Fear Drive My Feet Read Online Free Page A

and carrying with it such prestige. As his fingers were never too clean,
the new cap was little more than a greasy rag before we had been on the track many
days. The rifle, too, added to his already vast conceit. All day long he fondled and
patted it, and he spent every spare second rubbing off imaginary specks of rust.
I discovered that he had never fired a shot out of it, and was really rather scared
by the weapon. He knew which end the bullet might be expected to emerge from – wasn’t
there a hole there for the purpose? – but little else. His anxiety to display his
devotion to duty was pathetic. My slightest order was the signal for shuffling and
stamping, for saluting and slapping of the rifle-butt, and his dark eyes would roll
wildly as he hissed, ‘Yessir! Yessir!Yessir!’ He might have been a good musical-comedy
figure, but was hardly a source of comfort and inspiration to a young greenhorn on
his first patrol into territory that was wild and largely unexplored as well as being
controlled in all its approaches by the Japanese.
    A faint breeze just stirred the green foliage that grew like a wall on either side
of the river. From the sun I guessed that it was about three o’clock. The meagre information
I had been given suggested that we should reach Bob’s camp shortly before dark on
this the third day. It was time we moved on.
    ‘Achenmeri!’ I called.
    Instantly there was a scuttering of pebbles and a fumbling as he sprang to attention
and saluted.
    ‘Yessir!’
    ‘Talkim four-fella you-me walkabout now.’
    The other four grinned to each other at my halting order in pidgin English. Natives,
and white men who had mastered the language, spoke so rapidly that the words seemed
to pour forth in an almost incomprehensible torrent. I was trying desperately to
acquire fluency, and listened keenly to every word the boys said, though understanding
but a small part of it. One of the few useful tips I had been given by the district
officer was that pidgin was a real language with rules and grammar of its own, and
must be learnt as such. He was one of the best pidgin speakers in the Territory himself,
and emphasized that it was not merely a matter of bastardizing English by throwing
in a few ‘fellas’ and ‘belongs’. He pointed out that many Europeans who had lived
for years in New Guinea had never realized this fact, and their ability to converse
with natives easily and accurately was limited accordingly.
    The carriers were standing up now, stretching their back muscles before lifting their
loads. The proprietor of the long cigarette put the six-inch remnant behind his ear,
and in a few moments we set off single file along the narrow muddy track, my iron
patrol-box swinging from side to side, lashed to a pole which two boys carried on
their shoulders between them.
    For most of its length the track followed a stream called the Wampit, which was a
tributary of the Markham River. Bob’s, I had been told, was almost on the banks of
the Wampit, and not far from the junction of that stream with the Markham. It was
hidden in thick jungle, but one of the carriers said he had been there before and
could guide us to it.
    As we walked, the country became lower and flatter, and the track increasingly muddy.
The heat, too, grew more and more oppressive. It was the sort of heat one sometimes
finds in big laundries or in other places where there are large quantities of boiling
water. Though we were now almost down to sea-level, and the heat and humidity could
not have got much worse, I nevertheless had the strange feeling of going ever downward
into an inferno.
    At last, a little after five o’clock, with the Wampit on our right hand, the carriers
stopped at a dried-up, rocky little watercourse that crossed the path; they pointed
up it to the left.
    ‘Master, lookim,’ they said. ‘Road belong place belong all master.’
    I could see no ‘road’. The boulder-strewn gully showed no footprints. The only track
seemed to