“Something spooky about him being reincarnated in jaguar form, huh? Gosh, they don’t believe that part of it, this Pemberton family, do they, Captain?” Hal asked.

“Ah, no. They cannot even believe he is really dead, Señors—they say they won’t believe it till they find his body. And so they wait and the jaguar shrieks on moonlight nights. But Santarem is long in the distance, Señors—the story is ended.”

“Not for the Pembertons, I guess,” said Hal sympathetically. “Gosh blame it, I’d like to help those poor people find that man so’s they could get away and live like civilized people.”

“I think,” said his uncle, after the captain had left them quite alone, “that you have enough on your hands right now. What with your worries about Pizella, my future worries about tracing these munitions to Renan, I think we have sufficient for two human minds.”

“Aw, we could tackle this Pemberton business afterward, couldn’t we, Unk? Even if we just stopped to pay them a friendly visit. Gol darn it, I should think they’d be tickled silly to talk to a couple of sympathetic Americans after living in the wilderness and surrounded by savages all their....”

“I take it this Pallida Mors will have you for a visit, come sunshine or storm, eh, Hal?”

“And how! A nice little surprise visit to the Pembertons,” Hal mused delightedly.

Destiny thought differently about it evidently, for Hal was the one to be surprised, not the Pembertons.

CHAPTER VI A FAMILIAR FOLLOWER

A FAMILIAR FOLLOWER

They departed from the main stream and proceeded up the black waters of the Rio Negro just after sunrise. Manaos, with its modern buildings, crowded streets and electric lights, was indeed a “city lost in the jungle,” for a half mile beyond the city limits, the jungle, primeval and inviolable, lay like a vast green canvas under the sparkling sunlight.

“No one in the city knows what is in that forest twenty miles away,” Señor Goncalves informed Hal and his uncle as they drew into the wharf. “Manaos does not care to know, Señors, for she prefers to be a little New York and forget the naked savages that roam the forests.”

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