During our stay in it, the American flag was somewhat overworked in Copacabana, there being one over our cinema door and another in a sand lot a block away in which a battered and paintless one-ring American circus had recently opened. Not often, I wager, have American showmen directly competed so far from home. We soon made friends with the animal trainer, whose ten years of knocking about Brazil had brought out into sharper relief his native Iowa dialect and point of view. Among his collection of moth-eaten animals in rusty old cages were two of savage disposition. The hyena had several times bitten him, but “Frank,” the tiger, which sprang at anyone who came within ten feet of the cage, was the only one really to be feared.

“Once,” said the exiled Iowan, holding up the ring finger of his left hand, which was curled up in a half-circle, “I was doing my act at a burg up in Minas when ‘Frank’ made a swipe at me with one paw. Lucky she didn’t get all her claws in, or it would have been good-by hand, but she happened to get just one claw into the inside of this finger at the base. She pulled, and I was so scared I guess I pulled too, and she peeled the whole inside of the finger off the bone—tendons, nerves, veins and all. I hid that hand behind me so the audience couldn’t see the blood, or ‘Frank’ smell it, whelted her a few, and finished the act. I couldn’t go out, for the animals would have followed me into the audience; I had to finish the act and let them go out the regular way, like they’ve been trained. Then I wrapped up my hand in a towel and hiked over to a drug store and he threw a whole bottle of iodine into it, and then they called in one of these here native doctors and he chopped around in it and did it up in pasteboard, which of course bent, so that he had to chop into it every day or so and near killed me, and finally it twisted into this shape and stayed there. And that guy had the nerve to charge me a hundred and fifty mil! After the first dressing I went over to a bar and had a whole glass of rye whiskey and then about a quart of this nigger rum they call cachaza on top of it—but hell, I didn’t feel it any more’n milk, and for four nights I never got a wink of sleep. I was afraid to drink anything for fear of making it worse, but finally I says, ‘Oh, to hell with it! I’m going to have a sleep,’ and I went out and got drunk—God, I never got so drunk before in my life! And then I went home and slept a whole night and a day. But it sure does make a man sick at his stomach to get caught by an animal.”

“Tut” and I had taken a room—my seventh residence in Rio—out at the end of the tunnel in Leme—so called because a rock shaped like a leme, or rudder, juts out into the ocean at the end of the beach. By this time Christmas was drawing near and shops were everywhere offering “brinquedos á granel” (playthings by the bushel), and the rains had come on in earnest. Rio was suffering so severely from the “brutal crisis” that people in the cinema business had lost their nerve completely, and it began to look as if the show would catch up with me before I could make a new contract. For several days I dashed about in pouring rain before I finally succeeded in running to earth in the bosom of his own family—which is very bad business form in Brazil—a man with a string of theaters in Rio, Nictheroy, and the two largest towns of Minas Geraes. I quickly got his name signed to a sixteen-day contract and, relieved of the fear of having the show run over me, settled down to take life easy again.

CHAPTER XIV
WANDERING IN MINAS GERAES

On December 13th our alarm-clock having gone astray and being evidently unreplaceable in Brazil, where time means so little, I sat up all night in order to rout “Tut” out at four and send him off to the station, following him next day up on the cool and comfortable plateau to the second town of Minas Geraes. Juiz de Fora lies in a deep lap of wooded hills, with a conspicuous monument and statue of “Christo Redemptor” on a little parked hilltop high above yet close to the city, and revealing its site from afar off. Fir trees, masses of roses of all colors, and other flora of the temperate zone add to stretches of densely green grass, so unlike the gravel or paved squares almost universal in South America, in making the town a pleasant place of sojourn. The country round about is very rolling and without a suggestion of the tropics, but its coffee is unfortunately small, poor, and ill-tended, grown completely over in places with weeds and creepers; and as the town depends almost entirely on this product, it had a squeeze-penny mood that was not natural to Brazil. Like many another Brazilian town, its name is of simple origin. A juiz de fora, or “outside judge,” went about the country on a regular circuit in colonial days, holding court in various places, of which the present town was the most distant, not from Rio, which had no official standing in the olden times, but from the ancient capital of Minas Geraes, Ouro Preto.

It was toward Ouro Preto that I continued a day or two later, pausing in one town to make a contract with the local saloon-keeper, in another to find a cinema about the size of a box-car tight closed and the owner off traveling; in a third that turned out to be a mud village without electricity, even had I been willing to risk dragging our outfit through the atrocious streets to its toy theater. It was in the last that I boarded the northbound train an hour before it arrived, which is not what the Chileans call a “German tale,” but an everyday fact. For there the government railway, which comes that far with a gauge even wider than our own, suddenly changes to a meter in width, and I had already grown weary of sitting in the train I was waiting for when it rolled in and, transferring its contents to its narrower self, rambled on across the cool plateau.

Besides our cloth-mounted three-sheets, I had had printed several thousand posters and window-cards, and the towns of Brazil blossomed with Edison behind me. Then there were great bundles of avulsos, or handbills, of many colors, to be strewn among the eager populace when the show actually arrived. Except for the printer’s errors, which were legion, these new masterly appeals were all my own handiwork, as were the articles on the life of Edison which sprang up in the newspapers along my route, for I had at last almost tamed the mis-jointed Portuguese language. By the time our tour was finished Brazil would certainly have known the story of Edison far better than he knows it himself, had he not already been the best-known American in South America—with the possible exception of Franklin, whom thousands took to be his contemporary, often asking if the two great inventors sometimes worked together and were on good terms socially, or whether they raged with jealousy over each other’s achievements.

There were many tunnels on the way to Ouro Preto, and much winding among deep-green hills, the soil still reddish, but showing little cultivation. All this region is at least 3000 feet above sea-level, where corn feels more at home than bananas or even coffee. Herds of cream-colored cattle of part zebu ancestry roamed the broken, grassy countryside. It was a dull, showery day, and the wet green trees clung to the hillsides like the plumage of birds, while everywhere the palms stood with disheveled hair. We made several stops on the branch line eastward from Burnier, just why I do not know, and at length halted at an isolated building with the information that we had reached Ouro Preto.

On the train I had chanced to mention my business to one of several local celebrities in heavy overcoats, who quickly shouted the information to all within hearing, so that when I disembarked the negro hotel runners were already calling me “Doctor Franck.” One of them piled my baggage on his head and we set out on foot into the night, for Ouro Preto, I quickly discovered, is so steep that vehicles have never become acclimated there. As we panted upward past great sheer-cut bluffs, scattered lights gradually disclosed the town, piled and tumbled far above and below us, the round cobblestones of its precipitous streets worn so icy smooth by many generations of bare and shod feet that my own showed a continuous desire to lag behind me. In a hotel as old as Vasco da Gama, and about as dilapidated, I was shown with ceremonial courtesy into an enormous front room with a “matrimonial” bed wider than the street outside, the springs of which I quickly discovered to be solid planks. Recalling my courteous colored companion, I gave him five minutes in which to find me a real bed. We wandered much longer than that through a labyrinth of rooms and anterooms—the latter all with narrow bedsteads, suggesting the old slave days when each traveler brought with him a servant to sleep outside his door—before we found a cama de arame, or “bed of wire,” in another vast chamber, with a window looking out across what seemed to be a bottomless gorge to patches of small, window-shaped lights climbing high into the sky.

I went out for a stroll, climbing cobbled streets so sheer that a foot-slip would have landed me in quite another part of town, passing buildings so old and quaint and medieval that in spite of the modern lights Edison has bequeathed the place I expected some old Portuguese viceroy in his cloak and sword and plumed hat to step out of any dark passageway followed by his slaves and retainers and preceded by his link-boys. I had all but forgotten the “feel” of old South American mountain towns, with their something peculiarly their own, and could easily have fancied myself back in the Andes again. Indeed, I was only beginning to realize the charm of those old Andean pueblos, barely guessed when one is physically lost in their squalor, yet fascinating from a distance of time and space, every twist and turn and descent and rise of their streets a lurking mystery, like a winding mountain road, cool and silent—especially silent, in the absence of all wheeled traffic.