The Terms of Surrender Part 32

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 a.s.sume 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 pa.s.ses 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 debris, 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 alt.i.tude 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 c.u.mber 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 const.i.tution to that degree of fort.i.tude 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 c.u.mbered 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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.s 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 (_Chloephaga 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 pa.s.s, 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 pa.s.sing 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 pet.i.tioned 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 pa.s.s. 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.

And now Power began his regenerative work anew.

Thanks to the phenomenal style of his coming among them, the savages spared his life; but their possession of an almost unlimited stock of _chi-chi_, and the truculent mood which strong drink induces, even in Indians, led them, at first, to treat him as a Koko-huinche, or "white fool." Though their hunting-grounds were hundreds of miles from the coast, and singularly remote from the influence of white settlers, they were aflame with vague resentment against the invaders, and gladly made one of the hated race the b.u.t.t of their malevolent humor.

So Power, in self-defense, took to artifice. He discovered that they possessed two kegs of gunpowder, but owned no guns. He learned, too, that once there had been three kegs, but a careless experiment with one had removed a chief and his family. With some difficulty, and only by tickling their imagination by promising an exhibition of magic, he obtained some of the powder, and, on a dark night, electrified the community by a display of fireworks. Catharine wheels and Roman candles achieved wonders among the foothills of the Andes. From that instant his supremacy was established. A squib or two enforced edicts; a rocket set a const.i.tution squarely on its feet. In less than three years he had become the Indians' trusted guide and teacher. The day came when the store of powder was almost gone; yet he was strong enough to prohibit the manufacture of that season's supply of _chi-chi_.

But there was one thing he could not do. He could not calm these wild people's frenzy when a hunting party came in hot haste from the plains and announced that a cavalcade of white men was forcing a pa.s.sage along the river, being evidently bent on penetrating the valley of the apple-trees.

Power was asked to repel this invasion by black art; failing which, the Araucanians decided to ma.s.sacre the explorers in a neighboring canyon.

He had not the least doubt as to the success of the scheme. He knew the natural difficulties of the place. The upper end could be barricaded, the lower blocked by spearmen hidden in the dense vegetation, and every intruder caught in the trap would be battered to death by boulders flung from the crests of opposing precipices.

Very reluctantly the Indians allowed him to act as their amba.s.sador. By sheer force of will he bore down opposition, and was taken to a point whence the smoke of campfires was visible above the trees. It was hard to say whether the faith his friends placed in him was stronger than their fear and loathing of the white strangers; but he exacted a promise that, if he persuaded the members of the expedition to retreat, they would not be molested. Oddly enough, neither he nor the Indians gave a thought to any other possible development. These savages believed that the white G.o.d who had dropped upon them from the skies would never leave them, and Power himself had almost forgotten the existence of the outer world. Most certainly, he paid no heed to the fact that his seven years of expiation were nearly sped. He was happy among these simple people.

In his way, he was a king, and the habit of ruling had become second nature.

By chance, that day he carried the spear which had been his faithful ally in crossing the Andes, and a weird and barbarous figure he must have presented when he walked into an almost unguarded camp which had been set up for a few hours on the right bank of the river. Clothed in skins, his face bronzed to a deep brown by constant exposure to the elements, his hair falling over his shoulders, and a long beard sweeping to his breast, he looked a veritable wild man of the woods.

A halfbreed peon who was the first to see him whipped out a revolver, and shouted a warning; but Power held his spear crosswise above his head, showing, by this Indian sign, that he came in peace, and he was permitted to approach.

"Where is your leader?" he asked in Spanish.

The peon seemed to be vastly astonished; but he turned to a tall, thin, elderly man who had dived out of a tent at his cry, and now strode forward.

"Where have you come from?" he said; but his speech betrayed him, and Power added to the sensation he had already caused by saying:

"You are no Spaniard, at any rate."

"Good Lord!" cried the other. "It's an Englishman!"

"Next thing to it, an American," said Power.

"What is your name, and how do you happen to be in this outlandish place?" was the bewildered demand.

"I am here to explain all that, and more. Are you the head of this expedition?"

"Yes."

"Well, what about discussing matters in that tent of yours?"

"Come right along," said the stranger, leading the way.