The canoe was unloaded. The small clearing about Juan’s hut was tacitly adopted as a camping place. The equipment of the three men was old and worn out. The hammocks were laced together with strips of untanned hide where they had ripped. Had they been Indians they would have been no worse provided. One single package from the canoe alone was carefully wrapped and anxiously watched by all three until safely deposited in their midst.
Juan was lost in the darkness. He was motionless, he was silent—and he was eventually forgotten. Now and then fugitive gleams from the small camp-fire glinted on his eyes. But the thoughts behind the bronze mask of his face were strange thoughts for one of his breed. The white men had eaten of his food without cursing its quality. They had smoked his cigars with a passionate pleasure. They had brought in their own firewood—white men!—while an Indian was nearby idle.
An Indian ... But he, Juan, was part white himself. His skin was dark, it was true, and no white man had admitted parental interest in the past two generations of his forbears. But boastful myths concerning imaginary forefathers recurred to him. A putative ancestor had been great among the white men, a jéfe, no less. A greater man, probably, than these. Certainly a greater man. He would have worn shoes every day and other white men would have called him señor. Yes. Certainly. And these were madmen, no less, and beggarly madmen at that, and it was not fitting that the descendant of a white man whom other white men had called señor should go barefoot while madmen wore boots ...
“We’ll take our evening look,” said the red headed man. His voice was strained. And Juan, observing, found the words a mere jumble of sounds or else he might have realized that the hilarity with which these three men had come paddling down the river was a protective hilarity, a constant dwelling upon good fortune for the forgetting of hunger. There was certainly no hilarity in the voices now. The red headed man’s tone was harsh, by that immutable law which fixes every man’s emotion upon his greatest desire. When hungry, emeralds did not matter. They were encouragement, yes; a means of forgetting starvation by providing dreams.
The man with the boots moved back a little into the shadows as the gray eyed Yanqui slowly unfastened the intricate wrappings of untanned hide and unfolded the stiff and stinking cover of that guarded parcel. Other wrappings were inside the first. Juan, squatting motionless in the deepest shadows and quite forgotten, saw the faces of the two men stiffen and grow tense. The face of the third man was invisible.
Juan caught a glimpse of greenish pebbles in the firelight. The men regarded them with hypnotic attention, with a feverish intensity. As one of them moved, Juan saw the pebbles more clearly. Dull, uninteresting small stones. Colored, to be sure—but uncut emeralds are not articles of surpassing beauty. Even by the handful they are not impressive.
The still and silent figure in the shadows found scorn increasing. Juan’s impression of these men’s madness now was certified. The men were staring at the stones in utter silence. The gray eyed Yanqui began to speak monotonous, meaningless words—
“One, two, three, four, five ...”
His voice went on, while the sodden heat of a breezeless jungle night made sweat pour out on a man’s flesh, and while stars glowed luridly overhead, and while dancing moths and night flies from the jungle flittered drunkenly in the ruddy light of the camp-fire before they plunged crazily down into its coals.
Small, slithering sounds in the jungle. Small, furtive lappings from the stream. Tiny, crackling sounds from the fire. The monotonous, rhythmic murmur of a man counting tediously in the stillness. That was all.