have won. Over and over I think just how I did it—how I ought to have done it.

"Every night as I lie staring into the moon, I creep again into Señor Monan's house. The señor is gone, but she is there in the patio cutting flowers. Oh, señor, lifting her white arms this way and that! I creep, creep—leap upon her! I grip her in my arms, soft, writhing, a tiger's cub smelling of roses!

"Oh Madre de Dios! I am drunk! I rush for the outside! The old negro woman blocks my way with an ax! Then I make my terrible mistake. I lift an arm to parry the edge. Like a flash she is out of my arms, gone—gone—gone—into a door that locks when it slams, then another, slamming, locking, slamming, locking—no end of rooms in the cursed place!

Sweat poured off Jesu Diabolo. He gripped a tembuse vine and shook it in a fury of despair, crying:

"Fool! Fool! Fool! To lose her in an instant! The old woman could only have split a shoulder or a few ribs2"

As I watched his outburst, never have I felt such violent hatred for any of the spawn of the earth. A furious impulse to murder him seized me. I searched my pockets with shaking fingers. I found my pocket-knife; it was sizable. I had it out. I fumbled open the blade.

Suddenly Jesu, who was looking at me intently, gave a queer laugh. Then he laughed more. He sat down by the tembuse vine and laughed loudly and sardonically.

Quite suddenly he checked his uproar and asked—

"What are you going to trim, señor?"

I made no reply.

"That was an Arawak joke, señor," he explained looking at my knife. "I am half Arawak and half Spanish. This time I jest like the Arawaks about a woman—the woman señor loves, eh?"

He winked his good eye at me with monstrous effect.

I stared at him with hammering heart.

"Did you not jest with me about stealing these wings?" he inquired placidly. "Very funny, very droll. Now I give you my Arawak jest about your woman, eh?" He stood up, shrugged, took a deep breath and said, "Now where are the traps, señor?"

His lie was so absurd, I thought before I killed him, I would show it to him to his teeth.

"Why does Señor Monan fire on you at sight, Jesu Diabolo?" I whipped out.

Jesu opened his single pale eye in astonishment.

"He doss not shoot, Señor LeFever!"

I jerked off my sun-helmet and thrust it into his hands.

"How came that nick in the straw?" I could scarcely keep from leaping on him.

He examined the chipped place with passing interest, ran a finger over the raw edge, then observed carelessly2

"Moths, señor. Camphor and pepper are good."

"That's a bullet-hole from Señor Monan's carbine, Jesu Diabolo!" I cried, growing more angry at his flimsy tissue of lies. "And you did attempt to kidnap L'wanna!"

"How absurd!" defended the half-breed. "He would have the law on me in a moment. Kidnap—why, I should be garroted!"

"The señor has good enough reasons for keeping away from the law," I replied hotly, "or he would have2"

"I know very little of Señor Monan." declared Jesu, "if he is criminal—is he criminal?"

I could have bit my tongue for giving the information. Now I had more incentive than ever to stab him, but for that very reason—it is difficult to explain—because my motives were mixed and so in a way were selfish; because I now had two impulses, one weighing against the other, my vengeance became impossible.

I think Jesu sensed the dilemma goring in my brain, for he whistled a phrase of his detestable song, shrugged his shoulder again and at last made a placating movement and said in a commonplace tone—

"If the señor will show me his snares, I will set my traps and protect him."

I MARVELED at the lightness with which he came back to easy footing. We stood in the edge of a little savanna near a pau d'arco tree in which I had set a number of fine cat-gut snares. The trunk of the giant with its network of vines and shoots formed an easy climb. I indicated a tree, caught hold of a liana and began working my way up through the furry leaves.

Odd to say the last of my snares were unset. I reformed their loops with an irritated thought of monkeys. Below, I Could hear Jesu carelessly jingling his traps or breaking little twigs, awaiting my descent. After a bit he hushed these slight noises. A thought of treachery fluttered through my brain. I maneuvered for an opening in the leaves and peered down.

The half-breed knelt intently studying the choked area around the base of the pau d'arco. As I looked he pressed apart some vines and exhibited a few sticks, a handful of withered flowers fallen from a stalk above and some clods of fresh earth. He lifted one of the sticks which some liana tendril had bound to another in a rude cross and stirred the clay with it. He squatted, studying, stirring, brushing automatically at the gnats around his flap with the ibis wings.

By this time I was descending, not ten feet above his head.

"What is it?" I inquired, looking down suspiciously.

"Nothing, señor," he jingled his traps again.

I swung to the ground and reached the spot he had been examining. With vague distrust, I thrust my toe into the fresh earth and upturned it. There exposed lay the turquoise and ruby body of a peacock heron.

"What sort of scamp are you!" I snapped, out of temper. "You've ruined the feathers. Now it will do neither of us any good!"

"Señor!" the half-breed deprecated my anger.

At that instant a tremendous black beetle with formidable trefoil pincers scuttled out of the disturbed earth with a dry rustling.

"Ah, that explains it, señor, a coroner beetle!" he cried. "Whatever robbed your snares dropped this dead bird and the beetle buried it. A pity to lose it—" he stared at it in a deep reverie—"a great pity—such bright feathers."

With a trapper's instinct to leave no sign, he musingly recovered the body with earth and tossed back the withered blossoms and crossed sticks. He picked up his traps again and began climbing the pau d'arco.

"I'll stop this robber for you, Señor LeFever. Tomorrow you may expect your gins full of birds, and perhaps some minx or monkey will be in my trap. You take your game and I mine, eh? We work well together."

I nodded and Jesu went up as nimbly as a chinchilla. In a short time he came down, wished me luck and took himself off toward the river.

For some reason I had little heart to go further on my rounds. An unwonted depression crept over me. Perhaps it was a nervous reaction after my anger. At any rate I was disgusted with myself and my traps. Indeed, all at once, my very occupation seemed puerile and ridiculous—a [bird-watc]her! What difference between me and the half-breed? He pandered to the vanity of women, and I to the intellectual vanity of men. Both appeared utterly futile. Why this endless, empty study of birds? Did a slowly accumulating catalog of facts lead anywhere? Indeed, did man's whole life and works have any significance at all? The thought stretched out and out.

What excuse had man for all his tremendous pride? What real difference was there between me and Jesu Diabolo and the gaudy heron in the mold, or even the coroner beetle, laying its eggs in the dead meat? Were we not all little vital mechanisms, evolved with prodigal purposelessness by the steaming painted jungle around us?

A prodigious golden note clanged against my ears. It filled the humid air, the endless aisles of the trees and the wide reach of the sky with solemn reverberations. Slowly, argently, came the sound, chime on chime, billows of euphony! It suggested a solemn carillon in gothic spire, a solitary worshiper in the fevered jungle.

The first sound turned me into a keen ornithologist again. I followed the sound, searching everywhere with eyes and ears. For half a mile I stumbled, crawled and climbed; then I saw a sight which set my heart pounding.

On a branch of a Brazil tree perched a snow-white bell-bird, or as the natives call it, the arapunga. This was the eagerly sought object of my whole adventure. I did not disturb the singer, but marked its location. Then with endless labor, I retraced my steps to the pau d'arco, carried all of Jesu's traps to the Brazil tree, set them and spread a thick lime on every limb in my reach. After that I dragged myself home utterly exhausted but filled with a new professional enthusiasm.

III

THA I night, all night long, thoughts of Jesu Diabolo scurried through my brain like rats. I lay in a half sleep. At one moment I could see him creeping upon L'wanna while I sweated, helpless, in the grip of a nightmare. At another time we would stand quarreling furiously whether she were woman or child. Then I would twitch wide awake with the question still in my mind.

Was Señor Monan's daughter a woman? After all, was she—was she? Some profound interest seemed to balance on the answer.

At last in hope of shaking off such fancies I g»t up and walked across the chill tiled floor to the window. From the patio a smell of damp earth and flowers drifted through the bars. Outside in a faint starlight, two lunar moths spiraled monotonously about each other, appearing and vanishing in the gloom of a geranium tree. For several minutes I stood inhaling deeply, hoping to induce sleep when a light glowed in a window across the patio. I blinked at it, wondering sleepily who had lighted it when the shadow of a woman's arm crossed the curtain.

It was odd how that hint of a woman brought me wide awake, alert, in an instant. Indeed, I found myself waiting almost breathlessly for its reappearance.

As I waited, I became sure for no reason in the world that the light came from L'wanna's chamber. A dozen queries beseiged my heart. Was she ill or lonely or unhappy that she arose at such an hour? Did the languid night tease her into restlessness as it did me? Or did she keep some vigil of her faith?

A sudden strange impulse, a sympathy—yes, a sympathy moved me to call across the patio and acquaint the girl with my own wakefulness. I hardly knew what I would say. My heart beat with queer excitement. I drew a trembling breath and framed her name on my lips. At that moment the candle was snuffed out.

A hazy purple spotch floated before my eyes where the light had been. Then I heard a grating door across the patio softly open and close.

An extraordinary impulse sent me flying without second thought to my own bedroom door which gave upon the court. My hand bungled a nervous interval at the latch. I swung the door open in silent violence and stepped outside. Some one half-crouched in the opposite entry. I was well across the court, my heart knocking at my ribs when I recognized the crooked form of the negress, Angela.

So strong upon me was the impression of L'wanna's passing, I came near seizing he ancient and demanding where her mistress had gone, when I realized Angela was alone. It was the old crone who had opened the grating; it was the shadow of her withered arm I had marked upon the curtain.

The revulsion set me shivering; then, somehow, the irony of the thing brought relief to my overwrought nerves. I laughed sardonically, but the wrinkled creature paid not the slightest attention to my mirth. Then I stood smiling and at last musing on the hag to whom I had poured my emotion. And yet, I reflected, in her time, in her little flash of youth, no doubt, my grimalkin had her quota of lovers, dancing attendance upon her, spending white nights outside her hut, perhaps fighting for her favor—it only they could rise now and see this huddling rack of bones....

A morning chill sent a shiver over my body, then I noticed a pale illumination filled the patio. Somewhere a cock broke into a shrill crowing. It was too late for bed again, so with a yawn and a somewhat ironic "good morning" to Angela, I set out for my traps in the breaking dawn.

When I made my way through the palm walks and reached the edge of the river, I was not surprized in the least to see Jesu's bungo lying in the reeds.

As I stood looking at the clumsy boat, I grew ashamed that I had contracted the slightest partnership with L'wanna's attempted abductor. I promised myself the next time we met I would break off all intercourse with him. As I thought on it my wrath grew, and I vowed if he overstepped the least form I would kill him outright. It was a queer twist of civilization that I must wait for some petty second offense before I could kill him for his first inflamed attack.

I was chewing on this formality when a noise ahead brought me up sharply. By way of jungle caution I stepped behind a huge caladium and stood peering between the leaves in an effort to locate the disturbance.

What I saw astounded me. Jesu Diabolo tramped amid the undergrowth, bending low to search the ground and making short casts back and forth like a hound at fault. Apparently he was trailing something.

For a full minute I stood quite at loss to account for his actions when I suddenly remembered having moved the fellow's traps. No doubt he had gone to the pau d'arco, had missed the traps and, according to his nature, had leaped at the conclusion that I had stolen them. Now he was trying to follow my yesterday's trail and recover his property.

His suspicions filled me with disgusted amusement and, at the same time, offered me an opportunity to insult the fellow and have done with him at once. I was on the eve of discovering myself when he paused, drew an old brass watch from his pocket and consulted it. He stood a moment chewing his black mustache and calculating the time painfully, then took himself off toward the river.

I was so surprized at this dénouement I did not hail him at all. Never before had I seen an Indian carry a watch or pay the slightest attention to the flight of time. I could not fancy why he should give up looking for his traps on a certain hour. If there were a mortal unhurried by the fewness of minutes to the hour, that mortal surely was Jesu Diabolo.

PRESENTLY I gave up the slight conundrum and made my way to the Brazil tree. All along the course I saw signs of Jesu's reckless search, trampled undergrowth, crushed clumps, even to the tree where I had placed his traps.

When I observed this, I stood smiling at how close he had come to his quest and yet had missed it, when my ear caught a fluttering high up in the boughs. My limed twigs had snared something.

I craned my neck and moved about under the branches trying to locate my captive. Above me the Brazil tree stretched skyward chamber on chamber. The nearer leaves looked dark and polished, but far above they shaded into bluish-green masses. At last I glimpsed the tremulous wings of my catch. They were white wings. I peered more closely, almost incredulously. It was a bell-bird—no—yes. My heart began to thump. It really was a bell-bird!

I counted the limbs upward to my bird, for a man can get lost in one of those huge trees as easily as in a skyscraper, then I set about my climb. By good fortune a Spanish arbor made a long reach from the ground to the first branches and beyond that my way was easy.

Spanish arbor is a species of morning glory and at this hour its pied goblets formed a flowery mass just above the first branches. I gripped the vine, tested it with my weight, which set all the glories in a stir. Then I started up, hand over hand.

Beneath the first branch I paused a moment for breath, when I observed a continued stirring in the flowers above me. It was near my trap. I paused, thinking perhaps a bush-master or a sloth was in Jesu's trunk-trap and I had no stomach for a nipped finger. I climbed on cautiously when out of the blossoms arose a head, a girl's head—it was L'wanna.

I came within a squeak of loosing all holds and falling twenty feet to the ground.

The girl stared at me with horror-widened eyes; then slowly she seemed to recognize me. She gave a wavering cry.