This they would play for hours before changing to the other, as follows:
White squares of cloth hung from the shoulders of the players like the capes of the old Crusaders, and with their brilliant new ponchos and the bright green of the parrot-feather decorations they made a most picturesque effect. The weird and barbaric music was rather attractive at first as it rose from the distance and swelled in volume while the procession came nearer, but after eight or ten hours it palled, and the prospect of a week more of it was not cheerful. But an outbreak in the Indian town of Illabaya, ten miles off over the mountains, brought it to a close much earlier.
To Mrs. Arthur T. Jackson, of Boston, the wife of a prominent rubber-dealer in Bolivia, who was in Sorata at the time, the only white woman within hundreds of miles, I am indebted for the transcript of the Indian music. An accomplished musician, she was much interested in the subject, and at different times during her months on the Indian frontiers she had gathered and noted the airs as she heard them in the fiestas.
CHAPTER XXII
BACK HOME
More difficulty developed when I, in an amiable frame of mind bought a chance in a watch from a Sorata man, for when a man moves from a village he raffles off all his household goods and his own and his wife’s jewelry. This raffle was made famous by the fact that I won something. I won the watch; and the next morning was arrested by the intendente on the complaint of a thrifty Soratañian that the whole machinery of the raffle had been undermined and debauched, and Bolivia dishonored in order that the dice might give me this marvelous watch. The watch, by the way—I will keep it for years as proof that I am Fortune’s favorite—did strongly resemble gold in a dim light and when wound would tick for quite a while, but in its general aspect was on the order of those given as a premium with two cakes of scented soap for a quarter by the slick corner spieler of a gang of pickpockets.
At last we were to start the next day over the pass to Mapiri with our outfit and men. The surly American with his ever-present extraordinarily long barrel Colt sent a messenger to me to announce that his home office, easy chair, contract on the Mapiri River happened to cover all of the available balsas and callapos and that I could not use any. Presently we met in the plaza and he remarked with a suggestive emphasis, “You got my message about my callapos?” I replied briefly that I had and that I would act as my judgment dictated when I arrived in Mapiri. “Very well,” he said suggestively; “then you know the consequences and can take them.”
That night a friend came to our party with the information that this man had shipped in to his barraca recently some dozen Winchesters and considerable ammunition and that he was arranging to ship more. That gave their barraca some twenty-six rifles—a pretty heavy armament for merely a peaceful rubber company. His ignorance of the country and his truculent vanity and the carelessness with which he talked “fight,” drunk or sober, made it a matter of no little concern. And he neither knew nor respected the rights and customs of river travel, although he attempted to dictate them.
Like many patriots he was willing to fight as long as he could hire his fighting done for him—an absentee bravo.
We bought four Mausers and a thousand rounds of ammunition and started back to our camp, with five white men and some thirty-five Cholo workmen and three pack-trains of supplies.