“The oldest boy—he of the curly hair—was the son of Juanito, the blacksmith. And that one—the dark one—is the child of Pedro, the little Indian at San Carlos.”
She had left the blacksmith, it seems, because he caught her at flirtation, and failed to chastise the other man. He had simply taken her home, and beaten her. She had not minded this, for it was justified. But he should have beaten the other man, too. Did we not think so? And who could love such a coward?
We stopped on our third night at a little thatched farmhouse. While the women remained aboard the launch, reciting their rosaries in unison, as was their nightly custom throughout the voyage, the men adjourned to a narrow sandspit, opened a jug of rum, and took turns riding a young bull, which, despite its youth, contrived to toss most of them into the river. Thereafter we gathered at the farmhouse, where some one produced guitar and mandolin, and we all danced with the farmer’s three daughters. There was some question in my mind as to whether a gentleman about to dance with a barefoot partner should remove his own shoes. The book of etiquette, as I recalled it, had not covered this point. But, considering that the boards were full of splinters which might have been painful to any but the calloused sole of a native, I decided to forgo the courtesy. When the boatmen and passengers discovered that I could play a few pieces of their own music on the mandolin, they hailed me as “Paisano”—“fellow-countryman”—and thereafter called me by that name. These Nicaraguans were prejudiced against gringos, but like all Latin-Americans, were eager to be friendly with any individual who showed an interest in themselves.
One of the Generals could speak English. His hobby was collecting the pictures of short-skirted movie-actresses that came with each package of the cigarettes I smoked.
“Those American girl are some nifty girl, eh? All the time I am in the Nueva York I go always to the dance-hall to shake the—the what-do-you-call-it?—the wicked hip. And so mooch I like the scenic railway at the Coney Island—the one that go all the time through the dark tunnel! Some classy burg, that Nueva York!”
When the rain ceased momentarily, the men would ascend to the roof of the launch, among the crates of squawking chickens that formed the bulk of the cargo, and from that point of vantage would shoot at the alligators lying half-submerged along the mud-flats. The caymans were sluggish creatures. On the Amazon and other rivers, I have seen much larger monsters disappear with the crack of a rifle. Here they merely lumbered with awkward dignity toward the water. The boatmen showed no fear of them. When we struck a sandbar, as we did at two-hour intervals, the crew would leap overboard to shove us loose, and sometimes would plod all over the river to find the deeper channels.
If this were ever to become an interoceanic canal, it would require infinite dredging. Yet, should traffic outgrow the Panama waterway, this will be the site of another road. The mountain chain which soars aloft throughout Central America subsides at this point. Lake Nicaragua is only a hundred and ten feet above sea level, and from it another river empties into the Pacific just as the San Juan empties into the Caribbean. The principal disadvantage of a canal here would be its length. Any surveyor or engineer, making the journey as I made it, would swear that the San Juan was longer than the Mississippi.
IV
It was a relief when, after three days of it, we turned aside into a narrow channel, and pushed our way through lily-pads to the weather-stained city of San Juan del Norte, otherwise known as Greytown, our Caribbean terminus.
It was merely the typical East coast town, however—low, swampy, stinking, and generally unattractive—with black complexions prevailing. The Nicaraguan commandante was Spanish. All other officials were negroes. A customs’ inspector of West Indian descent, as immaculate in white linen uniform as only a colored official can be, directed me to a lodging house, and I set out to find it, hiking along a grass-grown embankment lined with rickety wooden shacks roofed with discolored tin, each house set upon piles above a pool of filth, and reached by a wobbly board-walk.