He had a mental vision of what would follow. In the heart of the jungle a camp site would be chosen. Palms would be felled, rude shelters would be formed. After this the real work would begin. Scattering out through the jungle, the Caribs would search out the largest, most promising sapodilla trees. These, by the aid of their bare toes and a single strap, they would scale to a distance of thirty or forty feet. Beginning at the top, working their way round and round the trunk, they would cut in the bark a spiral groove reaching to the ground. Down the groove sap from the bark would ooze. When a sufficient quantity had reached the canvas sack placed at the bottom of the groove, it would be collected and carried to camp where, in a huge copper kettle over a great fire that blazed merrily, the sap would be boiled down.
When the chicle had cooled, it would be kneaded like bread dough until it was thick enough to form in cakes. Then it would be poured into moulds and allowed to harden.
After that, packed two cakes in a gunny-sack, it would be carried on Caribs’ backs to the nearest stream. By pit-pan to the sea, then by sailing schooner to the nearest shipping point, Belize.
“And then,” he sighed, “our work is done. The Central Chicle Company will take it off our hands. They are the real exporters.”
His heart warmed as he saw the long rows of black and brown men and seemed to catch their weird chant as they marched on the first lap of the long journey with the freshly gathered chicle on their backs.
“We will succeed,” he told himself. “We must!”
One other thought came to him at that moment, a rather vexing thought. He would return to the Maya cave. Sooner or later he would go back and enter in search of the mysterious metal box he had seen there.
“And if I should find the beaten silver box,” he said to himself, “if the pearls should still be within, after all these years, to whom would they belong?”
“Finders keepers,” an old adage, kept running through his mind. Yet this did not quite satisfy him. This problem was soon dismissed from his mind. He had business before him.
He had reached the rocky crest of the hill that lay at the back of the old Don’s pasture. From this promontory one might command a view of the valley below and might trace the course of its main stream, the Rio de Grande, for a distance of thirty miles.