The boy, Porfirio, in response, showed Tom many trails across the swamp savannas surrounding the village, and helped him to search for beautiful tropical birds’ eggs, curious stones, and other specimens. Always he begged to be shown the magnet and its power; it fascinated him and, the day that Tom let him, fearfully and timidly, take it and play with it for a while, he looked toward Tom as one might have looked at a master, and from then on, followed him like a dog.
By that time Tom had picked up enough of the village dialect to learn that Porfirio’s father had been slain by one of the jaguars—or, as the natives termed the ferocious cats, tigers, caught on a lonely trail without a weapon, and horribly mangled. Tom felt sorry for the desolate child and did his best to amuse him.
After several wasted weeks, a great canoe arrived from upriver, in which, besides the paddlers, was an old man, bent and wizened and terribly dwarfed; yet he was stronger than any other man—or any two men—among the Indians, and seemed to be greatly respected. He was Toosa, the man they had come so far to see!
Henry at once began to question him, but Toosa paid no heed to him at all. He had come, primarily, to take the child, Porfirio, a great-grandson, to his own village further up the turbid stream.
“We came all the way up here—you recognize me, don’t you?” Henry cried, and when the old man nodded, went on, “we came all the way to find out where——”
Toosa made a gesture, stopping Henry. He had just landed and his young great-grandson ran to greet him. Toosa merely touched his shoulder with a finger and turned back toward the boats after a brief word with one of the natives. But Henry caught his thin, though muscular and wiry arm. Tom, watching, saw a display of a curious power that the old man possessed. He did not move his body or shake Henry off; he simply turned his head and fixed his steady, bright eyes on the impatient white man. Henry, about to speak, seemed to be struck by some invisible message of power, for he closed his lips, holding the grip he had for a moment; then his hand loosened and dropped, and he stood still. Toosa, turning back toward the boats, resumed his way, the small boy trotting at his side.
“We don’t want to let him get away, though, at that,” demurred Tom, but Bill merely gave him a warning glance, and slowly strolled along behind the dwarfed, bent old figure. Henry, after a moment, took up the march, and Tom kept close to Bill, curious and uncertain what was to happen.
“He’s a powerful chief, even if he isn’t the magician that the Indians think he is,” Bill observed quietly to Tom. “He won’t talk to us until he has settled himself in his own village.”
“But how will we get there?” Tom wondered.
He soon found out. As soon as he had settled himself in his great, roughly shaped canoe, made from the trunk of a huge tree, Toosa turned to the three whites on the bank, and beckoned.