FOR a month we waited in this tiny straggling rectangle of thatched huts before the balsas or callapos could get up to us to move our outfit down the river. Somewhere below us on the turbulent river Lecco crews were toiling up against the current, dragging and clawing their way through narrow caÑons, hanging fast in places to the bare rock, and again helped by the long, tropical vines that drooped to the swift water. Twice they had been beaten back by sudden rises in the river; the third time they got through, although two balsas had been wrecked and for the past two days they had lived mainly on the berries and leaves along the jungle banks.

A splendid lot of half-civilized people, tremendous of muscle and capable of prodigious feats of strength and endurance on their rivers; ashore sober and diffident, afloat on their rafts, by right of an immemorial custom they are always drunk and serenely confident in their intuitive skill.

For twenty-four hours after they arrived on the hot stone beach below the bluff on which Mapiri lived they drank and feasted and slept and then their head man, a Bolivian refugee, announced that all was in readiness. The gang of workmen we had chartered were collected and counted and then assigned to the three callapos, a queer lot, but in the main fairly promising for our purposes.

One was a negro who had been a rubber picker down the river before. During his absence his wife had left him preferring a gentleman of lighter color, but who had only one eye; some frontier mechanic had hammered a patch out of a silver coin and then engraved with a nail the ragged outlines of an eye, which the owner proudly wore as a most elegant makeshift. Both of these gentlemen were in the outfit and ordinarily both would boast in the utmost good nature of their fascinations with the ladies—except when they were in process of getting drunk. And on the Bolivian frontier getting drunk is recognized as a perfectly legitimate pastime. There are no games, no concerted forms of amusement, the montaÑa offers nothing except these little gatherings with some childish hopping as a dance and then the tin cans of caÑassa and the ensuing drunkenness.

There was another man in the gang, a stocky, loose-jointed fellow, Segorrondo, who was never sober, except during his working hours, but during that time he was worth any two of the other men—and he never failed to turn up sober for that allotted period. His capacity was nothing; three times in one afternoon in Mapiri he was sober and drunk, with the lines of demarcation startlingly distinct. He rarely joined in the little hoppings to the reed whistle with his face daubed with clay or charcoal and decorated with bits of twigs or leaves, yet he was perfectly sociable and never dangerous. Later, in the established camp down the river, there came a three day fiesta for which he prepared in advance. There was a falca—a still for making the caÑassa from a half-wild sugar-cane—up the river, and he drove his bargain before the fiesta began. He was, for the sum of one Boliviano—about half a dollar, gold—to be allowed to drink all he chose during the three days, but was to carry none away.

Long before dawn on the first day he was at the falca; for three days he never moved from the litter of crushed sugar-cane, lying in a stupor from which he only roused himself to reach out shakily for a tin cup of warm alcohol as it dripped from the still-worm. We expected a wreck to show up, but on the morning of the fourth day he returned, grinning cheerfully, and worked as though nothing had occurred.

Also there was Nosario, a stocky boy of about twelve or fourteen, who had been added as general utility around the cook or camp. He was worthless and it later developed that his wife, a Cholo lady of some thirty or forty years, had prodded him into the effort in order to add to her matrimonial support.

Agamemnon viewed the whole collection with great scorn. “These yer pipple ain’t noways fitten, ba’s,” he would remark. The other darky was included in his disfavor.

Agamemnon always swelled with pride at the thought that he was a Britisher by birth—born in Barbadoes—and he counted Americans as being too subtly differentiated to be separated; humbly accepting his place as assigned in their eyes, he looked down with scorn on these shambling, good natured animals.

During the four weeks of delay in Mapiri we had seen much of a neighboring rubber baron, old man Violand, whose barraca was a half day’s ride over the steep trails. The old man was as typically Teutonic as though he had but just pushed his mild, blue-eyed way into the jungle. His headquarters—a square of palm-thatched and palm-walled buildings—was self-sustaining from the coarse flour that a row of Indian women were grinding between heavy stones in one corner of the patio to his coffee and also a superior brand of caÑassa distilled in a wooden worm, cooled in a hollow palm log, which really had the flavor of a fine liqueur. He had been the chief figure in a couple of rubber wars over disputed territory with his nearest neighbor some thirty miles away and he showed a spattering of bullet holes in every room of his house with delighted pride. The dispute was a trifle complicated, but as the result, his opponent was a fugitive from Bolivia while Violand himself tiptoed into Sorata or occasionally La Paz with some caution.