“Where did you learn English?” I yawned.
“Why, I am an American!” came the startling answer. “My name is Jim Powell. We was born in Texas,” he went on without urging. “I don’t remember what place, an’ when I was small paw an’ maw they went away with five of us children because North America was fixin’ to fight. I don’t know what country they was aimin’ to fight, but paw he didn’t want to, ’n’ so we sailed across the ocean to Bolivia. The other seven children was born in Chiquitos, an’ finally paw he up an’ died last year. Maw she’s livin’ out to San Antonio, an’ the rest is mostly scattered around. One of the girl’s married to a judge in Santa Cruz an’ the others is on the rocks.”
His language was that of the “white trash” of our southern states, but was academic compared to the illiterate brogue of his brother, “Hughtie,” who arrived soon after him. The latter had come to Bolivia so young that Spanish and chiquitana were his native tongues. He was a bullock-driver for a native owning several carts, and had recently been released from eight months in the prison of Santa Cruz, at the cost of all he owned,—“Jes’ becoze I killed a feller thet was monkeyin’ with one o’ my women.” Accustomed as we are to transplanted foreigners of all nationalities in our own country, it was a distinct shock to come upon a Bolivianized American. Such atavism brought the reflection that civilization is at best a weak and artificial thing.
So completely native had the pair become that the natives themselves never thought of them as foreigners. “Hughtie” was soon to leave for the Paraguay river with a train of carts, and invited us to go along, pretending, native fashion, that he was in charge of the expedition, of which, in reality, he was a mere peon. When the time set came, he wandered into the monastery to say that we should start the following night—“if thet there mozo finds thet there bull that run away;” or if not, then the next night. “Hughtie” was a true Bolivian in putting his trust chiefly in to-morrow.
The shadow across the Jesuit sun-dial was exactly horizontal when, refreshed by four long gnatless days and nights in San José, we pushed on along a road that stretched like a tunnel through the greenery. Konanz had decided to travel a few days further eastward. The road was of sand that drunk up the rains quickly, but thirst was correspondingly worse. Jejenes were fewer, though swarms of swamp flies added their annoyance. The danger of savages was less than in the Monte Grande; on the other hand “tigers,” as the natives call the jaguar, were said to be plentiful. The mosquitero protected us from these, however, were any protection needed, even when sleeping in the wilderness; for the animal is never known to attack unless it can see the head of its victim. We were soon splashing again waist-deep through swamps, and often wading as laboriously through deep sand between them. Beyond the palm-thatched hamlet of Dolores, where we saw our first wild ostriches, the country grew more open, with scrub trees, the way strewn with appetizing petas, or land turtles, the hollow charred shells of which marked more than one camping-ground of former travelers. We should have reached the ranch of an American off the main trail on the second day, had not the German given out at Las Taperas, a cluster of three huts at the forking of the ways. We camped under a heavily loaded lemon tree, beside a swampy lake backed far off by a blue range of low hills. From this flowed a clear little stream in which I lay most of the afternoon with only my nose and hands out of water and finished the volume of Nietzsche, to the disgust of the German, who did not believe in “vashing all over der body.”
In the morning we struck off by the faint trail around the lake. The day was brilliant, and the going pleasant enough to be enjoyed amid my own meditations. I let the German and his animal draw on ahead, until they were lost to view in the placid chiquitano landscape. At Las Taperas we had bought for twenty cents a whole bunch of the fat little “silky” bananas of the region, and hung them on the pack. As I plodded on through a low scrub forest and a tough and wiry grass, knee-high, hunger gradually intruded upon my dreams, and almost at the instant it grew tangible a fresh banana appeared in the trail before me. After that they were as nicely proportioned to my requirements as manna to the Israelites in a not wholly dissimilar wilderness. But what had become of Konanz? Hour after hour passed without a sign of him. He was not accustomed to lead the way for so prolonged a period. I pushed on more rapidly, not entirely free from visions of savages falling upon him. The sun stood high overhead, casting down its rays like the contents of an overturned melting-pot, when I caught sight of him at last some distance beyond. He lay panting and dripping in the scant shade of a bush, while the mule stood tied to another, eyeing him suspiciously. It was a full minute before he gathered breath to relieve my anxiety.
“Oh, you —— —— mool!” he gasped, shaking his fist at the animal so savagely that it all but tore itself loose, “Rhight avay now I shoot you der head through, you ——”
Expurgated of its adjectives, the story, during which I was forced to retain a deep solemnity, was that the mule,—after having been beaten and kicked during all the loading that morning—had suddenly taken fright when the German started up from a log on which he had rested for a moment, and had run away. For hours the angry Teuton had pursued the animal, trailing her by the clue of bananas she had dropped at intervals for my benefit, until, no doubt frightened to find herself alone in the wilderness, “she come valking pack against me. Chust like a vomans, py Gott! Rhunned avay un’ den gum scneaking pack, pegause she haf to haf der home un’ der master!”
Beyond the rancho of Pablo Rojo the pampa gave place to monte, dense tangled growth not tall enough to shade us from the blazing afternoon sun, yet high enough to cut us off in the trough-like trail from every breath of breeze, until our tongues and throats went parched and charqui-dry, and the red-hot sand sifted in through the holes in my shoes and burned my toes. Konanz could only be coaxed along a mile at a time, between which he lay like a log in any patch of shade to be found. Luckily, the sun was still above the horizon when the endless jungle was enlivened by the welcome sight of a thatched house framed in corn and banana fields and backed by slight wooded ridges. About the gate, toward which we tore our way through jungle grass shoulder-high, were toiling three men in long-uncut hair and beards, barefoot in their leather ajotas, and wearing the customary chiquitano garb of two thin and faded garments topped by sun-faded hats of local weave.
