Chapter VII: Panther Eye’s Return

“Sit down, Pant,” Johnny’s mind spun like a top. “Pant! Good old Panther Eye. Sit down here. I’ll switch off that big light. There now! That’s more like it. What’s the good of light for a fellow like you? See in the dark well as the light. I—I’ll be right back, Pant. Got coffee! Lot of good hot coffee and hamburger, just right hamburger. Have a feast, Pant, and talk just like we used to. Jungles, Pant, and the great, white wilderness. Submarine in the Chicago river. Man! Oh, man!”

At this, as if suddenly realizing he was talking like a madman, Johnny ducked away toward the kitchen where, with shaky fingers, he laid crisp, brown hamburgers between round sliced rolls and poured great, steaming mugs of coffee.

All the time he was thinking. Panther Eye of all people! Panther Eye, you will know if you have been Johnny Thompson’s friend for long, had for a long time been Johnny’s boon companion. Then, quite suddenly and mysteriously, he had dropped out of his life. Nothing very strange about this for, after all, Pant had always been a mysterious person. He could see in the dark quite as well as in the light. This marvelous gift had more than once gotten them out of a tight place. Rumor had it that Pant and a great surgeon had been hunting panthers. A panther had torn out the boy’s eye. The surgeon had shot the panther, cut out its eye skillfully, set it in the place of the one Pant had lost and now, like all cats, he could see in the dark. A likely sort of story. But then, how could you explain it? Pant had once told Johnny he did it with the aid of some mechanical lighting device. Johnny had not quite believed that. What was one to believe? At any rate, here was Pant back again. Where had he been? Johnny wanted awfully to know. They’d have a grand talk about old times. Pant would tell of some fresh adventures. And then? Johnny was actually trembling with anticipation. Things would happen, they always did when Pant was about, weird, mysterious things. Oh well, this made life seem worth living. So let them come.

“Remember the Dust Eater?” Pant was saying three minutes later. “Remember the airship and all those little brown men way up there in the north?” Pant’s strange eyes shone.

“And the Siberian tiger?” Johnny exclaimed.

“Yes! Yes, Johnny! Them were the days!”

“Every day is a good day,” Johnny philosophized. “Every day’s got to be better than the one that went before. There’s no turning back Pant, old boy. We’ve got to go forward. But what have you been doing, Pant?”

“What Satan always does,” Pant smiled strangely.

“What’s that?” Johnny stared.

“Don’t you remember, Johnny? You should read old and treasured very old books. They help a lot in understanding life. Satan when asked where he had been is supposed to have said he had come ‘From going to and fro in the earth, and from walking up and down in it.’”

“Well,” Johnny grinned. “Who’s got a better right to follow Satan’s example than you, Pant. But where did you walk?”

“Africa, Ethiopia to be more explicit.”

“Oh!” Johnny’s breath came quick with surprise. “The one place I’d most like to have been! What were you doing? What happened? Plenty I’ll bet! Tell me about it.”

“Well you know,” Pant slumped down comfortably in his chair, then, as there came some slight noise outside, sprang half out of his seat.

“You’re nervous,” Johnny looked at him in surprise. “Nervous as a cat.”

“You’d be too, Johnny, if—” Pant did not finish.

“Well, Johnny,” he began again a half minute later, “I’ve got a brother. Didn’t know it, did you?”

“No I—”

“I have, Johnny. And like myself, he’s a bit queer, only in a different way. He’s a naturalist of a sort. He hunts up all kinds of queer animals. And Ethiopia’s the place to look for them. You’d hardly believe the truth, Johnny, antelopes no taller than a good sized cat, crows with great, thick bills, monkeys with capes growing on their backs to keep off the rain, and baboons! All sorts of man-like creatures! That’s Ethiopia. My brother went down there to hunt out these creatures. He got himself lost and I had to go find him.

“It’s a strange place, Johnny, awfully strange. Things happen that you don’t forget, you’ll never forget.” Pant’s eyes sought the dark corners of the room. His slim fingers toyed nervously with his coffee cup.

“Did you find your brother?” Johnny asked.

Pant did not appear to hear. Perhaps he did not. There are times in all our lives when we are living so much in the past that nothing close to us seems real.

“There are spots in that strange land,” Pant went on as if Johnny had not spoken. “Spots so beautiful you fancy they may have been the Garden of Eden. Beautiful? Yes, beautiful beyond compare—“ Pant drew in a long, deep breath. “Just imagine, Johnny, passing through a tropical jungle. You can imagine, can’t you? Remember—”

“Yes,” Johnny said quietly, “I remember Central America. The mahogany forests, tangled bushes and vines. The hush of night at noonday in the deep shade of the forests, the bright flash of birds, the damp, sweet smell of a thousand flowers.”

“Yes, Johnny,” Pant sighed, “you do remember. And, Johnny, African jungles are wilder, ruggeder, grander, more lonely. Johnny,” his voice fell, “imagine all that, then try to think what it would be like to catch a sound, a voice, singing beautifully. Not a bird’s voice, Johnny, a human voice, a girl’s voice.

“Not in the jungle either,” again Pant paused, he seemed to be experiencing it all again. “Think of walking a few steps forward then, after parting the bushes, to find yourself looking down upon a—a sort of paradise.

“Try to picture it, Johnny.” Pant leaned forward. “Try to see it as I saw it then, a broad, green pasture, flat as a floor and green as no pasture in America ever is. Back of that pasture a grove of date palms and among these, set like a diamond in green jade, a jewel of a house.

“Bananas hung on bunches at the edge of a garden near by,” Pant breathed deeply. “Oranges and grapefruit all green and gold, were there too. And, Johnny,” again his voice fell, “Johnny, right in the foreground of that picture, as if she had been put there by an artist, and the whole thing was not real, just painted, was a girl.”

“A white girl?” Johnny spoke at last.

“She may have been all white,” Pant spoke slowly. “I don’t know about that. Queer isn’t it? I was with her for hours. I never asked myself the question, not once until now. But then, when you’re helping a pretty girl who is in great peril you don’t ask yourself, ‘What race does she belong to?’ now do you?”

“Helping a beautiful girl in great peril!” Johnny sat up.

“Yes, that’s what it came to in the end. That’s what I was going to tell you—

“But say!” Pant broke off suddenly. “Here it is eleven o’clock! I’ve got just ten minutes to make it!” He grabbed for his hat.

“Make what?” Johnny received no answer. Pant was gone.

“Same old Pant,” Johnny murmured after a moment’s thought.

Johnny sat there for a short time staring into his half drained coffee cup. Life had, he thought, always been strange. Curious, mysterious things were always bobbing up. Life was a joyous affair too. It sure was good to live. The coming weeks promised to be full of interest. There was that queer old man and his nephew, Donald Day, down there in the mountains. They took jug-like affairs into a dark, cavern-like place beneath a mill, carried them down empty and brought them up filled with some precious fluid. How could they? What magic was this? He was going to know. His grandfather had given him a small car, a long, low one with a nose like a chisel. Cut the air like a knife, this car. He’d go spinning down to the mountains in it. Take Jensie or Ballard with him.

“Old Kentucky. That’s what they all called Ballard tonight,” he whispered. He was thinking of Ballard. Yes, surely life was joyous, grand and joyous. Things had a way of coming out right if you got a proper start and kept plugging. There was the Blue Moon now. It was going to be a success. Students needed such a meeting place, good, clean atmosphere, and all that.

“Just takes one good push,” he murmured. “Tonight it got that push. Ballard got his push too. He’ll make a great football star. I’m sure of it. I—” he broke off.

Then, like a ghost, a mental picture of Panther Eye came floating into his consciousness. “He’s been into something I’ll be bound,” he said this aloud to the empty room. “Nothing bad, but something that’s likely to get some people into a lot of trouble of one sort or another. Pant’s just naturally that way.

“Trouble for some people,” he repeated musingly. “But I won’t be one of those people.”

“Oh won’t you though!” He would have sworn that a voice whispered this in his ear. Springing to his feet, he flashed a look here, there, everywhere.

“No one!” he exclaimed. “Of course not. Time I was going home. Been a wild day. I’m beginning to hear things. Be seeing them pretty soon.”

At that he switched off the light, opened the door, then stood on the threshold listening, peering into the dark. Strangely enough, at that moment a curious notion took possession of his mind, it was that the mysterious Panther Eye had not been there at all, that Pant was dead, that only Pant’s ghost had been to visit him here in the big room of the Blue Moon.

“Boo!” he shivered.

He was sure he caught an answering “Boo!” But after all it might have been some lonesome old owl talking to himself.