they tie all these bones together if they wanted to pack them on llamas to Ayacucho? You know they would not. They would take them apart and put them in sacks until they reached America.”
“Why, that's a fact,” agreed Pasca, staring at the skeletons with new interest. “Certainly no llama would carry one of these things.” He stared a moment longer and added: “But perhaps these other scientists were also fools and did not think of that.”
“Then they would not have had wit enough to kill their guide. It takes some wit to kill a man, Pablo, I assure you.”
Naturally the geographers had been listening to this very candid opinion of their party. Now M. Demetriovich inquired, not without a certain respect in his voice:
“Señor Ruano, I may be wrong in my judgment. How do you think those skeletons came here?”
“Señor, returned the convict respectfully, ”this is the Rio Infiernillo. I think the devil put them here to scare men away, so they cannot look into hell while they are alive. Because if they had a look, señor, it would be so horrible they would change their lives, become good men and go to heaven—and so the devil would lose patronage.“
Standifer, who was chagrined with Ruano's description of himself, grunted out the word “barbarous.” Pethwick shouted with laughter.
With a blush Standifer drew out his notebook. As he did so, he said to Cesare:
“These entries are made, not because I lack intelligence, as you seem to think, but because I am the official secretary of this expedition; besides I am an author. I wrote a book called ”Reindeer in Iceland.“
A fit of coughing seized Pethwick.
“I meant nothing by what I said, Señor Standifer,” explained Ruano, “except to hearten this rabbit. Think nothing of it” He turned to the crowd as a whole. “We will never get the mules and llamas past the skeletons, so we will have to remove the skeletons past the mules and llamas.”
This plan recommended itself to the whole party and everybody set to work. The men lugged the things past the trembling animals and finally lined them up behind the cavalcade. They placed the human frame at the head of the troop, just as they had found it.
As Pethwick rode away he looked back at it. There it stood, representing the summit of creation, the masterpiece of life. It rattled its phalanges against its femur and grinned a long-toothed grin at the vast joke of existence—an evolutionary climb of a hundred-million years, a day or two of sunshine, a night or two of sleep, a little stirring, a little looking around, and poof! back it was where it had started a hundred million years ago. No wonder skeletons grin!
On the forward journey it transpired that Cesare Ruano had obtained a sort of moral ascendency over the whole party.
He certainly had set the whole crowd straight about the skeletons. They had talked for an hour to decide where they came from and in half a dozen words Cesare proved to them they knew nothing about the matter whatsoever. Another thing that gave Cesare prestige was his abrupt quelling of Pasca's desertion. Without Cesare, the Zambo would have escaped. None of the scientists would have acted in time to stop his headlong flight.
Civilization has the unfortunate effect of slowing up men's mental operations in emergencies. Indeed, civilization places such a premium on foresight that a civilized man lacks ability to live from instant to instant. The ordinary American lives usually in next month or next year, but he is rarely at home in the “now” and “here.”
This quality of concentration on the future is a splendid thing for developing inventions, building great businesses, painting great pictures, writing novels and philosophies, but it works badly indeed for guarding convicts, who invariably bolt in the present tense.
Cesare used his new authority to possess himself of a rifle.
“We don't know just who shot this skeleton,” he explained very simply to M. Demetriovich. “and we don't know how many more skeletons the fellow may want. I prefer to keep mine. Now I have observed that you señores never glance about when you travel, but look straight into your mules' ears and think of a great many things, no doubt. But this fellow could collect your skeletons very easily. So I will take a rifle and ride before and shoot whoever it is before he shoots us.”
Ruano chose Standifer's rifle for this task. The secretary was glad of it, for the weapon had been chafing his leg ever since the party left Ayacucho.
The immediate declivity leading into the Valley of the Rio Infiernillo was a field of boulders ranging in size from a man's head to a house. Far below them the tree line was marked by some small trees that had been tortured by the wind into grotesque shapes worked out by the Japanese in their dwarf trees. Here and there patches of snow disguised their precarious footing into white pitfalls.
The mules crept downward, exploring every step of the way with their little hoofs, then easing their weight forward. It made a very swaying, chafing ride. Pethwick's pommel worked against his stomach until he felt he had been sitting down a week, wrong side first.
After an endless jostle it seemed to the engineer that he was not descending in the slightest, but was being shaken back and forth, sticking in one place amid the cyclopean scenery. When he looked back, the endless boulder-field slanted toward the sky; when he looked down, it seemed as far as ever into the black and sinister valley where the river wound like an adder.
He looked to reaching the tree-line with a hope it would bring him relief from the monotony. It did not. His saddle chafed, his mule sagged and swayed. His fellow-scientists did as he was doing, squirmed about on the torturing saddle-horns. The sameness drove his mind in on itself. He began as Cesare had said, “to stare into his mule's ears and think.”
He wondered about the skeletons. He wondered what “trivial” thing Cesare had done to get
