THE MAN-TRAP CACTUS.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 1205, 5 April 1895, Page 28

THE MAN-TRAP CACTUS.

A STORY OF THE ORINOCO

Let me tell you how I lost my comrade, Dan Blind, in the Orinoco forests. If you don’t believe it, I reckon it won’t shock me much, for I’ve told the tale often; and if I’ve been rated as a gospeller once, I’ve been told I’m a liar a hundred times. A man gets used to that sort of thing, though, when he yarns about the Brazilian forests. First time I got into the '* ete ’ (that part of the wooded interior above the inundation line) I couldn’t hardly believe my eyes. It was spring, and all the flowering trees of the forest were blazing away in blossoms —purple, saffron, blood red, bright blue, gold and every colour you can think of was about. The cassice and silk-cotton tree just made me gasp. It wasn’t Nature as I had known the old lady up' to then. It was so like a great big lie, that it was a while before I felt sure I was myself and it was itself. That was two years or more before I met Dan, and we went off hunting and all the rest of it together. The ‘ hunting ’ was an excuse; Dan was more after flowers, and I was more after excitement and exploring than game of any kind. What made Dan most eager to come was a love affair. He had proposed to a girl, and she had said, ‘ No, thank you.’ I can’t understand a fellow taking these affairs so seriously; they never troubled me overmuch. Asking a girl to marry me, and getting refused, isn’t much worse than asking the price of a diamond ring in a Paris jeweller’s window and being told it was 5000 francs or so above my figure. I guess it’s a matter of constitution. My constitution runs short in romance, I’ve been told before now.

■ Well, then, ‘You come right along with me, Blind/ I said to Ban, when I ran against him in Cayenne, where he was seeing if he couldn't make things even hotter for himself than this girl had done. We had played poker and billiards together, and smoked each other’s weeds. Fellows soon thicken outside Europe, especially when the supply of suitable pals is uncommonly short. It was in New York that Ban had had his disappointment. He took a cruise down South after it, and we knocked together at Cayenne. ‘ Stay long here ?’ I asked him, as soon as we had nodded. ‘ Till I’m dead, T expect/ said he. That raised a laugh in me; and when I had slapped him on the back, and told him not to be a fool, and wo bad drunk a squash or Wo, David and Jonathan weren t in it with us. All the same, from first to last, I never knew whore he hailed from. There was nothing among his boxes to give mo a clue. He was just ‘ Daniel Blind, a jilted man / and he was that and no more when I had him on the ground in front of mo -with all his blood sucked out of him, and the colour of rather mellow ivory. His mouth was open, as if he had cried ‘ Oh!’ Avhen I buried him, poor chap; and I missed him fine in working my way back through the forests. Said Dan to me before we started (I had had a pretty job to recover bis spirits for him; but I had done it, and was proud of the deed): — ‘ There’s a certain love of a plant I’m bound to come back with if it’s in our heat; that is, if we can carry it. It kind o’ reminds me of Mary ’ ‘Mary’ was the girl that had said ‘No, thank you/ He pulled up when he had said ‘ Mary/ If he had gone one better, I might have had a chance of letting her know what had happened to him. As it was, I put ‘Dan Blind’s’ name in tho New York papers as dead; but, of course, I don’t know for sure if she saw it there. ‘ It’s a sort of a kind of a cactus/ Dan went on to say; ‘and I met a man at Trinidad who told me things about it that show it to be a demon of the first water. For one thing, it’s a man-killer/

‘ Poison P* said I.

* Yes, and more, by the looks of them/ said Dan. ‘But the man didn’t know the particulars. He’d seen it in flower, and smelt it, and there was no smell in all the perfume shops of Europe (let alone its j flowers) to Come high it for its ravishing I sWeethess. His idea was that it just made | fellows drunk with joy—if you can imagine ! su 9h a silly state—and then they died, j poisoned, but happy, though, from all accounts, looking anything but happy.’ In fact, accoi’ding to Dan’s precious acquaintance, this flower really did kill folks. He had seen a couple of German botanists lying toes-up by it, and no wound on them alive and in spectacles in the i morning, and in the afternoon white and stiff on the ground, with their spectacles inside the flower of the cactus, which, he reckoned, stank the sweeter for the spectacles, or something. He said the red spider-bee kind of flourished on the flowers; the petals shook backwards and forwards, and rubbed each other up and down, and seemed to lick and fondle each other; and it was all he could do to keep his nose out of the scentpot. The sight gave him more than one turn., and he was convinced that the flower was as humanly alive, and full of a sort of wicked intelligence, as the couple of dismal German orchid-hunters about its stalk were dead ’uns. That’s the lovely creature of a plant poor Dan Blind was set on capturing. If • Mary ’ was. like it, she was a treasure for some man. As for me, I laughed at Dan’s tale. I knew well enough that there are rum plants in the * Selvas,’ but I had never come across a brute like that, and I didn’t believe in it.‘Nor do J,’ sail Dan; ‘but I mean to see if it’s true.’ Well, I believe it now, and so does Dan himself, if folks keep their,wits going into the next world. But I’ll be surprised if you don’t rate me as a high-class liar, as I said before. Well, we started, Dan and I, and a numbskull of an Indian called Pedro, and for days we enjoyed all the sweets of sublime laziness as Pedro paddled up stream. Now and then we popped at a bird or a beast, but mostly we saved powder and shot until we were right in the wilds. We didn’t know what might happen, you know. They are not all civilised folk, the denizens of the Selvas; and they tip their arrowheads, some of them, with that nice stuff ‘ eurara,’ which belies its name in being far from easy to cure when it gets into a wound.

We had a guitar, and we startled the monkeys with it—at least, I did. Dan wasn’t in the mood for love songs, nor yet comic songs, which was more in my line. I used to be a very funny fellow then. That coffee-coloured thick-head, Pedro, would often drop his paddle to grin, though of course he didn’t catch the titbits of humour in the words of the songs. As for Dan, he just lay on his back in the shade, and smoked and yawned and thought of that jade Mary. I taxed him with wasting his mind over her; but it wasn’t any use. ‘Can’t help it,’ he would say. ‘You’d say “ ditto ” if you’d seen her.’ Would I, though ? I’d a deal sooner have boxed her pretty ears. I guess I’m far from being a lady’s man, and I can’t abide crookedness in man, woman, or child. And so we got plump into the forest after awhile—all among passion-flowers and orchids and snakes and hummingbirds, Botocudos, and females who think it a neat trick to wear the coral snake for a living necklace. It was before the time when every chap who goes out of temperate latitudes takes a kodak and a notebook, and returns home to spout lectures with limelight illustrations at the Lord-knows-how-many pounds apiece, else I might have made good business of that expedition, and especially where Dan came to grief. All the same, though, coldblooded coon that I am, I don’t believe I’d have had cheek enough to turn to pressing buttons just when Dan was saying ‘ How d’ye do ?’ to Death. There are fellows who could do it, I’ve been told, but the.y’re not my sort.

We had a rattling fortnight with our guns, and I bagged a lot of things worth skinning and keeping. Dan, too, was nigh off his head with excitement about the plants. Tho orchids he got would have excited Mr .Chamberlain to turn Home Ruler, or anything, to have the fingering of them. Towards the end of the fortnight, however, poor D ui got something else a bad go of fever. It made him mighty weak, and didn’t —along with his ravings about Mary —tend to improve his wits. But I stuck well to the poor chap, and, between nursing and quinine, we managed to bring him back to something like his old self. I make bold to say that from the time ho told me that tale about the man-eating cactus to the time he was through the fever neither of us thought one bit about this ghoul of a plant. I know I didn’t, for I put it all down to the credit of high falutin’; and I’m sure Dan didn’t, just because he was so taken up with the other real wonders that tickled his ears in every blessed direction. But the time was at hand, as they say in the play, when the villain’s turn, for checkmate is about due. It was the very first day, indeed, after Dan’s first toddle after lying up. He found himself in better fettle than we both expected. Cassava suited him fine. I think I can see him now, as he said to me that morning : ‘You know where we were yesterday, boss ?’ He called me ‘boss/ not because he reckoned me his better half, but because I ‘ bossed ’ the show, and kicked Pedro when, it was needed. ‘Why, cert/ I answered, ‘and a nice thick mess of tangle we got on to the offside of.’ ‘Right/said he,‘that’s just the place; I mean to get ahead there. There was a

iflelastdifift * (f think tliftt’s the Port'd, lie used) ‘up in a tree therfi; just thd dolour of a woman’s eye, and I know you’ll swarin up and nick it for me.’ I chaffed him a bit about the thing being ‘ the colour of a woman’s eye.’ As if women’s eyes were all like that vixen Mary’s!

‘Go it, boss,’, poor Dan said, kind of wearily, when I had laid on to that unknown young woman pretty smart; ‘ I’m not up to cudgelling for her yet. Next Week you’ll see what I’ll give you.’ ‘ Done with you* Blind/ said I. ‘lf you ean throw me with leg, arm or wing by this time next week, I’d like nothing better! It’ll show you’re in trim for pushing on West at double quick.’ We didn’t have any more Words together after that. We shouldered our giins; had another look at our jack-boots (useful things, those, in that land o’ snakes), gave Pedro a merciful clout or two by way of teaching him to do his best with the dinner, and started slick off. Once, Dan opened his mouth to say quietly, ‘ There’s a fortune in that flower, boss.’ And I threw him back the words, ‘ Don’t you think it. The odds it rots are flve-and-twenty to one. Besides, we haven’t sniffed it yet.’ I reckon it was about half an hour after saying this that I was sitting straddled across a big bough of a tree, with my toes in the top of a huge tree fern, doing my best to bag the melastoma, or whatever it was, with the flower ‘the colour of a woman’s eyes.’ Dan had- encouraged me up that tree, and when I was safe on the bough, I shouted to him that the thing was as goodas his. * Thanks so very much, old fellow!’ he shouted back to me, and I never heard him speak again. Well, I: had got the flower, root and all, right enough, and could look about for the return journey. ‘Where are you, Dan?’ I called. He didn’t answer, so I cried out to him to take care how he wandered, and to tell him that I would be with him in a minute. Then I took to the ropes of the creepers like a monkey. But I hadn’t got more than half-way down when I saw a sight that knocked me queer. On the far side of my tree, rising ten or twelve feet into the air, were the spiked palisades of a cactus, and between the spikes were three flame-coloured basins (so they looked like), standing on stalks about five high. There were really four of these beastly basins, but the fourth was hidden, because poor Dan had got his head screwed fast in it. I had wondered what

made the forest smell stronger than usual-. Now I guessed all in a minute, for it flashed home to me that the tale about the man-eating cactus was true, and no yarn. Dan was fighting with hands and feet, but the filthy flower was also fighting. You can believe me or not, when I tell you that I was so staggered by what I saw that I hadn't the sense for many moments to drop down quickly. And this is what I saw : that red hole closed about Dan's neck tighter and tighter; and, as if to clinch matters, one of those murderous great spiked poles of green curvetted forwards, and wound itself round the poor fellow just like a boa constrictor. It didn’t waste any time either. I breathed forth two or three strong swear words, and slid down the ropes. It took mo, perhaps, fifteen seconds, and another half-minute to wrestle my way to Dan’s neighbourhood. But I was too late, for there, on the ground, lay the poor chap, dead as an Egyptian mummy. I could see that his face was bad to look at: blue with suffocation, yet pricked all over with blood spots. Then I turned to the fiend of a cactus. Man! it was something devilish to see. The flower that had done for Dan was quivering; and its pink, pear-shaped bits of furniture seemed to be licking each other as if they enjoyed Dan’s blood amazingly. And the filthy palisade that had curled over to finish strangling Dan was brandishing about like the skirts of a dancing girl when she twirls. I expect there could be nothing really more graceful than the way it moved, but to me it seemed to be just preening itself on its cleverness in having parted a human soul from its body. The other three flowers, mind you, and all the other palisades were still as death.

I didn’t hesitate what to do very long, when I had examined Dan and found him good for nothing more on this earth. Lord! how strong he smelt of the flower ! There was a good little axe in my belt, and I plied it against that assassin of a cactus till there wasn’t three inches of it standing above ground. Then I ran to the tent, and, between us, Pedro and myself got poor Dan away. We were almost knocked over by his per-;

fume, the like of which, for diabolical sWeettiesS, I guess I’ll never smell again on tills earth;

There ! that’s my tfilfe'. If foil doubt its truth, go into the SelvaS; h'f the’ Orinoco, yourself, and, unless I’ve hacked down the last of these murdering plants (which I hope), you may come upon one of them. If you do, cart it home, and invite me to be present while it is tortured a bit, Indian fashion, before getting the coup de grace. — The Million.