cold, black nose into your hand for sympathy and appreciation.

Grandmother said: "I suppose you would rather have had that pup sick all winter, not being able to crawl a foot away from the stove. I suppose you think it would have been better off that way than to die a nice easy way like being chloroformed?"

Grandfather scratched his beard in vexation. "Well, I guess I would. It don't sound reasonable, maybe, but that's exactly what I'd like to see. That poor little pup could lie in front of that stove all winter long and never budge and I wouldn't say a word against it."

Grandmother exclaimed, "My conscience! You take on like a five-yearold!" and lifted up The Democrat and continued her reading of the Personal Items.

So far as she was concerned the discussion was ended. But grandfather continued to brood. He scarcely spoke during the rest of the evening. His beard remained sunk on the lapels of his worn coat, his faded eyes staring blankly into the shadows of the room. And thus the evening passed, and the hands of the old clock on the mantel came round to nine. That was the hour for retiring, as they always called the bedtime hour.

Grandmother folded up the paper and laid it on the table. She said: "Well?" to let grandfather know that she was going to bed and that she expected him to follow her. She did not like to have any one sit up in the house after she had gone to her bedroom; it seemed as if the day were incomplete. ... Grandfather waited up to blow out the light. And when, the little green house in darkness, he settled himself between the quilts and the featherbed, his last words for the night were: "That poor little pup." He heard the crowing of the Leghorn rooster from the chicken-coop before he went to sleep.

But in the morning he was dressed by six o'clock, out in the kitchen building a fire in the cook-stove for grandmother to make breakfast. And after the flames were roaring and he had filled the tea

kettle and set it on the stove to heat, he stepped out-of-doors into the morning light.

The wash-tub loomed reproachfully in the back yard. Grandfather averted his eyes from the sight of it. For now came the most hateful part of the whole disagreeable job: the burying of the pup. Going into the woodshed where he kept his tools, grandfather picked up a spade, then stood for a moment, debating on where he would dig the grave, whether he would dig it by the sunflower row or over at the west end of the lot where the canal flowed past. Down by the canal would be the best place, and there he went, his congress boots reluctantly tracking over the earth made hard by the coolness of the night.

He set his spade in the ground, pushed it down with his foot, and threw out the first slab of earth, which was thick with angleworms. He worked slowly and steadily; by the time grandmother appeared on the back porch to summon him to breakfast he had completed the small, rectangular hole in which the body of the pup was to rest.

"Sam!" called grandmother. "Your breakfast's ready."

"Go ahead, I'll come in a minute," he answered, and moved off toward the wash-tub. That poor little pup!

He stood over the wash-tub a moment before lifting it up, and on his face was a sad, lugubrious expression. Bending over, he raised the tub, under which he reached for the inanimate body

A cold nose touched his hand, and in a moment the pup was crawling out from under. It stood in the sunshine, blinking and shaking itself, trying to caper about on stiff legs, none the worse for the chloroform.

And at the sight of it grandfather lost his temper. "You-damned little devil!" he muttered, as he realized that all of his worries, his self-indictment, his sleepless night, his spading, had gone for nothing. He threw down his spade and would not even look at the pup, who scampered along beside him as he walked to the house.

66

outlined to my amazed ears a plan that struck me as something new in the history of tropical exploration. It was no less than to take a seaplane to southern Mexico and fly over those trackless forests, mapping the land and the timber from the air.

"Mahogany," I remember his saying, "king of tropical woods-my people have an option on a million acres. Option runs out in two months. We've got to know how much timber's there. A month will tell how much of the land is covered with forest and how much is grass-land. That's

"About fifty thousand." "Got any airplane views of forest areas?"

I showed him a few that our Forest Fire Air Patrol had taken over the national forests of Oregon. Then I added: "If you're particularly interested in airplane views, I have a number I made during the big disturbance."

He looked at me with sudden interest. "You're an aviator?"

"Yes."

"And a forester?"

"That's what the Forest Service has been kind enough to call me for the past ten years."

"Hum." For a time he sat in deep thought, strumming with his fingers on my dictaphone. "That's interesting," he said finally.

"What?"

"The combination of aviator and forester-very interesting." He smoked for a time. "Do you suppose the Forest Service would give you two months' leave?" "Only God can predict that. Leave for what?"

"For an airplane trip to southern Mexico to estimate mahogany timber there. Listen."

Then in those jerky sentences of his he

plane anyhow. Then go into the country afoot or mule-back and make a careful estimate of how the mahogany runs. Use the plane first." He seemed quite decided now that I was to make the trip.

"And if," I suggested, "if the motor quits when the seaplane is a hundred miles from water what does the pilot do?"

My unknown puffed a moment in silence. "When a motor quit in war time, what did the pilot do?"

"Became a prisoner."

"Exactly. Well, that's what will happen to you in Mexico. Carib Indians will take care of that."

"Are they unfriendly?"

"Kind of. Every tribe believes in the survival of the fittest." He let that sink in.

We lunched together twice that week and at last, partly because I had been chained to an office-desk overlong and partly because the flying game has an insistent allure for all of us who once followed that precarious mistress-well, at last I said I'd go.

My incognito friend arose and laid a check on the table. "You don't know me or my people. Don't need to. See you at Galveston one week from to-day. Hotel Galvez. Luck."

He left me, and but for the blue slip of

paper on the table and the blue haze of cigar smoke about me I could easily have wondered if it were not all some fantastic dream. Still, the figures on that slip of paper were very concrete realities.

Only one other episode occurred before I left Washington, and that had to do with my friend Pratt, who runs the Equitable in his spare moments. I had thought not unnaturally that it might be the part of wisdom to take out additional insurance for the next two months. Vague thoughts of landing in a mahogany-tree with a tribe of playful Caribs at the base may have prompted this. At any rate Pratt listened to my tale, whistling what sounded ominously like Chopin's "Funeral March," then reached for the telephone.

"There's just one company in the United States that may want to bet on you," he said, and called a number.

"A friend of mine wants to take out twenty-five thousand dollars," Pratt told his man. "He's going to fly over some unknown forests in Mexico populated by hostile Indians. No, not for pleasure. To estimate mahogany timber. No, quite rational." I beamed my thanks. "Oh, about two hundred miles from the nearest settlement. Yes, well, that's for you to decide, of course. All right. Good-by."

He hung up and I knew the verdict before he spoke.

"They wouldn't handle you. Tropical jungle and Indians running amuck are bad enough, but the airplane gave the finishing touch."

And so I left Pratt thoughtfully whistling that damnable funeral march.

Four days later in the lobby of the Galvez I espied my unknown, again halfobscured in cigar-smoke. This time he pulled out not a map, but a one-way ticket to Frontera, Mexico, and a sealed letter marked "Instructions. Open Second Day Out."

"Just a precaution," he answered my unspoken question. "Precaution against any news of your trip leaking out prematurely. Boat leaves at three," he added. "I'll see you off."

He did. I remember we both looked a little sceptically at the craft to which I was intrusting my being for the next three

days. Two hundred feet long and a thirtyfoot beam, she had the appearance of a Pittsburgh stogy and seemed just about as seaworthy.

"Used to be a sub-chaser," said my unknown, with a visible effort to reassure me. "Stanch little boat."

"Stanch" wasn't inappropriate. I said so, but before we could find a really descriptive adjective he was hustled ashore, and with a thud of the gang-plank, a muffled whirr of the engines, and a splash of the hawsers we cast off.

"Luck," came his smoky valedictory from the dock. I waved and in answer my man of mystery wiggled his cigar. I never saw him again.

And as the sun set over the low Texas coast, I had opportunity again to consider this rather mad adventure. Why had I embarked upon it? Well, part of the answer, at least, lies in the eternal attraction of the unknown. There to the south was a land where the clock of time still ticked out prehistoric minutes—a land to which so far as I knew no white man had ever penetrated to find what manner of people lived there, what secrets of the past or what promise for the future it might hold. Then for a time the anachronism of the seaplane in this land of yesterday amused me. But what if the confounded motor failed? That possibility restrained my amusement. I had landed many times because of a dead motor with more or less satisfactory results, but the prospect of gliding down into a trackless jungle desperately seeking a landing-place as the precious moments passed, and finally crashing among tree-tops a hundred feet or more from the ground-well, as I say, one could imagine more amusing situations.

Dusk fell, and the sea-gulls that had been crying about our wireless aerial fell astern. The last of the bell-buoys tolled a dismal farewell, and free of the channel we turned our bow toward the equator. And so for three days we bore south with never sight of a sail or a pause in the monotonous throb of the engines. Each morning I woke to the sound of splashing waters intermingled with the voice of the cook in the galley cursing life in fluent Italian whenever a lurch of the vessel sent table things sprawling on the mess-floor.

Each evening I watched the sun set in flaming grandeur over the starboard bow. Between times nothing happened; and as hour followed hour a pall of monotony settled over me and I wondered why in heaven's name a man ever chooses the sea as a vocation.

Yes, one thing did happen. On the morning of the second day I opened my sealed envelope and took out a map and the letter. "At Frontera," the letter read, "you will find a seaplane, with pilot and mechanic. After your air work you will proceed by canoe to Encanto, where Robert Marsh and Colonel Richardson will take you to any portion of the property you wish to investigate. Primarily I want to know the amount of cedar and mahogany on this land. Your report is to be shown to none but the undersigned."

The signature was a name very familiar to me, one identified with many a courageous undertaking the name of a farsighted pioneer of industry.

So I was to have a pilot. Well, that would leave me free to put in part of my air-time mapping. I looked at my letter again.

"Richardson"-I wondered if it could be my good fortune to meet again the Tracy Richardson I had flown with in war time. A long chance--still wherever danger and adventure and the unknown were, there sooner or later was Richardson. No better comrade in the pinch ever lived, no more fearless soldier of fortune. General under the flag of Mexico-trench fighter with the Princess Pats-flier in the armies of the British-and later instructor in the art of aerial warfare to those of us who wore the wings of the U. S. A.

I remembered the foggy day I had almost flown Tracy into a church steeple, when he was a captain and I a struggling shave-tail. Anticipating a royal bawling out, I had dreaded landing after that flight. But he had only grinned, and as he wiped the oil from his glasses said casually enough: "You know, Gill, those ecclesiastical structures aren't a damn bit softer to hit than a brewery."

The triangular fin of a shark sped past -sign of nearing land; and before noon we sighted clumps of water-narcissus floating by. A tropical storm burst over us, deluged the deck, and was gone.

Those sudden tropical storms they resemble nothing we know in the North. They come unheralded, and like the sudden opening of some celestial faucet. Not in drops do they come but as in solid slender columns of water. Then, just as suddenly, the faucet is turned off and again the world steams beneath the tropical sun.

At dusk the captain, a weather-scarred Norwegian speaking English with a poisonous accent, called me to the bridge and pointed to what seemed a low-lying bank of clouds. "Dar she bane," he told me, and gave me the glass. With their aid I could make out a fringe of palm-trees and several thatched roofs. "Frontera," he added, "lie ten mile up river."

The engines ceased. We anchored, and for the first time in three days marked time on the long swells of the Gulf, awaiting our pilot. In the offshore wind I caught the damp heavy breath of the jungle, that troubling scent, complex with the multitudinous and hidden life of the tropic night. One never forgets it and no one has ever described it, but in some mysterious way it came to me on the low, fitful gusts, like the breath of some gigantic entity typified by the jungle-yet one with the silver of the moonlight above and with the dark, swaying palms along the distant beach. Once I made out dimly the reflection of the lights of Frontera on the low-lying clouds to the south.

At ten that night, while I bent over my map in the cabin, a faint hail came over the water. I hurried on deck in time to see a little dory glide from beneath the shadow of our bow and a dark figure vault the railing.

"I am your pilot," he said in Spanish to the mate. "Start the engines. Where is your captain?"

The mate pointed toward the pilothouse and the Mexican disappeared up the ladder. Followed the clank of the winch as we raised anchor, then the thud of the screws. Soon we were over the bar and slipping in silence through the quiet waters of the Rio Usumacinta. Suddenly as we rounded a turn in the channel, the lights of Frontera glittered above the dark stream bed. We anchored opposite the brilliantly lighted custom-house, where from the deck we could see shadowy couples dancing. In the silence that fol

lowed the cessation of the engines there came to us very clearly from across the waters that favorite air of caballero and peon, "Quiéreme mucho."

Somehow it means Mexico to me, that air played as only they can play it south of the Rio Grande. Couples passed and repassed, waltzing with the effortless rhythm of motion that has come to them as a heritage from old Spain. The faint laughter of women reached us and the applause that followed the music. Yes, Mexico means music, I thought, music and laughter and smiles from lips that have learned that life is, after all, no very important matter, and that sorrow is the only immorality. Children, I caught my self thinking, as I watched the dancers weaving patterns of color; children in their gaiety as in their cruelty. For I had known them, these people of the sunlight, at times when there was no music and in places where there was no laughter. And always they played at life as at a game. But romance, I knew, fades in the light of day; so I leaned on the rail that night listening and watching, and wondering what awakening to-morrow might bring.

As a matter of fact, I awoke with the first mate thumping my shoulder.

"Come down to the captain's cabin," he ordered. "The custom's outfit want to see your papers."

Hurriedly digging into my bag for the passport which one really doesn't need, I ran below to be greeted by a dark, portly Mexican in full official regalia, and wearing at his belt a Luger revolver. "Americano?" he questioned. "Si."

"Señor Tomás Gill?”

I nodded. He examined a batch of papers, then leisurely checked my name from the passenger-list. Next the inspecting doctor signified that so far as he was concerned I could depart. "But if the señor ascends in that villainous airplane," he added smiling, "we shall perhaps meet again."

Free now to enter the country, I packed my luggage and went aft. Bedlam had broken out on deck and in the waters about the boat. Custom officials swarmed from bow to stern. Cargo was being lowered into lighters, and about the steamer like little water-beetles innumerable ca

noes glided, laden with bananas, oranges, and tortillas. I hailed one of the river-men and in ten minutes was exhibiting my baggage at the Custom House.

Yes, assuredly romance had fled with the night and the music. Two-story houses stretched interminably along dusty streets where evil-looking vultures-the city's only street-cleaning force-hopped and fought on innumerable refuse heaps. Indians squatting on the dock offered for sale grass baskets, cocoanuts, and dogs. To the wrist of one Indian an otter was chained. Their women knelt in the street near by baking tortillas on hot stones. Every bench in the plaza was occupied by sleeping soldiers, for Frontera teemed with men in ragged uniforms.

At the hotel a telegram from Marsh told me that the plane was up the river at Salto and would reach me by noon. So with two hours of leisure before me I sauntered back to the plaza, and as a soldier wandered off in search of food, seized my opportunity of pre-empting a bench. There I had smoked and sunned myself for perhaps an hour when a down-at-theheel fellow countryman approached me.

"What brought you to this benighted country, buddy?" was his greeting.

I pointed to the ship still anchored in midstream. "That banana-boat is the guilty party."

He chuckled. "Which is a polite way of saying it's none of my business. Oil or bananas, buddy-one or the other you're after, and if you don't feel like saying, why, don't. Oil's my game. Though I can't say my success has been exactly uproarious."

I changed the subject. "How are living conditions?"

"Not bad. Not now since things quieted down. But it was hell and pinwheels while the revolution was running. The band-stand is still chipped up with bullets. A man needed a tin suit to walk through town."

"We didn't hear much about it back in the States."

"Sure you didn't, and for good and sufficient reasons." My friend rolled a cigarette and looked reflectively out over the plaza. He belonged to the fraternity of picturesque nomads that frequent the seaports of the world-always on the