In plain English, Peyrounel was a beggar, though he would have been shocked beyond words to hear us say so. He called himself a “Champion of God,” a bitter enemy of the priesthood, and in each town of importance gave a lecture on his journey and, later on, “if the population showed enough intelligence,” a sermon. The religious fanatic so often proves, sooner or later, to be in a sexually neurotic state that we were not surprised when, several days later, Peyrounel burst out, apropos of nothing:
“Why do girls always become enamored of strange travelers? No sooner do I enter a town than several maidens fall desperately in love with me. I can’t be expected to satisfy them all, can I? One has one’s work to do.”
“Wooden-headed ass that I am!” growled Hays. “If I’d only thought to grow curls!”
“Between you and me, as men of the same profession,” went on the collector of signatures, “I don’t mind telling you that I ride now and then by train through a bad piece of country. What’s the use of walking hundreds of hot desert miles, when the people will never know the difference? For instance; here, under the seal of ——, it says that I walked all the four hundred miles from ——. Well, I did—on a steamer most of the way.”
In short the argentino’s mental equipment was somewhat out of repair. One could not exactly put one’s finger on the loose screw, but it could frequently be heard rattling. The following Sunday we attended his first “lecture.” On the dismal daytime stage of Quito’s hitherto lifeless Teatro Sucre sat Peyrounel, utterly alone but for the faithful dog at his feet, thrown into silhouette by an uncurtained window at the back, his sky-blue uniform looking more absurd than ever, his hair hanging in long, wet, careful curls about his broad shoulders. Quito has so few entertainments that it will endure almost anything particularly if no admission is charged; and some three hundred men were scattered about in the painfully upright seats, when the “andarín” rose. He read first some incomprehensible rodomontade on the power of the will, then drew forth a manuscript purporting to give an account of his journey, in reality strictly confined to a list of the towns he had visited, with the height of each above sea-level. The “lecture” was doubly unsuccessful, for when the speaker ended with an appeal for funds to continue his statistical journey, the gathering stampeded so effectively that all but a few had escaped when he reached the door, and the reward of his labors was a bare six dollars.
“Next Sunday,” he announced, when we met him in the plaza that evening, “I am going to give the public of Quito the benefit of my conclusions on suicide. Suicide, I shall prove, is always a prompting of the devil. Therefore it cannot be the prompting of God. Ergo, a man should not commit suicide, because he should never yield to the promptings of the devil.”
Truly a Solomon of pure reason had come to Quito. Yet somehow the authorities, always backward in such matters, failed to take advantage of this splendid opportunity to give the Teatro Sucre another free airing.
Never since those days in Quito have I heard the oft-repeated word “andarín,” than the picture of Peyrounel and his curls has not come to mind. However, he had undoubtedly covered long distances on foot, and we exchanged many a practical hint of roadway information. He planned to visit all the important cities of the United States, and to reach New York within three years. His letters of introduction already included many to American officials; he carried, for instance, one to the mayor of Seattle. Being an experienced traveler, all may have gone well with him south of the Rio Grande. But beyond it lay dangers he did not suspect; for some unromantic justice of the peace, unable to distinguish between an “andarín” and a common “vag,” between the honorable profession of gathering seals and signatures, and mere begging, may have the cruelty to reward him with the notorious “year and a day.”
On October tenth there was an eclipse of the sun, total at the Ecuador-Colombia boundary, and visible in all the southern hemisphere. In the days of the Scyri and Incas such a phenomenon was taken as a threat that the end of the world was at hand; a sign that an angry god was abandoning his erring people. On this occasion many of the less-educated classes remained in the streets all night, for an earthquake had been prophesied. The local observatory had assigned a scientist to “note the peculiar actions of the populace and the lower animals during the eclipse.” It came toward seven in the morning. Gradually the brilliant sun disappeared, until only the slightest thread, of crescent shape, remained visible; the world grew dark as at early dusk on a heavily clouded evening, then slowly lighted up again in all its equatorial magnificence. Observers reported that a few fowls returned to roost; the curs slinking about the plaza seemed for a time undecided whether to seek their nightly lairs. But the actions of the populace were confined to the incessant smoking of cigarettes and to making the most of an excuse to put off their day’s task as long as possible—neither of which was unusual enough to be worthy of note. The majority, unsupplied with smoked glasses, found this no handicap, for the reflected eclipse in the plaza pool served the same purpose. World scientists had been sent to many of the larger South American cities with elaborate photographic equipment, only to find their long journeys wasted because of clouds. They would have done better to have come to Quito, where two unscientific vagabonds caught excellent pictures of the phenomenon in mere kodak snapshots.
It was on the morning of November eighteenth, five months from the day we had sailed together from the Canal Zone, that Hays and I set out along the muddy, cobbled highway to the railway station, carrying in turn a bundle of the size of a suitcase. By 7:30 the former corporal of police had taken his wooden seat in the dingy little second-class car, and had stowed his belongings under it well out of sight of the collector; for extravagant as are its fares, the Guayaquil-Quito Railway allows a second-class passenger only fifteen pounds of baggage. At eight the tri-weekly train let pass unnoticed its scheduled hour of departure. Several stocky Americans of the type easily recognized as “railroad men,” and as many English-speaking negroes could be seen shouldering their way in and out of the motley throng. The engineers were leathery-skinned Americans; the conductors fat, burly Americans; the collectors gaunt, stringy, dense-looking young Englishmen, and the brakemen West Indian negroes who spoke a more fluent Spanish that their superiors, and were better “mixers” among the native passengers. After a time they decided to repair the last coach, and lay for some time under it, tinkering at a brake-shoe. Rumor had it that this was only a ruse; that the engineer assigned to the run had been arrested the evening before, and that the train could not leave until his trial was over.