Boots

START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 75096
A story of the Sierra of Peru
By MURRAY LEINSTER
It is doubtful whether Juan was moved to his act of high courage by fear, or whether it was covetousness—which is a sin—or whether it was merely the love of a woman. He did a most amazing thing for one of his breed, and the woman who may have inspired him was marvelous. It is a pity that her name is lost to posterity. And it is a pity that no one knows what motive actually stirred Juan. But the woman was really a miracle of femininity. She was almost half white.
Juan himself was thirteen-sixteenths Araucanian Indian, which as a description means more in Peru than here. He had a tiny clearing up a small jungle stream that nobody has bothered to give a name to, and from time to time he planted something, and from time to time he gathered his crop, and from time to time he fished. In between these activities he thought about the woman and toilsomely acquired as romantic and hopeless an infatuation as a man can acquire with such diluted Latin blood. Which may be important in explaining what he did.
He was fishing when three gringos came paddling down the jungle stream from the mountains, and from the beginning he knew that they were mad. Only madmen traveled with such energy. Only madmen beamed and smiled as did the gray eyed gringo , and only lunatics splashed their paddles hilariously and sang snatches of indecorous songs off key, like the red headed Yanqui in the bow. The third man gave no such obvious signs of madness, to be sure. His expression was composed and calm. But Juan looked at his eyes, and immediately thereafter Juan was thinking in panicky fashion of certain jungle trails that he knew, and that he could follow, but which no white man could ever unravel.
Long slanting shadows fell athwart the little stream and seemed to give the jungle an expression of sardonic calm; of a quietly malicious amusement which did not in the least detract from its luxuriantly leafy beauty. The jungle is beautiful always, but sometimes its beauty is welcoming, and sometimes its beauty is sinister and secretive. Its beauty just then was like the beauty of those gorgeously flowering vines which drape themselves languorously, caressingly, about the sturdy trees they are slowly murdering.