Chapter IX: The “ghost” Walks Again

That night the “ghost” walked again—that is, Panther Eye returned. It was late, how late Johnny did not quite know. He was seated beside the great, wood-burning stove in the great front room of the Blue Moon.

The crowd was gone. And what a crowd it had been, a merry mob of college folks celebrating a football game. Yells, songs, wild, fantastic dances and eats, lots of eats, and good, hot drinks, that was what the long evening had been. The Blue Moon was a success, a howling success. As he sat there in the half-darkness—one dim light shone in a far corner—Johnny was in a mellow mood.

And then, without a sound, the door opened. There came the shuffling of feet. Johnny caught the pale gleam of two balls of fire. “Pant’s eyes,” he whispered with an involuntary shudder.

“Hello, Johnny, I’m back,” came in a hoarse whisper.

“Hello, yourself,” Johnny was on his feet. “Wait. The coffee’s still hot. There are mince pies, the turnover sort you can hold in your hands. I’ll be back in a flash.” He was.

“Pant,” Johnny leaned forward eagerly as his strange visitor finished his last bite of pie. “Last time I saw you, you were telling me of a beautiful valley in Ethiopia and something about a girl, perhaps a white girl, you didn’t seem to know. You said—”

“Yes,” Pant gave forth a low, hollow chuckle. “Yes, Johnny, that was strange and—and exciting too.

“You see,” he settled back in his chair, his unusual eyes half closed. “That girl was watching a small herd of cattle. They don’t have fences in Ethiopia, at least, not in most places. So there was the girl and her cattle, the green pasture like a magnificent oriental carpet, and the small house set among the palms.

“It was warm, midafternoon. I sat down on a fallen tree to rest myself and to just—well sort of enjoy that beautiful picture.

“I must have fallen asleep—” suddenly Pant’s eyes opened very wide. He went through the preliminary motions of springing to his feet. “Yes, I MUST have fallen asleep for, of a sudden, I heard a most unearthly scream.

“I sprang to my feet just in time to see a huge, dark-faced man leap into the brush. And, Johnny,” Pant drew in a long breath, “he was carrying something on his back, carrying it like a sack of oats. He was carrying that girl.”

“Oh-oo,” Johnny exclaimed.

“It’s quite common, that sort of thing there in Ethiopia,” Pant went on more quietly. “You see, Johnny, they still have slaves in Ethiopia, perhaps a million or two, no one seems to know exactly. And if you’re to sell slaves, you must steal them. That’s what this fellow was doing. Probably he was a Mohammedan, most of them are, a pretty low-lived lot.”

“And you—” Johnny began eagerly.

“Well, Johnny—” again the low, hollow chuckle, “it wasn’t any of my business, not really. I hadn’t come there to reform the country. I just wanted to see what it was like and to hunt up my brother. But this fellow, that big, dark-faced man with a hooked nose, I learned about the nose later, that fellow had spoiled my picture—you know, the girl, the cattle, the carpet of green, the jewel of a house. It was all spoiled after he had taken the girl. I wanted that girl back in the picture. So—natur—ally—” Pant’s voice dropped to a drawl, “I went after him.”

“Pant,” exclaimed Johnny, “you are queer!”

“That’s what I’ve been told,” Pant grinned broadly.

“So you went after him,” Johnny prompted.

“Yes—I followed him. And that was the longest bit of following I’ve ever done. That man, with the girl on his back, kept me coming along at a good pace for hours and hours. Didn’t even stop for dark, just marched on and on. Must have known every step of the way. And I—there I was pussy-footing along, expecting every minute to have him whirl about and drop me with the young cannon of a revolver he had slung from his belt.

“I didn’t carry a weapon, Johnny, just a big pocket knife, that’s all. I’d left my light rifle at a bamboo shack in the jungle. I figured that the night, darkness, and that fellow’s falling asleep was my only chance. And here he was marching on and on.

“‘Might as well give it up,’ I told myself, ‘he’ll be breaking into a clearing before long,—into a whole village of his sort. Then what will be the good?’

“I was really about ready to give up when the fellow turned abruptly to the right, went staggering up a stiff slope for maybe a thousand feet, then vanished, just vanished—” Pant paused.

“A—a cave,” Johnny breathed.

“A cave,” Pant nodded his head.

“Just what you wanted.”

“Just that—” Pant nodded once more.

At that instant, through the half open window there came the high shrill note of a whistle—just such a night call as Johnny had once heard in the heart of a jungle at midnight.

Pant sprang to his feet. He went gliding to a window. There, crouching low, he peered through a crack beneath the drawn shade out into the night. He remained thus while the clock ticked off three full minutes, then, without a word of explanation, resumed his place by the stove.

“You see,” he went on exactly where he had left off, “he had taken that girl into the cave. He was armed, I was not. I could see in the dark, he could not. But probably he had matches. Most likely he’d make a fire. I had to have that girl back for my picture there at the edge of the jungle. Besides—” Pant paused to stare at the floor, “I don’t like slavery. Do you?”

“No one does, Pant, at least no one but those who keep slaves or make a business of selling them.”

“That’s just it!” Pant agreed. “So of course I had to rescue that girl. Don’t get me wrong, Johnny. I’m no romancer. Not a bit of it. But I had to get that girl.”

“For your picture.”

“For my picture.

“He fell asleep—that man. I crept into the cave. The girl was there unharmed. Terribly frightened, of course. Bound hand and foot. I should have killed him, that slave-snatching son of Ali. But to try that would have been dangerous. Besides I hate corpses. Don’t you, Johnny? Can’t seem to forget ’em ever. Remember that man in the mine back there in Russia?”

Johnny nodded.

“I never forgot how he looked, Johnny.”

“So you carried the girl away and that was all of it?” Johnny relaxed.

“No.” Once more Pant was on the prowl. Springing to his feet, he wandered like a cat looking for a mouse all over the place. Then he came back and sat down. “That,” he went on, “was only the beginning. You’d be surprised, Johnny, you really would. Perhaps—” he spoke slowly, “perhaps, you won’t believe the rest of it. I—I guess I better not tell you. It’s too—”

“No! No!” Johnny’s voice rose. “Go on. Tell it all!”

“It wasn’t easy—” Pant went on at last in a slow drawl, “to find the way back over the way we came, in fact, it was impossible. I tried to remember the way we had come. But you know the jungle, Johnny, vines that trip you and thorny bushes that turn you back. Rough and rugged it was too, great rocks here and deep ravines there.

“The girl found it difficult to walk, she’d been bound for hours. I helped her along until she showed me she could go it alone.

“Strange sort of girl, that one, Johnny. Never said a word—just marched straight on behind me. Perhaps she didn’t know my language. Quite surely she didn’t. Think of the languages spoken in Africa—French, Dutch, Italian, German, and all the black lingos.

“We marched on for hours,” Pant heaved a heavy sigh. “All the time I was looking for the way back. I found a river I’d seen. Then, in passing around a rocky barrier, I lost it. All I could do was to make sure we were going down, not up. That would take us toward valleys. What valleys? Who could tell?

“All the time I was thinking of the girl. Was she all white or only one of those white-blacks they call albino. And what did she think of me? Perhaps she thought me one more slave trader who had stolen her from this big fellow with the hooked nose.

“Johnny,” Pant sat up quite suddenly, his strange eyes gleaming, his tone mysterious. “Johnny, did you ever see a man in one place, just see him a time or two, not know him very well—and then, weeks later did you think you saw him again in a different place thousands of miles away where he couldn’t very well be?”

“No,” Johnny grinned. “There are some things that have never happened to me. That’s one of them. Why?”

“Oh—oh nothing,” Pant settled back. “About this girl now. It was queer, Johnny, downright queer. We’d come to the top of a high ridge. Dawn had come, as it always does in the tropics, with a rush and with the joyous scream of a thousand birds.

“We stood there on the ridge looking down at a sort of barren plateau when some baboons, a whole troop of them, came marching out from the jungle. Huge fellows they were. Powerful beasts with arms a foot longer than mine. Powerful? Johnny, one of them could have grabbed me and broken every bone in my body. But they wouldn’t, Johnny, I knew that well enough. Once, for a whole week, I’d lived in such a place, just to watch them. If I met one on the trail he’d try to bluff me. He’d march straight at me swinging his huge fists and cracking his teeth as if he meant to tear me to bits. When he was twenty feet away he’d stop dead in his tracks. Then I’d laugh at him, laugh big and loud. And the poor old fellow would turn and go slouching away like some huge bully who’s been running a bluff.

“No, they wouldn’t harm us, Johnny, those baboons, but they were interesting to watch. They played a sort of ball game with a cocoanut, tossing it about. They did the leap-frog act better than any boys you’ve ever seen. They had just seated themselves in a circle for some other game, when all of a sudden, a sound from the jungle startled them.”

“A sound?”

“A shot, Johnny, a shot fired close at hand! You may think I wasn’t startled. That big boy with the hooked nose was my first thought. I dragged the girl into the fronds of a low growing palm.

“It wasn’t the big fellow with the hooked nose, Johnny. Worse than that.” Pant rose to take one more prowl about the room. “Wild men, Johnny, a whole troop of them! And were they wild! Such faces! Such bodies! Such weapons!

“Scared, Johnny? Of course I was scared. All these wild men hate whites. All whites looked the same to them. One glimpse of my face and the face of the girl! That’s all that would be needed. They’d get us, those wild men. Worse than a whole drove of those little tropical pigs, these wild men were. They’d sure get us.

“I looked around for some place to hide. Then I glanced back where the wild men were. I saw right away they had troubles of their own. They were looking back and scurrying for shelter all at the same time.

“Somebody was after them. We were close to the border. Had they been on a raid? Were whites after them or some other black men? There wasn’t time to settle that.

“Gripping the girl by the wrist, I led her back among the bushes, then along the ridge a short distance. And what do you think I saw, Johnny?”

“Can—can’t guess,” Johnny stammered.

“A cave, Johnny, a perfectly good cave. Wouldn’t believe it would you? Well, you’ll not believe what happened after that—you couldn’t.”

“Yes, Pant,” Johnny’s voice was low, “I’ll believe it if you say it’s true. Couldn’t be any stranger than the things that happened to us up there on Behring Straits in Russia.”

“Don’t seem that they could be,” Pant rumbled down deep in his throat. “You’ll be surprised, Johnny. Downright surprised. We—”

Pant broke short off to sit staring at the window. The shade was drawn. Only one small light was turned on. This left the window in deep shadows. The light from a street lamp was brighter than the light from within. The wind was blowing, tossing tree branches about. Like ghostly fingers, these branches traced strange moving patterns on the shade.

Johnny was shocked by the change that had come over his companion’s face. Lips parted, nostrils wide, eyes aglow with strange fire, he sat there staring as if entranced.

“Only the shadow of tossing branches,” Johnny said reassuringly.

“No, Johnny,” Pant’s voice sounded hollow, “No, Johnny, that was not all. Excuse me, Johnny. I—I’ve got to go.” Next instant without a sound the boy was gone.

Then Johnny, staring once more at the curtain saw, for an instant only, a pair of massive shoulders, a giant head, a strangely hooked nose—all this appeared in dark silhouette on the window shade. One instant it was there, the next it was gone. Only the eerie, wind-traced tossing shadows were left.

For a full five minutes Johnny sat there staring. At last, with a heavy sigh, he arose to go.

Once again, as he snapped off the light, then for a period of seconds, stood in the doorway, as on that other night, he was seized with a strange notion, that Pant had not been there, only his ghost; that the strange boy had been killed over there in Ethiopia—his spirit returned to haunt his friends.

“Nonsense!” he exclaimed. “It’s true I didn’t touch him but ghosts don’t eat mince pie.”