A groan of anguish escaped the stricken priest. He rose from his knees and followed stumbling after the girl. As he reached the shales he saw her far in the distance at the mouth of the trail. She turned, and waved her hand to him. Then the dark trail swallowed her, and he saw her no more.
For a moment he stood like a statue, striving with futile gaze to penetrate that black opening in the dense bush that had engulfed his very soul. His bloodshot eyes were wild. His lips fluttered. His hand closed convulsively over the paper which the girl had left with him. Mechanically he opened it and read:
“Dearest, dearest Padre, these four little Bible verses I leave with you; and you will promise your little girl that you will always live by them. Then your problem will be solved.
“1. Thou shall have no other gods before me.
“2. Love thy neighbor as thyself.
“3. Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect.
“4. Whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die.
“And, Padre, my dearest, dearest Padre, God is everywhere.”
His hand fell. His brain reeled, and he swayed like a drunken man. He turned about, muttering incoherently. Doña Maria stood behind him. Tenderly taking his arm, she led him back to the forlorn little house. Its ghastly emptiness smote him until his reason tottered. He sank into a chair 361 and gazed with dull, stony eyes out over the placid lake, where the white beams of the rising sun were breaking into myriad colors against the brume.
CHAPTER 37
The two hundred miles which lay before Rosendo and his little band stretched their rugged, forbidding length through ragged cañons, rushing waters, and dank, virginal forest. Only the old man, as he trudged along the worn trail between Simití and the Inanea river, where canoes waited to transport the travelers to the little village of Boque, had any adequate conception of what the journey meant. Even the cargadores were unfamiliar with the region which they were to penetrate. Some of them had been over the Guamocó trail as far as Culata; a few had ascended the Boque river to its farthest navigable point. But none had penetrated the inmost reaches of the great cañon through which the headwaters tumbled and roared, and none had ever dreamed of making the passage over the great divide, the Barra Principal, to the Tiguí beyond.
To the Americans, fresh from the luxury and convention of city life, and imbued with the indomitable Yankee spirit of adventure, the prospect was absorbing in its allurements. Especially to the excitable, high-strung Harris, whose great eyes almost popped from his head at the continuous display of tropical marvels, and whose exclamations of astonishment and surprise, enriched from his inexhaustible store of American slang and miner’s parlance, burst from his gaping mouth at every turn of the sinuous trail. From the outset, he had constituted himself Carmen’s special protector, although much to Rosendo’s consternation, for the lank, awkward fellow, whose lean shoulders bent under the weight of some six-feet-two of height, went stumbling and tripping along the way, swaying against every tree and bush that edged the path, and constantly giving noisy vent to his opinions regarding trails in general, and those of the tropics in particular. His only accouterment was a Winchester rifle of tremendous bore, which he insisted on carrying in constant readiness to meet either beasts of prey or savage Indians, but which, in his absent-mindedness and dreamy preoccupation, he either dragged, muzzle up, or carried at such dangerous angles that the natives were finally obliged, in self-protection, to insist that he hand the weapon over to Rosendo. To Carmen, as the days passed and she 362 gradually recognized his sterling qualities, he became a source of delight. Hour after hour she trotted along after him, chatting merrily in her beloved English tongue, poking fun at his awkwardness, and laughing boisterously over his quaint slang and naïve Yankee expressions. She had never heard such things from Josè; nor had the priest, despite his profound knowledge, ever told her such exciting tales as did Harris, when he drew from his store of frontier memories and colored his narratives with the rich tints furnished by his easy imagination.
The first day out had been one of mental struggle for the girl. She had turned into the trail, after waving a last farewell to Josè, with a feeling that she had never experienced before. For hours she trudged along, oblivious of her environment, murmuring, “It isn’t true––it isn’t true!” until Harris, his curiosity aroused by the constant repetition which floated now and then to his ears, demanded to know what it was that was so radically false.