a mass upon
the white men. Marcoy managed to slip his fine ivory-handled machete
within his trowser leg, but every other cutting tool disappeared as if
by magic from the possession of the explorers. The shooting-utensils
the savages, believing them haunted, would not touch. Then, half
irritated at the exhaustion of the booty, the amiable children of
Nature burst out into open derision. The artists of the tribe, filling
their palms with rocoa, and moistening the same with saliva, went up
to their late patrons and began to decorate their faces. The latter,
judging patience their best policy, sat in silence while the delicate
fancy of the savages expended itself in arabesques and flourishes.
Perez and Aragon had their eyes surrounded with red spectacles. The
face of Marcoy, covered with a heavy beard, only allowed room for
a "W" on the forehead, and Pepe Garcia was quit for a set of
interfacings like a checkerboard. Having thus signed their marks upon
their visitors, the aborigines retired, catching up here and there
a stray ball of cord or a strip of beef, saluting with the hand, and
vanishing into the woods with the repeated compliment, _Eminiki_--"I
am off."

The victims rested motionless for fifteen minutes: then pellmell,
through the thickest of the brush and down the steepest of the hill,
blotted out under gigantic ferns and covered by umbrageous vines,
stealing along water-courses and skirting the sides of the mountains,
they rushed precipitately westward.

Two months after the priest of Marcapata had dismissed with his
benediction the party of confident and enthusiastic explorers, he
received again his strayed flock, but this time in rags, armed with
ammunitionless guns and one poor knife, wasted by hunger, baked by the
sun, and tattooed like Polynesians by the briers and insects. The
good man could not repress a tear. "Ah, my son," said he as he clasped
Marcoy's hand, "see what it costs to go hunting the cascarilla in the
land of the infidels!"

The explorations started by Don Juan Sanz de Santo Domingo came to
profitable result, but not to his advantage. Three weeks after the
pioneers arrived again in Cuzco, Don Juan started another expedition,
on a much larger scale, to accomplish the working of the cinchona
valleys, under charge of the same Bolivians, who could make like a bee
for every tree they had discovered. A detachment of soldiers was
to protect the party, and the working force was more than double.