Looking from one to the other, Juan felt momentarily reassured. He lumbered to his private larder. Yuca, and maize, and various roots. He began to grub among them while the red headed gringo laughed uproariously. He had to sit down on the beach and laugh. Juan stared stolidly at him as he slapped his knees.
“We can’t pay him!” he panted hilariously, rolling on his back to laugh at the graying sky. “We—can’t pay him. We’ve found the Inca’s emerald mines and we can’t pay for a dollar’s worth of grub! Can you beat it? We’re millionaires and we can’t pay—”
He rolled upon the sand while Juan stared, with stray articles of food in his hands. Thirteen-sixteenths of Araucanian blood do not sharpen a man’s sense of humor anyhow, and Juan quite simply classed these men as maniacs. The gray eyed Yanqui bubbled over with laughter likewise and pointed at Juan and gasped out:
“The s-solemn m-mummy! He—he don’t know what we’re talking about! He th-thinks we’re crazy!”
When the gray eyed man laughed at him, Juan did not think of the hysteria that comes of good fortune at last secure. Juan thought explicitly of madmen. They were unpleasant things to have about. It was frequently necessary to shoot them or do something else drastic to them, just in case they became violent. These men were assuredly insane. Ragged and emaciated and laughing while they rolled upon the beach ... It was not the babbling of fever. It was madness. And Juan thought wistfully of certain tortuous jungle paths it was dangerous to try to reach—while these white men had guns—and then he thought desperately of a long Araucanian bow in his shack behind him. Juan was nearly one-fourth Spanish, but he owned no gun. If he had ...
A voice spat an order at him. It was in Spanish, and only a fraction less comprehensible to Juan than the gibberish in which these gringos spoke to one another. But this was the voice of the dark man, the man with boots, and Juan trembled.
He hastened to kindle a fire and cook humbly, while that man watched him ominously. That one man frightened Juan more than any of the others. He was all too familiar a type; the type of certain saturnine, hard-bitten men who rove the backwaters of all the new countries of the world. They are not amiable persons, and they are not especially moral persons, but they obtain their desires in highly effective fashion from the natives of backward nations. Those same natives, as a rule, fear them a great deal more than whatever local devils there may be. And, as a rule, with much more reason.
The man with the boots watched Juan coldly while he cooked. Juan’s hands trembled a little. He sweated more than the heat would call for; at the same time he shivered. Once, when the man with the boots moved behind him, Juan cringed as if expecting a kick, and his eyes were agonized. A man who is mostly Araucanian Indian can tell you stories which do not redound remarkably to the credit of the white races.
With an exterior showing only the most impassive stolidity, Juan was nevertheless nearly a nervous wreck from pure terror when the food was cooked; yet all that the dark man had done was to look at him. But considering that Juan knew the man’s breed and dreaded them sane, and considering that he considered this man probably mad, Juan’s terror was as understandable as it was abject.