Meanwhile some of the refugees had reached nearby settlements. Several search parties were made up and, having buried what the vultures had left, took up the scent. The natives of these jungle regions are not easily eluded in their own element. For four days the Britons struggled through the tropical wilderness, half-dead from thirst—for it was September, at the end of the dry season—and soon reduced to a few native berries as food. The gold became too heavy for their waning forces. They managed to climb to the summit of a jungle bluff and bury most of it. On the fifth day a search party came upon them resting in a shaded thicket. A volley killed his companion and slightly wounded “Thompson.” Leaving the corpse for the vultures, the pursuers tracked the wounded man all night and next morning caught him at bay. Having pointed out the hiding-place of the gold, he was set backward astride a mule with his hands tied behind him and, amid such persecution as the savage, half-Indian Bolivian can invent, was escorted to San José, and later driven through the jungle and lodged in the departmental prison.
All this had occurred three years before. Twice “Thompson,” who was a Mason, as are some of the officials of Bolivia, “escaped.” The first time he was found drunk in the plaza before his evasion was known; the second, he walked the 160 leagues to Yacuiva through the jungle without once touching the trail, only to celebrate too early what he fancied, for lack of geographical knowledge, was his escape into the Argentine, and be forced to walk all the way back. Finally, after more than a year in prison, he had been tried—on paper, as in all Spanish-America—and within another twelve-month had coaxed the judge to deliver his verdict and sentence him—to be shot. The supreme court and the president had still to pass upon the matter, and another year had drifted by.
Of late years it is not easy to gain admittance to the prison of Santa Cruz. About its doors swarm ragged sentinels who scream frantically “Cabo de Guardia!” (“Corporal of the Guard”), and swing their aged muskets menacingly whenever a stranger pauses to speak to them. But a note from the prefect brought me the attention of the haughty superiors of the “Policía de Seguridad,” who saw fit to permit me to wade across the first patio of the prison. There an insolent half-negro in the remnants of a faded khaki uniform felt me carefully over for firearms, and at length deigned to open a wooden-barred door. Beyond another mud-floored anteroom and through another wooden gate, I found myself in a bare patio some forty feet square, with a deep open well and signs that the entire yard became a pond whenever it rained. This was surrounded on all sides by an ancient low building of adobe, under the projecting eaves of which, on the ground or in hammocks, and inside squalid cell-like rooms, loafed a score or more of men and several women of all known human complexions and degrees of undress. A single boy soldier of simian brow, with a disproportionately heavy loaded rifle on his shoulder, paraded in the shade of the eaves. He looked, indeed, like one to whose ingrown intelligence could safely be trusted matters of life and death!
My errand made known, several of the prisoners, without rising, began to shout, “Don Arturo!” By and by a voice came back, “’Stá bañandose!” I crossed to one of the cells, a small room filled with sundry junk, chiefly the tools of a mechanic, of which the wooden-barred door stood ajar. Inside, on a piece of board laid on the earth floor, stood “Thompson,” in the costume of Adam, pouring a bucket of water over his head. I explained that I was drifting through Bolivia and fancied he might be glad to hear his native tongue again. He was, having had only two such visitors during the year just ended. Wrapping a towel about his loins, he stood and chatted, while an anemic half-negro in what had once been khaki leaned against the door-post watching our every movement, and several other prisoners crowded round in the customary ill-bred South American fashion.
“Thompson” was an unattractive man in middle life, rather thin, with the accent and bad teeth of the Englishman of the mechanic class, and the uninspired and rather hopeless philosophy of life common to that caste. Otherwise his attitude was in no way different from what it would have been had we been a pair of tramps met on the road. He smiled frequently as he talked, and was neither more sad nor more cynical than the average of his class. He made no secret of his part in what he referred to as “our stunt,” and gave me detailed information on how to find the graves along the trail “where we pulled it off,” in case I should continue to the eastward. He plainly regretted the crime, but only because he had been caught. Knowing he had already published a doctored account of the occurrence in an English monthly and had found the remuneration exceedingly useful in eking out his existence in a Bolivian prison, I suggested the writing of the whole story.
“Aye, but they ’re not going to give me time,” he answered, rolling and lighting a cigarette. “I just got word from Sucre that they have confirmed the sentence. Now as soon as the president signs it, they’ll call me out and ...”
“Oh, I don’t believe Montes would do that to a gringo,” I remarked encouragingly. “He is a Mason, too—”
“Well, I don’t care a rap whether they do or not,” he replied, with considerable heat, “I’m perfectly willing they do it and have it over with. Even if he commutes the sentence, it means ten years more of this”—he pointed to the slovenly yard and dirtier inmates—“and it’s quite as bad as the other; I don’t know but worse.”
When he had dressed and stepped outside to pose for a photograph, he presented rather a “natty” appearance, though his low-caste face could not be disguised. Together we wandered through the prison. “Thompson,” in his striving to be “simpático” amid his surroundings, had become quite a “caballero” in his manner, and spoke Spanish unusually well for one of his class and nationality. The prisoners found it as necessary to earn their own living inside the prison as outside, for though the government theoretically furnishes food, it would not have kept the smallest inmate alive for a week. “Thompson” asserted that he had not touched prison fare since his incarceration. His “cell” was fitted up as a workshop, with a bench, a small vise, and such tools of a mechanic as he had been able to collect, and he earned a meager fare and other necessities by mending watches and at the various tinkering jobs that reached him from outside. Shoe-making was the favorite occupation of his fellow-jailbirds. More than a dozen had their open “cells” scattered with odds and ends of leather and half-finished footwear. Formerly, the public had passed freely in and out of the prison, and prisoners, underbidding free labor, since their lodging was already supplied them, had always earned enough to satisfy their appetites. Now, the rules had become somewhat more strict, at least to outsiders, and with less opportunity to sell their wares more than one inmate suffered from hunger.
We passed into one of the two large common rooms, foul-smelling mud dens in which “Thompson” had seen as many as 37 persons of both sexes and all degrees of crime, age, and condition sometimes locked in for an entire month by some whim of carcelero or judge. The room being completely innocent of any convenience whatever, the conditions of prisoners and prison when the door might finally be unlocked needs no description. Just now the room was open, and there were but 26 inmates, men and women mixed indiscriminately, for there were no rules, even at night, as to the sleeping-places of the two sexes. The female prisoners, in fact, earned their food as do so many cruceñas outside, from such of the male inmates and soldier guards as could reward their favors, and had advanced to a point where even privacy was no longer requisite. Even then several slovenly couples reclined together on the uneven floor in half-amorous attitudes, and on a species of crippled bed in a corner sat an evil-eyed fellow of some negro blood, on the floor at whose feet, her uncurried head resting affectionately between his legs, squatted a native woman in the early thirties, who might years before have been almost beautiful. She had killed the “Turk” with whom she had been living, and was for a time under sentence to be shot. The president, however, after making her two accomplices draw lots for fifteen years’ imprisonment and execution respectively—by Bolivian law two persons cannot be executed for the same crime—the supreme penalty falling upon a Chilian, had commuted her sentence to ten years. Outside the prison the rumor was prevalent that her lenient treatment arose from the fact that she had borne a son to the prosecuting attorney.