Amazon Nights: Classic Adventure Tales from the Pulps Read online

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  Copyright ©2005 by Wildside Press

  First published in USA, 2005

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  AMAZON NIGHTS

  Classic Adventure Tales from the Pulps

  ARTHUR O. FRIEL

  WILDSIDE PRESS

  AMAZON DAYS: CLASSIC ADVENTURE TALES FROM THE PULPS

  "Introduction” copyright © 2005 by Wildside Press.

  "The Spider” originally appeared in Adventure, December 3, 1919. “The Peccaries” originally appeared in Adventure, First March 1920. “The Firefly” originally appeared in Adventure, “The Tailed Men” originally appeared in Adventure, February 18, 1921. “The Trumpeter” originally appeared in Adventure, May 3, 1921. “The Barrigudo” originally appeared in Adventure, June 3, 1921. “The Bouto” originally appeared in Adventure, Mid-July, 1921. “The Ant-Eater” originally appeared in Adventure, July 18, 1921. “The Jararaca” originally appeared in Adventure, Dec. 30, 1921.

  Copyright © 2005 by Wildside Press

  All rights reserved.

  For more information, or for a list of other Wildside Pulp Classics, please see our web site: www.wildsidepress.com

  CONTENTS

  Introduction, by Darrell Schweitzer 7

  The Spider

  The Peccaries

  The Firefly

  The Tailed Men

  The Trumpeter

  The Barrigudo

  The Bouto

  The Ant-Eater

  The Jararaca

  INTRODUCTION

  ARTHUR O. FRIEL is one of those writers is whose identity has diminished to a byline on old books and magazines—but not entirely. A vague outline remains. Somewhere beyond that is the man, who probably would have been an interesting person to know. He led an adventurous life. He had a good mind.

  What we do know is that Arthur Olney Friel was born in Detroit in 1885, and died in Concord, New Hampshire in 1959. He graduated from Yale, in a time when less than 5% of American men attended any college at all. His occupation might be described as “novelist, explorerer, and adventurer.” No known military service. Some newspaper work. Began writing freelance in 1919.

  As is revealed in his 1924 book, The River of the Seven Stars, Friel, a fellow of the American Geographical Society, participated in a number of exploratory expeditions up the Orinoco River and into the Venezuelan jungle in the early 1920s. This experience colored much of his later writing. He seems to have traveled in much of the same area as the once-famous Colonel Fawcett, who vanished in those parts in the mid-1920s.

  We remember Friel as one of the most popular contributors to the prestigious pulp magazine Adventure, where he published thirteen serials and fifty-five shorter pieces. He was extremely popular there and came to the attention of the most famous of all Adventure readers, Robert E. Howard, who never quite managed to become an Adventure writer, but doubtless would have if he'd stuck around longer. Howard wrote to fellow pulpster Carl Jacobi in 1934, “I was much interested to note that you are acquainted with Arthur O. Friel. He has been one of my favorite authors for years."

  This doesn't so much suggest that Jacobi knew Friel, but that he, too, read him in Adventure.

  An influence on Robert E. Howard? Just possibly. Other Adventure writers, including Harold Lamb and Talbot Mundy, represented an ideal to which many pulp writers—not just Howard—aspired. There was a mystique about them, something which comes across strongly in the “Camp Fire” department of that magazine. Adventure writers, the best of them anyway, wrote what they knew. They had been there, wherever there was, and wrote from first-hand knowledge. Friel was the genuine article. He really was one of those pith-helmeted explorers in a canoe paddling into the unknown, just as depicted on the dustjacket to his 1922 novel, The Pathless Trail. He also wrote vividly and well. He was the perfect Adventure author.

  Friel left behind a series of books, some of which have been reprinted in modern times. The River of Seven Stars is something of a classic of exploration literature. Among his novels, The Pathless Trail (1922) and Tiger River (1923), both first serialized in Adventure, were reprinted in the Timelost series from Centaur Press about twenty-five years ago. These novels, and a few of his others, use their extremely authentic detail to edge over the borderline into the fantastic convincingly. Some of them have Lost Race elements. Mountains of Mystery (1925) is about a quest for a legendary white race dwelling in the depths of the South American jungle.

  Other Friel titles include The King of No Man's Land, Cat O'Mountain, King of Kearsarge, Hardwood, Renegade, and Forgotten Island. Not all his books are set in South America. King of Kearsarge is about the North Woods. Later in life, he had at least one story, “Long Hand,” in Mystery Stories in 1942.

  Much more research needs to be done if we are to flesh out these fleeting impressions of who Friel was and what happened in his life, but even from such scraps (you might say we know about as much about Friel as we do about Shakespeare) it is clear that he is a subject worth more research. It is obvious, too, that his fiction is worth reprinting and reading.

  —Darrell Schweitzer

  Philadelphia PA

  January 30, 2005

  THE SPIDER

  I WOULD not attack that spider again, senhor, if I were you. You have seen for yourself that you can not hit him. No matter how quickly you strike, he is inches away when the blow falls.

  Those huge, bird-killing spiders all are incredibly swift. I have heard that not even a bullet is fast enough to kill one—that at the flash of the gun he jumps so quickly that the whole seven inches of him is out of danger when the shot strikes. Whether that be true or not, I know you will never hit him with your fist; you will only tire yourself out. Besides, he may grow angry and attack you in return. His fangs are half an inch long, senhor, and he is full of poison. It is not wise to risk his springing at you.

  This is an odd place to find such a monster—here in the middle of the broad Amazon, on a steamer outward bound toward the Atlantic. Yet strange creatures sometimes come aboard these river boats while they are tied up at the bank. Some of them are harmless, and some are deadly. And not all of the deadly things are found on the outgoing steamers, nor are they all bred here in the jungle.

  Sometimes they come up the river from the outside and are the more deadly because they are human. The memory of one of them came into my mind just now while I watched that great spider leaping aside from your blows. He, too, was called the “Spider,” that man, though his name was Schwartz.

  What is that? You say that schwarz means “black"? That is very droll, senhor, for the Spider was black. Black of hair, black of beard, black of eye he was—yes, and black of heart, too, though at first we did not know that. We called him Spider because he looked like one. His little eyes were set close together with a sort of spidery look in them. His body was small and bunchy, while his arms were long and thin and covered with black hair. His legs were short and crooked. Yet he could run amazingly fast on those little legs; that made him seem all the more like a spider. And later he made himself a spider's lair—and came to a spider's end.

  An upriver boat brought him to us one day, and with him a small brown bag
and a rifle. He had no letters to Coronel Nunes, owner of the great rubber estate where I worked, nor anything else to show who he was or whence he had come. The coronel, however, received him with the courtesy he shows to all who come to him; and when this man told him he had had another bag, containing letters of introduction and other things of value, but that it had been stolen from him on the boat, the coronel believed him—or at any rate seemed to, for theft is a thing that may happen to any man in almost any place.

  Schwartz boldly made himself at home there at the headquarters and talked vaguely about looking over the country for the people he said he represented. He went out in the jungle with us men and saw all he could see. Always he carried two weapons—the rifle, and a pistol.

  It may be a foolish fancy, senhores, but I have sometimes thought that a man may be judged by his weapons, and not only the man himself, but the country whence he comes—for a man usually carries the weapons made in his own land. Now you two Americans, I have noticed, carry with you that flat pistol made by the Senhor Colt, which you say was used by your army in the war in Europe. There is about it a square, solid look which fits well with the things I have observed about you and with what I have heard about your great country. Also, the shape of that pistol is such that it seems to say—

  "I do not seek trouble with any man, but if any man wants it—I am ready."

  Your Winchesters, too, have something of that same air of solid readiness.

  The guns of the Spider had a much different appearance. The pistol looked venomous; it leaned forward from the ugly butt to the thin muzzle, as if always eager to kill. It reminded me of a striking snake. The name of it, he once told me, was a Loo—let me see—ah yes, that is it, senhor—a Luger. The rifle, too, looked wicked, but I can not remember its name; it does not matter. But that pistol and the look of the spidery man who carried it were such that, when he was following behind me in the bush, I got a cold feeling between my shoulder blades, as if death were about to strike me in the back.

  My mates, too, said that they had the same feeling when he was behind them; yet he gave us no real cause for it. He did not bluster nor threaten us by word or act. Indeed, he was very quiet. He had the spider's way of remaining still in one place for a long time, watching everything and making no move. It might be our work that he watched, or it might be something in the jungle that aroused his interest; but whatever it was, you felt that when he stopped looking at it he had seen everything about it and remembered it all.

  One thing that amused us was his habit of watching other spiders—real spiders of the bush, which we often met. No matter what sort of spider it might be, he would study it and learn its ways and how it lived and got its prey. When he did this we would wink at one another and laugh behind our hands, and one of my mates named Pedro—a, tall, handsome young fellow who was very droll—would pretend to pounce on something, and then say under his breath:

  "Take care, little spider, the big Spider will eat you!"

  It seemed very funny to us at the time. But later on things came about which made it not funny at all.

  After he had been among us for some time, another boat came. It brought us welcome guests: the coronel's daughter, who had journeyed all the way from Rio to visit him, and her cousin, a gentleman of Rio, Senhor Affonso da Fonseca. Every year the Senhorita Flora made this long trip from the great city where she was receiving the finest education the coronel's wealth could give her, to see her lonely old father. And though he would never allow her to remain very long, lest she become ill from the climate or meet some mischance from snakes or other things, we all knew that he looked forward to these short visits of hers as the brightest days of all the year.

  We knew, too, that he planned eventually to make his own home again in Rio, where he had lived until his wife died. And we knew also that Senhor Affonso, who was somewhat older than the senhorita, had a deeper feeling for her than that of a cousin, and that, though he accompanied her partly because he was interested in our rubber country and partly because he felt it his duty to protect her on the long journey, he came more for the pleasure of being with her. We were glad of this, for she was a handsome, gracious girl—the true daughter of her father—while the senhor was every inch a man and would make her a fine husband. The coronel himself approved the match.

  Now it happened just at this time that I met with a rather bad accident in the bush—my right leg was cut by a machete—and so I had to go back to headquarters to let the injury heal. My old coronel had a very friendly feeling for me because in past days I had done some dangerous things for him which many men would not have done. So, while I was recovering from my hurt, he often had me come to the house and sit and talk to him, and, being there, I saw a number of things.

  For one thing, I noticed that the Spider stopped going into the jungle so much. He stayed around the headquarters, sitting quiet for hours in that spidery way of his and watching the senhorita or Senhor Affonso. Sometimes he talked, in his throaty foreign way, and the others answered him with all politeness, but I could see that none of them liked him.

  The coronel was displeased at the way the Spider's eyes followed his daughter, and the girl herself avoided him. Senhor Affonso, though, was much interested sometimes by the black-bearded man's talk of things he had studied in the jungle, and now and then he went out with him to see those things for himself. At such times I always felt uneasy, and Senhorita Flora, too, kept watching anxiously until they returned.

  Mind you, senhores, the Spider never had done anything to make us distrust him. But dark crimes can easily be committed when two men are alone in the bush, and we knew that Senhor Affonso was wealthy and that, no doubt, he had a tempting sum of milreis with him; and, as I have said, there was that about the Spider which made one feel that it would not be well to trust him too far. So I always felt relieved when the Rio gentleman came back unharmed, and I knew the senhorita did also, though she never spoke of what was in her mind.

  Then one day a man of ours reported seeing a splendid black jaguar in the forest, and Senhor Affonso and the Spider went to hunt it. They made the longest trip they had yet taken, for they were gone two days. This time we were more at ease about them, however, for by the coronel's order two of our men went with them—the man who had seen the jaguar and another who was a good hunter.

  Not long after they departed, another boat came. It was the one which had brought the Spider to us. My leg was better now, though still stiff, and I limped down to watch the unloading of the supplies. As I started, the coronel asked me to request the captain to come up for a moment. I did so and thought no more of it. After the boat went, though, I noticed that the coronel seemed disturbed. At times his eyes would snap angrily and then he would walk up and down, his face wrinkled in thought. I asked no questions, of course, but after the Spider and Senhor Affonso returned I soon learned what was the matter.

  They had found the jaguar, and brought with them his great, glossy hide, which Senhor Affonso proudly showed to the girl and her father.

  "It shall go back to Rio with us,” he said, looking at Flora, and there was that in his face which added: “And some day, beloved, it shall be in our home."

  She smiled and blushed a little, dropping her eyes.

  I do not know why I did it, but I glanced at the Spider to see if he watched this. I saw he did and that a nasty expression crossed his face. The coronel saw this, too, and his mouth tightened. When the others started into the house he said—

  "Senhor Schwartz, I would speak with you."

  I turned to go away. But, as I have said, my leg was stiff, and I had to walk slowly—and I will admit that I did not try very hard to hasten, for I knew the coronel was about to say something worth hearing. Before I had gone far the old gentleman spoke:

  "Senhor, you have now made me quite a long visit. I have greatly enjoyed your companionship and I am grieved that in this poor home of mine I have been unable to offer you better entertainment. I trust, however, that the lit
tle I could do to show you the workings of the estate has been of some assistance to you, and that on your departure you will carry with you many pleasant memories."

  The Spider said nothing. So the coronel added—

  "It is with sorrow that I learn that you are to leave us on the next boat."

  After a pause the Spider said:

  "Ya, I see. It is because I lost that bag mit my papers."

  "Pardon, senhor,” said the coronel, “but the Aurora was here yesterday, and as you are my guest I asked the captain if any trace of your black bag, of which you told me, had been found. He told me, senhor, that you had no black bag whatever—only the brown one which you brought here, and that nothing had been taken from you. No doubt there is some mistake. Yet I have known this captain for years, and I know him to be honest and truthful."

  There was another pause. Just as I passed out of hearing the Spider said—

  "He is a goddam liar, but I will go."

  I heard him walk into the house.

  As no boat was expected for a time, things went on as before. I said nothing of what I had overheard and I know the coronel did not tell the others, for he is the very soul of hospitality and it had cost him an unpleasant struggle to do what he had to do. The Spider went out into the bush a few times alone and returned and talked of various things he had seen. Then one morning he and Senhor Affonso went out together, to look at something or other this blackhearted man said he had found.

  I watched them go and I became more uneasy than ever before. I wanted to follow, but my leg was not yet good enough to let me travel easily and noiselessly; so I looked about, and my eye fell on young Pedro, the droll fellow who used to pretend to devour spiders. I beckoned to him and whispered to him to follow the pair and keep out of sight. He did so at once.

  TIME PASSED, and a sort of drowsiness had crept upon me, when there came a sound—a sound like a shot, some distance away and muffled by the bush. I sprang awake and listened. Suddenly I remembered that Pedro had not taken his rifle—only the machete he always carried at his belt. Senhor Affonso, though, had a gun with him and he might be shooting at some animal.