On this, the fifth day of his journey to fetch Don Manuel, the Whites of the Western Provinces mustered 437 men at San Jacinto. They moved out to Don Manuel’s advanced post beyond the river, having left word that the final rendezvous would be at San Pablo, only thirty miles from Santa Barbara city. They brought with them many spare horses: this was the only excellence in their force, their weapons being mainly machetes, revolvers, rook rifles and shot-guns of all sorts and bores with whatever cartridges they had. There was no hesitation in any of them at the thought of marching upon Santa Barbara. They were all religious men, who felt that their faith was threatened. The parish priest at San Luis, where Don Manuel was camped, blessed them at their setting out: certainly no man among them doubted that his going was in the service of God.
XV
Towards three in the morning Hi fell into a deeper sleep, from which he was roused by the cold: his fire was out and his quilt had slipped from him. In groping for it, he found that his head had so swollen that he could hardly see. The pain was gone, but he was puffed like a prize pig.
“O Lord,” he moaned, “I shan’t be able to see. I can’t see across this hut. I shan’t be able to reach Anselmo even to-day. Now I am bound to be too late, and Carlotta may be killed because of me.” He turned out of his hammock to prove himself: it was only too true, he was nearly blind: he could not hope to go on without a guide. “Horses,” he thought. “These people have no horses. My only hope is a river. I may be near some tributary of the San Jacinto. If I could take a canoe down that, or if some Indian would take me, I might even find Don Manuel during to-day. There must be rivers which run into the San Jacinto. If that fellow told the truth, if this is the Melchior forest, I must be near the San Jacinto, or its eastern tributaries. I must speak to that fellow and beg him to help me. After all, he is an Englishman, though he is as ross as a mule.”
As it was dark and cold, he turned back to his hammock to try for warmth and sleep. He slept a little, by starts, always broken by nightmares. The cold struck him from underneath: it got into all his bones. “Aha, you English boy,” voices said to him in his dreams. “Now you’ve come into our power you shall be searched. You’ve got the cramps, you’ve got the aches, you’ve got the forest fever, you are going to go blind; you’ve got the poison in your entrails and we’re going to wring you with it.”
When he next awoke it was daylight, though still early. The village had come again to the life it had hardly laid down during the darkness. The thudding noise, of wet linen being banged on stones with a mallet, had begun again: women were singing and little brown children were playing in the patio. The sharp-eared dogs had tucked their noses into their flanks for sleep in sunny places. The tiny devils were sidling about, mocking at people. He recognised them now as dove-grey parrots with rosy breasts. Their bright eyes and compact bent beaks gave them the knowing look of men about town: they looked like devilled-bone-and-biscuit men. They looked at him, with their heads cocked aside, considering his offers of friendship, and then sheered off from him as something not to be trusted.
He turned out of his hammock to peer from his puffy eyes at the new world about him. His body felt as though it did not belong to him: pains and aches had taken it over. His face and hands felt dead: his mouth was full of fur. He wandered out into the morning.
He could see well enough to take a track which led past the side of his hut to a river some twenty feet broad where naked men and women were sitting in the water immersed to their chins. Some women were pounding bunches of wet cotton on the stones near the river; their tiny children, tying minute fragments of stone to strips of bast, were making bolases with which they entangled the dragon-flies.
After washing in the river, and bathing his puffy eyes, Hi returned to the huts, hoping to see the white man, who was not in his hut. Early as it was, most of the men of the community had gone to whatever work they had to do. Women were pounding and straining cassava, or baking it into loaves. They laughed at Hi in a friendly way: one of them gave him bread and a gourd full of broth. While he ate this, sitting in a hammock, an Indian, dressed in three tobacco-tin lids, took station before him, grinned, pointed to his chest and said: “Me Johnny God-dam.” Unfortunately, this was all the English known to him. Hi tried by signs to find out where the white man was, where one would come out if one were to follow the river, and where the white settlements were. His performance roused great interest, but nobody understood it: he had the general impression that they thought that he was praying for dry weather.
He went back to the hut where he had passed the night; he was full of anxiety and helplessness. Chug-chug, if that were his name, appeared with some aromatic leaves, which he rubbed gently on Hi’s blistered skin, with a soothing effect. He was a cheerful man, who talked all the time. Hi questioned him in English and by signs: this increased Chug-chug’s flow of talk, without bringing any enlightenment.