THE WANDER-YEARS
If this record were a story of romantic adventure, it might well start
from the moment Power set foot in the hotel which a relative of an
eminent French actress used to keep in Valparaiso. He had not been in
the city many hours before a brutal assault on a woman led him to
intervene. During the resultant scuffle he was robbed of his pocketbook,
and, in addition to a narrow escape from being knifed, he was informed
by a supercilious policeman that the whole affair, including the screams
of a female apparently in fear of her life, had been cleverly engineered
for the express purpose of relieving him of his money.
When settling his affairs at Bison he had arranged that the bulk of his
revenues should be lodged with his New York bankers, to whom letters and
communications of every sort were to be sent. To provide against the
unforeseen--a word of wide significance when applied to the vortex into
which he was plunging--it was understood that a cablegram in his name
would be acted on only if it bore the code-word "Bido," a simple
composite of the first syllables of Bison and Dolores, and, had it not
been for the lucky chance that the bulk of his available ready money,
some five thousand dollars, was safe in his room at the hotel, he might
have been compelled to reveal his whereabouts to the bank forthwith.
Then, a Chilean gentleman, impressed by the fact that Power was an
American, and therefore a millionaire, tried to extract gold from him by
the safer and really more effective method of selling him a guano
island. Singularly enough, this second thief's pertinacity opened up the
narrow and hazardous path for which Power was looking. The captain of a
small steamer engaged in the guano trade went out of his way to warn the
American that he was being exploited by a scoundrel. Such disinterested
honesty in a Chilean was attractive. Some talk followed, and, three days
after arriving in Valparaiso, Power quitted that lively city as a
passenger on board the _Carmen_, bound for islands in the south.
The friendly skipper had no inkling of his new acquaintance's
intentions. He thought that the señor was veritably a speculator in
guano, who, all the better-known deposits off the coast of Peru being
either taken up or exhausted, was bent on exploiting fresh fields in
Chile. This much is certain. Had Captain Malaspina realized that this
well-spoken and pleasant-mannered stranger meant to throw in his lot
with the savage race which infests the inhospitable islands and
rock-strewn channels of the wildest coast in the world, he would have
regarded him as a lunatic. He could never guess that his own
blood-curdling yarns of these outcasts added fuel to the fire of Power's
strange enthusiasm. He believed that the Indians were cannibals. He had
seen them living and eating in the interior of a putrid whale. He had
found a five-year-old boy lying on the rocks with his brains dashed
out, and was told that the child's father had shown his anger in that
way because the victim dropped some edible seaweed which the man had
been at some pains to gather. Mere words could not describe the brutes.
The worthy skipper always spat when he spoke of them.
His gruesome stories beguiled a slow voyage while the leaky boilers of
the _Carmen_, iron steamship, of five hundred tons, pushed her
sluggishly through the long rollers of the Pacific. Then a heavy
sou'westerly gale sprang up, and the _Carmen_ staggered for refuge into
the Corcovado Gulf, and thence plashed and wallowed through the
sheltered Moraleda Channel. To eke out her scanty stock of coal she put
into the estuary of the Aisen River, where Malaspina bargained with
Indians for a supply of wood.
Power saw his opportunity, and seized it eagerly. He asked to be put
ashore for a couple of days in order that he might study the natives at
close quarters. The friendly skipper was unwilling, arguing that a tribe
of monkeys would better repay investigation, but ultimately yielded to
pressure. There was really no great risk, he knew, because Chilean
gunboats had taught these coast Indians to leave white men alone; so
Power was landed, his total equipment being a small medicine chest, a
hut, a folding bed, some few stores, and a shotgun, with a hundred
cartridges, all told. He took more food than such a brief stay demanded;
but the necessity of placating the head men of the village supplied a
plausible excuse. A couple of silver dollars proved an irresistible
bribe to a Spanish-speaking Indian who promised to guide him into the
interior, and a letter to the amazed skipper of the _Carmen_ saved the
villagers from reprisals.
"I am sorry I was compelled to mislead you [he wrote]; but I mean
to explore the Andes at this point, and I prefer to set out on a
crazy project without undergoing the protests and dissuasion I
should certainly have met with from the kind friend you have
proved yourself. If all is well with you seven years from this
date, write to me, care of the National Bank, New York. I will
surely answer."
"Seven years!" shouted Malaspina, shaking a huge fist at the silent
hills. "Seven devils! He is mad, mad! There will be an inquiry by the
American consul, and I shall be accused of killing him. Holy Virgin!
What a fool I was to let him go alone!"
He was minded to flog an Indian or two, and thus extract information;
but calmer counsels prevailed. After all, he had a letter proving that
Power had left the ship voluntarily. At first he resolved to report the
astounding incident on returning to Valparaiso, and discussed the matter
volubly with José, second in command. José said, "No. Let sleeping dogs
lie. Those foreign consuls are plaguy fellows. They get many a poor man
hanged just to please their governments."
Malaspina had been well paid, of course; so he decided to hold his
tongue, keeping the letter, in case---- Thus was the trail lost. Power
was buried alive.
The guide led him twenty miles up the valley of the Aisen, and handed
him over to the members of another tribe, describing him as a harmless
moon-gazer. In a hovel lay an elderly Indian, shivering with fever.
Power dosed the quaking wretch with calomel and quinine, and performed
a miracle. Thenceforth his life was safe; as long as the few ounces of
quinine and calomel lasted, at any rate. He had landed in the Chile
region at the beginning of spring, and his nomad hosts moved nearer the
Andes when the weather improved, taking him with them. Their barbarous
tongue included a number of Spanish words, and by slow degrees he
learned their comparatively small but curiously inflected vocabulary.
Once he could make himself understood, the foundations of his mission
were laid securely. By sheer initiative, having no training in such arts
beyond the knowledge acquired by most intelligent men, he taught them
how to spin and weave the long hair of the Chilean goat. He established
some principles of communal law. He showed them how to use nitrate as a
fertilizer. He experimented with medicinal herbs when his own small
store of drugs had given out. He got them to build better huts, and
adopt some elementary principles of sanitation. Tillage and crops broke
down the migratory habit. Land was cleared, and drained or irrigated as
needed. For the first time in its history, the tribe lived in permanent
dwellings. In a word, Power established a state.
Within four years he had elevated these apemen and women to a standard
so far above that of their neighbors that his fame spread into unknown
fastnesses of the Cordillera. Among his adopted people he would have
been worshiped as a god if he had not sternly repressed any such
tendencies. But he could not stop the growth of his reputation as a
magician, and a well-planned raid by another tribe brought about the
slaughter of a section of the community and his own capture.
He was reduced now to the direst misery. His captors, some degrees
cruder and more bestial than the men he was governing, took him by
forced marches across a spur of the Andes, giving him food of such
revolting nature that he became deadly ill. At last they were compelled
to carry him, and, using such limited reasoning faculties as they
possessed, allowed him to save his life by cooking and eating portions
of animals freshly killed. Their object in making him a prisoner, he
gathered, was to divert his magic to their own district so that his
incantations might increase their herds. When he failed to accomplish
this laudable purpose offhand, they became violent, and threatened to
burn him alive. On the homeopathic principle, an abnormally dry and
scorching spring came to his rescue. Some species of noxious insect,
whose bite was fatal to horses and cattle, multiplied exceedingly, and
the tribe lost half their stock. A wily candidate for the chiefship
spread the notion that the white god had caused this misfortune, and
that the person who really ought to be burnt alive was the chief who
counseled the raid. This was duly done, and heavy rain fell that night,
effectually disposing of the insect pests.
The new chief, who would have been an acquisition to certain political
circles in more temperate climes, saw that, although he had scored
heavily, the dangerous wonder-worker might be associated with evils yet
to come; so, on his suggestion, Power was taken through the mountains by
a secret pass, and left on the eastern slopes of the range to fare as
best he might.
The Indians were afraid to gratify their instincts by murdering him
outright; but, seeing that he was absolutely unarmed, and without a
scrap of food in his possession, there was no misunderstanding the
malevolent grin with which their leader pointed out the path he must
follow. These very aborigines, despite their animal lore concerning
edible roots, and their readiness to dispute with vultures for a carrion
meal, knew that no man could traverse those leagues of foothills without
arms and a commissariat of some kind. No semblance of a track existed.
Power and his guards stood on a scree of loose stones and shale not far
below the snow line, and well above the first precipitous valley in
which even the hardiest pines reached a stunted growth. The steep
hillside was covered with the strange snow shapes known to Spanish South
America as penitentes, weird wraiths like sheeted ghosts, and more than
one broad track torn through these awesome sentinels showed where
avalanches of rocks and ice had thundered down from the heights that
very day.
Power looked out over the appalling vista of barren hills and
tree-choked ravines which lay in front. In the direction shown by the
Indian he saw a slight depression in an otherwise unbroken ring of
unscalable mountains, and it was reasonable to assume that the
milk-white glacier stream flowing through a canyon a thousand feet
beneath must find its way to the sea through that gap. It was so long
since he had glanced at a map of South America that he had only the
vaguest notion of his whereabouts. As a rough guess, beyond those
tremendous highlands lay the plains of Lower Argentina--the black,
wind-swept, semidesert pampas. At the lowest calculation, he was three
hundred and fifty miles from the Atlantic, and fifty of those miles
offered such difficulties to man's endeavor that well-equipped
expeditions had turned back time and again from attempts to find new
passes through the Andes in that region.
To try and reach the eastern coast meant almost certain death; but the
scowling faces of the Indians showed that the effort must be made,
unless he was prepared to fall under their weapons then and there. The
uncouth tongue he had acquired on the Trans-Andean slope was not of much
avail with his present custodians; but, when he asked the leader of the
party for a spear, he was understood.
By nothing less, in Power's view, than the direct intervention of
Providence, the man was minded to treat the matter as a joke, and handed
over his own spear, a nine-foot shaft of tough and limber hickory,
tipped with a flat blade of iron about eight inches in length and two in
width at its widest part. A stout shank was gripped by the split wood,
and strongly bound in its socket with a thong of hide. Singularly
enough, these savages had never searched their prisoner's pockets.
Probably, they were afraid to touch him, lest he laid some evil spell on
them; so he was able now to produce a silver dollar, which he gave with
a smile, indicating, at the same time, his willingness to purchase a
couple of strips of the dried meat carried by some members of the
escort.
This request was refused peremptorily, and a distinctly threatening
gesture warned Power that the parley was at an end. He turned resolutely
toward the rising sun, and began his lonely and affrighting Odyssey. He
admitted afterward that he knew what fear meant during the first few
strides across the broken ground, because he was suspicious lest the
Indians might have planned to spear him from behind. Indeed, some such
barbaric pleasantry may have occurred to them. A fierce clamor of talk
broke out suddenly; but a swirl of snow swept down from a neighboring
glacier, and even these hardy savages had no desire to be caught on that
dangerous scree in a snowstorm. So the hubbub died away as quickly as it
had arisen.
Fortunately, the snow did not fall so thickly as to be actually
blinding. The hapless fugitive could discern his bearings, and he moved
as speedily as possible to a point he had already fixed on as being out
of the track of avalanches. He reached this landmark, a hump of rock,
and perforce remained in its shelter till the weather cleared. During
this vigil he heard the dull roar and rumble of falling débris, and,
when the snow-shower ceased, he saw that two fresh lanes had been plowed
through the serried ranks of the penitentes. Of the Indians there was
neither sight nor sound.
It was then about noon on a spring day. He had not troubled to keep any
reckoning of the calendar; but he knew that the month was late October
or early November. So there still remained six or seven hours of
practicable daylight, and he resolved to push on boldly, and reach a
less perilous altitude before night fell.
He had two vital problems to solve. The first was the food difficulty;
the second, to find a road where road there was none. The awful
solitudes of the higher Andes and the dank forests which cumber the
lateral valleys are singularly devoid of animal and bird life. It is a
land of decay and death. The very hills disintegrate so rapidly that
rivers which flow into the Pacific in one century may empty themselves
into the Atlantic in the next. The constant falling away of precipices,
and the luxuriant growth of trees and brushwood amid a tangle of rotting
timber, render continuous advance by way of the ravines absolutely
impossible. Hence, his only chance of escape lay in keeping to the
highlands, trusting to luck and the lie of the land when an occasional
crossing of a canyon became necessary in order to avoid doubling on his
tracks and being driven back to the white wilderness of the inner chain.
Happily, he was better equipped than most men for an undertaking which
was almost comparable with the plight of an explorer lost in the Arctic.
Though enfeebled by his recent illness, and already in need of a meal,
four years of exposure to hardships which would have killed a weakling,
and daily living in the open in the worst of weather, had hardened his
frame and toughened his constitution to that degree of fortitude with
which Greek historians loved to invest Mithridates Eupator. Moreover, he
was suitably clothed in skins, and his feet were incased in moccasins.
Above all, his was an equable heart. Death had hovered near many a time
and oft during those wild wander-years. He had heard the very fluttering
of its sable pinions when he turned his back on the pitiless Indians;
but he was firmly resolved not to lose faith while he could stand square
on his feet. Time enough to lie down and die when movement was no
longer possible. Meanwhile, he would struggle on.
Progress, of course, was slow. Every yard of the way was difficult,
every second yard hazardous. As an alpenstock, the spear was invaluable.
But for its aid he would have slipped and fallen a dozen times on that
treacherous mountainside. After a couple of miles of fairly straight
going, he was faced by the need of crossing to another range. Choosing a
line which seemed practicable, he climbed down a broken rock face,
plunged into the medley of fallen logs which cumbered the nearer slope
of the intervening canyon, and ferried a torrent by the precarious
bridge of a rotting pine, the only one, among hundreds which had fallen,
long enough to reach the opposite bank, and so slender and brittle at
its apex that it crumbled beneath him just as he sprang to safety on a
rock slippery with spray.
The climb to the open again was exhausting work. Once he thought he was
done for when an apparently sound log snapped suddenly, and plunged him
into a dark and fearsome network of dead wood, so swathed in soft and
noisome fungus growths that he seemed to be unable to find sure hold for
either hand or foot. Somehow, he clambered into daylight again, and
found himself clinging to the roots of a tree which throve on the
tangled husks of its ancestors. It took him three hours to reach a
height of five hundred feet, at which point the treacherous forest belt
yielded to a firmer area covered by alpine moss.
Then, utterly worn out, and unequal to further effort that day, he was
thinking of gnawing some bulbs of resin which had exuded from the
bigger firs, when he caught sight of a small armadillo scuttling over
the rocks. It was the first living creature, save for an occasional
vulture, he had seen since leaving the snow-line. The discovery brought
a spurious energy, and he dashed off in pursuit. The armadillo, which
was far removed from its natural habitat--probably owing to the drought
in the lowlands--ran very rapidly, and was evidently making for a
burrow. Indeed, Power despaired of securing the creature when it headed
for a fissure in the ground. As a last resource, he hurled the spear at
it. The weapon turned in the air, fell vertically, and buried its broad
blade in the animal's neck, striking the only vulnerable part of its
body, since the whole remaining structure was covered with a strong,
bony case of flexible plates.
The chances against any such haphazard casting of a javelin proving
successful were simply incalculable; but Power took this piece of good
fortune as further proof that he was being befriended by Providence.
Leaving the armadillo where it had fallen, he searched the crevices in
which it was about to seek refuge, and obtained some handfuls of dry
moss. Then he gathered a bundle of the driest sticks he could find, and,
by using a flint and steel, which, in his case, had long ago superseded
all other means of lighting a fire, was soon enjoying a meal the like to
which no chef in Paris could have prepared that night. True, there were
but one course and one sauce; but the joint was eatable, with something
of a pork flavor, and the sauce was ravenous hunger. Only the other day
he told the most famous of contemporary head waiters that roast
armadillo was vastly superior to sucking pig, at which the eminent one
smiled, realizing that his patron was no gourmet.
Covering the remains of the feast with the creature's own armor, which,
as an extra precaution against vultures, he weighted down with stones,
Power arranged a bed of moss under an overhanging rock, and lay down to
sleep. A wild storm of wind and rain raged during the night; but he was
merely awaked for a minute or two by the unusual clamor, and slept
soundly again, despite the fury of the elements. At dawn he was astir,
and, after eating a few mouthfuls, tied the rest of the small joints to
the spear by their own sinews, and began his march again.
As the armadillo supplied the only food he secured, or could have
secured, during six days of a most arduous and nerve-racking advance
through a country which offered every sort of obstacle to the explorer,
it is not to be wondered at if Power came to believe that he would yet
emerge in safety from the perils confronting him. But his rate of
movement was exasperatingly slow. On one day of the six he only
succeeded in crossing one particularly troublesome ravine. On another,
after skirting a mountain slope which positively bristled with dangers,
he found himself on a receding angle, and was compelled to retrace his
steps; although, a dozen times already, he had been called on to
exercise every ounce of strength, every shred of resolution, in order to
cross appallingly difficult places which he must now tackle again.
Still, he kept on, and that gap in the hills grew ever wider and more
distinct. He was gnawing the last bone of the armadillo, and asking
himself how much longer it would be possible to maintain an unequal
struggle against the grim forces which sought to crush him, when he had
a stroke of luck. The Andes would be even more impregnable than they are
were it not for an unusual geological formation which provides broad and
often practicable rock ledges along the walls of the worst precipices.
Farther north, in Peru, and, to a less extent, in Chile, these roadways
of Nature's own contriving are much utilized by mountaineers and their
mules. When Power stumbled across one of them after getting out of a
specially steep and timber-clogged ravine, he really did believe that
his troubles were lessening. He fancied he could discern faint signs of
others having passed that way, and he jumped to the conclusion that
those most unfriendly Indians knew of this track, and could have piloted
him to it in a quarter of the time he had consumed. Obviously, it led in
the right direction. After climbing to a dizzy height, it dipped again
into the next valley, and, despite a hazardous crossing of a mountain
torrent, with complications caused by a recent landslide, he discerned
another similar ledge on the opposite hill, and valiantly made for it.
There could be no doubting now that he was entering a more open country.
The pass had broadened into a valley, and a flat blue smear on the
horizon told of earth and sky meeting beyond a plain. The sight spurred
him to a frenzy of hope and effort. He pressed on at far too rapid a
pace, and, when hunger gripped him once more, he strove to sate its
pangs by munching some dried berries, remnants of last year's autumn,
which he gathered from a deciduous tree. He fancied, judging by the
taste, that they were not poisonous; but, perhaps owing to his famished
condition, they seemed to induce a curious excitation of mind,
accompanied by dilated vision, which rendered colors entrancingly bright
and clear. In the valley opening out before the descending ledge he
imagined he could see patches of pink blossom which reminded him of the
apple orchards of Colorado. He laughed aloud at the fantasy;
nevertheless, he tore on in desperate haste to get into that attractive
zone, where, surely, there must be animal life, and, with it, the
prospect of a meal. Overjoyed, he sang as he went, rousing strange
echoes. He, who had dwelt among the heathen like another Xavier, poured
out his soul in the lilt and rhythm of "Marching Through Georgia"! That
stirring refrain had led many a gallant heart to the "crash of the
cannonade and the desperate strife"; but never, surely, has it been
heard amid such surroundings. Cliff spoke to cliff. Primeval nature was
stirred, and answered his voice in rude harmonies:
"Hurrah! Hurrah! We bring the jubilee!
Hurrah! Hurrah! The flag that makes you free!
So we sang the chorus from Atlanta to the sea,
While we were marching through Georgia."
With a rush of wings and frantic clamor of screams, a flock of upland
geese (_Chloëphaga magellanica_) rose from some hidden marsh beneath,
and fled in ordered phalanx to some distant sanctuary; whereupon Power
yelled that ecstatic "Hurrah!" anew. Here was life! Here was a world
that smiled and was not dumb! He must hurry, hurry, and enter into this
Paradise!
Yet it came to pass, as so often happens in the most commonplace phases
of man's life, that, at the very moment when the worst stage of the
journey was nearing its end, when he had accomplished the almost
impossible, when the leaping torrents of the hills were merging into a
stream which, if turbid and noisy, bore some semblance to a river, he
met with a disaster that brought death even nearer than it had come at
any other crisis of his extraordinary career.
The track, rough as it was, offered comparatively easy going. Now
winding round the inner curve of some huge fold in the hill, soon it
would swing boldly out across the face of a promontory of rock; while
passing one of these awesome precipices, which actually jutted out so
far beyond its own base that Power could not see the river, though he
could hear its mighty voice roaring among bowlders, he fell. That is to
say, the broad ledge sank away beneath his feet, and, after a vain
spring toward a section which still gripped the rocky wall, he fell with
it.
He uttered no cry, made no plaint to Heaven. His brain worked with
inconceivable rapidity, and he knew that he had been flung from a sheer
height of well over a hundred feet. Thus, unless he dropped into deep
water, and managed to retain his senses, either outcome of the accident
being wildly improbable, he must be crushed into a pulp when he came to
earth. He petitioned the Most High that, if this was death, it might be
instantaneous, that his soul might go out of its worn tabernacle in
merciful oblivion, that he might not be called on to lie, maimed and
inert, watching the gathering of vultures. Then some mighty hand seemed
to seize him in an irresistible grip, and he lost consciousness.
When his senses returned, he found himself staring blankly at a blue
sky, a sky that shone gloriously through a fairy lacework of branches of
trees laden with apple blossom; while a sweet and subtle scent was
pungent in his nostrils, and undoubtedly gave rise to the quaint notion
which instantly possessed him, that he was already dead, and translated
to a land of everlasting spring. Then he knew that he was still clothed
in skins, that his bones ached, that he was hungry and athirst; so this
could be neither death nor immortality. Suddenly, a savage face bent
over him, his head was lifted, and he was given some liquid. It tasted
like cider, and he drank copiously. Then his brain reeled; for he was in
no fit condition to withstand a draft of singular potency, and again the
mists came, and he lapsed into the void.
He did not recover full consciousness that day. The Indians, who had
heard and been amazed at his singing, saw him drop from the precipice,
and ran to its base, expecting to find a mangled corpse. But a tall and
slender pine had thrust its straight shaft into the stout skin coat he
wore, and had bent until it yielded to the strain, and broke. Thus, he
fell with enough force to knock the wits out of him; but the major
catastrophe was averted, and the Indians were awed by an incident which
no patriarch of the tribe had witnessed before, nor would ever see again
if he attained the age of Methuselah. The spear, which had left Power's
hand when he was in the air, had buried its eight inches of blade in a
fallen treetrunk, and had to be hewed out with an ax.
These things the white necromancer learned afterward. He found also that
his vision of apple blossom was no dream, but reality. Three centuries
ago Jesuit missionaries had crossed the Andes by that very pass. They
brought, as peace offerings to the Indians, some of the fruit-trees and
cereals of more favored climes; but they were murdered without parley.
Curiosity, perhaps, led the savages to plant the trees and seeds; the
apples alone, finding a congenial soil, throve marvelously. All that
region abounds in sweet, wild apples, from which the Indians concoct a
fermented liquor which they call _chi-chi_. Those same apples, and the
orgies of drunkenness to which they give rise, probably account for the
legend of a great city existing within the untrodden depths of the
Cordillera. But there is no city--no trace of civilization save the
apples, a kindly memento of the unfortunate Jesuits.
* * * * *
And now Power began his regenerative work anew.
Thanks to the phenomenal style of his coming among them, the savages
spared his life; but their possession of an almost unlimited stock of
_chi-chi_, and the truculent mood which strong drink induces, even in
Indians, led them, at first, to treat him as a Kokó-huinché, or "white
fool." Though their hunting-grounds were hundreds of miles from the
coast, and singularly remote from the influence of white settlers, they
were aflame with vague resentment against the invaders, and gladly made
one of the hated race the butt of their malevolent humor.
So Power, in self-defense, took to artifice. He discovered that they
possessed two kegs of gunpowder, but owned no guns. He learned, too,
that once there had been three kegs, but a careless experiment with one
had removed a chief and his family. With some difficulty, and only by
tickling their imagination by promising an exhibition of magic, he
obtained some of the powder, and, on a dark night, electrified the
community by a display of fireworks. Catharine wheels and Roman candles
achieved wonders among the foothills of the Andes. From that instant his
supremacy was established. A squib or two enforced edicts; a rocket set
a constitution squarely on its feet. In less than three years he had
become the Indians' trusted guide and teacher. The day came when the
store of powder was almost gone; yet he was strong enough to prohibit
the manufacture of that season's supply of _chi-chi_.
But there was one thing he could not do. He could not calm these wild
people's frenzy when a hunting party came in hot haste from the plains
and announced that a cavalcade of white men was forcing a passage along
the river, being evidently bent on penetrating the valley of the
apple-trees.
Power was asked to repel this invasion by black art; failing which, the
Araucanians decided to massacre the explorers in a neighboring canyon.
He had not the least doubt as to the success of the scheme. He knew the
natural difficulties of the place. The upper end could be barricaded,
the lower blocked by spearmen hidden in the dense vegetation, and every
intruder caught in the trap would be battered to death by boulders
flung from the crests of opposing precipices.
Very reluctantly the Indians allowed him to act as their ambassador. By
sheer force of will he bore down opposition, and was taken to a point
whence the smoke of campfires was visible above the trees. It was hard
to say whether the faith his friends placed in him was stronger than
their fear and loathing of the white strangers; but he exacted a promise
that, if he persuaded the members of the expedition to retreat, they
would not be molested. Oddly enough, neither he nor the Indians gave a
thought to any other possible development. These savages believed that
the white god who had dropped upon them from the skies would never leave
them, and Power himself had almost forgotten the existence of the outer
world. Most certainly, he paid no heed to the fact that his seven years
of expiation were nearly sped. He was happy among these simple people.
In his way, he was a king, and the habit of ruling had become second
nature.
By chance, that day he carried the spear which had been his faithful
ally in crossing the Andes, and a weird and barbarous figure he must
have presented when he walked into an almost unguarded camp which had
been set up for a few hours on the right bank of the river. Clothed in
skins, his face bronzed to a deep brown by constant exposure to the
elements, his hair falling over his shoulders, and a long beard sweeping
to his breast, he looked a veritable wild man of the woods.
A halfbreed peon who was the first to see him whipped out a revolver,
and shouted a warning; but Power held his spear crosswise above his
head, showing, by this Indian sign, that he came in peace, and he was
permitted to approach.
"Where is your leader?" he asked in Spanish.
The peon seemed to be vastly astonished; but he turned to a tall, thin,
elderly man who had dived out of a tent at his cry, and now strode
forward.
"Where have you come from?" he said; but his speech betrayed him, and
Power added to the sensation he had already caused by saying:
"You are no Spaniard, at any rate."
"Good Lord!" cried the other. "It's an Englishman!"
"Next thing to it, an American," said Power.
"What is your name, and how do you happen to be in this outlandish
place?" was the bewildered demand.
"I am here to explain all that, and more. Are you the head of this
expedition?"
"Yes."
"Well, what about discussing matters in that tent of yours?"
"Come right along," said the stranger, leading the way.