We told him of the rumors and the threats that came from Sorata.
“Sure, I know,” he said; “that old cuss didn’t do much else but talk fight with me when I was out; how many rifles, how we’re going to run things—you know him—and I’ll bet he’s never heard anything more than a firecracker go off in his life. He’d fire me if he thought I had you at my table. Bring up the hammocks and come on into grub!”
And so like most other really serious things it faded away on a close approach. But it had held all of the serious elements.
The next morning we swung out into the river and again shot the rapids of the Ratama and drifted out where the whirlpools drew the callapos under neck-deep. As we approached the site of our camp we turned loose the rifles and shortly came the answering pop of guns. The callapos grounded on the shallows at the foot of the bank, the old Cholo workmen swarmed around the new comers and waded ashore with the new freight. Where we had left the beginnings of a palm thatched roof was a long bunk-house; a patch of young platanos was opening its long leaves with its promise of our own base of supplies; a hen clucked around with one lone chick—the rest having succumbed to snakes—the result of some trading with the cacique; under a palm thatch there drifted the blue wisps of smoke from a bank of charcoal burning and a well defined trail stretched through the jungle to a clearing farther down where the placer workings would be finally located.
It was like the Swiss family Robinson—it was coming home. The Cholo with the one silver eye, the drunken shoemaker with the scalloped scar, and all the others crowded around and chattered in a happy excitement. The proper native custom is to celebrate so according to formula a tin of alcohol was ordered for the night and the workmen decked themselves with leaves and shuffled round in what passes for a dance until exhausted. The next day the time expired ones started up-river with the callapos.
It had been five months since I left the camp and we began that slow, heart-breaking struggle against the current. It was with all the feelings of having at last reached my restful home that I turned into my hammock that night. Rapidly the camp grew under the influx of the new men; the song of the whip-saw rose in the forest and long clean timbers began piling themselves along the trail; now and again the roar of some huge tree shook the air as it mowed a swath of jungle in its fall; a tiny store was opened and now and again Leccos came to trade—out from the original jungle of the year before had come a tiny, fragmentary community hanging on to the frontier.
And three weeks later I started on a callapo down the river to cross the interior basin of South America, over the Falls of the Madeira and then down the Amazon and to London. Two days and two night camps with a callapo and a crew of Leccos and one forenoon we drifted and scraped on the gravel beach of Rurrenabaque. Here was the last touch of a town, or of a straggling settlement that I would sleep in for many days.
CHAPTER XXIII
OFF ACROSS THE CONTINENT IN A BATALON
A clumsy cart, with its two wheels cross-cut from a single mahogany log, and slowly dragged by a pair of mud covered oxen, crawled across the open space before the settlement that had been left, after the Spanish custom, in crude reminder of a plaza. Under the midday tropic sun the quivering heat-waves boiled up from the baking ground and through them the straggling line of high-peaked, palm-thatched, cane houses shimmered in the glare. Under the torrent of heat the jungle sounds were silenced, and only in the distance, from the river’s edge, came the splashing and clatter of the Tacana woman, with the happy shrieks of the sun-proof, naked babies.
The wooden axles of the cart cried aloud for grease as a ragged Tacana prodded the lumbering oxen; on the raw hides in the cart lay a tiny sack of mail and beside it the tawny mottlings of a fresh stripped jaguar skin. The cart stopped before the cane house of the intendente and that functionary rolled lazily from his hammock and signed a paper; the half-breed roused himself from the corrugated floor of split palm logs, and disappeared in the jungle paths of the scattered settlement to gather his crew, and by that I knew that at last my time for embarking on the muddy, swirling current of the Rio Beni had arrived.