“That lad certainly needs a mental tonic!” he exclaimed, as he went on deck again.
“I don’t doubt that he is telling the exact truth, in his whimsical way, of course,” Frank argued, in defense of his friend. “That is an old trick in this country. You buy something of one man and another claims it. Alex would have been buying that dog yet if he had remained on shore. He just had to run for it or lose the dog.”
“He needs a dog about as much as I need a cupola on top of my head,” Case put in.
“I don’t see how we’ve got along without a dog as long as we have,” grinned Jule.
“What sort of a river is this Para stream?” asked Case, as the Rambler pressed on through what seemed to be a lake anywhere from ten to fifteen miles in width, with a row of long islands hugging the south shore.
“No river at all,” Frank replied. “It is merely an estuary, as you will see when the Atlantic tide meets the current coming down from the west. And the river that runs into this estuary isn’t the Para at all. It is the Tocantins, a stream a thousand miles long. Why this body of water is put down on the maps as the Para river is more than I can say.”
About dark, after a run of sixty or seventy miles, the boys came to the island which sits at the mouth of the Tocantins river. At nine in the evening they anchored in front of Cameta, which is a small town on the west side of the Tocantins. Here they decided to spend the night.
“It seems like we were never going to get to the Amazon,” Jule complained, as the lights of the town vanished for the night.
“We are still at least two hundred miles from the Amazon,” Frank replied. “Across there, to the North, is Marajo island. We will sail along on this side of it all day to-morrow, probably, on an estuary fully as wide as that we have been following. Then we will come to a region of bayous from 50 to 100 yards in width. There are trees two hundred feet high in there, and the forest is so thick with tangled vines that one can scarcely get through it. Then we will come out on the Amazon, not far from Gurupa, a place of some importance. Then, after we pass the mouth of the Xingu river, we will be fairly on our way to the foot of the Andes.”
“Well, hurry up!” broke in Alex, snapping his fingers at Captain Joe, “this honorable puppy wants to get his paws into the earth again.”