She failed lamentably, and, in her pique, so far forgot herself as to inquire sarcastically what magnetic influence the girl exerted that she was able to keep Power in constant attendance.
Marguerite surveyed her rival with bland unconcern. “You are mistaken,” she cried. “He cares nothing for women’s society.”
The other thought she saw an opening, and struck viciously. “So it would appear,” she smirked. “You are the only woman on the ship he has spoken to.”
“Yes. Odd, isn’t it?”
“Distinctly so. Perhaps he is one of those rare mortals who really believe that beauty is only skin deep.”
“How consoling that great and original thought must be for you!”
“For me? Why for me?”
“Because, like charity, beauty covers a multitude of sins.”
Someone overheard this passage at arms. The quip held a barbed shaft which flew far, even unto Iquique, and the Chilean merchant regained lost ground when he heard of it by exclaiming, “How true!”
But, strive as she might, and did, Marguerite never received any confidences from Power. They talked about many things; but his past history remained a closed volume. The long, hot days succeeded one another with monotonous regularity. When the red cliffs of Valparaiso appeared beneath the snow-crowned line of the Andes, those two, perhaps, were the only people on the ship who regretted that the voyage was at an end.
“So we part here,” said the girl, as Power found her waiting near the gangway to go ashore in the tender.
“Yes,” he said. “When you are older you will realize that life consists largely of partings.”
“I know that now,” she said. She was wearing a white double veil, which was her habit when in towns, so he could not see that she was very pale. He was aware of an irksome pause – a rare thing as between Marguerite Sinclair and himself.
“You go straight to your new steamer, I believe?” he went on, forcing the conversation.
“Yes. And you?”
“I drift into a hotel for a couple of days.”
“And I cannot tempt you to visit my poor but proud Patagonia?”
“I fear not.”
“Goodby, Mr. Power.”
She shook hands with him hurriedly, and joined the crush of passengers in the gangway. She moved with the easy grace of one who lived much in the open air. For the hundredth time she reminded him of Nancy. He sighed. At last his seven years’ pilgrimage had really begun!
CHAPTER XIV
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.