AMBUSHED BY LADRONES
Early in the morning I was off; some of the celebrants of the night
before were strewn along the streets, still drunk, and among them the
sociable hogs rooted or wandered. The horse I looked over anxiously, but
he was sound as a dollar and even a little frisky in the keen air. Once
in a while an Indian was to be seen plowing a tiny patch of the Andean
plateau with a bull and a crooked tree trunk or here and there a single
figure plodding the trail. In the afternoon I caught up with a Spaniard,
the manager of a gold mine back in the mountains he said, and together
we rode comfortably along. Until we met I had no idea of the enormous
craving for companionship that can develop in the human mind. Bolivian
fashion, he had galloped and exhausted his horse in the early morning
and now it could not be urged off a tired walk.
At Cocuta we stopped and had a little supper, some fried eggs and a hot
stew, mainly of aji, while the horses rested with loosened girths. La
Paz was only some twelve miles distant and to the edge of the high plain
from which its lights could be seen even less. I was going on so that I
could get in that night. The Spaniard's idea was to stop in one of the
mud rooms of the tambo and ride in, freshened, foam-bedecked, and
prancing in the morning. The mud rooms, acrid with llama-dung smoke from
the cooking fires and infested as well, made no appeal to me. My
companion went outside to look over his horse and came back in a state
of suppressed excitement. He beckoned me over in one of the mud rooms:
"There are here a gang of ladrones--highwaymen," he said. "We must go on
at once I know them. They killed the mail carrier on the trail last
month. We dare not stop here--we will saddle slowly and ride on as if we
had not noticed them. Then we can see if they follow."
We tightened the girths and the Spaniard's Indian boy picked up his
bundle and swung alongside on foot--he could keep up with the horse at
the end of a day's march on the trails. As we rode out of the corral
there was a group of Cholos and Bolivians mud spattered and dusty who
had evidently just arrived. Their animals wandered around while their
riders with a bottle of alcohol and some bottles of native beer were
getting drunk as rapidly as possible. One of them had on an old style
blue army overcoat of the United States and, so far as looks went, they
easily lived up to the reputation of brigands that my Spanish friend had
just given them.
The interesting question for us was whether they would follow and
overtake us. The cold afterglow of sunset was almost at our backs and we
carefully watched the long, level horizon on which Cocuta long remained
in sight for signs of horsemen. The Spaniard was for covering ground as
fast as possible, but I insisted on keeping to a walk; his horse was
played out and needed to be saved up to the last minute if we were
really in for a bad time.
It grew dark, and the thinnest possible silver of moon gave only an
accent to the night. No following horsemen had appeared and we were
feeling quite relieved when the Indian boy spoke to the Spaniard. Off on
our right, perhaps a couple of hundred feet from the trail furrows, rode
a little group of horsemen. There were four or five, in the night it was
uncertain, but they were off the trail--for nothing that one could
imagine except of a sinister purpose since everyone follows the
trail--and suiting their pace to ours, were walking abreast without
closing in. We had dismounted to ease our horses and now we climbed back
into the saddles. The figures did not close in nor did they give any
sign.
"They are trying to count us," said my friend, and then he added, "have
you another pistol, señor, one that you could lend me--I have not one."
I had not. And I remember to this day the cold, clammy undulations of my
spine as I realized that the only gun between us belonged to me and that
whatever responsibilities the situation developed the field of action
was also to be wholly mine.
The hold-up in these parts is not practiced with the gentle chivalry of
the "hands up" or stand-and-deliver method; you are first shot up and,
if the aim has been successful from the chosen ambush, your remains are
searched. Spanish--or the surviving Bolivian procedure--places a very
high value on the testimony of surviving principals, so much so that one
of the effects of any form of hold-up is to see that there are no
surviving principals.
The little figures off the trail kept pace with us and gave no sign.
Presently they gradually quickened their gait and disappeared in the
darkness ahead. The Spaniard laid his hand softly on my arm:
"They have gone ahead to await us in an arroyo, señor," he said. "Be
sure that your pistol is in order."
These arroyos are gashes in the high plateau, sometimes only six or
eight feet deep and more often deep gullies with a dried watercourse at
the bottom into which one rides in steep zigzags like the mountain
trails, and by reason of having the only gun it became my part to ride
ahead. Presently we came to one--deep and as dark as the inside of a
cow. There was nothing else to do so I cocked my gun, a forty-four,
Russian model, and shoved the spurs in so that my horse would take the
trail, down into the arroyo first. There was not a sound except the
rattle of stones from my horse's feet; there was not a thing that could
be seen in the darkness; I was on edge for the slightest sound.
"If you hear a sound, señor, shoot!" said my fellow traveler as I
spurred ahead.
It seemed an age before I rode out on the plain on the other side--and
it was only a little arroyo. And there were some eight or ten more of
these ahead. How many we passed I do not remember, but it was from the
opposite bank of one deep gully that I heard the rattle of displaced
gravel and I swung my gun into the direction of the sound and blazed
away. Down the last slope of the near side my horse slid and then in a
rattling gallop stumbling and pitching over the dried watercourse on up
the opposite side while I banged away in the direction of the first
sound. More gravel poured down and then there came the sounds of
scurrying and of hoof beats pounding on hard ground. Close behind me
came the Spaniard in a clatter of flying stones and still further behind
the noise of his Indian boy scuttling down the bank and trying to keep
up.
On the farther bank we halted and took stock. To this day I do not know
how many shots I fired for I broke the gun, dumped out all the shells,
and reloaded without taking stock of expended ammunition. But the
tension was gone; we looked at each other in the darkness and the rest
of the trail seemed easy.
"They will not likely appear again," he said. "But there are one or two
bad places yet."
There were narrow zigzags with sharp turns guarded by jutting rocks
where a man could be hidden until the horse pivoted for the sharp turn
and this constant riding with a cocked gun into a black gash that maybe
contained something that never appeared wore on the nerves. How much I
did not know until, as we rode into the outskirts of La Paz, a couple of
fighting bulls broke loose in the streets and a loose fighting bull is
very dangerous. A man on horseback was perfectly safe, but at the
shrill, terrified cries of "_los toros! los toros!_" and the low bellow
of the bulls, I spurred on a law-breaking gallop through the streets of
La Paz and did not stop until I had clattered into the patio of the
hotel. My nerve was gone.
The trouble over the lack of company funds was soon located. Our agent
in La Paz, a hard drinking old man of many exaggerated politenesses and
a teller of tales that began with a British commission in a Bengal
lancers regiment and drifted through Sioux and Blackfeet raids, a man
who was utterly delightful across a club table, had been seized with a
madness for power. The poor old fellow, as honest as he was shiftless, a
genteel drifter for years, had become an appointed and accredited
resident agent and with a full company cash box felt for the first time
in years the thrill of responsibility as "agent" and had been for days
shifting from club to hotel and back to the club maudlin with boasts and
Scotch-and-sodas. It did not take long to straighten out affairs and
soon I was headed for the interior.
Once more I was back in Sorata. One of the men, our only mechanic, an
Englishman, was quarantined in a little house on the outskirts, down
with the smallpox. We had shared the room in the Sorata posada together
before I started across the high plain, and he had become sick
twenty-four hours after I left. The intendente of Sorata was irritated
at him, he was some trouble with his smallpox. They had locked an old
Indian woman in the house on the outskirts to which he had been removed
and kept a guard at the door so she could not escape. She was cook and
nurse.
The queer official government doctor who ran a queer medicine shop and
barely kept alive under the government subsidy, shuffled up to the house
each day and called inquiries through the window that were answered by
the sick man. Fortunately he was not very ill, and he pulled through.
While the peeling or shedding process was on we would go up and sit
across the alley from his window and smoke some pipes with the patient.
At night he used to be annoyed while he was helpless, by the Aymarás,
who would hold little dances and celebrations under his windows, tooting
the doleful flutes and beating the drums. While he was sickest he was
helpless; one of his first messages was to the intendente to chase off
the Indians. It had the usual result--nothing. His first convalescent
act was to crawl over to the window one night with his gun and open
fire. Two muffled echoes from the night proved that he had punctured two
drums and he was left in peace. True, the Aymarás complained but the
intendente came back with the information that a crazy smallpox patient
was a free agent and they had better keep away. Thereafter no more drums
or flutes broke the night's peace.