More difficulty developed when I, in an amiable frame of mind bought a chance in a watch from a Sorata man, for when a man moves from a village he raffles off all his household goods and his own and his wife’s jewelry. This raffle was made famous by the fact that I won something. I won the watch; and the next morning was arrested by the intendente on the complaint of a thrifty SorataÑian that the whole machinery of the raffle had been undermined and debauched, and Bolivia dishonored in order that the dice might give me this marvelous watch. The watch, by the way—I will keep it for years as proof that I am Fortune’s favorite—did strongly resemble gold in a dim light and when wound would tick for quite a while, but in its general aspect was on the order of those given as a premium with two cakes of scented soap for a quarter by the slick corner spieler of a gang of pickpockets.

At last we were to start the next day over the pass to Mapiri with our outfit and men. The surly American with his ever-present extraordinarily long barrel Colt sent a messenger to me to announce that his home office, easy chair, contract on the Mapiri River happened to cover all of the available balsas and callapos and that I could not use any. Presently we met in the plaza and he remarked with a suggestive emphasis, “You got my message about my callapos?” I replied briefly that I had and that I would act as my judgment dictated when I arrived in Mapiri. “Very well,” he said suggestively; “then you know the consequences and can take them.”

That night a friend came to our party with the information that this man had shipped in to his barraca recently some dozen Winchesters and considerable ammunition and that he was arranging to ship more. That gave their barraca some twenty-six rifles—a pretty heavy armament for merely a peaceful rubber company. His ignorance of the country and his truculent vanity and the carelessness with which he talked “fight,” drunk or sober, made it a matter of no little concern. And he neither knew nor respected the rights and customs of river travel, although he attempted to dictate them.

Like many patriots he was willing to fight as long as he could hire his fighting done for him—an absentee bravo.

We bought four Mausers and a thousand rounds of ammunition and started back to our camp, with five white men and some thirty-five Cholo workmen and three pack-trains of supplies.

Once again we climbed sleepily into the saddles at daybreak and began crawling up to the final pass over this third and last great range of the Andes. The first night’s camp was hardly below the snow line in a little sheltered cove on the mountain flank; the next morning a slippery climb in a blizzard that coated every mule in ice as though with armor brought us to a ragged, narrow cleft in a long fin of rock through which we passed as through a gateway. It was the summit of the pass. There was on the farther side the usual votive cairn of stones built by the AymarÁs with the twig cross at its apex while, leaning against the fin of protruding rock as far as the eyes could penetrate the blizzard, were narrow, spear-head pieces of shale placed on end as further efforts in worship or propitiation of the great god of the mountain.

From the pass the trail dropped a trifle and we crowded for that night into the tambo in Yngenio. They were a surly lot and viewing with a hostile suspicion—doubtless with causes inherited from the remote past of the conquistadores—any outfit of wayfarers.

Again followed a day of sleet and snow-squall with an occasional rift in the clouds when, thousands of feet below, could be seen the soft greens and the waving palms of inviting tropical warmth and dryness. The narrow trail zigzagged up the bare mountain steeps, followed for a distance the wanderings of the crest, and then dropped in another series of zigzags to lower levels. For hours there was this constant rise and fall. In a cold rain we camped in a stone hut, Tolopampa, a place that has the reputation of perpetual mud and rain where the skull of some deserted AymarÁ packer still kicked around in the cold mud outside.

And then at daybreak began the drop into the warmer zones where there was sunlight and a riot of tropical color. For two days it was one unbroken descent while the back grew weary and exhausted leaning against the cantle and the stirrups interfered with the mule’s waggling ears. The clayey mud of the wallowing trails rose up and wrapped us in its welcome until boot-lacings, spur and puttee buckles blended in shapeless, indistinguishable masses. And then, five days after leaving Sorata, we plodded into the straggling line of palm thatched huts that is credited on Bolivian maps with being the town of Mapiri. For two days the mules were rested while the arrieros passed the time in keeping mildly drunk. Below the high bank on which the town stood, the River Mapiri boiled past in muddy eddies; here in a cane hut we camped and oiled and packed the saddles; from now on it would be rafts, callapos, until we again reached the main camp.

In Mapiri the callapos were waiting and we embarked. One camp on a sand bar, one camp in Guanai and the next day we shot more rapids and came into the country of the truculent one with the long barreled Colt. The barraca lay just around the bend where the river broke in some small rapids and then saved itself in miles of smoothly coiling eddies for the grand smother of the Ratama. It was here at this chief barraca of his company that there might be trouble—we had been warned that if we attempted to round this bend in any unapproved, uncensored callapos we would be fired on. The four Mausers had been issued and the case of ammunition unscrewed. There were four callapos with the white men on the one in the lead. It was rather exciting, this uncertainty, but it was accompanied by the invariably clammy spinal undulations and the strong desire that I was somewhere else or that what that jungled river bed held for us was an incident of the past rather than of this imminence.

As though casually the freight had been loaded on the callapo platforms so that it made an informal breastwork and quite as informally we loafed behind it. And then the callapos drifted silently around the bend—we had not fired the salute that is ordinarily made when approaching a barraca at which one is going to stop and call—and the clearing with its collections of huts and palm thatched roofs broke into view. A little figure scuttled across the clearing and disappeared. The edge of the clearing on the bank was within a stone’s throw and not a sound broke the stillness. A word to the Leccos and their heavy paddles began working us over to the bank where a little path ran down to the water’s edge. If the two camps were in for a frontier war, a feud, it might as well be found out at once. Before there had been only the threats of a foolish man—here was the place and here were the men under his control. How far would they back his stupidities?

In single file we climbed the steep path to the clearing; at the top the head man came forward cordially.

“What’s this about firing on us as we came around the bend—you getting in Winchesters by the crate?”

He laughed cheerfully:

“Oh, phut! If it amuses that old fool outside to send them in I don’t mind, but if he wants to start any fighting let him come on in and do it himself.”

We told him of the rumors and the threats that came from Sorata.

“Sure, I know,” he said; “that old cuss didn’t do much else but talk fight with me when I was out; how many rifles, how we’re going to run things—you know him—and I’ll bet he’s never heard anything more than a firecracker go off in his life. He’d fire me if he thought I had you at my table. Bring up the hammocks and come on into grub!”

And so like most other really serious things it faded away on a close approach. But it had held all of the serious elements.

The next morning we swung out into the river and again shot the rapids of the Ratama and drifted out where the whirlpools drew the callapos under neck-deep. As we approached the site of our camp we turned loose the rifles and shortly came the answering pop of guns. The callapos grounded on the shallows at the foot of the bank, the old Cholo workmen swarmed around the new comers and waded ashore with the new freight. Where we had left the beginnings of a palm thatched roof was a long bunk-house; a patch of young platanos was opening its long leaves with its promise of our own base of supplies; a hen clucked around with one lone chick—the rest having succumbed to snakes—the result of some trading with the cacique; under a palm thatch there drifted the blue wisps of smoke from a bank of charcoal burning and a well defined trail stretched through the jungle to a clearing farther down where the placer workings would be finally located.

It was like the Swiss family Robinson—it was coming home. The Cholo with the one silver eye, the drunken shoemaker with the scalloped scar, and all the others crowded around and chattered in a happy excitement. The proper native custom is to celebrate so according to formula a tin of alcohol was ordered for the night and the workmen decked themselves with leaves and shuffled round in what passes for a dance until exhausted. The next day the time expired ones started up-river with the callapos.

It had been five months since I left the camp and we began that slow, heart-breaking struggle against the current. It was with all the feelings of having at last reached my restful home that I turned into my hammock that night. Rapidly the camp grew under the influx of the new men; the song of the whip-saw rose in the forest and long clean timbers began piling themselves along the trail; now and again the roar of some huge tree shook the air as it mowed a swath of jungle in its fall; a tiny store was opened and now and again Leccos came to trade—out from the original jungle of the year before had come a tiny, fragmentary community hanging on to the frontier.

And three weeks later I started on a callapo down the river to cross the interior basin of South America, over the Falls of the Madeira and then down the Amazon and to London. Two days and two night camps with a callapo and a crew of Leccos and one forenoon we drifted and scraped on the gravel beach of Rurrenabaque. Here was the last touch of a town, or of a straggling settlement that I would sleep in for many days.