The native doctor was a little old man who had no small opinion of his own importance, and was as contemptuously ignorant of Spanish as the Yankee was of Huaxtecan and Cariban. He passed his hand over the patient’s brow, breathed on him, muttered incantations, and then walked round the hut about a dozen times, solemnly talking to himself, till Stephens could scarcely resist the temptation to give him a lift into the street with his foot. After a time the piache, doctor, conjurer, or whatever he called himself, took out two powders from his girdle, poured water on them, sipped the drink, breathed and mumbled over it, opened the sufferer’s mouth, and poured it down his throat before the spectator could make up his mind whether to interfere or no. Then the old image strutted out of the hut, as proud as Punch.
This was all very well, but Stephens’ mind was ill at ease. He followed the man of medicine into the 135 street, and found the chief waiting modestly but expectantly outside.
“Ask him what he has given my friend,” he said, curtly. The chief bowed, but shook his head.
“These are mysteries into which I may not inquire. The physician’s secrets are sacred. You may rest assured that the young white man will soon be well.”
Of course, Stephens did anything but rest assured of this. He turned into the hut again, and lo! Catherwood was sleeping as peacefully as a child, with no sign of indisposition except the flush on his face. The chief peeped in apologetically.
“He says that the sick señor will be well enough to travel by midday,” he whispered. It was now four o’clock; Stephens ate some breakfast fretfully, looked at the patient, walked about the village, and sought to kill time as best he could. Every time he re-entered the hut, Catherwood’s temperature was less high; and, about the middle of the day, he awoke of his own accord, ravenous for some breakfast. The old medicine-man had known his business; had administered two, out of the thousand and two, healing drugs which the American forests and valleys produce—probably quinine and some preparation of poppy—and had nipped in the bud what was doubtless an attack of malarial fever.
Catherwood paid his doctor’s bill by the gift of a four-bladed pen-knife, his friend forced a similar present on the chief, and early in the afternoon they rode away about their business. The next few weeks were passed in hurried journeys from town to town, in false alarms, in being potted at by revolutionaries, and 136 humbugged by officials; and by the time they had crossed once more to the Bay of Honduras and the Guatemala coast, they had found out all that there was to learn.
About a mile from the British boundary they encountered their most exciting adventure. Outside a Carib village were a dozen Indians and Mestizos, all armed with guns, and in heated argument with five young men, who were obviously British officers in mufti; these also had guns, and two of them carried well-filled game-bags.
“You intend to keep us here? It will be the worse for you if you try it,” the eldest of the white men was saying in Spanish.
“Unless you give us what we ask,” replied a Mestizo insolently. “You have no right to be over the border.”