Under superior orders the native lieutenant assigned a sergeant and eleven men of the guardia to accompany us through the bandit haunts beyond. As they lined up for final inspection they were spick and span out of all parallel in my tropical experience, from newly ironed breeches to oiled rifles; ten minutes later they were marching knee-deep through a river in the well-polished shoes they would gladly have left behind had American discipline permitted it. Their own fault, I mused, for they might have spent some of their ample garrison leisure in building a bridge; but I soon withdrew the mental criticism. A single bridge would not much have improved that route. It consisted of a wide cleared space through the mountainous forest, and nothing more—rather less, in fact, for in many places neither the stumps or the huge felled trunks had been removed. Streams succeeded one another in swift succession; the almost constant rains of this region had made the steep slopes precarious toboggans of red mud, where they were not corduroyed with camclones, slippery ridges of earth with deep troughs of muddy water between them. Here and there the guards were forced to climb a slimy bank virtually on their hands and knees; in other places the mud clung to their feet in hundred-weight; with the densest vegetation on either hand cutting off all suggestion of breeze, the sweat dripped from them in streams. Within half an hour the bedraggled, soaked, mud-plastered rifle-bearers staggering before and behind us along the trail showed slight resemblance indeed to the perfectly starched and polished young men who had been drawn up for the lieutenant’s inspection.
“Mac” and I on our sorry mounts were not much better off. It was beginning to be apparent why one can get from Santiago to New York more easily and in less time than to the Dominican capital. The ex-“top,” as a high government official, had been given Jovero’s best mule, but it would be easy to imagine a better one. My own steed had long since become a candidate for the glue factory and his suffering air had already riddled my conscience before a shifting of the saddle-cloth disclosed an open sore on his back larger than my two hands. Santo Domingo needs such a law as that with which we cured the Canal Zone of this heartless Latin-American custom of working their animals in a mutilated condition. But what could one do under the circumstances but urge on the suffering beast? We had come too far for me to turn back in the faint hope of getting another mount; it was as necessary to reach Seibo as it was not to leave “Mac” in the lurch, and even had I taken to my feet along with the mud-caked guards the abandoned animal would have been almost certain to fall into the still less compassionate hands of the bandits.
Precautions against the latter now began to be taken in earnest. We were approaching a labyrinth of sharp gullies and high hills which had always been a favorite lurking-place of the outlaws. Any turn of the now narrow trail would have made a splendid ambush. Drenching showers at frequent intervals made it easy for the ruffians to sneak up through the bush unheard; the heavy humidity of a tropical rainy season deadens sounds even when the sun shines. The sergeant arranged his men in skirmish formation, with strict orders not to “bunch up” under any circumstances. A barefoot native on horseback, who had overtaken us soon after our departure from Jovero, was forbidden to ride ahead of the party. We had no means of knowing whether his assertion that he had hastened to join us for safety’s sake, after waiting a fortnight for a chance to make the journey, was truth or pretense. These preparations concluded, we moved forward ready for instant battle.
Nothing of the kind occurred. I might have known it would not; there is no greater Jonah on earth than I for scaring off adventure. Trails worn deeper than a horseman’s head and so narrow as to rub our elbows offered attackers comparative immunity; the dense jungle might easily have concealed a score of men within a yard or two on either side of us; the steepness of the mountain-top, forcing us to dismount and drag our weary, stumbling animals behind us, left us scant breath to spend in physical combat, yet nothing but the deep, oppressive silence of a tropical wilderness enlivened our laborious progress. By the time the summit was reached we were ready to believe that the bandits of Seibo were a myth. An unbroken expanse of vegetation, dark green everywhere, spread away to the limitless southern horizon. Yet the rains ceased abruptly at the crest of the range, and the trail that carried us swiftly downward was as dry as the Sahara.
The sergeant gradually relaxed his vigilance and let his men once more straggle along at will, though he watched closely the rare travelers who began to appear. Several of the guards, I found, as we grouped together again for a rest, spoke to one another in Samaná English rather than Spanish. When I gave a cheering word in the latter tongue to a ragged native civilian who had plodded at my horse’s heels since the beginning of the journey, he glanced up at me with an expression of incomprehension and asked the guard behind him to interpret my remark. He was Canadian born, had been seven years in the sugar fields of Cuba without learning a word of Spanish, and had been robbed by Haitian cacos of everything except his tattered hat, shirt and trousers. “Nobody told me there were that kind of people in that country,” he explained, plaintively, “I never thought such things of people of my color.” The wisdom gained from that unexpected experience developed a precaution that had held him nearly three weeks in Jovero awaiting a safe opportunity to proceed to the sugar district of southeastern Santo Domingo.
A Dominican switch engine
A Dominican hearse
