The new line petered out in the stony village of Changolla, some sixty-five miles from Oruro and halfway to Cochabamba, which it is in time due to reach. A stage-coach offered accommodations for the rest of the trip; but the joy of jolting all day in the thing was not commensurate with the pleasure of a new experience, even had the fare for both passengers and baggage not been prohibitive to a scantily supplied wanderer. “See Sinclair there,” suggested the gringo chief, pointing to a sandy, unshaven Scot of more than six energetic feet, who was superintending the loading of all manner of railroad material into ponderous two-wheeled carts; and the hint was sufficient.
Changolla would have been excited that night were it possible for railroad constructors of long experience in many wild regions to become so. A fellow-countryman and predecessor of the New Zealander in charge of the camp had gone on a rampage with an American youth and turned bandits, in dime-novel style. Filled with distilled bravery, they had “held up” a nearby camp under the impression that the paymaster had arrived, and disappointed in this, they had shot a harmless Chilian employee. It took some time and all my papers to calm the suspicions of Changolla before I was offered lodging with the New Zealander. The “bandits” had sworn to shoot him and his assistants on sight, and a cardboard had been fastened over the window to prevent them from carrying out the threat by lamp-light as we ate, though none of the group showed any nervousness at the prospect.
But the highwaying of the pair was amateurish at best. They had made no plans whatever for getting out of town, had even to ask the way, and had as provisions—two bottles of whiskey. Thus it was not strange that they were rounded up before morning, and my hosts showed no surprise when dawn disclosed the prisoners shackled in one of the box-cars. They had been taken, asleep, some ten miles from the scene of the crime, with a bottle in one hand and a gun in the other. The chief looked his fellow-countryman over, expressed his sentiments with a “You’re a hell of a bandit, you are,” lit a cigarette, and went on about his day’s work. Mounted on asses, with a stick through their elbows behind them, the pair set out for Cochabamba guarded by a score of soldiers. The punishment for murder in Bolivia is to be taken back to the scene of the crime and shot, though there is many a slip between the law and its execution, and judges, according to my hosts, must be properly “greased” before they will even indict a criminal, particularly when the complainant is a rich foreign company.
Meanwhile nine enormous carts, each drawn by six sleek and mighty mules, laden with all the bulky material required for railroad construction, to say nothing of my baggage, and covered in Forty-niner fashion, got under way. I set off ahead. The trail followed a broad, stony and sandy river-bed across which serpentined a yellow brook of brackish, luke-warm water which it was impossible by just two steps to cross dry-shod. The unfinished railroad flanked the barren, stony hills on the left, the embankment carved out of them being broken by unbuilt bridges and incomplete cuts and tunnels that cost me many a steep scramble. In the river-bed below passed a broken stream of Indians and cholos driving donkeys and mules, heavy-laden, as were most of the drivers themselves, their ponchos, chiefly of red with narrow perpendicular stripes, standing out against the barren brown landscape. Every little green patch on its edge was well-populated; many a hacienda or small village having become a railway construction camp where haughty young Englishmen gazed coldly and suspiciously at one of their race sinking his caste to travel on foot. The Briton who has “knocked about” the world until the corners have been blunted is an agreeable fellow; but in his youthful, fresh-from-London days he is best avoided.
The embankment gave out, and we struck a gorge where the carts were saved only by the vigilance of “Sandy,” astride his splendid macho, and the mules, as by a miracle. In the blazing, dusty, river-bed, sweat poured profusely as I plodded, clinging to the tail of a cart to be snatched across the ever-recurring stream. The towns were miserable, yet misery seems far less pitiful in perpetual summer. Worst of all, there was no water a man dared drink. The banks of the river were lined for broken spaces with large quantities of cobbles inside wire nets—an Argentine idea, according to the Scot—to keep the river from undermining and washing away the coming railroad. It seemed absurd to have to take such precautions against a tiny meandering brook, but in the rainy season this increases to a rushing torrent filling all the valley.
It was starving mid-afternoon before “Sandy” called a halt for “breakfast,” and the peons prepared a chupe,—a stew of potatoes, charqui, rice, and anything else that it occurred to them to toss into the pot. At sunset we camped like gypsies in the stony, wind-blown, waterless river-bed; the mules were turned loose among several heaps of straw carried in one of the carts, and we rolled up in blankets on the sand. The drivers were a motley gang of Bolivian, Argentine, and Chilian cholos, each with the accent peculiar to his nationality. All had long knives in their belts and were inclined to use them on slight provocation. Several carried their wives, or at least their women, with them in the carts, sometimes with a child or two in addition.
Next day as I plodded beside his long-legged mule, “Sandy” whiled away the long, hot hours with reminiscences.
“Did they tell you in Juliaca how I cleaned out their damned hotel,” he asked.
They had, but I wanted “Sandy’s” own version of the affair.
“Well, we were playing billiards, when some greaser said something about gringos, and I told him to shut up. The crowd was too drunk to know better, so I had to take a bunch of billiard-cues and clean out the thirty-two of them. It cost me just a hundred and twelve pounds—twelve for the greasers’ doctor-bills and a hundred to get my friend the subprefect to lie low until I could get over the line.