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Show ADVENTURERS' CLUB i l HEADLINES FROM THE LIVES OF PEOPLE LIKE YOURSELF! "Horror of the Gray Spots" HELLO, EVERYBODY: Adventure just happens to most people, but Jim Burnett of East Rutherford, N. J., goes out and hunts for his thrills. You know, I've always felt that you'll have just as many adventures if you stay right at home and let them hunt you up. But Jim seems to have had pretty good success suc-cess with his system, too. In the last 20 years or so, Jim had adventured in 54 countries. But the biggest scare he ever got in his life was that time, way back in the interior of Brazil, when he ran into the Adventure of the Gray Spots. In December, 1922, Jim and his pal Jay McKay, were on their way up the Amazon on an errand of vengeance. A Portuguese half breed had killed McKay's father and fled upstream to hide in the wilderness. Jim and Jay had a hunch that they would find him in the Geral Indian country, coun-try, and they had started off after him. For two weeks they traveled up-river in a molloca, a type of canoe used on the Amazon, turned south to ascend the River Purus and, after a week's paddling, picked up the murderer's trail from an Indian w'ho said that a half-breed was hiding with a certain Geral tribe on a stream that branched off the Purus a few miles farther on. Voyagers Reach End of Their Trail. They had paddled all that night, and dawn found them at the mouth of the unnamed tributary of the Purus that the Indian had described. Up that little stream they went. In a couple more hours they were at the spot to which the Indian had directed them the end of their trail. They ran their boat ashore on a narrow, sandy beach, and started ashore. Back jn the jungle they could see an Indian village, vil-lage, and a group of half a dozen natives coming forward to meet them. "The Geral Indians were once considered the most savage sav-age on the South American continent," says Jim, "but we advanced ad-vanced boldly toward the handful before us." It was a tense situation, and Jim and Jay knew it. The Indians might be peaceably disposed and then again they might not. And even though they might be inclined to be peaceable, they certainly wouldn't Then both of them turned and started to'i"ai ua; n their canoe. feel any too friendly to the two white men when they learned their errand was to take away the fugitive they had been sheltering. Yes it was a tense situation all right but nothing Jim or Jay had yet imagined was as bad as what actually happened. The Indians were about twenty paces away when Jim saw them the gray spots. The skins of every one of those Indians were grray and blotchy and spotted spotted with the most dreadful dread-ful disease known to the world. Leprosy! Jim yelled: "Stop, McKay stop." McKay uttered just one word. "Lepers!" Then both of them turned and started to run back to their canoe. They reached the river bank together, leaped over it and landed on the beach right on top of a couple of Indian boys who had circled around them to see what they could steal from the boat. "They turned on us and fought us fiercely," says Jim, "no doubt resenting our catching them at it. They scratched and bit and kicked us before, finally we heaved them bodily out onto the sand and pushed our molloca into the river amid a bedlam bed-lam of shouts from the advancing Indians. Fear of Leprosy Haunts the Two Men. "For the moment we had just one single thought in our minds to get away from the immediate neighborhood. It wasn't until after a quarter quar-ter of an hour of hard paddling, when we were a mile away down stream, that we realized, with a strange, sinking sensation in the pits of our stomachs that we had handled the leprous wretches that they had bitten and scratched us." Jim says that worrying about their exposure to leprosy was bad enough, but the real horror of the business didn't hit them until a week later. Then, tiny, round gray spots began to appear on his and Jay McKay's wrists and arms. "The shock," says Jim, "was terrific. In fact, McKay's hair turned snow white at the age of thirty. I wished that I were dead then and there, and I guess McKay did, too. Have you ever seen the Louisiana leper colony, or Been in the Ladrones? I had always pitied those poor gray-skinned victims of a living death and now I was becoming one myself." They pushed on down the river. In another two weeks the spots had spread over their entire bodies. Life, then, was like a nightmare. For there they were, thousands of miles away from civilization, coming down with the world's most dreaded disease. And even getting back to civilization would be scant comfort. Not even modern medicine can cure that hateful, wasting malady of which those spots were the first awful symptom. Horror Grows Worse as Time Passes. "The ghastly horror," says Jim, "grew on us day by day. We paddled pad-dled along mechanically, like a couple of automatons, wishing to heaven we'd die trying to get up the courage to end our mental agony. As we paddleii, we prayed. We knew that no prayer could cure us, but I believe today that they saved us from a worse death madness!" And then, one day as they were rounding a turn near the mouth ol the Maderia river, they came upon another white man a doctor from the English hospital at Porto Velho, and Jim says that if there ever was a messenger from heaven come in answer to a prayer. Doctor King was that messenger. There in the jungle he gave them a brief examination, and then he told them the news. "Boys," he said, "I know you've been suffering the tortures of the damned, but you can stop worrying. Your cases are a rare form of false leprosy a disease that looks a lot like the real thing, but which a good rest and a little medical attention will take care of. It won't be long before you're as fit as ever." That ended those two lads' mission of vengeance. They never did catch the killer. But Jim hopes that if Jay McKay is in this country he reads this yarn. After all these years, he'd like to see him again. Copyright. WNU Service. |