The Web of the Sun (Adventure Magazine, 1922)/Chapter 2

by T. S. Stribling

 

II

TWENTY-THREE days after the Brazilian sailed from New York, Lassiter and Birdsong were in Quito, Ecuador, buying muleteers' outfits for their trans-Andean junket. The Stendill agent bought thoroughly; his purchases extended right down from brightly colored ponchos, high sombreros, wide trousers to the tasseled goad used by the muleteers.

Lassiter believed, no doubt, that he donned the costume purely for the purpose of guarding his identity and his business secret, but the gay clothes flattered the poet and the masquerader wrapped up in the financial agent. He put them on in the back room of the tienda where he bought them. When he glanced into a dusty mirror, the image he saw caught and held his eye. It gave him a queer sense of having stumbled, quite unexpectedly, upon that youthful, romantic Charles Lassiter who had entered the Stendill offices in Maiden Lane thirteen years prior. Thirteen years—then he was twenty-six. Now he was thirty-nine——

As he stood and looked into the glass, came that strange realization that his youth, his immortal youth, had slipped from him like a worn garment.

Here Birdsong drawled that they must go to San Francisco Plaza and hire some mules.

As for the colporteur, his yellow and purple poncho, his sombrero with a band of silver lace, his trousers, affected him not at all. The man might have been born a mulero. But Lassiter's costume affected him both physically and mentally. The loose freedom of the poncho lifted his spirits; in the wide trousers his legs felt fit for running and jumping.

As he walked along the heavy Spanish streets of Quito, kinship of costume made him realize that the mestizos and Indian muleteers he met were human beings like himself—which is a remarkable realization for an upper-middle-class man. He understood their supple swinging walk and the way they carried their goads along their arms. He shifted his to that position.

PLAZA SAN FRANCISCO, the live stock grain market of Quito, is a colorful, noisy place set in the cold brilliance of mountain sunshine. A babble of bastard Spanish, Aymara and Quichua dialects fill the air. The air is rank with the smell of animal ammonia, straw, droppings, mules and burros. Buyers and venders come and go with strings of donkeys, mules and high-necked llamas. Over the plaza are ponchos of every color, greens, yellows, oranges, reds, stripes, checks and fanciful designs. There is much sombrero tipping and courtly address between all men, rich or beggarly. In this land where work is held in low esteem, men realize best the dignity of simple existence apart from the ability to grab.

On the south side of Plaza San Francisco is a heavily built feed stable of adobe, fronted by an arcade. In the western end of the long arcade half a dozen Indian girls, wrapped in brilliant mantillas, sold piquante at little tables. Beside them on the bare packed earth boiled caldrons of the peppery stuff.

They fired their pots now and then with dried droppings, and no sooner had they finished that task than they scooped up a double handful of peppers to throw into the stew, and next moment ladle out fiery portions to their customers.

A little way from the piquante tables, out in the plaza, a Colombian jockey rode a bucking mule. The fellow had on a green velvet jacket. He sat the animal carelessly, and in the midst of its leaps and stiff-legged falls, he extolled to a prospective buyer how well broken the animal was, what an amiable disposition the mule possessed, how it would work from alba to tardecita (dawn to twilight) without so much as backing an ear, a willing mule, a sincere mule——

Amidst this oratory and bucking, he found time to flash a smile of brilliant teeth at the piquante girls. Lassiter wondered vaguely if he were too old to ride like that. The jockey was some twenty-three or four. Then the financial agent's attention wandered to a llama that was hissing like a snake; then to a man tying a stone to a jack's tail to keep it from braying.

As a background for this kaleidoscopic scene arose the cone of Pichincha far to the east in flashing silver and purple. Against this arose the spires and domes of the city, the twin towers of the cathedral, the weather observation bureau on top of the Prensa building, the monastery of the Gray Friars. From the height of the volcano there swept down great ridges of tufa that embraced the city in vast bluish arms. Lassiter's attention to the landscape was diverted by Birdsong's calling him.

The colporteur was bargaining with the man in the green jacket to hire his mules for the expedition. The jockey's English had flickered out among the higher numerals. Lassiter walked over and picked up the conversation in Spanish.

“What do you want for your mules, señor?"

“Where do you wish to go, señor?"

“East, through Corriente, past the Rio Vampiro——”

The expression on the vender's face stopped Lassiter.

“Not the Rio Vampiro?”

“Yes, on through the Ticunas into Brazil.”

The Colombian looked at Lassiter with a loose jaw.

“The señor is mad!”

“I was never clearer-headed.”

“Then you have never been to the Rio Vampiro.”

“No.”

“I have.”

“Then you'll make the very guide.”

The Colombian stroked a polished black mustache and broke into a nervous laugh.

“Señores, the man who has been in the Rio Vampiro makes no guide at all. He has learned his lesson. I would not go there again for two hundred sucres a month.”

“I'll give a hundred-and-fifty.”

The man in the green jacket frowned and pulled hard at his mustachio. His black eyes seemed staring at something disagreeable.

“But, señores, I warn you,” he flung out, “that is a vampire country—in that country——”

“I've heard so,” interrupted Lassiter indifferently.

“It is not hearsay with me,” declared the Colombian warmly. “Look——”

He stepped nearer Lassiter, bringing with him the odor of mules and of his own unwashed body.

“Look——”

He tipped his head to one side and the movement drew the skin of his neck up from under the greasy collar of his green velvet coat. This drew a peculiar withered spot on the skin into view.

Lassiter looked at it uncomprehendingly.

“A vampire, señor, right over that big vein,” explained the vender. “My camarado discovered it just as I lay stretched out breathing my last. The beast was as big as an eagle. It was fluttering over me, fanning me deeper into my last sleep, when he rushed up and beat it off with a stick. Ah, señores, many a time has Balthasar Nunes gambled with death, but never before—never before—pardon me, señores, un momento, I think the señoritas are listening. I will explain to them. I could not rest in Heaven if I thought the gentle bosom of any woman held a question unanswered by Balthasar Nunes——”

Here he made rather a fine bow to the Americans and withdrew to the piquante stands.

Just how Balthasar discovered the women were listening, Lassiter never knew. Balthasar's back had been to them. Lassiter turned and watched the Colombian display the withered spot on his neck. To observe it, the cream-colored women moved past Balthasar in a line, like sightseers at a side show. One of them touched the place with the tip of her finger.

During the procession, Señor Nunes gave a new and enlarged version of his adventure with the vampire. After a five minute description of how he skirted death, Lassiter heard him say that his last thoughts, just before he lost consciousness were that a dark-eyed, adorable Indian madonna was stooping over him, lifting him, pressing him to her bosom with kisses like piquante——”

The girls blushed and gasped—

“Piquante!”

“Si, señoritas, piquante!” cried Nunes with hand to heart. “And my miserable camarado waked me from a dream like that! Mio Dios! How I wish I could have died in such a dream! When I gained strength I was furious! He tried to appease me. I would not hear him. We divided the gold—for the Rio Vampiro is lined with gold—and parted—”

Balthasar cast liquid eyes at the piquante venders—

“Can you blame me?”

“It was a very impious wish, señor," trembled the one who had touched the scar.

Señor Nunes smote a hand on his brow.

“A man's brain is a furnace, señorita, when he looks into such black almond eyes; the holy saints do not hold his words against his soul.”

He gave a great sigh as if he were about to melt into the piquante girl's arms, then shrugged and said:

“Now I must go back and dicker over the mules with those Americanos. No doubt they are caballeros (gentlemen) in their cold fashion, but they think of nothing but mules.”

All the girls lifted their eyes to the foreigners and smiled faintly before they returned to their task of collecting droppings for their pots.

Balthasar's philandering vaguely annoyed Lassiter, yet the agent was a trifle amused at Balthasar's Latin notion that kisses in Heaven tingled with piquante. When he thought it over, he was forced to admit that it was more interesting than the idea diffused through American theology that kisses in Heaven were chilly and infrequent—if, indeed, they were permitted at all.

The Colombian returned from the piquante girls with a beaming face. For some reason Lassiter began a little bruskly:

“I will give you a hundred and fifty sucres a month, Señor Nunes, and no more.”

Balthasar seemed a little surprized at such brevity, which is not in accord with Spanish-American traditions. He paused a moment, then asked—

“What do you want packed, señor?"

“Bibles.”

Balthasar stared.

“Bibles—pack Bibles out in that devil's country?”

Birdsong caught the drift of these Spanish words.

“Brother Nunes,” he interposed, “where is a better place for spreaden the blessed Word than in a land of sin and wickedness?”

Balthasar looked at the man from Arkansas.

“Oh—you want the Bibles packed!” as if he did not find that so incomprehensible.

“Yes, I hope I am one of His chosen vessels, Brother Nunes.”

“And what do you want packed?” inquired the muleteer of Lassiter.

“I am his helper,” said the Stendill agent.

“You are what?”

“This gentleman's assistant,” repeated Lassiter with a certain pointedness.

Nunes looked from one to the other, plainly incredulous, and also speculating. Presently he began again.

“It is a noble work— May I ask, Señor Lassiter, how long you have been in the business of selling Bibles?”

“We don't sell them——”

“We're spreaden the Word and sowen the seed,” interpolated Birdsong earnestly.

The Colombian nodded.

“Certainly—spreading the Word—muy bien——”

Here he took each of his prospective employers by the edges of their ponchos, and with a confidential nodding of the head led them farther away from the crowd. The smell of mules again wafted to Lassiter. When at a safe distance, the muleteer glanced around and began in a half tone:

“Señores, men do not risk their lives in the Rio Vampiro without a cause. You come from America to go to the Rio Vampiro—to distribute Bibles—that is your cause, is it not?”

“Yes,” agreed Lassiter impatiently, “if you want to take us——”

“Un momento—You are Americanos. You come to Ecuador, dress up as muleros and go to the Rio Vampiro—to distribute Bibles—that is your cause, is it not?”

“Look here!” snapped Lassiter. “If you'll take us, say so, if you won't——”

“Do not feel nervous, mi amigo,” soothed the muleteer. “All is well. You are most fortunate—Ah, you are most fortunate to fall in with Dom Pedro Balthasar Nunes, a man of infinite discretion. Any other mulero would wonder why two Americans disguised themselves as muleros to carry Bibles into the Rio Vampiro country—They would be curious——”

“To save lost souls,” interposed Birdsong.

“Whose lost souls?” asked Balthasar cryptically.

“Why—just any lost soul,” replied Birdsong, a little at loss. However one of his pet phrases came to his aid and he added, “The harvest is white, but the laborers are few.”

Nunes nodded with a faint dry smile, pulling down his mustachios.

“Surely—What simpler?—I am discreet. I do not ask what is in your Bibles. I do not ask what you are going to do with them——”

“We're going to give them away,” said Lassiter.

“Precisamente—give them away in the Rio Vampiro—trust my discretion. I have never been any too good friends with the police myself, and—I shoot very well with a pistolete.”

Here he reached into the back of his green jacket, pulled the lining around and cautiously displayed the butt of a very modern automatic.

“I'll go for five hundred sucres a month,” he concluded.

“Look here,” cried Lassiter, caught off guard at this jump, “we're not afraid of the police!”

“Neither am I, señor.” Nunes tapped the tail of his jacket.

“I mean the police are not after us.”

“And they will not be, señor—trust my discretion—if you hire me.”

This last phrase was put so significantly that Lassiter thought it best to put down his rising temper. It was clear the Colombian was prepared to bring down the Quito police on them unless they came to his terms. An investigation undoubtedly would expose Lassiter's identity. The fact that he was traveling incog from Quito would be headlined up and down the West Coast. He would have to give over his plan or reconstruct it with an infinity of precautions.

Balthasar watched the Stendill agent's face.

“Only five hundred sucres,” he suggested, shrugged, spread his hands. “What is five hundred sucres to Americanos, who are rich—and always in a hurry?”

Lassiter decided this was the cheapest secrecy in sight.

“All right, we start tomorrow.”

“But wait,” interrupted Birdsong. “I can not afford to pay two hundred and fifty dollars a month just for mules-

“I'll fix that,” said Lassiter.

“Yes,” nodded Balthasar, “your assistant Bible giver will fix a little thing like that, Señor Birdsong.”

“Praise the Lord,” said Birdsong.

BALTHASAR'S bit of blackmail turned out, on the whole, rather a stroke of luck for the expedition. The Colombian was very useful in translating the Quichua dialect of the Indians. When the mules and their Bible packs were in the mountains, Lassiter found his Castilian of little service. Not only did the Indians not understand pure Spanish, they distrusted every one who spoke the language. Four centuries of slavery, peonage and inquisition have crushed out of the Indian the last shred of faith in the Spaniard.

Undoubtedly the Quichuas are the most wretched human beings on the globe. The villages through which the colporteurs passed were mere kennels of adobe and stone stuck up on the mountainsides. Along the more abrupt heights in these villages were strung rudimentary stone fences to keep the children from dashing into space and being killed below.

The houses themselves were dug partly in the earth and were without windows, so the observer looked down into black kennel like holes. Smoke poured from these holes, because there were no chimneys. Such excavations formed the home, stable, poultry house, [sty and dog-kennel all rolled into one.

It pleased Ezekiel Birdsong to buy a hand bell in Quito and he made a processional through these miserable villages, and sometimes singing the hymns so popular with rural revivals.

The Arkansan's penetrating nasal yowling and his bell formed a clamorous introduction to these villages. As he passed through at the tail of his mules, anything was likely to pop out of the huts to view the disturbance—a pig, a milk goat, a dog, a game-cock, an Indian woman followed by the rest of her tenants, for all held equal tenure in these motley domiciliaries.

The Indian housewives who heaved themselves up into the cold mountain sunshine were invariably shapeless creatures, weaving ponchos for their lords out of vicuna wool, or a Panama hat, with the fibers spraying off at the point of labor.

The housewife was always ugly with an ugliness that was appalling, but among her brood, there would be almost surely two or three dark-eyed, sad-faced girls, who came out with the pigs and goats and stood staring at the strange procession.

It was these girls coming out of the crevices in the rocks that made this groveling existence human to Lassiter. Often these girl faces held that strange quality of wistfulness that belongs to youth and maidenhood. Of what they dreamed, Lassiter could not imagine. What they were to become, he saw too plainly: Hags in a hole, used and shapeless, flowers crushed in a sty.

And Zeke Birdsong came along and gave them little Spanish Testaments.

The futility of the gift, the fanatical earnestness of the giver always struck Lassiter with a sad irony. Sometimes he would wonder if by any possible means the little Testaments could be of the slightest moral or intellectual value to these girls.

He never thought of any of the other denizens except the girls. Their faces always gave him the impression of something delicate and precious being wasted.

Birdsong, however, had much wider sympathies, no doubt because he was a father of both boys and girls. Between villages, trudging at his mule's tail, he would talk of his beneficiaries.

“That was a fine chunk of a boy,” he would say. “I hope he will read that Testament and grow up into a preacher.” Or—“That was a good-hearted old woman with the red shawl. I hope she sees the light and I meet her in Heaven.”

Birdsong used this last phrase so much, one could say he tramped at a mule's heels through the Andes;, extending invitations to Indians to meet him in Heaven.

Lassiter looked on Heaven as medieval nonsense, but Birdsong, through his interpreter, talked of it so earnestly, so concretely—apparently he was acquainted with the pearly gates down to their hasps and hinges—that at intervals a strange fancy drifted across the financier's mind, that maybe, somewhere, there was such a place—somewhere—and he would look up at the icy peaks freezing against the abyss of the sky.

WITHOUT Balthasar not one Bible could have been given away. The first village they entered refused to accept a single book. The Indians thought it was some new trick of priests to bring down on their heads new and devastating ecclesiastical dues. However, Balthasar's eloquence reassured them. He explained that these men were good American bank robbers who were giving away Bibles as a penance for their sins. The Indians, thus assured that they were dealing with simple cutthroats, gained confidence and took the little books.

By the time the expedition had camped two nights on the trail, word, somehow, had passed ahead of their penitent and benevolent mission, and the colporteurs found the Indians eager for the Testaments. In fact, on two occasions, the little books themselves had been passed on ahead of the expedition.

In one village, the men found an Indian who had a bullet wound in his arm. He had bound one of the Testaments tightly over the place. He declared to Balthasar that all pain left him when he applied the book. On the following day they discovered an Indian woman, who was expecting confinement, drinking a tea made of Testament leaves.

Birdsong caught these patent miracles to his heart, and overflowed with thanks giving in both prayer and song. He saw himself an evangel attended by the hosts of Heaven. He would stretch a string of miracles through Ecuador and prepare the way for—as near as Lassiter could get the idea—for an enormous revival.

For a while Lassiter argued mildly with Birdsong about the authenticity of these miracles. He attempted to explain to Birdsong that the patient was probably healed by the workings of their own subconscious minds—but in the gulf of the subconscious, Lassiter quickly lost his own bearings.

As for Birdsong, he had no idea what subconscious meant. He rebutted everything by his unassailable argument—

“If the Lord wanted to work miracles with His Testaments, He could, couldn't He?”

After that, Birdsong recommended his books as a nostrum for all the ills of the flesh.

As Lassiter trudged day after day, behind his mule, goading it on under its pack of Bibles, there were times when he felt, that he was moving in some kind of delirium And would presently awake, with a high fever, no doubt, in his New York apartment.

At the end of eight days' journeying, the expedition was widely advertised. At each camp came Indians bringing gifts—olla podrida, chickens to cook, potatoes, mangoes, or cakes of ice brought down by the donkeys from snow fields five thousand feet higher up.

As they journeyed farther and farther east, the villages became more widely scattered, for they were reaching the fringe of Ecuadorian civilization, which is the department of Corriente.

At the village of Canelos, an Indian boy offered to carry a sack of Bibles over to Bujeo, the last civilized village toward the east, and allow the white men to turn back. The men of Canelos told strange tales of the country beyond Bujeo. It belonged, they said, to a tribe called the Jivaros, who fed strangers to their gods.

Birdsong interrupted these tales with pious ejaculations:

“Lead me to my chosen field, O Lord! Show Thy power to the heathen Jivaros!”

The more terrible were the stories of the men of Canelos, the more determined Birdsong was to go on. On the ninth morning the white men reached Bujeo. A handful of wretched Indians lived here, and by some miracle the white men's coming was known to them. The whole village met the colporteurs.

After each person had received a testament of medicinal and spiritual value, the Bujeans implored the three men to go no farther. They would surely be lost in the infernal land of the Jivaros.

By this time, Birdsong was harrying his mule in his eagerness to reach a post of genuine danger and miraculous service. The expedition was soon on its way again.

One of the Bujeans, an Indian named Chombo Meone, attached himself to the colporteurs for several hours. As they ascended the rising slopes of the eastern range of the Andes, Chombo told Lassiter a most fantastic tale, which he hoped would turn back the adventurers. This was the tale:

WHEN Chombo was a boy his mother died. He consulted a monk as to the state of her soul and was shocked to find that she was probably still in purgatory. Ten masses might win freedom for her.

Unfortunately, Chombo did not have enough money to pay for ten masses, so he took three.

Now every one in Bujeo knew that the Rio Vampiro was lined with nuggets of gold the size of a man's head, but the difficulty was, it all belonged to the King of the Jivaros, or that is to say, the devil.

Chombo explained his predicament to the monk, and the good man told Chombo if he would learn a prayer to subdue the devil, he could probably go to the Rio Vampiro, get the gold and return in safety.

Chombo agreed to this,, so the monk, who knew all sorts of prayers, taught him a prayer, and the Indian set out. Sure enough, he found the valley of the Rio Vampiro scattered with gold. He filled his packs so full his poor donkey could scarcely crawl. He goaded the beast at every step and cursed it by all the saints in the calendar, but unfortunately black night fell upon him before he was clear of the land of the Jivaros. So he camped, refreshed himself with cocoa leaves, said the prayer seven times, then wrapped himself in his poncho and fell asleep.

He had the most horrible dreams.

When he awoke, his bags were gone, and his donkey hung to a tree by a cord, strangled as if it had been a sparrow. Who could pull a donkey up a tree by a cord except the devil?

Chombo had the presence of mind to cut off a piece of the cord as proof of his story and then fled the place.

At the conclusion of this extraordinary narrative, Chombo drew from under his poncho his embroidered bag of ashes and cocoa leaves, opened it and displayed the bit of cord he had salvaged from the tragedy. It was a piece of silk cord about an inch and a half long, greasy from years of handling.

The Stendill agent looked at the shred of silk around which Chombo had woven such a fantasy. He avoided expressing his skepticism by inquiring after the present state of Chombo's mother's soul. Chombo hoped the good woman had been in Paradise for several years.

During the last mile or two, Chombo had talked with a certain nervous haste and many glances out over the boulder-strewn mountainside. Now that he had finished, he walked on a bit farther with some desultory conversation, then made his adieus and turned back to Bujeo.

At first he moved off on the return trail with sufficient dignity, but the farther he got from the white men the more quickly he stepped. At seventy-five paces, he began to trot. At a hundred yards he was in full flight, running as if the very King of the Jivaros were on his heels.

The white men watched him curiously, until his poncho diminished to a bit of fluttering red far down among the gray stones, and he vanished around a turn in the trail.