“Then I shall furnish you a mount to Huancabamba,” he announced.
I declined. It seemed foolish to besmirch my long, unbroken record afoot. But he insisted on at least sending a peon to carry my baggage and to serve as “guide,” and actually kept his promise!
“It dawned raining,” as they say in the Andes, but the peon assigned the task, because his rent was in arrears, was already astride a good saddle-horse when I stepped out into the storm. Another debtor had been ordered to furnish a boiled chicken, the cook, a bag of rice. With few respites we zigzagged all day up into the Cordillera Central, ever vaster views of the valleys about San Pablo opening out, though advancing little except upward. Relieved of my load I seemed to have wings, and in the steeper places had often to wait for the horseman. Barely a hut and not a traveler did we pass during a day which ended with a perpendicular climb to a miserable mud hovel on a high and wintry pampa. Alone, accommodation might have been refused me, but my companion was distantly related to the two crabbed females who, with their tawny flock of half-naked children, existed in this cheerless spot, and I was passively suffered to remain. In their mud den, where the usual fagot-fire was blazing under an ancient and enormous kettle set on three stones, I sat down on a sort of short trough with six-inch legs, one of the “chairs” of this region, when any exist, and some time later we were served in bowls made of gourds a boiling-hot mixture of potatoes, habas, and some mountain mystery. Still unsatisfied, I drew out my bag of rice. Válgame Diós if that lazy cook of the “Hacienda San Pablo” had not delivered it to me uncooked! I followed the custom of the place and circumstances by presenting the women with enough of the grain to feed her entire family for a day or two, then asked that a bowlful be cooked for me.
“Now hay manteca—there is no lard,” mumbled one of the females.
“Eureka!” I cried, “Then for once I can have it cooked as it should be.”
“There is no other kettle,” said the woman in a faint monotone, projecting her lips toward that containing the stew.
The teniente-gobernador, or “lieutenant-governor,” of Jaen, whose duty it was, at sight of my official papers, to find me lodging, food, pasture, and make himself generally useful
The two of us. “Cleopatra” and I in the hungry jungles of Jaen some forty-eight hours after the last glimpse of a human being