The drummer screwed up his eyes against the shimmer, and made out what looked like a grove of trees on the horizon. Nearer, the spot developed into trees and a house of some sort. There seemed to be only one house. Strawbridge stared mechanically. The heat dulled his perceptions.
"What is it?" he asked.
"A hacienda. It belongs to an English firm, and is in federal territory. We are outside of General Fombombo's scope of influence now."
Strawbridge repeated these last words mechanically; the meaning was almost baked out of them by the heat of the sun beating on his head. "Outside of General Fombombo's scope of influence...." The drummer remembered the red line on the map in the library. So that was where he was—on that red line. The whole force of peons, officers, men, and women were crossing that red line and trying to extend it.
"How far is it to San Geronimo?" he asked.
"We're about half-way."
Strawbridge rode on for ten or fifteen minutes, with his eyes resting on the deep green of the grove. It was a eucalyptus grove. He noted this vaguely; then his mind went back to the answer to his questions. They were about half the distance ... outside the scope of General Fombombo's influence.... A red line on the map of Venezuela.... They were extending that, pushing it eastward and southward.... Somewhere the señora was playing a piano in a cool room.... The pleasant señora.... God, but it was hot!
The estate of "El Limon," in the Orinoco basin, belonged to an English meat-packing concern, and it was managed by a Trinidadian and his wife, the Tollivers. These English colonials lived in a ranch-house made of stone instead of adobe. Near the dwelling-house stood a vast wooden barn. It was this barn which Strawbridge had seen from a distance. House and barn were shaded by a magnificent eucalyptus grove, and these great trees formed the only restful spot amid the leagues of burning llanos. It was an English experiment and importation, this grove, and not another like it existed in all Venezuela.
Mr. Tolliver was a tall, rangy man wearing a native palm-fiber hat and alpargatas. He was burned browner than the natives themselves, but it was the deep reddish-brown of the Anglo-Saxon, not the yellowish-brown of a Spaniard. Out of this deep-brown face two pale English eyes looked on Venezuela, in chill condemnation.