The guide led him twenty miles up the valley of the Aisen, and handed him over to the members of another tribe, describing him as a harmless moon-gazer. In a hovel lay an elderly Indian, shivering with fever. Power dosed the quaking wretch with calomel and quinine, and performed a miracle. Thenceforth his life was safe; as long as the few ounces of quinine and calomel lasted, at any rate. He had landed in the Chile region at the beginning of spring, and his nomad hosts moved nearer the Andes when the weather improved, taking him with them. Their barbarous tongue included a number of Spanish words, and by slow degrees he learned their comparatively small but curiously inflected vocabulary. Once he could make himself understood, the foundations of his mission were laid securely. By sheer initiative, having no training in such arts beyond the knowledge acquired by most intelligent men, he taught them how to spin and weave the long hair of the Chilean goat. He established some principles of communal law. He showed them how to use nitrate as a fertilizer. He experimented with medicinal herbs when his own small store of drugs had given out. He got them to build better huts, and adopt some elementary principles of sanitation. Tillage and crops broke down the migratory habit. Land was cleared, and drained or irrigated as needed. For the first time in its history, the tribe lived in permanent dwellings. In a word, Power established a state.
Within four years he had elevated these apemen and women to a standard so far above that of their neighbors that his fame spread into unknown fastnesses of the Cordillera. Among his adopted people he would have been worshiped as a god if he had not sternly repressed any such tendencies. But he could not stop the growth of his reputation as a magician, and a well-planned raid by another tribe brought about the slaughter of a section of the community and his own capture.
He was reduced now to the direst misery. His captors, some degrees cruder and more bestial than the men he was governing, took him by forced marches across a spur of the Andes, giving him food of such revolting nature that he became deadly ill. At last they were compelled to carry him, and, using such limited reasoning faculties as they possessed, allowed him to save his life by cooking and eating portions of animals freshly killed. Their object in making him a prisoner, he gathered, was to divert his magic to their own district so that his incantations might increase their herds. When he failed to accomplish this laudable purpose offhand, they became violent, and threatened to burn him alive. On the homeopathic principle, an abnormally dry and scorching spring came to his rescue. Some species of noxious insect, whose bite was fatal to horses and cattle, multiplied exceedingly, and the tribe lost half their stock. A wily candidate for the chiefship spread the notion that the white god had caused this misfortune, and that the person who really ought to be burnt alive was the chief who counseled the raid. This was duly done, and heavy rain fell that night, effectually disposing of the insect pests.
The new chief, who would have been an acquisition to certain political circles in more temperate climes, saw that, although he had scored heavily, the dangerous wonder-worker might be associated with evils yet to come; so, on his suggestion, Power was taken through the mountains by a secret pass, and left on the eastern slopes of the range to fare as best he might.
The Indians were afraid to gratify their instincts by murdering him outright; but, seeing that he was absolutely unarmed, and without a scrap of food in his possession, there was no misunderstanding the malevolent grin with which their leader pointed out the path he must follow. These very aborigines, despite their animal lore concerning edible roots, and their readiness to dispute with vultures for a carrion meal, knew that no man could traverse those leagues of foothills without arms and a commissariat of some kind. No semblance of a track existed. Power and his guards stood on a scree of loose stones and shale not far below the snow line, and well above the first precipitous valley in which even the hardiest pines reached a stunted growth. The steep hillside was covered with the strange snow shapes known to Spanish South America as penitentes, weird wraiths like sheeted ghosts, and more than one broad track torn through these awesome sentinels showed where avalanches of rocks and ice had thundered down from the heights that very day.
Power looked out over the appalling vista of barren hills and tree-choked ravines which lay in front. In the direction shown by the Indian he saw a slight depression in an otherwise unbroken ring of unscalable mountains, and it was reasonable to assume that the milk-white glacier stream flowing through a canyon a thousand feet beneath must find its way to the sea through that gap. It was so long since he had glanced at a map of South America that he had only the vaguest notion of his whereabouts. As a rough guess, beyond those tremendous highlands lay the plains of Lower Argentina—the black, wind-swept, semidesert pampas. At the lowest calculation, he was three hundred and fifty miles from the Atlantic, and fifty of those miles offered such difficulties to man’s endeavor that well-equipped expeditions had turned back time and again from attempts to find new passes through the Andes in that region.
To try and reach the eastern coast meant almost certain death; but the scowling faces of the Indians showed that the effort must be made, unless he was prepared to fall under their weapons then and there. The uncouth tongue he had acquired on the Trans-Andean slope was not of much avail with his present custodians; but, when he asked the leader of the party for a spear, he was understood.
By nothing less, in Power’s view, than the direct intervention of Providence, the man was minded to treat the matter as a joke, and handed over his own spear, a nine-foot shaft of tough and limber hickory, tipped with a flat blade of iron about eight inches in length and two in width at its widest part. A stout shank was gripped by the split wood, and strongly bound in its socket with a thong of hide. Singularly enough, these savages had never searched their prisoner’s pockets. Probably, they were afraid to touch him, lest he laid some evil spell on them; so he was able now to produce a silver dollar, which he gave with a smile, indicating, at the same time, his willingness to purchase a couple of strips of the dried meat carried by some members of the escort.
This request was refused peremptorily, and a distinctly threatening gesture warned Power that the parley was at an end. He turned resolutely toward the rising sun, and began his lonely and affrighting Odyssey. He admitted afterward that he knew what fear meant during the first few strides across the broken ground, because he was suspicious lest the Indians might have planned to spear him from behind. Indeed, some such barbaric pleasantry may have occurred to them. A fierce clamor of talk broke out suddenly; but a swirl of snow swept down from a neighboring glacier, and even these hardy savages had no desire to be caught on that dangerous scree in a snowstorm. So the hubbub died away as quickly as it had arisen.
Fortunately, the snow did not fall so thickly as to be actually blinding. The hapless fugitive could discern his bearings, and he moved as speedily as possible to a point he had already fixed on as being out of the track of avalanches. He reached this landmark, a hump of rock, and perforce remained in its shelter till the weather cleared. During this vigil he heard the dull roar and rumble of falling débris, and, when the snow-shower ceased, he saw that two fresh lanes had been plowed through the serried ranks of the penitentes. Of the Indians there was neither sight nor sound.