Harry Escombe: A Tale of Adventure in Peru

by Harry Collingwood

It had been Butler’s custom, from the commencement of the survey, to flag out a certain length of route daily, and to insist—without very much regard to the difficulties of the task—that that amount of work should be done by nightfall. This length of route usually amounted to from two to three miles, and Escombe had once or twice protested—when the natural difficulties of the work were excessive—that he could not undertake to guarantee the accuracy of his work if so much were demanded of him; to which Butler had retorted that, in his opinion, the amount of work demanded was exceedingly moderate, that he should expect it to be done, and that he should hold Escombe responsible for all inaccuracies. Yet, upon Escombe’s return to camp he found that, during the nineteen days of his absence, Butler had advanced the survey by a distance of less than four miles! the explanation which the elder man condescended to make being that, during the four days immediately following the accident, no survey work at all had been done, the whole body of peons having been scattered in various directions, seeking some clue to Harry’s fate.

For a week or two after Escombe’s return to camp matters went very much more smoothly. Whether it was that Harry’s accident had given Butler a wholesome fright, or that the conviction had been forced upon the latter that he had been outrageously exacting, there was nothing to show, but certain it was that, for a while, Escombe was allowed to take his own time over his work and do it his own way, with the result that while this state of affairs lasted the lad actually took pleasure in, nay, thoroughly enjoyed, his work. But on the third week after his return Harry began to detect signs that these agreeable conditions were drawing to an end. Thenceforth Butler allowed himself to gradually drift back into his former exacting and autocratic ways, until at length life in the camp again became a veritable purgatory for everybody concerned, Butler himself included, the natural result of his tyrannical conduct being that everybody—Harry excepted—did everything in his power to thwart him, while even the lad himself ceased to attempt the apparently impossible task of pleasing his chief.

In this unpleasant and unsatisfactory manner the railway survey proceeded for the two months following Escombe’s return to duty; by which time Butler’s behaviour had become so unendurable that nearly three-fourths of the peons originally engaged had deserted, notwithstanding the fact that their desertion involved them in the loss of a sum in wages that, to these humble toilers, represented quite a little fortune, and their places had been filled by others of a much less desirable type in every way. And this was all the more to be regretted since the surveyors were now in the very heart of the mountains, where the natural difficulties to be contended with were at their worst, while the newcomers, being of course utterly strange to such work, had to be taught their duties, down to the simplest detail, under the most adverse conditions possible. It can be readily understood that the attempt to instruct a set of ignorant, stupid, sullen, and lawless half-castes under such conditions was a task of surpassing difficulty, resulting in constant acute friction, and demanding the nicest judgment and the utmost diplomacy upon the part of the teachers. Harry met this difficulty by bringing to his assistance an almost sublime patience, that in the course of time—and not a very long time either—completely wore down the opposition of his unwilling pupils and brought a change in their mental attitude which was as surprising as it was satisfactory. Butler, however, knew not the meaning of the word “patience”, nor did his character contain the smallest particle of that valuable quality; his method was what he termed “the rough-and-ready”, and consisted in emphasising every order, and item of construction, with a kick! It was not surprising, therefore, that the relations between him and the peons daily grew more strained.

It was when the tension between Butler on the one hand and the peons on the other had developed to such an extent that the labourers had been goaded into a state of almost open mutiny, that the former set out as usual, on horseback, one morning, accompanied by a half-dozen of the new hands, to seek for and stake out a few miles farther of practicable route. Such a duty as this he usually contrived to complete in time to return to the camp for lunch, after which he was wont to saunter out along the line until he encountered Harry, when he would spend the remainder of the day in making the poor lad’s life a burden to him by finding fault with everything he did, frequently insisting upon having some particularly awkward and difficult piece of work done over again. Consequently the progress of the survey was abnormally and exasperatingly slow; and when, upon the day in question, Butler failed to put in an appearance on the scene of operations, young Escombe’s first feeling was one of gratification, for he was just then engaged upon an exceptionally difficult task which he was most anxious to complete without being interfered with. So absorbed was the lad in his work that he had not much thought to spare for speculation as to the reason for so unusual a piece of good luck, although it is true that, as the afternoon wore on, he did once or twice permit himself to wonder whether “perchance” he had to thank a slight touch of indisposition, or possibly a sprained ankle, for this unexpected and most welcome freedom from interruption. But when at length, upon his arrival in camp at the conclusion of his day’s survey work, he learned, to his astonishment, that neither Butler nor his party of peons had returned, the impression forced itself upon him that something serious had happened, and mustering afresh his own gang of tired and hungry assistants, and providing them with lanterns, ropes, and other aids to a search, he led them forth along the survey line in quest of the absent ones.

For a distance of nearly two miles from the camp the route of the missing party was easily followed, being marked by stakes at frequent intervals, indicating the line chosen by Butler as that to be surveyed by Escombe. It ended at the foot of a precipitous slope of bare rock towering aloft some seven or eight hundred feet, with further heights beyond it. Here the searchers were brought to an abrupt halt, for Harry was fully aware that no sane engineer would for a single moment dream of carrying an ordinary railway up that rocky acclivity, while it was well understood that the rack system of construction was to be avoided, if possible, upon the score of expense. The probability was that Butler, upon reaching this point, and finding himself confronted by the necessity to make a wide détour, or, alternatively, to consider the question of a tunnel, had struck off, either to the right or to the left, on a tour of investigation; and there was the chance that, becoming involved in the maze-like intricacies of his surroundings, he had decided to camp out for the night rather than risk an accident by attempting to return in darkness over difficult ground. But this was a question which Harry felt ought to be settled forthwith, and he accordingly issued instructions to his peons to search for the spoor of the party and follow it up. To find the spoor was a very easy matter, for the last stake had been driven in comparatively soft ground, and despite the fact that it was by this time almost pitch dark, a short search, aided by the light of the lanterns, disclosed the hoof prints of Butlers horse, which led off to the left, and which were followed until the searchers found themselves on the borders of an extensive pine wood growing on hard, steeply rising ground over which it was impossible to trace further the trail in the darkness. This impossibility once realised, the search was abandoned for the night, and Harry very reluctantly gave the word for a return to camp, which was reached about nine o’clock.

At daybreak the next morning the camp was roused, breakfast prepared and eaten, and, taking with them rations to last until nightfall, the search party again set out upon their quest, making their way direct to the spot where the trail had been lost on the previous night, where it was again picked up without much trouble. It led in straight toward the heart of the wood, and was followed, with ever-increasing difficulty, for a distance of about three-quarters of a mile until it was lost on hard, shaley ground, nor were the utmost efforts of the party equal to finding it again. After carefully considering the situation, therefore, Escombe detailed one man, an Indian, to accompany him, and, placing the remainder of the peons in charge of a man whom he believed he could trust, with instructions to search the wood thoroughly, returned to the outskirts of the timber, and, beginning at the spot where the trail entered it, proceeded, with the assistance of the Indian, to encircle the wood, carefully examining every foot of the ground as they went, in the hope that, if Butler and his party had passed through the timber and emerged on its other side, the Indian would succeed in picking up the spoor. But the hope was vain, for the wood was completely encircled—the task occupying the entire day—without the discovery of the faintest trace or sign of the passage of the missing party, which was not at all surprising, for when the far side of the wood was reached the soil proved to be of so stony a character, thickly interspersed with great outcrops of rock, that even the most skilled and keen-eyed of trackers might have been excused for failing in the search for footprints on so unyielding a surface. It was a little puzzling to Harry that not even the horse had left any trace behind him; but this was accounted for when, upon rejoining the party who had been detailed to search the interior of the wood, it was discovered that the animal had been found by them, still saddled and bridled, wandering aimlessly about in search of such scanty herbage as the soil there afforded. Upon the horse being brought to him, the young Englishman—mindful of the scarcely concealed hatred which Butler had, almost wantonly, as it seemed, aroused in the breasts of the peons—immediately subjected the animal and his trappings to a most rigorous examination in search of any sign of possible violence, but nothing of the kind could be found, and the only result of the examination was the conclusion, to which everything pointed, that Butler had, for some reason, voluntarily dismounted and at least temporarily abandoned the animal.

Butler and his party had now been missing for full twenty-four hours, and Harry speedily arrived at two conclusions which inexorably led him to a third. The first conclusion at which he arrived was that the peons who had accompanied his chief, accustomed as they had been from their earliest childhood to make their way about the country, were so little likely to have lost their way that that theory might be unhesitatingly abandoned; the second was that Butler would certainly not have absented himself purposely from the camp for a whole night and a day, and that therefore—this was the third conclusion—something had gone very seriously wrong. The next problem that presented itself for solution was: What was it that had gone wrong? Had the entire party met with an accident? It was most unlikely. There were seven of them altogether, and in the event of an accident, surely at least one of the seven would have escaped and returned to the camp for help. Had they been seized and carried off by brigands? When Harry put this question to the peons who remained with him he was laughed at good-naturedly and assured that, in the first place, there were no brigands in Peru, so far as they were aware; and, in the second place, that if perchance there were they would probably not have contented themselves with simply carrying off seven men, six of whom would be only an encumbrance to them, but would almost certainly have attacked and sacked the camp some time during the hours of daylight, when it was left comparatively unprotected. There was but one other probable alternative of which Harry could think, and that was that Butler’s peons, exasperated at length beyond endurance by some fresh piece of petty tyranny on the white man’s part, had deserted, carrying off their employer with them, either with the purpose of being revenged upon him, or in the hope that by holding him as a hostage they might be able to secure payment of the amount of wages due to them. But when Escombe submitted this alternative to his peons for their consideration and opinion, they shook their heads and emphatically declared that they did not believe that any such thing had happened. And when further asked for their opinion as to what had happened, they simply answered that they did not know what to think. But to Harry it seemed that there was a certain lack of spontaneity in this reply, which caused him to doubt whether the speakers were quite sincere in so saying.

With a very heavy load of responsibility thus unexpectedly thrown upon his shoulders, the young Englishman spent several anxious hours in camp that night pondering upon what was the proper course for him now to pursue, and he finally came to the conclusion that, having ascertained beyond much possibility of doubt that his chief had been abducted, the next thing to be done was to discover whither and under what circumstances he had been carried off, and then to take the necessary steps to effect his rescue. On the following morning, therefore, he mustered the peons who still remained with him, and briefly explaining to them his theory of an abduction, dispatched six of them in as many different directions to seek for traces of the missing party, offering a substantial reward to the one who should bring him such information as should lead to the recovery of the missing white man; and then, taking a couple of sure-footed mules, set off in company with an Indian tracker to scour the entire neighbourhood, in the hope of obtaining some clue to the whereabouts of the missing party from some of the people by whom that particular part of the country was sparsely inhabited. And in order to avoid the loss of time which would be entailed by returning to camp at night, he took with him three days’ provisions for himself and his guide, intending to carry out as exhaustive a search as possible in that space of time.

Thus far the search had been prosecuted entirely in a forward direction; but at the last moment, before setting out upon his three days’ quest, it suddenly occurred to Escombe that the missing ones might possibly have doubled back and be making their way toward the sea coast, so in order to test the value of this theory he determined to return a few miles along the line of the survey and see whether he could discover any traces of them in that direction.

At this time the surveyors were in the heart of an exceptionally difficult tract of country, where the obstacles to rapid work were such that, since Harry’s return to duty after his adventures in the quebrada, they had not advanced very much more than twenty miles from that spot; thus it was still early in the afternoon of the first day when he found himself gazing down into the abyss, wherein he had so narrowly escaped a terrible death. By a natural association of ideas he no sooner beheld the scene so indelibly engraven upon his memory than his thoughts reverted to Cachama, his kind-hearted old Indian nurse, and her son Yupanqui, and he vaguely wondered whether perhaps either of these might be able to afford him any information or suggestion that would assist him in his quest. The more he thought of it the more did the idea grow upon his mind, and at length he came to the decision that he might as well prosecute his search in the direction of their cave as in any other, and he forthwith communicated his decision to his guide, who, somewhat to Escombe’s surprise, at once admitted that he was well acquainted with Cachama and her son, and offered to conduct the young Englishman to the cave in which the two resided, by a short route, if Harry would consent to be blindfolded during their passage of certain portions of the way. To this the lad readily agreed—for he was by this time becoming exceedingly anxious on Butler’s account—and thereupon the Indian, having hobbled the mules, demanded Harry’s pocket—handkerchief and immediately proceeded to blindfold the owner therewith, after which, with joined hands, the pair resumed their way, travelling for two full hours or more over exceedingly broken and difficult ground. Then the pocket-handkerchief was removed, and Harry found himself standing in the midst of a number of enormous fallen boulders at the foot of a stupendous cliff, and facing an opening in the latter which had all the appearance of being the mouth of a cavern. But by what route he had arrived at the spot he could not tell, for he was so completely hemmed in on every side by the boulders in the midst of which he stood that the surrounding landscape was completely shut out, nothing being visible save the boulders and the face of the cliff with the opening in it. That he was correct in his surmise that this opening was a cavern was now demonstrated by his Indian guide, who said: