The Giant Raft quotes

No. Lost in thought, the captain of the woods turned the curious paper again and again between his fingers. With the cipher, of which he had the secret, he assigned to each letter its true value.

He read, he verified the sense of those lines, unintelligible to all but him, and then he smiled⁠—and a most unpleasant smile it was.

Then he murmured some phrases in an undertone which none in the solitude of the Peruvian forests could hear, and which no one, had he been anywhere else, would have heard.

But he had not then awoke, and what advanced was able to arrive in his presence, at ten paces from the tree, without being perceived.

It was not a man at all, it was a “guariba.”

Of all the prehensile-tailed monkeys which haunt the forests of the Upper Amazon—graceful sahuis, horned sapajous, gray-coated monos, sagouins which seem to wear a mask on their grimacing faces—the guariba is without doubt the most eccentric.

Of the ancient Manaus one can count but a wandering party or two. On the banks of the Rio Negro there are only a few half-breeds, Portuguese and natives, where a few years ago twenty-four different nations had their homes.

Such is the law of progress. The Indians will disappear.

Before the Anglo-Saxon race Australians and Tasmanians have vanished. Before the conquerors of the Far West the North American Indians have been wiped out. One day perhaps the Arabs will be annihilated by the colonization of the French.

“But you will see things that you never saw before,” Yaquita kept saying to her.

“Will they be better than what I see now?” was Cybele’s invariable reply.

Minha and her favorite for their part took care of what more particularly concerned them. They were not preparing for a simple voyage;

“An ex-hanger-on, as far as I see.”

“Wait a minute and I will recall myself,” said he, passing his hand over his forehead.

“I am known as Fragoso, at your service; and I am still able to curl and cut your hair, to shave you, and to make you comfortable according to all the rules of my art.

“Yes, Minha; yes,” replied Joam.

“It is rather as if we were returning from exile⁠—voluntary exile! Do your best; I approve beforehand of what you do.”

On Minha and Lina, to whom were added of their own free will Manoel on the one side and Fragoso on the other, devolved the care of decorating the inside of the house.

“Mr. Garral,” said he, “from the day when you received me at the fazenda of Iquitos, lodged, clothed, fed—in a word, took me in so hospitably—I have owed you—”

“You owe me absolutely nothing, my friend,” answered Joam, “so do not insist⁠—”

“Oh, do not be alarmed!” exclaimed Fragoso, “I am not going to pay it off! Let me add, that you took me on board the jangada and gave me the means of descending the river.

These arrows, made of the leaf of the coucourite palm, are feathered with cotton, and nine or ten inches long, with a point like a needle, and poisoned with curare.

Curare, or wourah, the liquor “which kills in a whisper,” as the Indians say

, is prepared from the sap of one of the euphorbiaceæ and the juice of a bulbous strychnos, not to mention the paste of venomous ants and poisonous serpent fangs which they mix with it.

“That is true!” replied Benito, embarrassed. “You are right, and in a sense it is one cruel care the less! Nevertheless, Manoel, my suspicions still exist!

It is not always a man’s worst enemy who wishes him dead!

”

The adventurer, seated opposite to Joam Garral, who was always taciturn, listened to all that was said, but took no part in the conversation. Benito quietly and attentively watched him. The eyes of Torres, with a peculiar expression, constantly sought his father.

One would have called them the eyes of some wild beast trying to fascinate his prey before he sprang on it.

Manoel talked mostly with Minha. Between whiles his eyes wandered to Torres, but he acted his part more successfully than Benito in a situation which, if it did not finish at Manaus, would certainly end at Belém.

Yes! Probably so. So Torres did not question him. At the outset of the conversation he took the affirmative, and assumed the part of an accuser.

“Joam,” he said, “your name is not Garral. Your name is Dacosta!”

At the guilty name which Torres thus gave him, Joam Garral could not repress a slight shudder.

At length, crossing his arms, he said:

“You have a daughter!⁠—I like her⁠—and I want to marry her!”

Apparently Joam Garral expected anything from such a man, and was as quiet as before.

“

Let the justice of man be done while we wait for the justice of God!

”

The fingers of Judge Jarriquez tattooed more quickly, and he could not avoid exclaiming,

“The man who can furnish the proof of a prisoner’s innocence is always dead.”

“If the real culprit is dead, sir,” replied Dacosta, “Torres at least is living, and the proof, written throughout in the handwriting of the author of the crime, he has assured me is in his hands! He offered to sell it to me!”

“Why?” exclaimed Benito, who became pale as death.

“Because this document is a cryptogram, and⁠—”

“We have not got the key!”

On the contrary, the most forward of them in accusing him of being the principal author of the crime of Tijuco now averred that he was not guilty, and demanded his immediate restoration to liberty.

Thus it always is with the mob⁠—from one extreme they run to the other.

But the change was intelligible.