The Pathless Trail

Three men stood ankle deep in mud on the shore of a jungle river, silently watching a ribbon of smoke drift and dissolve above the somber mass of trees to the northwest. Three men of widely different types they were, yet all cradled in the same far-off northern land. The tallest, lean bodied but broad shouldered, black of hair and gray of eye, held himself in soldierly fashion and gazed unmoved. His two mates - one stocky, red faced and red headed; the other slender, bronzed and blond - betrayed their thoughts in their blue eyes. The red man squinted quizzically at the smoke feather as if it mattered little to him where he was. The blond watched it with the wistfulness of one who sees the last sign of his own world fade out. Behind them, at a respectful distance, a number of swarthy individuals of both sexes in nondescript garments smoked and stared at the trio with the interest always accorded strangers by the dwellers of the Out Places. They eyed the uncompromising back of the tall one, the easy lounge of the red one, the thoughtful attitude of the light one. The copper-faced men peered at the rifles hanging in the right hands of the newcomers, their knee boots, khaki clothing, and wide hats. The women let their eyes rove over the boxes and bundles reposing in the mud beside the three. "Ingles?" hazarded a woman, speaking through the stem of the black pipe clutched in her filed teeth. "Notre-Americano," asserted a man, nodding toward the broad hats. "Englishmen would wear the round helmets of pith." "Mercadores? Traders?" suggested the woman, hopefully running an eye again over the bundles. "Exploradores," the man corrected. "Explorers of the bush. Have you no eyes? Do you not see the guns and high boots?" The woman subsided. The others continued what seemed to be their only occupation - smoking. The smoke streamer in the north vanished. As if moved by the same impulse, the three strangers turned their heads and looked south-westward, upriver. The red-haired man spoke. "So we've lit at last, as the feller said when him and his airyplane landed in a sewer. Faith, I dunno but he was better off than us, at that - he wasn't two thousand miles from nowheres like we are. The steamer's gone, and us three pore li'l' boys are left a long ways from home."