When Bert Mackey and I got back to New York we were both in the same
boat--to wit, we were without jobs. On the way down, though, Bert
unfolded a very alluring scheme by which we could, he allowed, make
_oodles_ of money and at the same time stand a chance of meeting with
something that looked like real adventure.
“Do you know, Jack,” Bert said confidentially, “that I went into the
wireless game simply because it appeared to me to offer the best chance
of meeting Miss Adventure. I’ve been at it for five years now and I’ve
never even had the pleasure of getting a look at her face.
“Wherever I go she is always on the other side of the street and
although I tip my hat to her she never looks up, much less gives me a
_tumble_. I took that sealing job because I certainly thought I’d meet
Miss Adventure somewhere among the ice floes and blizzards of the Arctic
North. But no! all I did was to sit in my cabin and send what my Captain
wanted to tell your Captain and receive what your Captain had to say to
my Captain. And to what purpose? So that a few rich men could get richer
by enabling vain women to run around the streets of New York and a few
other big burgs bedecked out in the skins of baby seals that had been
clubbed to death. Now that’s big business for men and women to be in,
isn’t it?
“I wish I could get a job on a pirate ship or start a revolution in some
punk Central American country. And it’s funny,” he went on
complainingly, “how a fellow like you, who has only been in the service
a couple of years, could meet with a big adventure like the sinking of
the _Andalusian_, I’d have given a year of my life to have been in your
place.
“Now down along the Amazon River there are great rubber plantations,
savage tribes of Indians, tigers, monkeys, boa-constrictors and all the
garnishings that go to make up a first class tropical jungle. I know a
man in New York that does business with a rubber concern in Para, Brazil
and he told me, just before we sailed north, that the _Compagnie
Francaise de Telegraphie sans Fil_ had a contract to put up half a dozen
wireless stations along the river.
“It strikes me, Jack, that it would be a good scheme if you and I took a
trip down there and looked over the ground. What do you say?”
Having a few dollars in my pocket and nothing else to do at that
particular moment I said O K and agreed to join him provided we could
get free transportation on some liner going down there. Bert assured me
that he could _fix it_ and he was as good as his word.
So it was we sailed in due time on the _Ceara_ of the _Holliday Line_.
It was an old tub that stood every chance of having on board Miss
Adventure and I didn’t doubt in the least but that Bert would have ample
opportunity to strike up an acquaintance with her and to swim back, if
he got back at all, for the _Ceara_ had no wireless equipment--such was
her regard for the laws of the U.S.
As luck would have it we had fine weather and she beat her way down just
as she had for the last quarter of a century if she was as old as she
looked. We enjoyed the trip, at that, for there were not many passengers
aboard and all of them, especially the South Americans, were very
pleasant people. Having learned that we had never been in South America
we were told that it was a great country full of possibilities for young
men with some capital but that if we were unacquainted there it would be
better for us to _about face_ at Para and go home.
Bert and I had other thoughts on the subject but as we were nearing the
Equator I kind of wondered why I had not stayed at home selling
crude-oil engines or taking the post on the new _Cunarder_ that Sammis
said he’d get for me, or doing something else that was nice and cool.
In a little less than a month’s time we landed at Para, as it is
popularly called, or Belem, as it is more properly called, or to give it
its full name _Santa Maria de Del Belem do Para_. Just as New Orleans is
built back from the Gulf of Mexico, on the Mississippi River so Para is
situated a hundred miles inland from the Atlantic on the Amazon River.
So this is Para from which Para rubber comes, thought I as I looked
about, and indeed I should have known it had I sailed into port with my
eyes shut for the smell of rubber everywhere permeated the air.
But don’t think for a moment that it is made up of a lot of adobe houses
as so many Mexican towns are. Far from it, for in architecture it is a
miniature reproduction of Rio de Janeiro, which city in turn looks more
like Paris than any other in either North or South America. Nor is Para
a small burg, for it has a population of a hundred thousand now and some
day, if the Amazon valley is ever developed, it may be larger than Rio
de Janeiro, aye, even than New York itself.
Different from the equatorial city I expected to find, where every one
had nothing to do but to lie under a palm tree, look at the blue sky,
smoke cigarettes and agitate the air with a fan, there was much to do,
for there rubber is King, and the white, yellow and black folks were
doing it with a good deal of vim too. The demand for rubber, we learned,
was greater than it had ever been before and consequently the people
were prosperous and happy.
After a deal of searching we located the offices of the _Compagnie
Francaise de Telegraphie sans Fil_ and Bert explained to Señor Benoit,
the manager, that we were a couple of wireless operators from the United
States. The manager acted as though he was dazed and Bert handed him our
credentials to set him right.
In a moment, though, he recovered and I wish you could have seen the way
he greeted us! You’d have thought he’d found two long lost brothers for
he hugged us in turn and almost wept on our necks. I thought the heat
and the smell of the rubber had made him _nutty_ where as it was only
his great good luck. Believe me, he knew exactly what it was all about.
He had come on from France six months before to put up a chain of
wireless stations beginning at Para and on up the river for 2500 miles
to Equitos, at intervals of about 500 miles. Before the wireless men got
to Jurutty they had been taken down with the fever and were even then on
their way to Para, and so the job was open and ready for us to tackle.
He agreed to pay us a million _reis_, including all our expenses and a
million _reis_ for every month we remained as operators in his company’s
service. It didn’t take half-an-eye to see that if we could stick it out
for a few months we’d be regular millionaires.
“I want to make our wireless system a success to show the Brazilian
capitalists its superiority over the wire system. They have an overhead
line stretched along the banks of the river but it gives very poor
service for any one of a number of reasons, chief among them being that
it is hard to keep iron wires from rusting away owing to the great
amount of rain, and when copper wire is used the Indians have a great
liking for it and cut out a length here and there whenever they want it.
“With wireless it is different and if I can only get the stations set up
and working I will show the advantages of it over the wire system very
quickly. Wireless will be safer and surer for the rains can’t affect it
and I am quite sure the Indians will not steal the ether.”
We took passage on the _Asuncion_, one of the _Amazon Steamship
Company’s_ fleet of small steamers and sailed up the Rio Amazonia, or as
we call it the Amazon River, the mightiest of all flowing waters. On
either side of it for hundreds of miles lay a tangled mass of tropical
vegetation--the jungle in very truth. The villages were far between but
occasionally we saw the rude huts of a few settlers who had come forth
from the civilized quarters of the world to sap out their energies and
make their fortunes in rubber.
We were told that a mighty small area of the jungle had been explored
though a few expeditions had made their devious ways through some parts
of it either for scientific purposes, such as studying the vegetation
and living things, or for commercial reasons as getting plants for
medicines and more frequently rubber.
And rain! I can’t remember a day down there when it didn’t rain. The
reason it rains so much is this: the warm winds that blow up the river
from the Atlantic carry a lot of moisture with them and the winds that
blow down the river from the Andes are cold and when they come together,
the moisture condenses and it rains.
The scenery looked about the same all the way along--just one mass of
tropical trees of all kinds for the warp and these were woven together
with vines of every description for the woof. I could see our finish
before we started in to “look over the ground” as Bert had suggested
when we were in dear old New York. Yes, dear little old New York--how I
wished I were back there again.
As for rubber plantations they were there, the savage tribes of Indians
were there too--I didn’t see them on the trip up stream but they were
there all right just as Bert had said. There were no tigers as Bert
guessed but we saw the onca, or jaguar (pronounced _ja-gwar_), a buff
feline beast covered with black spots that is a second cousin to the
tiger in both size and ferociousness.
The whole blooming tribe of monkeys with faces on them that ought to
make a fellow ashamed to look at himself in a glass, and make you know
that Darwin was right; boa-constrictors and seven million, more or less
of other kinds of snakes were there--in fact equatorial America was all
that Bert, or I, or any one else, ever dreamed it was and then multiply
it by about a hundred and you will get a faint impression of it. Yes,
beasts, birds, fishes, snakes and insects end without number, and each a
marvel of its kind, were there and so was the Indian princess.
There was the _tapir_, a sort of a cross between a horse and a
rhinocerous having a short proboscis as though its snout was made of
rubber and some one had stretched it for him; it is a shy and harmless
beastie that moves about chiefly at night. The _sloth_, a greenish-brown
animal whose chief business it is to hang back downward from the branch
of a tree and to sleep away its life.
The _ant-eater_ who picks up a living by eating ants and other insects.
All hail to the ant-eater! I’ve seen a dozen other animals down there
that have no business outside of a jungle, or a zoo or a menagerie.
Lizards are there in great variety from those that change their colors
while you wait to those the natives serve up for you to eat.
And talking about colors, no coal tar dye was ever discovered that could
begin to equal the plumage of the birds down there. Large parrots called
_macaws_, parakeets, which are little parrots with long tails, cockatoos
and love birds, which belong to the parrot family, and others on down to
humming birds that are scarcely larger than wasps, are as thick as
microbes in sour milk.
But the jungle is the paradise of the insects; there is every
conceivable kind and then as many more that are beyond human belief:
gigantic, gorgeous butterflies, beetles that looked as if they had been
stencilled with the rainbow colors of the sun, and flies as numerous per
square unit of space as grains of powder in the charge of an 8 gauge
shell.
The ants, though, have all the other insects _faded_ and everything else
in the jungle that lives on the ground. Next to William Hohenzollern’s
armies that devastated Belgium and Flanders rank the Amazon armies of
ants that march out to seek what and whom they can devour. Everything
from a jaguar on down that gets in their way becomes meat and drink for
them.
You have, of course, often watched our little fireflies and wondered
what kind of an apparatus was installed in their anatomy which produces
the intermittent, phosphorescent light as they flit around. Well, down
in Brazil there are fireflies that look like electric lights. They
measure nearly 4 inches long, and 1¼ inches wide and carry three light
reservoirs--two in the thorax and one in the abdomen--and these give off
a bright greenish light.
When the natives want a light they simply catch a few fireflies, put
them in a bottle and cork it up. They could read by this light if they
could read but they can’t so the chief use to which they put the
fire-fly lights is to hunt around in their beds to see what has crawled
in with them. This, then, is the cheapest form of light and, according
to Sir Oliver Lodge, if man could produce an electric light with as
little expenditure of power as the fire-fly then a boy turning the
handle of an electric machine could light up a good sized factory.
The things that live in the Amazon River are just as plentiful as those
that inhabit the jungle. The _manatee_, or _sea-cow_ as it is called, is
the largest having a length of something like 10 feet. If you were far
enough away from it you might mistake it for a seal for it has the same
general outline. Turtles grow to be 3 feet long, and _oddsfish_, there’s
enough different kinds to stock the seven seas and then have some left
over for the boarding houses.
I could talk to you for a week about the strange living creatures I saw
in and along the banks of the Amazon and in the jungle, but the trees
and plants are just as wonderful. For instance, there are palms out of
which palm-leaf fans are made and palm trees that grow up as high as
wireless masts and on their _main trucks_ and _pennants_ are cocoanuts.
Trees that when you tap ’em rubber, milk or cold water comes forth
depending on the kind of a tree it happens to be. Also a large number of
most uncommon fruits are there in great abundance.
At last we arrived at our destination, Jurutty, a village about 500
miles east of Manaos. When we landed my first and only thought was of
home and mother. My trip to the Arctic was a delightful little pleasure
jaunt as against this one up the Amazon River! Had I been castaway on
the moon, aye, even on Mars, I couldn’t have felt more remote from my
native land than when I stepped ashore at Jurutty. And yet, would you
believe it, now that it is in the past tense I would like to go there
once again.
We were met at the dock by Señor Castro, the _fezendero_, that is the
owner of the _fezenda_, which means the plantation. He was a mixture of
Portuguese and Indian but none the less a gentleman for that. A motley
crew of negroes, men, women and children with very little clothing on
and Indians who hadn’t the remotest idea why any one should wear clothes
at all, and mixtures of these races, were also at hand to see the
newcomers.
Señor Castro was right glad to see us and after shaking hands with us
half-a-dozen times he led the way back through a path in the jungle to
his _fezenda_. We dined in his home as I had never dined before nor have
since, drank coffee that threw the surpassing beverage of the same name
which is brewed in Child’s and the Waldorf-Astoria in the shade and
smoked his long tobacco wrapped cigarettes.
Then we talked wireless. The apparatus, as Señor Benoit had said, was
there and Señor Castro assured us that we should have all the help we
needed to set it up. He told us that there was an electric generator and
a crude-oil engine to furnish the power to run it with--and yet there
were hundreds of thousands of horse power to be had from the Amazon--but
which had never been tapped. Fortunately I happened to know all about
the history, theory and practise of oil engines and how to sell them if
the alleged prospects had the slightest idea of buying such power units.
Señor Castro also had a billiard table, a phonograph and other civilized
inventions to while away life as pleasantly as possible in the jungle,
and taking it all in all Bert and I considered that things were not
altogether against us.
After we turned in our bobbinet curtained beds that night all went well
until we were awakened in the small hours by the sound of a woman’s
voice outside. Thinking it was some female in distress Bert awakened the
_fezendero_ only to be told with great courtesy that it was not a woman
but an _organ bird_. Bert returned saying something about forming a
_Society for the Prevention of Jungle Noises at Night_, and we slept
again.
In the morning Señor Castro took us out to show us his _fezenda_. Three
small horses were saddled ready for us to ride--though I can ride a wave
at sea much better than I can ride a quadruped on land. We rode around
his rubber plantation and Señor Castro showed us how the rubber trees
are tapped, explained that the fluid which comes from the trees is not
the sap of the wood but of the bark and we saw how the natives stick
little tin-cups to the trees with bits of clay to catch the fluid.
On returning we rode along the edge of the jungle and Señor Castro
cautioned us “never to go into the jungle for you will either get lost,
be killed by jaguars, bitten by snakes, or by fever laden insects which
are just as bad.”
“To the south of us,” he went on calmly, “are the
_Caripunas_--aboriginal Indians that kill and eat people if they get a
chance.”
“Cannibals?” I asked to make sure I had heard aright, and when he said
“yes” I could feel an electric oscillation run up and down my spinal
column.
“How far away from here are they?” questioned Bert with a peculiar light
in his eyes I had noticed whenever he spoke of adventure.
“The village is about 200 kilometers from here,” Señor Castro replied.
“It’s strange but they seem to have some kind of a sixth sense by which
they can tell the moment strangers arrive--some kind of a wireless
telegraph system, I guess,” and he laughed.
Then he went on: “I don’t doubt but that they have been stalking us
because you fellows are new to the place. It’s seldom that any of them
ever come across this road because I’ve put bullets into a couple of
them and they won’t get away with any more of my rubber men on this side
of the line.”
I asked him if they had captured many of his men.
“Every time my men tread the jungle outside of the _fezenda_ they are
taken unless they have an Indian guide with them.”
“Oh, I see, they are Union savages,” said Bert and he added, “I know I’m
going to like this place, Señor Castro.”
In the days that followed we got right down to business for we wanted
that million _reis_ as soon as we could get it. We unpacked the
materials for the aerial first and every move we made was watched with
great interest by the villagers. The _phosphor-bronze_ wire for the
aerial seemed to have an especial attraction for them, for they would
pick it up, look critically at it and examine it as carefully as though
they were looking for flaws in it.
There were two palm trees at least 100 feet high and about 250 feet
apart, and Bert and I decided to use these for the masts. When we had
the aerial assembled with the leading-in wire soldered to it I asked if
any one there could climb the palm tree and every man, woman and child
said that they could. I gave one of the half-breeds a coil of
quarter-inch hemp rope to hoist the aerial with and showed him how I
wanted the end of the aerial made fast to the tree top and then told him
to go aloft.
I wish you could have seen that fellow climb the tree! I used to think
our old time sailors were about as clever as they made ’em when it comes
to climbing but there’s no use talking they’re too civilized--too far
removed from the monkey family to know how to climb anything but a rope
ladder.
The half-breed grasped the back of the tree with the open palms of his
hands and placing the bare soles of his feet in front like a jack-knife
he just naturally _walked_ up it. These same fellows can travel for
miles through the jungle by swinging themselves from vine to vine and
going as fast as you or I can walk. So you see there are some things an
ignorant Amazonian can do that an educated New Yorker can’t do. And thus
does Nature’s law of compensation work out.
After we got the aerial swung between the palms we set the engine and
dynamo in place on their foundations and with some tinkering we got them
to running pretty smoothly. To Señor Castro’s delight we had enough
current not only to work the wireless set but for lighting up his house
as well. Last of all came the transmitter and receiver and although
these were of French make we had no difficulty in either installing or
operating them and it was a _cinch_ to get either Manaos on the west or
Almeirir on the east.
It seemed that the operators at both stations could get us a deal better
than we could get them though all of the transmitters were fitted with
one kilowatt transformers. But never mind, we had established
communication, thus fulfilling our part of the agreement, and Señor
Castro, by all the arts of a true gentleman, showed us how deeply he
appreciated our work. Nothing was too good for us. The only flaw in the
whole system was the operator at Manaos. He was like the sloth in that
he was just as liable to go to sleep as he was to stay awake.
I believe that every message I ever sent had something in it about
rubber, whether the body of it related to the doctor, medicines, or what
not, for along the Amazon River they live and die by that commodity.
After we had been at Jurutty a few weeks Bert and I got so we knew the
_fezenda_ about as well as its owner did and we walked or rode about the
place either alone or with Señor Castro for we made it a point for one
or the other to be on duty all the time and so make a reputation for
ourselves and for future United States operators who might happen that
way.
I often thought, in my rambles, that I could _feel_ the presence of some
human being back of a tree, or see a human shadow come and go before I
could really make it out, but as this happened very often I came to
believe it was merely a case of _nerves_. I talked with Bert about it
and he said he frequently heard and saw things too but that there was
nothing more to it than a snake or an animal moving about.
“Señor Castro,” he said, “has told us this little yarn about cannibals
so that we would keep inside the _fezenda_. There used to be tribes of
cannibals in the interior but all that sort of thing has been wiped out
by the Jesuit missionaries long ago.”
I was out for a walk one morning not long after and I heard a monkey
crying as though he was in great pain. I located him a dozen or twenty
paces in the jungle and went after him. He seemed to have gotten tangled
up in some vines and the harder he tried to get away the tighter they
held him.
Just as I reached up and released him a piece of wood was slipped into
my mouth by some one from behind making it impossible for me to utter a
sound and before I could take my revolver from its holster my hands were
pinioned back of me and my feet were bound so that I couldn’t kick, much
less run. Although I kept my eyes open I couldn’t see a man-jack of my
captors nor did they make the slightest noise.
They lifted me up bodily and after a few manœuvers in penetrating the
jungle we finally reached a pretty well trodden trail and then they set
me down and took the gag out of my mouth. Four strapping big, copper
colored bucks with splashes of red paint on their stark naked bodies
were the imps of Satan who had so unceremoniously abducted me. I would
have given just $7.00 in American gold to have gotten each one of them
to hold on to the spark-gap of a 10-inch induction coil for just one
second.
They were a quartet of jim-dandies and all they needed was a stove-pipe
hat apiece to complete their outfits.
Again they boosted me into the air and with a savage at each corner of
me they started off on a dog-trot, whither I knew not but what I did
know was that I was a goner. After a march, or a trot, of two days and
nights we came to an Indian village. There were several hundred men,
women and children savages about but they were dressed better than the
hunters who had brought me in for each one wore a string around his or
her waist and a rattle-box on her or his ankle.
If any one thinks that cannibalism has been wiped out in the Amazon
jungles he has another think coming for I saw with these--my own
eyes--the whole horrible ceremony gone through with of eating human
flesh.
After I had been there a few days a couple of savages, one with brown
hair and beard and the other with red hair and beard, began talking to
me in Spanish after trying Portuguese on me. I was quite surprised when
they told me they were rubber men from Señor Castro’s _fezenda_ whom the
cannibals had captured nearly a year before.
We planned escape by the hour, though one of them said that was just
what these man eaters wanted us to do and that when a fellow tried to
escape they would recapture him, bring him back, put him in the
proverbial pot and let him stew in his own juice. We were of a mind that
it would be better to be live men turned savages than to be cooked men
eaten by cannibals.
His most high worshipful King Oopla relieved me of my revolver, and came
nearly shooting up the village,--which I heartily wished he had
done,--also my watch, knife, compass and other trinkets which four
former articles he generously kept for himself and the latter he gave to
a wench whom I afterwards learned was his daughter, the Princess
Jaci--which is as near as I could come to pronouncing her name. I called
her _Princess Mabel_, the latter name being that of a _shine
kitchen-mechanic_ we once had.
Her face was thin and small and was topped by an enormous mass of
frizzled hair while her eyes set at a slight angle so that you couldn’t
just tell whether she was looking at you to the leeward or a rubber tree
to the windward.
Although her eyes were thus slightly out of alignment and her mouth was
cut on much too large a scale, which gave her a hard look, she was
always smiling good naturedly.
The first thing I knew Princess Mabel began to hang around me and to eat
and drink out of my cocoa-nut shell. She was an artistic creation in
olive drab, small, and lithe, but withal a very amiable and charming
maiden as cannibal maidens go.
She hadn’t been spoiled by working in high-toned families in Montclair
yet. I fought shy of her for some time for I thought they wanted to put
up a job on me and that the moment I gave her a pleasant look I’d be on
my way to the stew pot; this belief was further fixed in my mind by
occasionally finding a skull, a rib, ulna, fibula, and other parts of
the human skeleton lying around loose.
The rubber men, who could speak the Indian tongue a little, assured me,
however, that the King had taken a great fancy to me--I suppose because
I looked so young and tender--and that the Princess herself thought very
well of me. The King’s idea, they informed me, was to have me marry the
princess so as to improve the royal strain just as his own savage self
had been improved in the slave days of South America when the niggers
would run away from their masters and seek decent society among the
cannibals.
“For heaven’s sake, boy,” one of the rubber men said to me, “make up
your mind to marry her or we’ll all be served up _a la_ chop suey in the
grill room.”
Henceforth I treated her with all the courtesy and dignity I could
command and she reciprocated by showing me where her papa kept my
pistol, my watch and my compass--things I was glad to know, and she gave
me these stones too, which I am told by dealers in gems in Maiden Lane
to be diamonds. How much are they worth? No one knows until I have them
cut.
Everything went fine for the next couple of months but I was getting
pretty sick of the life and kept scheming to get away. This tribe of
savages used powerful bows and arrows barbed with bone and tipped with
feathers. It was all I could do to bend them but the King had one made
for me that was more to my strength and I learned to use it with
precision and great effect.
Every day I would go hunting and I always had the company of a couple of
pleasant secret service savages. Whatever I bagged I gave King Oopla and
Princess Mabel the very choicest of it and I always tried to get game
that was to their liking. We became great friends and I wouldn’t leave
these good simple minded people--no not for anything in the world unless
I got a good chance.
But I went a little farther every day and often lost myself from my
savage guides, but, never fear, I always came back like a dutiful
prospective son-in-law should. On returning one day from a hunting trip
that had lasted longer than-any of the others I had ever made, I found
they had killed one of the rubber men and were cooking him _en
casserole_.
That evening at sundown the ceremonies began and when it had grown dark
great bonfires were lit and the cannibals, with hideous painted faces
and bodies were dancing as if their very lives depended on it to the
bombastic beating of tom-toms, Old King Oopla had on his dress suit
which consisted of a pair of long horns projecting from either side of
his head, a red undershirt, and a celluloid cuff on each ankle. Her
royal highness, Princess Mabel, was bedecked out in a wonderful
head-gear and a fluffy ballet skirt built up of macaw and other
brilliant feathers. A few strings of human teeth around her neck
completed her bridal costume. She looked _awful_ nice.
The King, Mabel, and myself were squatting on a kind of throne built up
in the center of the ring of dancers but so enthusiastic did these royal
personages become that the King and the Princess must needs have a fling
at it too.
After keeping the dance going into the small hours of the morning they
stopped and gorged themselves with human flesh until they fell down in
their tracks, actually drunk with the gruesome orgy. It was a
preliminary feast to my marriage with Princess Mabel. When at last the
coast was clear I recovered not only my revolver but another one from
the hole in the tree where the King hid his treasures and giving it to
Señor Paes, the surviving rubber man, we stole forth determined on
gaining our freedom or else going to our deaths.
At the end of every mile we covered I put my ear to the ground and
_listened in_, but there were no sounds of our being followed. After ten
hours’ travel over trails that I knew I figured that we were nearer
Jurutty than to the cannibal village. We kept right on and after another
five hours my ground telegraph told me that human footsteps were coming
and I knew it was a question of only a little time until the savages
would overtake us.
When they were within arrow shot of us we each stood back of a tree on
either side of the trail and as a squad of them came up unsuspectingly
we blazed away at them with our revolvers and there were eight cannibal
carcasses ready for the buzzards to pick.
When we reached the _fezenda_ Bert came near to giving the buzzards
still more pickings, for he mistook my companion and myself, with our
long, unkempt hair and bare bodies, as brown as those of Indians, for a
precious pair of cannibals and he took a couple of pot-shots at us.
After we had taken our baths and put on some honest-to-goodness clothes
we had a long talk-fest. Señor Castro, he said, believed that I had been
devoured by jaguars, but he had somehow felt that I had been captured by
the cannibals. He had searched into the depths of the jungle for some
trace of me until he was taken down with the fever where he lay nigh
unto death for a month. When he got well he concluded he’d go north for
in the meantime Señor Castro had gotten another operator.
“I’m certainly an unlucky dog, Jack,” Bert bemoaned his fate; “I can’t
understand why I couldn’t have had even a look-in on that cannibal
business. Here I’ve been down with the fever while you’ve had as fine an
adventure as ever befell a man. Back to Broadway for mine where the only
cannibal princesses I shall ever see are those that trip the light
fantastic in the chorus.”
“Truly, I’m sorry, old man,” I consoled him, “but it wasn’t my fault
though it was your misfortune. You’ll get yours yet, so cheer up.”
A week later we were ready to sail down the Amazon to Para, there to
take ship for New York. Señor Castro paid us the full amount agreed upon
by the manager of the _Compagnie_ _Francaise de Telegraphie sans Fil_
and we had in all a total of about 4,000,000 _reis_ between us--in fact
we were, as we had anticipated, bloated millionaires. I had a satchel
full of bills of big denomination--there is neither gold nor silver
money down there.
When we got to Para, though, and we began to spend our money we were
astonished and disgusted to find that a meal cost about 6000 _reis_, the
street-car fare was 400 _reis_ and the postage on a letter home was 300
_reis_. In other words, 1,000,000 _reis_ was just about equivalent to
325 dollars in our money. Well, we were millionaires while we thought we
were anyhow.
What about the diamonds I have? I don’t know but if they are the real
thing I think I’ll organize a company, go down there with a machine gun,
wipe out the cannibals and open up a diamond field.