Half an hour later found him still working on that single word.
"Whew!" he remarked when he finally had it memorized, "I've heard it takes eight years to learn Eskimo. It's liable to take me eighty before I can talk Mundurucu. What about this one?" he went on, undiscouraged, pointing to a curious tree with a mahogany-red bark—which, if he had but known it, was a stranger whose seeds had in some way drifted down from much farther north.
"E-lit-ta-pix-tee-e-fa-cho-to-kee-not-e," said Pinto, slowly and distinctly.
For fifteen minutes Will wrestled with this new word.
"Do you know what he said?" at last interrupted Professor Ditson, who had been listening to the lesson.
"He gave me the name for that tree, didn't he?" returned Will, a little peevishly.
"Not at all," said the scientist. "He simply said, 'I don't know.'"
"Not so blame simply, either," murmured Jud, who had also been following the lesson.
"Our own language is full of similar mistakes imported from native dialects," lectured Professor Ditson. "'Kangaroo' simply means 'I don't know' in Bushman; so do 'mosquito' and 'quinine' and 'cockatoo' in different Indian languages."
"Well," said Will, "I'm going to pass up Mundurucu. Here I've spent the better part of an hour in learning two words—and one of them isn't right."