“Now, for the good of Pampa Grande, I advise you! There are plenty of chickens in town.”
“The people will not sell. The only way is for you to go out and shoot one with your revolver.”
“I never risk my aim on anything smaller than a bullock. Cartridges are expensive in the wilds of Bolivia.”
Such gringo persistency was annoying. Native travelers needed only to be told the same lie two or three times before they left him in peace to drowse in his hammock. With a badly concealed sigh he wandered into the street, and led the way across the noiseless sanded plaza to the house of his friend the alcalde. The two conferred together and finally sent out a cholo with orders to run down a chicken—“anybody’s at all.” The emissary returned by and by to report that he could not find one. The pair looked at me as much as to say, “There, you see the last hope has failed.” I ignored the hint. In despair they called in another cholo and with a mumbled order handed him a shotgun. A long time later a report was heard some distance off. The two officials shivered. By and by the cholo returned with the shotgun and announced that “it was badly loaded.” He said nothing about the aiming. The officials looked at me imploringly. I remained like a statue of patience seated on a cactus. At last the alcalde, with the air of a member of a suicide club who has drawn the black bean, snatched up the gun and, calling upon the cholo to follow, disappeared into the sunshine. For a time only the chirp of an insect in the thatch above sounded. Then a shot was heard, and a moment later the alcalde dodged into the room like a man pursued by bandits, thrust the weapon quickly under a reed mat, and assumed his seat and his most innocent air. Legally he might shoot all his neighbors’ chickens on government order; practically he was not anxious to be seen at it. The corregidor looked sorrowfully but appealingly up at him. His voice was a weak whisper:
“Yes, we got him. It was Don Panchito’s red one. No, the pullet. No, none of the family seemed to see me, but quién sabe?”
For a considerable time more nothing happened. I began to wonder if this, too, had been a well-acted ruse. Now and then the alcalde or the corregidor rose and peered anxiously down the street through the crack of the door. Whenever the patter of footsteps sounded outside, the pair grew stiff with misgiving.
Then suddenly in burst the cholo, carrying under his poncho the pollo, already relieved of its feathers, thus accounting for the last delay. It was a tolerably plump bird, and the corregidor thought fifty centavos would be a just price. He would give it to Don Panchito to-morrow, when his wrath had cooled. I paid it and hurried home. There followed an hour’s wandering and pleading, all of which I must do in person, since Tommy spoke no Spanish, and several more appeals to the corregidor before I got lard, rice, tiny potatoes at ten cents a pound, as well as an unexpected bowl of what purported to be stewed peaches. The pot the corregidor could lend us was large enough for an army. Tommy, who had once been second cook on board ship—after they had found him—was appointed fireman and general assistant, and soon had the three-stone fagot cook-stove out under the back porch roaring. Then with plantains fried in lard and —. But why enumerate? By the time we had fed the ragamuffins at the back door and hung the not yet empty kettle on the top of a hammock-post, even Tommy’s inclination to make tea had evaporated. It may not have been a genuine Christmas dinner. Pumpkin pie, for instance, was painfully conspicuous by its absence. But it produced the same effect. While Tommy stretched out on a mud divan, I spread my poncho on the sand under a tree in the back yard, where the gusts of breeze came often enough to lull me quickly into a siesta.
I had barely fallen asleep when the chicken-shooter came to “give me information about the town,” and I must get up and go back to the room with him. There he picked up the scattered pages of Ibañez’ “Flor de Mayo” I had discarded as I read, then clawed out my copy of a Cochabamba newspaper. When he had perused that he took to fingering my note-book, which fortunately he could not read, until at last in disgust I spread my poncho again on the brick floor and was soon sound asleep. When I woke again at sunset both informant and information had faded away. I went out on the porch to write, and a neighbor came to pull the note-book out of my hands and solemnly “read” it, quite oblivious in his illiteracy to the fact that there was hardly a word of Spanish in it, besides being legible only to the elect. Then he must inspect my fountain-pen and learn all its inner secrets. When I recovered it and continued writing with what ink was not smeared over his person, he thrust his nose between the pages, inquiring:
“Are you noting all the inhabitants of Pampa Grande?”
“No.”