During my stroll my companion ceremoniously introduced me to several of the six “gringo” prisoners. One was a German-Peruvian, eight months before the manager of a local bank, and since then in prison, still untried, on the charge of disposing of bad drafts. When a powerful company does not feel it has sufficient evidence to convict a man whose arrest it has caused, it is the Bolivian custom to see that the judge does not bring the case to trial. Nearly every government official semi-openly having his price, the prisons are apt to hold chiefly those who have underbid in the contest for “justice.” “Thompson” asserted—and he was corroborated by many outside the cárcel—that for some £200 he could make his escape. The savage half-Indian conscripts serving as carceleros vented their hatred of the gringos at every opportunity, and made their lives constantly miserable by watching for the slightest breaking of the rules to give them an excuse to shoot. In former times, when rubber was high in price, the Intendente de la Policía frequently sold prisoners to the “rubber kings” of the Beni at 1000 bolivianos a head, and it was a rare victim of this system who did not end his days as a virtual slave in the Amazonian forests.
As we shook hands at the gate of the inner patio, “Thompson” remarked:
“If Montes signs it, I’ll have forty-eight hours left with nothing to do and I’ll write you something. I believe the thoughts of a man waiting to be shot”—it was the only time he used that word during the interview—“would make interesting reading. The ending would be all right if these Indians could make a good job of it, but they’ll end by bashing in my head with the butts of their muskets, as they have all the others.”
If I have inadvertently given the impression that there are no stern laws and rules of personal conduct in Santa Cruz de la Sierra let me hasten to disavow it as quickly as I was disabused in the matter myself; for it was here that I tarnished my hitherto spotless record for non-arrest in South America. I had come to give “Thompson” a bundle of American weeklies and was leaving the prison again, when a German who had ridden in from Cochabamba asked me to serve as interpreter while he procured a gun license. As we stepped into the comandancia, an anemic, yellow-skinned half-Indian youth in uniform shouted in the most insolent tone at his command, “Take off your hats!” The German quickly snatched his close-cropped bullet head bare, but the tone aroused my antagonism in spite of myself; moreover, a dozen unwashed natives lounged about the miserable mud hall with their hats on. To obey the orders of this class of Latin-American officials requires a certain degree of humility, of which, thank God, I have not a trace. At the second command I retorted, “What for?”
“In respect for the Bolivian government!” shrieked the evil-eyed, ill-smelling official behind the main desk.
“But I have no respect whatever for the Bolivian government,” I protested, warding off with an elbow the boy soldier who was attempting to snatch the hat from my head; and I stepped out into the street. There I was legally immune. There is no law requiring one to uncover in the streets, even in straight-laced Santa Cruz. But the legal aspect of a case is easily overlooked in Bolivia. The official screamed, “Cabo de la Guardia!”, and there poured out upon me five boy soldiers with loaded muskets, who, clutching at me like cats, began pushing me back into the prison. I had been long enough a policeman myself to know the folly of resisting arrest, however unjustified; moreover, there was an entire regiment of these little brown fellows in town, most of whom would be only too happy to give vent to their dislike of gringos.
Once I had entered an empty mud room on the first patio, the door was quickly bolted behind me and I stood looking out through the wooden-barred window upon the mud-hole yard, back and forth across which marched the jeering little soldiers and several loungers, grinning at me nastily behind their blackened stumps of teeth. I was in great danger—that I should be late for the dinner to which I had been invited at eleven. For though my arrest was not legal, those responsible for it had the very simple old Latin-American expedient of holding me “incomunicado” and keeping everyone outside ignorant of my plight. I sat down on the window-ledge and fell to reading the Spanish paper edition of Ernst Haeckel I was so fortunate as to have with me. A half-hour passed. Meanwhile that dinner was a bare hour away, and formal feasts are not so frequent in tropical Bolivia as to be missed without regret. Luckily, I caught Tommy’s eye as he dodged under the eaves to escape a new cloud-burst and, beckoning him to the window, managed to say, before he was driven off by three soldiers with fixed bayonets, “Go tell the prefect ...”
The matter never got as far as the prefect. No sooner did the comandante of the prison learn that a man, who only yesterday had been hobnobbing with the supreme chief of the department, had been visited with the indignity of imprisonment, than he hastened to order me set at liberty.
Before we leave Santa Cruz, the story of “Thompson” permits a bit of anticipation. Months later, in far southern Chile, I chanced to pick up a newspaper, among the scant foreign despatches of which my eye fell upon:
“Bolivia, 14 May—In Santa Cruz de la Sierra was shot to-day the criminal ’Thompson,’ of English nationality, condemned to the supreme penalty for having assassinated the conductors of money of some local houses.”