“They are as sickly looking as the ones at Porto Bello were,” Cliff confided to his companions. “They certainly need a doctor,” Tom admitted. “It seems as though all the Central American Indians we have seen are degraded and poor looking through carelessness.”
“Bad diet, too,” Tom declared. “They eat the same diet year in and year out, and they’re too lazy—or don’t know how—to exercise. I don’t know that we ought to pity them. Still, somehow I do.”
“Well, why shouldn’t we pity them?” demanded Nicky.
“Because they really belong to a race which had a civilization that seems to have been as fine as ours in many ways,” Tom said. “But the race didn’t keep up to its old standards and so these people have themselves, and their ancestors, to blame.”
“I guess you’re right,” Nicky agreed.
They were not treated badly: their guide showed them a hut where several women brought them a sort of stew, taken from a big pot at one part of the small cleared square of the village. The stew was not as palatable as some might like; but it was food and seemed to be made in a reasonably clean way, considering the scanty provisions for cleanliness that these people possessed.
In that village Tom and his two comrades had to remain for three days. No restraint was put on their movements. The jungle was enough to keep them prisoners. From the village, once they had lost their sense of the direction whence they had come, there was no trace of the way out. Nevertheless people came and went, going into the jungle in the morning and returning with trapped game or birds shot with their finely polished, long, light arrows.
Nicky, who was rather good at archery, one day made friends with one of the younger boys who was watching a half dozen women polish and bind pointed thorns onto sticks.
“There’s a nice, true one,” said Nicky, knowing that his words were not understood, but intending to use the arrow to demonstrate his own skill and impress the other youth favorably; but the Indian, catching his hand, held him back from the tiny pile on which the arrow lay.
“Now, why did he do that?” Nicky wondered.