The river stretched on, mile after mile, a vast moving plane that banished the shores to level lines almost at the horizon. At last Strawbridge came to paddle close to one shore, in order that their tiny canoe might not be utterly lost amid such an immensity. As they clung closely to the left or easterly bank they passed, in the afternoon, what appeared to be the mouth of a small tributary river. Along its banks were a scattering of deserted huts, stakes with rusting chains fastened to them, a stockade of reeds daubed with mud, two or three adobe ovens such as the peons use. Strawbridge looked curiously at the abandoned site, and presently he realized that he was passing one of the branches that would have formed a part of General Fombombo's great system of canals. The work lay abandoned in a furnace of heat; the conscripted "reds" were gone. The only evidences of life were the crocodiles which had taken possession of the waterway and sunned themselves along its sandy rim.
As the man and the woman floated past they looked at the intake and the empty camp until it grew small in the distance and at last melted into the dancing horizon. What the Spanish girl thought as she looked at this ruinous fragment of her husband's great dream, Strawbridge did not know, nor did he dare to ask.
This long reach of water, wrought by the fettered "reds," somehow made Strawbridge, as he floated past it in his little canoe, feel small and uncertain of himself. It brought to his mind keenly the general, his restless planning; working, gathering gold, attacking cities, conscripting labor for vast projects; and now he was gone and this mighty fragment of his work was a harbor for reptiles. Seen from this perspective, the fact that the dictator had abandoned Dolores, who did not love him, for peon girls who did, no longer appeared the high crime which the American had held most harshly against him. It occurred to Strawbridge that there must have been sides to the general which he had missed, or but dimly apprehended.
The drummer's thoughts swung away from the general, to the long line of dictators who had arisen and oppressed Rio Negro. Each tyrant no sooner gained power than immediately he fell into some madness peculiar to himself.
Strawbridge wondered why this was so. Heretofore he had thought such tyranny and oppression arose out of sheer wickedness, but now, looking back on the life of the general, he doubted this judgment. The trend of Fombombo's plans had always been toward some great good for his state. But his efforts, it seemed to Strawbridge, were unbusinesslike. He made a gesture toward projects far beyond his resources. His effort to outstrip his physical resources forced him to conscript the "reds." It was his sensitiveness to any criticism of his unbusinesslike policy that caused him to imprison every critic of his methods. Lack of business acumen was the basic weakness which led to the dictator's tyrannies and to his final downfall.
As Strawbridge sat in the canoe, brooding over it, a strange thought came to him that perhaps all righteousness of conduct was at last resolvable to dollars and cents.
He mused over this curious theory. Gumersindo had told him some of the history of Spain, and all the time the negro editor was relating the expulsion of the Moors and the Jews from the peninsula, the drummer kept thinking not of any abstract injustice of the banishment but of the extraordinarily bad business methods the Spanish monarch used. Likewise, he could not help thinking that while the Spanish Inquisition struck a fine attitude before Heaven, it cut a very poor figure on Exchange.
And now he thought that just as Spain had suffered from lack of business, Venezuela, her colony, had inherited the same curse. The Venezuelans placed religion before business, they placed family pride before business, they placed pleasure before business. It seemed to him that they placed the smallest before the greatest.
Heretofore, when Strawbridge's Venezuelan friends had twitted the American with possessing "monetary morals," the drummer was wounded and inclined to take offense at the qualification. Now, as he thought about it more steadily, it dawned on him that the ability to sift conduct down to its money value was about the only universal standard of righteousness that the world would ever know. This curious conclusion settled many interrogations in the drummer's mind, and brought to him a kind of peace.
Strawbridge felt a man's impulse to share his thoughts with the señora. He glanced up at her, with his theory on the tip of his tongue, but she seemed absorbed in her own musings. As he looked at her through the glare of sunshine, his instinct warned him that he would better not attempt it. It was very precious to him, but it would not be very precious to her. Indeed, as he looked at her, he began to realize that she would never understand it; that she was born on the wrong side of the world ever to understand just these thoughts.