Part 22 (1/2)

”Get up the tree, Joyce,” I whispered. ”I'll boost you.”

So I did, shoving her up for all I was worth, and she hung on as high as she could reach, and there she stuck; even the best girls aren't quite like boys.

”Swarm up it,” I urged.

”I can't,” she said in an agonised voice, and I saw it was true, her petticoats were to blame, of course; any boy would have been up before you could say ”knife.”

Down she came again with a thud, and old Mr. Buffalo heard it and made for us like a fiend. We ran for the next tree and dodged him round it; it was a bit too exciting! He made rushes at us dead straight, and we tried always to keep the trunk of the tree between us and him as if it were the leader in Fox and Geese. When he came past like a bolt we ran the other side, but once or twice he nearly spiked us, and if he had knocked one of us down, or we had stumbled, it would have been all up with us. It was exhausting too. I was fearfully out of breath myself; being on a steamer a fellow can't keep in training, and as for Joyce, she was panting so that she couldn't speak.

Then I noticed that across the road was a jungly thicket; it was not open ground, as it was on the side we had come from, and I thought if we could reach that we might perhaps lose the gentleman, or he would lose us.

So I explained to Joyce in gasps that the next time he charged we must run behind his back and bolt across the road; she nodded and clutched my hand tighter than ever.

So we did it and were half-way over the road--it was very wide--before he found it out.

All the time, I must tell you, he had been making a funny little noise, a bit between a grunt and squeak, quite ridiculous for a huge black hairy beast like him; if I had had any breath to waste it would have made me laugh.

Now we heard that funny little noise--Uweekuweekuweek--just like that, coming over the road; we hadn't time to look. Never did any road I ever crossed seem so long; it was like a bad dream. We slipped and stumbled and didn't seem to make any headway, and every moment I expected to feel that great head in the flat of my back sending me sprawling ready to be spiked. At last we reached the line of bushes, and I gave Joyce a great pull with all my strength to pitch her to one side, for he was close on us then, and she went headlong and fell full length into the bushes, and I dropped on the top of her just as his majesty thundered past.

We lay there quiet as mice, though it was awfully uncomfortable; I was squas.h.i.+ng Joyce to bits, and great thorns seemed running into me all over. Then a dreadful thought occurred to me--there were probably snakes there! Which was worst, snakes or the buffalo? And I asked cautiously--

”Have you been stung, Joyce?” and she answered so gravely, ”Not yet,”

that I exploded, and, would you believe it, that old animal that had been rootling about in the bushes to find us, heard it and came at us again. We scrambled up and ran, tripping and tearing and cras.h.i.+ng on into that wood, and I think he found some difficulty in following us, for after a while we couldn't hear him any more.

We stopped and listened with all our ears, but it seemed as if we were safe, for he wasn't a crafty animal and didn't know enough to come along quietly and surprise us. It was very dark there in that jungle, and for the first time I thought of you and how anxious you and Joyce's mother would be. So I said, ”Come along home now,” and pulled hold of Joyce.

But she resisted and said, ”It's not that way, silly; it's just the opposite.”

I was positive and so was she.

I tried to think of all the things one tells by: the stars, but there weren't any, and I couldn't have done much with them if there had been; the moss on the north side of the trees, but there didn't seem to be any. I guess it's different in Burma. However, there was just a yellowish glow still, and I knew that must be in the west, and as the river runs north and south, and we were on the left bank, I guessed the way I wanted to go was about right. When I had proved it to Joyce she gave in and said she had said it all the time, just as women always do!

So we walked and walked, but we never came to that old road again. Once I thought I'd found it, but it was only some open, flat, th.o.r.n.y ground.

It was very dark then, the dark comes on so fast here. Suddenly we both began to run as hard as we could, hand in hand; I don't know why, something set us off and I felt just as if I must, and I suppose Joyce did too, and then--cras.h.!.+--before we knew where we were--smas.h.!.+--we were flying, slipping, tobogganing down through some bushes, with our feet shooting out under us, and at last we reached the bottom. It was a steep gully, a kind of nullah. When we did get down we arrived separately, for we had had to let go to save ourselves. I was awfully sore, I know, and I wondered what had happened to her, being a girl and so much softer.

But she didn't seem to mind much, for when I sang out, she answered quite cheerfully, ”I'm sitting in the middle of a bramble bush like a b.u.mble-bee. Do they sit in bushes, though? I think I'm getting a little mixed!”

A girl like that is a jolly good pal, I can tell you!

It was a snaky place and that is what I was afraid of. We trod carefully along the bottom and made noises to scare them off. Then I had a happy thought; I had a box of matches with me, and I kept on striking them till we found a handful of dry twigs which burnt up finely. It was so still there that they blazed straight and steady, and I used them as a torch and flourished them about low down as we walked.

I don't know if we really did see any snakes. Joyce is quite positive she counted fourteen, sliding away in front of the light at different times; but then she sees things much quicker than I do.

[Ill.u.s.tration: WE HAD TO PLUNGE THROUGH MARSHY GROUND.]

It took us a long time to get out of that nullah, and we tried all sorts of different ways, but the sides were too steep. Often we had to stop to get more twigs, and once, just as I had got a handful, Joyce said, ”Why, there are little plums growing on them.” We ate quite a lot, and they were refres.h.i.+ng and bitter, but it didn't mean much, for they were all skin and stone.

The nullah sloped up at the end, and after a good deal of hard work I hauled her up. It was jolly cold, I can tell you, and when we saw a light moving about ahead we made a bee-line for it. Joyce thought it was a will-o'-the-wisp; she had never seen one, but she had read of them, and she said they moved up and down just like that. We had to plunge through a lot of very marshy ground before we got to it, and sometimes we lost sight of it altogether; but it came again, and then it went out for good. We arrived at a high th.o.r.n.y hedge and I shouted, and then there was such a noise you would have thought the world was coming to an end,--dogs barking, c.o.c.ks crowing, people chattering, and at last a man with a lantern crept out from the hedge--it must have been his light we had seen--and he was followed by heaps of others, all Burmans, and they waved the light about; and when they saw who we were, and that we were alone, they were very kind and took us in through an opening in the hedge, and kicked the dogs away. We couldn't see much inside, for the moon wasn't up then, but they led us to a house, and made us go up a ladder on to a verandah and into a nice wooden room, where there was a civilised oil lamp on a bracket, and several women and children sitting and lying about on mats on the floor.

Joyce looked at me and I at her and we both knew what sights we were, all scratched and torn and muddy. Her dress had been white when we started, but you could hardly tell that now. I don't know how she felt, but I was glad to drop down on to a mat they gave us. We tried to explain who we were, but no one understood any English. Then they brought us some water from a great jar in the corner; they handed it to us in half a coco-nut, but it smelt so that we couldn't touch it, though we were awfully thirsty. So one of the men who had followed us in took up a round green thing with a smooth sh.e.l.l outside (I never knew coco-nuts looked like that before), and with his great knife made four cuts across the top in a neat square, and took out the piece as if it were a lid, and offered us the nut, making signs we were to drink it.

Joyce tried first and nodded with pleasure. ”It's good,” she said, and it was! A sort of sickly sweet stuff came out like sugary water, and when you drank a lot of it it made you feel very full inside suddenly.

When I read about coco-nut milk in _Swiss Family Robinson_ I always thought it was really like milk.