"Are there Indians of that sort in Patagonia?" he broke in.

"Fifty-seven varieties--all bad. Some have souls, I believe; others rank lower than the beasts. But what have I said now?" for he had sprung upright as if in a great hurry to get away.

"Forgive me," he muttered. "I have just remembered some important letters I must write before we call at San Diego."

"So," she communed, when he had vanished through the companion-hatch, "even Mr. John Darien Power can prevaricate at times. But he is a nice man. I wonder why some woman treated him badly. It must have been a woman. If it were a man, he wouldn't have run!"

The two became firm friends. As the days pa.s.sed, and the _Panama_ plodded south through tropic seas, Power learned so many details of the girl's life that he could have written her biography. Her father was an Englishman, who found a wife in Los Angeles. After being swindled by a nitrate company, he had the good fortune to recover from the a.s.sets a tract of land in the Chubut Territory of Patagonia. It contained no nitrate; but the discovery that it would grow good cattle came in the nick of time to save him from ruin. His wife was killed in the Indian raid which had left its disastrous record on his daughter; but Argentine troops had exterminated the Araucanian tribe responsible for the outrage, a rare event in that district, and the ranch had prospered.

Each year or eighteen months Marguerite visited her maternal relatives in Los Angeles, and worked hard at the university for a term. By that device, it was evident, Sinclair salved certain twinges of conscience for keeping her bright intelligence pent in a Patagonian ranch. The two hated these breaks in their home life. However, they provided a middle way; so father and daughter made the best of them.

Although the eastern route, via New York, was quicker, the girl herself elected for the long sea voyage down the Chile coast, and through the Straits of Magellan. She knew most of the ships plying in those waters, and felt more at home in them.

She was a prime favorite on board the _Panama_--among the men; her sharp tongue and amazing outspokenness did not endear her to the women. Some of them resented her popularity, and tried to snub her, and the result was a foregone conclusion. Quite unconsciously, Power caused one of these brief combats. A pretty, but vapid, and rather rapid lady from Iquique thought that a good-looking young man like the American was devoting far too much time to Miss Sinclair, and resolved to detach him.

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 mult.i.tude of sins."

Someone overheard this pa.s.sage 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 ash.o.r.e 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 pa.s.sengers 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 a.s.sault 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 pa.s.senger 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 senor 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 ash.o.r.e 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 Jose, second in command. Jose 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 G.o.d 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 b.e.s.t.i.a.l 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 G.o.d 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 a.s.sociated with evils yet to come; so, on his suggestion, Power was taken through the mountains by a secret pa.s.s, 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 sc.r.a.p 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.