CHAPTER XXLIFE IN THE BOLIVIAN WILDERNESS

Santa Cruz de la Sierra, capital of all the vast department of eastern Bolivia, owes its fame largely to its isolation. Like those eminent men of many secluded corners of South America, it is important only because of the exceeding unimportance of its neighbors. The only tropical city of Bolivia, it stands some 1500 feet above sea-level on the 18th meridian, very near the geographical center of the republic, so far from the outside world that mail deposited on January 7th reached New York on March 11th. Of its 19,000 inhabitants, 11,000 are female. The emporium and distributing point of all this region and of the rubber districts of the Beni, its commerce is chiefly in the hands of Germans, though the two houses that all but monopolize the trade pose as Belgian, with headquarters in Antwerp. There are few Bolivian, and only threecruceñohouses of importance, and these for the most part buy of German wholesalers in Cochabamba. Three or four native families have as much as $150,000, a fortune bycruceñostandards, won from rubber, or from cattle ranches roundabout the city. Yet there is much primitive barter, even in the town,—an ox for a load of fire-wood, and the like, with no money concerned in the transaction. Santa Cruz is the place of birth of those famous Suarez brothers who are kings of the rubber districts of the Amazon.

It is a city of silence. Spreading over a dead-flat, half-sandy, jungled plain, its right-angled streets are deep in reddish sand in which not only its shod feet—by no means in the majority, though the upper class is almost foppish in dress—but even the solid wooden wheels of its clumsy ox-carts make not a sound. There is no modern industry to lend its strident voice, though the town boasts three “steam establishments” for the making of ice, the grinding of maize, and the sawing of lumber, and every street fades away at either end into the whispering jungle. Narrow sidewalks of porous red bricks, roofed by the wide overhanging eaves of the houses, often upheld by pillars or poles, line most of the streets. But these are by no means continuous,and being commonly high above the street level and often taken up entirely, especially of an evening, by the families, who consider this their veranda rather than the pedestrian’s right of way, the latter generally finds it easier to plod through the sand of the street itself. In the rainy season, which begins with the new year and lasts through April, there are many muddy pools and ponds in the outskirts, along the edges of some of which the streets crawl by on long heaps of the skulls of cattle, bleached snow-white by the sun, and the larger of which, almost lakes, somehow carried the mind back to Kandy, Ceylon. Frequently the streets in the center of town are flooded for an hour or more, until the thirsty sand has drunk up a tropical deluge. For these eventualities Santa Cruz has a system of its own. At each corner four rows ofatoquines, weather-blackened piles of a kind of mahogany, protrude a foot or more above the sand; and along these stepping-stones the minority passes dry-shod from one roofed sidewalk to another.

The houses, usually of a single story, their tile roofs bleached yellowish by the tropical sun, present a large room, wide open by day on the porch sidewalk, and rather bare in appearance in spite of a forest of frail cane chairs, black in color. From the once whitewashed adobe walls protrude several pairs of hooks on each of which hangs, except during the hour of siesta, a rolled-up hammock. On or near the floor sits a little hand sewing-machine, the exotic whirr of which sounds now and then; and just inside the door are usually a few shallow tubs, like small dugout canoes, holding tropical fruits, soggy bread cakes, and sugar in all its stages; for many, even of the “best families,” patch out their livelihood with a bit of amateur shopkeeping. Through this main room, parlor, and chief pride of each family, past which one cannot walk without glancing in upon the household, a back door gives a glimpse of the patio, a pretty garden hidden away after the Moorish fashion—strange that the Arab influence should have reached even this far-distant heart of South America—airy and bright and large, for space is not lacking in Santa Cruz, often almost an orchard and blooming with flowers of many colors. On this open several smaller rooms which, being out of sight of the public, are often far less attractive than the parlor.

A street of Santa Cruz de la Sierra after a shower, showing theatoquines, or projecting spiles by which pedestrians cross from one roofed sidewalk to another

Conscripts of the Bolivian army practicing their first manoeuvers in the central plaza of Santa Cruz. All who have reached the age of nineteen during the past year are obliged to report at the capital of their province on New Year’s Day

In the outside world the climate of Santa Cruz is reputed obnoxious to whites; about its name hover those legends, common also to India, of Europeans being worn to fever-yellow wrecks. As a matter of fact, the temperature does not rise higher than in southern Canadain July, and a cool breeze sweeps almost continually across the pampas about it. Mosquitos are rare, fever all but unknown. It is not loss of health, but his energetic view of life which the Caucasian immigrant risks. Especially during this hottest season of January the heat was humid and heavy, and I found myself falling quickly into the local mood of contentment just to lie in a hammock and let the world drift on without me. It took an unusual length of time to make up my mind to do anything, and then required more will-power than usual to force myself to get up and do it, particularly to keep on doing it until it was finished. But it is perhaps as largely due to environment as to the climate that Santa Cruz is visibly lazy. The region roundabout is so fertile that almost every staple except wheat and potatoes grow, and the slightest exertion earns sustenance. There are sugar plantations and sugar- and alcohol-producing establishments scattered here and there; the province of Sara to the north supplies food not only to the city but to the rubber districts as far away as the Acre; coffee, rice, and tobacco can be produced in abundance; hides already constitute an important export; the region to the west is reputed rich in oil. Yet Santa Cruz makes small use of her possibilities, languidly waiting for the arrival of a railroad and the influx of foreign capital to develop them.

The rumors that seep up out of Santa Cruz of her beautiful pure-white types are largely of artificial propagation. It is true that she has a larger percentage of Spanish blood than any other city of Bolivia, but this is rarely found in its unadulterated form. Some negro and considerable Indian ancestry has left its mark, and while there is not a full-blooded African, or perhaps a full Indian, in town, and Spanish is the universal, if slovenly, tongue, genuine white natives are few in number. As to the beautiful girls and women of popular fancy, they do exist, but certainly in no larger proportion than pearls in oysters. The overwhelming majority are coarse-featured, with heavy noses and sensual lips, crumbling teeth that hint at degeneration, and little attractiveness beyond the quick-fading physical one of youth.

Some cynic has said that a wall set about Santa Cruz de la Sierra would enclose the largest house of ill-fame on earth. So broad a statement is unkind. Yet not merely are the majority ofcruceñosborn out of wedlock—that much can be said of all Bolivia—but those who are accustomed to investigate such matters agree that the seeker after feminine favors in Santa Cruz need never leave the block in which he chances to find himself. Plain-spoken foreign residentsput it baldly that virginity never survives the twelfth year, but this is no doubt an exaggeration. The causes of this lack of social tautness are several. The overstock of one sex, due largely to the migration of the young men to the rubber forests of the Beni, often never to return; a widespread poverty and the lack of any independent means of livelihood for women; and a tropical apathy, even of character, are perhaps the chief. Then, too, there is a marked absence of good example. The higher officials and more wealthy men have, with rare exceptions, at least one irregular household; not a few have only irregular ones. The story is current of one of the chief political powers of the department who decided to visit his daughter at school in Germany. Forewarned, that startled young lady hastened to write: “If you and mama are coming to Germany, you must get married first.” The father yielded good-naturedly to this quaint whim of a favorite daughter, and during the weeks before his departure, spread the story far and wide as one of his best after-dinner witticisms. The native priests almost invariably have concubines. Some, using the transparent subterfuge common to all Latin-America, refer to their families as “housekeeper” and “nephews.” Not a few frankly speak of “the mother of my children.” With rare exceptions this runs to the plural. Among the masses, naturally, these conditions are not improved upon. Marriage, troublesome, expensive, and conspicuous, hardly bringing even the advantage of neighborly approbation, is apt to be looked upon as a nuisance; and it is always hard to go to useless trouble in the tropics. The nineteen-year-old son of an American resident was pointed out by both sexes as a curiosity, because he was still without natural children. The laws of Bolivia recognize three classes of offspring,—legitimate, natural, and unnatural. The second are inalienable heirs to one fifth the father’s property. The third division comprises those born out of wedlock to parents who could not marry if they wished,—that is, one or both of whom is already married, or has taken the priestly vows of celibacy. The town has little notion of the viewpoint of the rest of the world on this subject. Like an island far out at sea, all but cut off from the rest of mankind, it has developed customs—or a lack of them—of its own, its individual point of view; and, like all isolated groups, it is sure of its own importance in exact ratio to the lack of outside influence; so that barefootedcruceñosare firmly convinced that their ways are vastly superior to those of the rest of the world, which they judge by the few sorry specimens thereof who drift in upon them bedraggled by weekson wilderness trails. The term “Colla,” used to designate the people of the Bolivian highlands, and passed on by the masses to the world at large, is here a word of deprecation.

With few exceptions the foreign residents soon fall into this easy, tropical way of life. The two “Belgian” firms bring in scores of young German employees trained in the European main house; and there are normally some 250 Teutonic residents. The percentage of these is low who are not established within a month of their arrival in any part of the region with their own “housekeepers.” The recruit is shown the expediency of this arrangement by both the precept and the example of his fellow-countrymen. Celibacy is alleged to be doubly baneful in the tropics; there are no hotels or restaurants worthy the name; the pleasure of forming a part of the best native family would soon wear threadbare, even if the Moorish seclusion of these did not make admittance impossible. To live with even a modicum of comfort in these wilds the white man must have a home of his own. The frail walls thereof are slight protection against theft. Unless he will reduce his possessions to what he can carry to and from his stool or counter each day, a “housekeeper” is imperative. Though a neighbor might be induced to provide meals and such housekeeping as she has time for, thecruceñabrings her personal interest to bear only on those things of which she is genuinely, if temporarily, a part. To her, wages are neither customary nor attractive; the reward for her labors must be a temporarily permanent home. Hence the “servant problem” is most easily solved by adopting the servant. Whatever principles contrary to this mode of life the youthful Teuton brings with him from his native land, they quickly melt away under the tropical sun, and there is commonly little resistance to the new environment.

Let it not be understood that there is unusual betrayal or persecution of innocent womanhood in Santa Cruz. Rather the contrary is true. It is the man who runs the most constant gauntlet of temptation. The arrival of a new clerk is sure to cause a crowding of young women about the door of the establishment, and to swamp it with pretended purchasers. Report has it that a daughter of almost the “best families” may be won by the employee who will remain a few years and buy her a house or leave her a small income at his departure. With the poorer classes the usual procedure is to open negotiations with the girl’s family, to give her mother a present, or win her consent through her taste for strong drink. In the wilder regions of theinterior the gift of a rifle, or something equally coveted, to the father is usually sufficient. Daughters are easily acquired, but rifles are scarce. Coming under short contract, the recruit, grown to a darker-skinned bookkeeper or sub-manager, goes his way, or is transferred, and leaves behind whatever family may have befallen him, frequently recommending his “widow” to a newly arrived compatriot. Though there is said to be less taking of “housekeepers” than formerly, in a given group of thirty Germans, twenty had female companions, six had German wives, and four, legalcruceñawives. At the time of my stay in Santa Cruz, 49 native women were calling monthly upon the cashier of a single commercial house for the pension granted them for the rearing of their from one to six half-German children; and these were the abandoned mates only of such as were still employees of the firm elsewhere, or of the rare few who had themselves left some stipend for their offspring. The point of view of the Teuton on this subject is that he is no worse, but merely more free from “hypocrisy” than the Anglo-Saxon. Even the German women accept the condition with little protest, often joining in the celebration at the baptism of the illegitimate infant of a compatriot. In an isolated corner of the department I found a well-educated, likable German keeping house with a jet-black negro girl; and not only was his wife in Germany aware of the arrangement, and amused by his letters concerning his companion, but advised him to keep her as long as he remained in Bolivia, that he might have “some one to look after him and keep him in health.”

Were the results of these attachments an improved human stock, there might be less to condemn. For in its present stage of progress, tropical Bolivia is more amenable to economic than to “moral” improvement; and the country is sorely in need of population. But the foreign blood injected intocruceñoarteries is as nothing against the environment. The sons of Europeans may be an improvement upon the natives, at least in those rare cases where the father has remained to add the vigor of his training; but the succeeding generation is only too apt to degenerate quickly into the most native of natives. The assertion of scientists that new blood must constantly be brought to the tropics if these regions are to progress, is plainly demonstrated in Santa Cruz. Throughout the department may be seen to-day in the flesh those conditions which, centuries ago, followed the coming of the Conquistadores without their own women or the Puritan’spoint of view, which have made Latin-America from end to end the abode of a chiefly mongrel race.

Attempted improvement of the status quo meets with as little approval as in all other centers of the universe. The American directress of the government girls’ school found herself balked at the outset in the simplest matters. Her edict that pupils must not come to school without some other nether garment than the customary skirt was bitterly opposed both by mothers and by her assistants, on the ground that “it is so hot in Santa Cruz.” Cruceños blame the heat for most of their shortcomings, as the gringo miners of the Andes sweepingly “lay it to the altitude.” In the school in question there were 300 girls of the “best families” of Santa Cruz. One in every four of them was of legitimate birth. The teachers were in many cases decrepit grand-dames, yet no one with a relative or a friend in the government offices could be removed, because these saw to it that no report against their protegees ever reached higher officials. In the faculty meetings it was impossible to criticize a pupil, whatever her delinquency, for she was sure to have at least one relative among the teachers to precipitate an uproar.

On New Year’s Day I had taken up my abode with the only permanent American resident of Santa Cruz. “Juan” S. Bowles, born in Ohio—a cavalry troop of which state he had commanded from Atlanta to the sea—had come to Brazil nine years after the war and ascended to Santa Cruz by way of the Amazon, in the years when 80 days of hard labor were required to cover the 280 miles now served by the Madeira-Mamoré railroad. He had never since seen his native land. His ice-plant was for many years the only producer of that exotic commodity in tropical Bolivia, where, in the early days, it ranked as a luxury at 25 cents a pound. Under his unwilted American energy and indifference to local caste rules the plant still produced its daily quota, if at something less than that regal reward. On his back veranda stood a leather bed—an ox-hide stretched on a wooden frame on legs—just the place to spend acruceñonight, and his stories of “Johnny Rebs” alone made the week I spent there well worth while.

Sometimes, though with difficulty, his reminiscences could be staged in Bolivia. After Santa Cruz had drunk and died of swamp water savored with dead cats for some three centuries, this energetic new resident imported machinery and drove an artesian well, coming upon excellent water some fifty feet below the surface. This he offeredfor sale, putting out of business the friars who, watching the barometer, successfully prayed to the Virgin for rain. The first woman to arrive with hercántaroon her head asked the son in charge if he were not “ashamed to sell the water God gave.”

“But he didn’t give the pump or drive the well,” retorted the boy; “There is plenty of God’s free water over there in the swamp.”

To-day the former captain of cavalry has ten wells to his credit and is trying to get the municipality to let him install an “aeromotor.”

For all his long residence, the Ohioan had by no means reconciled life to thecruceñopoint of view. His criticisms on this subject were biting. Though the town swarmed with “educated” loafers, well-dressed according to their ideals, it was all but impossible to get native assistants. The youths, egged on by their mothers, flocked to the already overcrowded white-fingered professions, rather than become mechanics or learn to run an engine, two occupations sadly needed in Santa Cruz. As the old man put it, “They won’t come here and learn a good, useful trade, with pay while learning; yet if you throw a stone at a dog anywhere in town and miss him, you are sure to hit a priest, a lawyer, or a doctor—with nothing to do.” The boys he could hire, of the most poverty-stricken families, would not work where anyone could see them. Agapito would tote bricks within the patio without a protest, but he would take his discharge rather than carry a parcel to or from the post-office. The mothers would rather have their daughters earn their living in the local feminine way than have their sons descend to manual labor. A “caballero,” wearing shoes, without socks, requiring his gun repaired to go hunting, could not get it to the shop until he could find an Indian to carry it there.

Bowles was an interesting example of the transplanted American. A man of education and of shrewd native wit, he had developed here in the wilderness a quaint, isolated philosophy of his own, and was one of those rare white men who have spent many years unbrokenly in such an environment and climate without “going to seed.” Not merely was he a wide and reflective reader on all subjects from the scientific to the curious, but still, at seventy-five, produced in the interstices of his labors as chief mechanic of the region authoritative articles for the Buenos Aires, London, and American periodicals. How great a feat this is only those can understand who know the enervating effect on both mind and body of long tropical residence. His staunch individualism and independence of the verdict of the worldwas little short of startling to those of us who live more nearly in it. Set away in the fastnesses of the earth, with only his own mind to feed upon, instead of having his opinions delivered at his door each morning by the newsboy, he had developed a thinking-machine of his own that grasped firmly whatever it took hold of, and a hard, unsentimental common sense fitted to his environment. His speech carried one back to the Civil War, and his vocabulary had quaint, amusing touches; for the words he had added to it since his migration had been chiefly from books, with rare and brief intercourse with English-speaking persons. Thus his pronunciation of many terms unknown to the world in the seventies had been evolved from his own mind amid his Spanish-tongued environment. He spoke of “alumeénum,” and called the recently discovered cause of all earthly ills “Mee-crów-bays.” Words like “poligamic,” rarely heard from any but scientific mouths, appeared in the same sentence with “ketched,” the past participle of Civil War days. Edison’s noisy invention he called “pho-nó-graph,” but the word “leisurely” he pronounced correctly, not a common American feat.

This New Year’s Day was notable to Bowles for another reason. His youngest son and last effective assistant made his first appearance in the uniform of a Bolivian soldier, and moved from home to the cuartel. Conscription is theoretically universal in Bolivia. On the first day of each year every youth within the republic who has reached his nineteenth birthday must report at the capital of his department, ready for service. Those that are not physically unfit, or have not sufficient influence, are given three months training, after which they draw lots to serve two years at 40 centavos a day. During my time there the plaza of Santa Cruz was overrun with lank country boys and sallow city youths, in most cases still in their civilian garb of baggy, road-worn linen or near-Parisiangente decenteattire, awkwardly practicing the right and left face under the commands of youthful officers. By Bolivian law a child born in Bolivia is a Bolivian, whatever the nationality of the father. The Civil War veteran, who had strictly kept his American citizenship, though married to a Bolivian wife, had appealed in vain to the American minister in La Paz. Prospective immigrants to this, as to several other South American countries, should not overlook this point in the future of their children. As Bowles expressed it, “Fifteen hundred bolivianos for every son born in the country is too much tax to pay for the privilege of living in it.” When the time came for choosing by lot the recruits neededto make up the peace quota of the Bolivian army, Teutonic in its discipline and formation, this useful son of an American “drew unlucky” and was obliged to serve two years, though fate had left behind in Santa Cruz many a worthless native loafer.

But the then most widely-known gringo sojourner in Santa Cruz was an Englishman who chose to call himself “Jack Thompson.” His habitat was the departmental prison. His story was well-fitted to the “Penny Dreadful” or the cinema screen. Some years ago “Thompson” and a fellow-countryman had drifted out of the interior of Brazil into Corumbá, and offered to sell their rights to a rubber forest they had discovered. The Teutonic house that showed interest asked them to await a decision, and meanwhile offered them employment in the escort of a party of German employees, peons, and muleteers carrying £7000 in gold to a branch of the establishment in the interior of Bolivia. On the trail a German of the escort drew the Englishmen into a plot to hold up the party. A week or more inland, at a rivulet called Ypias, the trio suddenly fell upon their companions and killed three Germans, a Frenchman, a Bolivian muleteer, and the chola “housekeeper” of the chief of the expedition. The rest scattered into the jungle; except one old Indian arriero who, unable to run, managed to crawl up into the branches of a nearby tree. There he witnessed the second act of the melodrama. For a time the trio remained in peace and concord, washed, drank, and concocted a meal over jungle brush. But soon the question of the division of the gold became a dispute. The German asserted that, as author of the plan, he should take half. The Englishmen insisted on an equal division. The dispute became a quarrel. At length, late in the afternoon, when the unknown observer was ready to drop to the ground and a quick death, from exhaustion, fear, and thirst, the Englishmen fell upon their confederate with a revolver, two rifles, and a sabre. Even a German must succumb under such odds. Leaving the body where it fell, the pair divided the gold, and each swinging a pair of saddlebags over a shoulder, struck off into the trackless jungle, for some reason fancying this a surer escape than to mount mules and dash for safety in Brazil.

Manuel Abasto, a native of Santa Cruz de la Sierra

Through the open doors of Santa Cruz one often catches a glimpse of the patio, a garden gay with flowers

Meanwhile some of the refugees had reached nearby settlements. Several search parties were made up and, having buried what the vultures had left, took up the scent. The natives of these jungle regions are not easily eluded in their own element. For four days the Britons struggled through the tropical wilderness, half-dead fromthirst—for it was September, at the end of the dry season—and soon reduced to a few native berries as food. The gold became too heavy for their waning forces. They managed to climb to the summit of a jungle bluff and bury most of it. On the fifth day a search party came upon them resting in a shaded thicket. A volley killed his companion and slightly wounded “Thompson.” Leaving the corpse for the vultures, the pursuers tracked the wounded man all night and next morning caught him at bay. Having pointed out the hiding-place of the gold, he was set backward astride a mule with his hands tied behind him and, amid such persecution as the savage, half-Indian Bolivian can invent, was escorted to San José, and later driven through the jungle and lodged in the departmental prison.

All this had occurred three years before. Twice “Thompson,” who was a Mason, as are some of the officials of Bolivia, “escaped.” The first time he was found drunk in the plaza before his evasion was known; the second, he walked the 160 leagues to Yacuiva through the jungle without once touching the trail, only to celebrate too early what he fancied, for lack of geographical knowledge, was his escape into the Argentine, and be forced to walk all the way back. Finally, after more than a year in prison, he had been tried—on paper, as in all Spanish-America—and within another twelve-month had coaxed the judge to deliver his verdict and sentence him—to be shot. The supreme court and the president had still to pass upon the matter, and another year had drifted by.

Of late years it is not easy to gain admittance to the prison of Santa Cruz. About its doors swarm ragged sentinels who scream frantically “Cabo de Guardia!” (“Corporal of the Guard”), and swing their aged muskets menacingly whenever a stranger pauses to speak to them. But a note from the prefect brought me the attention of the haughty superiors of the “Policía de Seguridad,” who saw fit to permit me to wade across the first patio of the prison. There an insolent half-negro in the remnants of a faded khaki uniform felt me carefully over for firearms, and at length deigned to open a wooden-barred door. Beyond another mud-floored anteroom and through another wooden gate, I found myself in a bare patio some forty feet square, with a deep open well and signs that the entire yard became a pond whenever it rained. This was surrounded on all sides by an ancient low building of adobe, under the projecting eaves of which, on the ground or in hammocks, and inside squalid cell-like rooms, loafed a score or more of men and several women of all known humancomplexions and degrees of undress. A single boy soldier of simian brow, with a disproportionately heavy loaded rifle on his shoulder, paraded in the shade of the eaves. He looked, indeed, like one to whose ingrown intelligence could safely be trusted matters of life and death!

My errand made known, several of the prisoners, without rising, began to shout, “Don Arturo!” By and by a voice came back, “’Stá bañandose!” I crossed to one of the cells, a small room filled with sundry junk, chiefly the tools of a mechanic, of which the wooden-barred door stood ajar. Inside, on a piece of board laid on the earth floor, stood “Thompson,” in the costume of Adam, pouring a bucket of water over his head. I explained that I was drifting through Bolivia and fancied he might be glad to hear his native tongue again. He was, having had only two such visitors during the year just ended. Wrapping a towel about his loins, he stood and chatted, while an anemic half-negro in what had once been khaki leaned against the door-post watching our every movement, and several other prisoners crowded round in the customary ill-bred South American fashion.

“Thompson” was an unattractive man in middle life, rather thin, with the accent and bad teeth of the Englishman of the mechanic class, and the uninspired and rather hopeless philosophy of life common to that caste. Otherwise his attitude was in no way different from what it would have been had we been a pair of tramps met on the road. He smiled frequently as he talked, and was neither more sad nor more cynical than the average of his class. He made no secret of his part in what he referred to as “our stunt,” and gave me detailed information on how to find the graves along the trail “where we pulled it off,” in case I should continue to the eastward. He plainly regretted the crime, but only because he had been caught. Knowing he had already published a doctored account of the occurrence in an English monthly and had found the remuneration exceedingly useful in eking out his existence in a Bolivian prison, I suggested the writing of the whole story.

“Aye, but they ’re not going to give me time,” he answered, rolling and lighting a cigarette. “I just got word from Sucre that they have confirmed the sentence. Now as soon as the president signs it, they’ll call me out and ...”

“Oh, I don’t believe Montes would do that to a gringo,” I remarked encouragingly. “He is a Mason, too—”

“Well, I don’t care a rap whether they do or not,” he replied, withconsiderable heat, “I’m perfectly willing they do it and have it over with. Even if he commutes the sentence, it means ten years more of this”—he pointed to the slovenly yard and dirtier inmates—“and it’s quite as bad as the other; I don’t know but worse.”

When he had dressed and stepped outside to pose for a photograph, he presented rather a “natty” appearance, though his low-caste face could not be disguised. Together we wandered through the prison. “Thompson,” in his striving to be “simpático” amid his surroundings, had become quite a “caballero” in his manner, and spoke Spanish unusually well for one of his class and nationality. The prisoners found it as necessary to earn their own living inside the prison as outside, for though the government theoretically furnishes food, it would not have kept the smallest inmate alive for a week. “Thompson” asserted that he had not touched prison fare since his incarceration. His “cell” was fitted up as a workshop, with a bench, a small vise, and such tools of a mechanic as he had been able to collect, and he earned a meager fare and other necessities by mending watches and at the various tinkering jobs that reached him from outside. Shoe-making was the favorite occupation of his fellow-jailbirds. More than a dozen had their open “cells” scattered with odds and ends of leather and half-finished footwear. Formerly, the public had passed freely in and out of the prison, and prisoners, underbidding free labor, since their lodging was already supplied them, had always earned enough to satisfy their appetites. Now, the rules had become somewhat more strict, at least to outsiders, and with less opportunity to sell their wares more than one inmate suffered from hunger.

We passed into one of the two large common rooms, foul-smelling mud dens in which “Thompson” had seen as many as 37 persons of both sexes and all degrees of crime, age, and condition sometimeslocked infor an entire month by some whim ofcarceleroor judge. The room being completely innocent of any convenience whatever, the conditions of prisoners and prison when the door might finally be unlocked needs no description. Just now the room was open, and there were but 26 inmates, men and women mixed indiscriminately, for there were no rules, even at night, as to the sleeping-places of the two sexes. The female prisoners, in fact, earned their food as do so many cruceñas outside, from such of the male inmates and soldier guards as could reward their favors, and had advanced to a point where even privacy was no longer requisite. Even then several slovenly couples reclined together on the uneven floor in half-amorousattitudes, and on a species of crippled bed in a corner sat an evil-eyed fellow of some negro blood, on the floor at whose feet, her uncurried head resting affectionately between his legs, squatted a native woman in the early thirties, who might years before have been almost beautiful. She had killed the “Turk” with whom she had been living, and was for a time under sentence to be shot. The president, however, after making her two accomplices draw lots for fifteen years’ imprisonment and execution respectively—by Bolivian law two persons cannot be executed for the same crime—the supreme penalty falling upon a Chilian, had commuted her sentence to ten years. Outside the prison the rumor was prevalent that her lenient treatment arose from the fact that she had borne a son to the prosecuting attorney.

During my stroll my companion ceremoniously introduced me to several of the six “gringo” prisoners. One was a German-Peruvian, eight months before the manager of a local bank, and since then in prison, still untried, on the charge of disposing of bad drafts. When a powerful company does not feel it has sufficient evidence to convict a man whose arrest it has caused, it is the Bolivian custom to see that the judge does not bring the case to trial. Nearly every government official semi-openly having his price, the prisons are apt to hold chiefly those who have underbid in the contest for “justice.” “Thompson” asserted—and he was corroborated by many outside thecárcel—that for some £200 he could make his escape. The savage half-Indian conscripts serving as carceleros vented their hatred of the gringos at every opportunity, and made their lives constantly miserable by watching for the slightest breaking of the rules to give them an excuse to shoot. In former times, when rubber was high in price, theIntendente de la Policíafrequently sold prisoners to the “rubber kings” of the Beni at 1000 bolivianos a head, and it was a rare victim of this system who did not end his days as a virtual slave in the Amazonian forests.

As we shook hands at the gate of the inner patio, “Thompson” remarked:

“If Montes signs it, I’ll have forty-eight hours left with nothing to do and I’ll write you something. I believe the thoughts of a man waiting to be shot”—it was the only time he used that word during the interview—“would make interesting reading. The ending would be all right if these Indians could make a good job of it, but they’ll end by bashing in my head with the butts of their muskets, as they have all the others.”

If I have inadvertently given the impression that there are no stern laws and rules of personal conduct in Santa Cruz de la Sierra let me hasten to disavow it as quickly as I was disabused in the matter myself; for it was here that I tarnished my hitherto spotless record for non-arrest in South America. I had come to give “Thompson” a bundle of American weeklies and was leaving the prison again, when a German who had ridden in from Cochabamba asked me to serve as interpreter while he procured a gun license. As we stepped into the comandancia, an anemic, yellow-skinned half-Indian youth in uniform shouted in the most insolent tone at his command, “Take off your hats!” The German quickly snatched his close-cropped bullet head bare, but the tone aroused my antagonism in spite of myself; moreover, a dozen unwashed natives lounged about the miserable mud hall with their hats on. To obey the orders of this class of Latin-American officials requires a certain degree of humility, of which, thank God, I have not a trace. At the second command I retorted, “What for?”

“In respect for the Bolivian government!” shrieked the evil-eyed, ill-smelling official behind the main desk.

“But I have no respect whatever for the Bolivian government,” I protested, warding off with an elbow the boy soldier who was attempting to snatch the hat from my head; and I stepped out into the street. There I was legally immune. There is no law requiring one to uncover in the streets, even in straight-laced Santa Cruz. But the legal aspect of a case is easily overlooked in Bolivia. The official screamed, “Cabo de la Guardia!”, and there poured out upon me five boy soldiers with loaded muskets, who, clutching at me like cats, began pushing me back into the prison. I had been long enough a policeman myself to know the folly of resisting arrest, however unjustified; moreover, there was an entire regiment of these little brown fellows in town, most of whom would be only too happy to give vent to their dislike of gringos.

Once I had entered an empty mud room on the first patio, the door was quickly bolted behind me and I stood looking out through the wooden-barred window upon the mud-hole yard, back and forth across which marched the jeering little soldiers and several loungers, grinning at me nastily behind their blackened stumps of teeth. I was in great danger—that I should be late for the dinner to which I had been invited at eleven. For though my arrest was not legal, those responsible for it had the very simple old Latin-American expedientof holding me “incomunicado” and keeping everyone outside ignorant of my plight. I sat down on the window-ledge and fell to reading the Spanish paper edition of Ernst Haeckel I was so fortunate as to have with me. A half-hour passed. Meanwhile that dinner was a bare hour away, and formal feasts are not so frequent in tropical Bolivia as to be missed without regret. Luckily, I caught Tommy’s eye as he dodged under the eaves to escape a new cloud-burst and, beckoning him to the window, managed to say, before he was driven off by three soldiers with fixed bayonets, “Go tell the prefect ...”

The matter never got as far as the prefect. No sooner did the comandante of the prison learn that a man, who only yesterday had been hobnobbing with the supreme chief of the department, had been visited with the indignity of imprisonment, than he hastened to order me set at liberty.

Before we leave Santa Cruz, the story of “Thompson” permits a bit of anticipation. Months later, in far southern Chile, I chanced to pick up a newspaper, among the scant foreign despatches of which my eye fell upon:

“Bolivia, 14 May—In Santa Cruz de la Sierra was shot to-day the criminal ’Thompson,’ of English nationality, condemned to the supreme penalty for having assassinated the conductors of money of some local houses.”

Another half-year passed before there reached me in Brazil local papers and letters giving details. According to these, the judge wept when he read the sentence, but “Thompson” shook hands with him, telling him the sentence was just, and that the only criticism he had to offer was that the execution had been so long delayed. As his last favor, he asked that jail conditions be improved, that his friends might be more humanly housed. On his last night he got permission to have a few of these—all jailbirds—to dinner with him, but refused to touch liquor himself, “so I shall be able to take in every detail clearly.” In the morning he informed friends that he had parents, brothers, and sisters in London, and a wife and son in the United States. To these he had been writing since his arrest that he was engaged in an enterprise that would in time make him rich, if luck was with him. On the evening before his execution he wrote bidding them all farewell, saying he had suddenly contracted a tropical disease the doctors despaired of, and would be dead by the time they got the letter. He was shot at noon, while the bells of the cathedral were striking, so that nothing should be heard outside the prison.

In Santa Cruz Tommy fell victim to that loathsome ailment popularly known as “cold feet.” An attack of fever and a hazy promise of employment for his trusty trowel were no doubt among the causes; it is probable, too, that he had not entirely lost faith in the attractiveness of sandy hair. But the inoculation was chiefly due to the replies to our inquiries about the road ahead. These were not exactly reassuring. It was characteristic of Tommy, however, that he pretended to be eager to push on, while secretly planning to remain behind.

There is one of the sand streets of Santa Cruz de la Sierra which does not run out to nothing in the surrounding jungle, but dwindles to what is known locally as the “camino de Chiquitos,” and pushes on to the Paraguay river, some 400 miles distant. “Road” in thecruceñosense, however, means anything but a comfortable highway. As usual, the town was scornful of the suggestion that two lone gringos could make the journey on foot. Disheartening stories assailed us of the dangers from snakes and “tigers,” of the unending pest of insects, of the almost total lack of sleeping-places and even of supplies. For the first week we must carry all food with us; in this rainy season the route was sure to abound with chest-deep mud-holes and miles of swamps; the last twenty leagues, near the Paraguay, would be completely inundated and impassable for months, until the waters subsided. Or, if the rains did not come on at their accustomed time, there was as much danger of the country being wholly waterless for long distances. Moreover, beyond the Rio Guapay, eight leagues east of the capital, stretched the notorious Monte Grande, a dense, unbroken forest in which roamed wild Indians given to shooting six-foot arrows ofchonta, or iron-heavy black palm, from their eight-foot bows, with such force that they pass clear through a man at fifty yards. This was said to be quite painful. Nor were these mere idle rumors; we had only to drop in on one of several men in town to be shown arrows taken from the bodies of victims, and a sojourning fellow-countryman had several relics of the tribe he had had the good fortune to see first while prospecting on the banks of the Guapay.

Reading Tommy’s real opinion of the journey behind his face, I laid plans to continue alone. Experienced travelers asserted that boiled water, a careful diet, a selected medicine-kit, waterproofs, a tropical helmet, and a woolen cholera-belt for night chills were prime necessities. I had all but six of this half-dozen requisites. By choice I should have turned rural native entirely and worn a straw hat, a breechclout, a pair of leather sandals, and a towel. But life canseldom be reduced to such charming simplicity. Two things at least were indispensable,—a cloth hammock and amosquiteroto hang over it; for the only sleeping-place on most of the journey would be that which the traveler carried with him. Then I must “hacer tapeque,” as they say in Santa Cruz, or “pack” a bag of rice and some sheets of sun-dried beef, to say nothing of distributing about my person a kodak, revolver, cartridges, and money in various forms of metal. Add to this a few indispensable garments, sealed tins of salt and matches, kitchenette, photographic and writing materials, and the other unavoidable odds and ends for a scantily inhabited 400-mile trip of unknown duration, and it will be readily understood why, after mailing the developing-tank and even my coat, razor and accessories, I staggered heavily across town on January 8th, to begin the longest single leg of my South American journey.

Fortunately, the German who had sought my assistance in the matter of the gun license, was bound for at least a few days in the same direction. Heinrich Konanz, born in Karlsruhe, had served the last of three years as a conscript in the expedition against the Chinese Boxers, and had since worked as a carpenter in China and California, until he had concluded to seek a permanent home as a colonist in some region where population was less numerous. He was largely innocent of geography, spoke habitually a painful cross between his once native tongue and what he fondly fancied was English, with a peppering of Chinese, and knew almost no Spanish. The mule that had carried him from Cochabamba he found it necessary to turn into a pack-animal for the tools, materials, and provisions he had purchased in Santa Cruz, and was to continue on foot. He had been placidly making plans to push on alone, when rumors in his own tongue suddenly reached him of the Monte Grande and its playful Indians. His first inclination had been to throw up the sponge and return to Cochabamba. But his capital had been greatly reduced and his hotel room was heaped with the supplies sold him by his local fellow-countrymen, who would not have taken them back at a fourth of the original cost. He made a virtue of necessity, added a new rifle to his revolver and shotgun, and offered to find room on the mule for the heavier portion of my baggage in return for the reassurance of my company.

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