Part 15

Kate and Lou flushed up, and Brown stuck out his lip contemptuously, but Tip only answered, drily:

“No-o, not so awful smart—just smart enough for what we need.”

This was fuel to the fire. Mat, who was much the heavier of the two, stepped forward; and very likely there would have been a scene, except that the good old minister just then stopped his sleigh for a chat with some friends, the boys. But Mat had clinched a nickname, and Tip’s turnout became in every mouth “The Rebel Double-runner.”

Nor did it stop there. An organized movement—in which Mat was far too shrewd to let himself be seen, leaving it to his younger followers—was made to cut (boycott, as we would say nowadays) everyone who had anything to do with Tip.

Brown evidently didn’t borrow much trouble about the scorn of boys so much younger than himself; and whatever Tip may have felt, he said nothing.

But Kate and Lou felt it keenly, for even the sisters of the camp were enlisted to make things unpleasant for “all who gave aid and comfort to Rebels.” But, as they were loyal and plucky girls, they stuck to their friend in a fashion that was rather heroic, considering the heat and the meanness of youthful partisanship. I trust that for the many shabby turns done them they found some recompense in the regularity with which, day after day and many times a day, they whizzed past their envious persecutors. For Tip had left no gap in his plans. The Rebel double-runner was safe to win every time—thanks partly to its superior construction, partly to the dangerous hill on which it got its headway, and partly to the tremendous send-off given it by that hatefully muscular Brown.

Besides, Tip had a perfect genius as a steerer—the genius of effort and fixity, which counts oftener than any other kind. He seemed afraid of nothing, because he really “saw his way through.” He had studied that slide in every inch, and knew how to give his sled every advantage of it.

It was an aggravation almost beyond endurance to have them flash by us so easily every time; but for all Mat’s efforts and schemes and our wild jockeying, they continued to do it. If the continued triumph of the Rebel double-runner was aggravating to us, it was gall and wormwood to Mat. The thing became a town joke; and older folks, who did not share our grudge against Tip nor our awe of our “Napoleon,” poked all manner of fun.

Suave, self-satisfied, Mat grew glum and snappish. Those of us who ventured to ride with Tip—and it must be confessed that our patriotism was not always proof against the temptation—were made to feel the weight of Mat’s displeasure. Our “leader of men” had not quite learned to lead himself.

As we trudged up with our sleds from the depot one afternoon, we caught sight of Tip’s outfit whisking around the tannery corner and bearing down like a streak of dark lightning.

Mat was ahead, talking hard to young Burpee, who had a long red-bark switch in his hand. Just as the flying traverse was close, the young imp flung his stick down across the road.

Quick as thought we saw the act—and that Tip saw it, too. He slid back, with feet braced hard on the crosspiece, and swung the sled a trifle to the right.

He was pale—but not half so white as Mat, who stood glaring at him like one fascinated. It was right on the last bridge, over the big fall—that old wooden bridge with its crazy railing!

We were too horror-struck even to cry out, and there was no sound from the white faces on the sled. I can remember yet how the great falls roared, as out of a dead hush; how Tip’s teeth showed, and that the steering-rope was sunk deep in his wrists. How many things made themselves seen and felt in that instant!

The sled struck the slender switch exactly square. We looked to see its occupants fly off into space; but, though Tip was snapped forward until his knees bruised his face, those wiry legs saved him and the rest, who were half piled upon him.

The flying ends of the switch told the story. Tip had steered upon the slenderer end, and the swift, high-tempered runners had chopped it in two, as was his hope, and without too great a shock.

Had the switch resisted never so little! It seemed to us—and does to me yet—almost a miracle of escape. But for Tip’s instant wit, the whole party would have broken their necks on the hill, or crashed through the rail to the falls.

That day broke the back of the Cannonball Railroad. No one would so much as look at Burpee; but we felt that the responsibility rested further back.

Of course, Mat had not told him to throw the switch, and doubtless made himself believe that he had no blame in the matter. But the rest of us—well, even boys sometimes know how to read between the lines.

Tip never opened his month about the matter, and promptly stopped any attempted reference to it. He had plenty of companions now, and treated them in his square-toed boy way, as though nothing had ever happened.

A week after the switch episode, the crowd, including Tip, was straggling up the hill as Mat and his few remaining satellites came down on the “Avalanche.” Just as they reached the grist-mill, a loaded wood-sledge stalled at the tannery corner—the snow was soft that day. The sled was, for the same reason, not going half so fast as usual, but quite fast enough. Seeing the dangerous passage thus blockaded, Mat began to get panicky, and the sled wobbled.

“He’s going to jump!” exclaimed someone. “Don’t!”

Tip flung his sled-rope to me. “Hold to her, Mat!” he yelled, standing at the very edge of the slide and balanced, catlike. But Mat did _not_ hold on. The “Avalanche” slewed to one side, and he leaped and went plowing and rolling fifty feet in the slush. Almost as he struck the road, Tip had flung himself headlong upon the steering-seat and caught the lines.

He was just in time to “snub” the front sled before it could “turn cross” and make a wreck; and, steering through the narrow space between the wood-sledge and the bridge-rail, he fetched up safely with the traverse and its four frightened boys on the grade that climbs to Water Street.

That settled the business. From that day out, I think no one was ever heard to mention anything that sounded like “Rebel double-runner.” It was “Tip’s Tornado,” and there wasn’t a boy in town, except one, but was glad to ride on it—or to follow Tip in anything. It was the quietest of victories, but complete.

The Balsa Boy of Lake Titi-Caca.

The Balsa Boy of Lake Titi-Caca.

I.

“But, _hombrote_, thou art a mouthful, and the lake is brave. Of me it counts not, but much eye to this box. That is the far-looker that makes the pictures, and if it went to the _bogas_ or were even wet, how couldst thou answer?”

“There is no care, Excellency. More than that I am small, in this lake I was born, and now I am made to it. I will not drown your Excellency, nor more wet ye than must be when the lake is so. Trust me, _viracocha_, to put you to the island safely. And if not then name me Bobo.”

Well, I had to get across, and that was all there was to it. The island was there, I here, the miles of angry water between, and for bridge, only this twelve-year-old Aymará boy with his water-logged _balsa_. I looked out at the whitecaps, then at the unlikely craft, then in Pablo’s eyes.

“_Ba-le_, it is well. Thou hast the heart of a man. Hold her level for the box.”

I waded out through the mud and rushes, waist-deep in the icy water, holding the precious camera box on my head, and between us we got it safely stowed abaft the beanpole mast. Then I scrambled aboard as best might be, with Pablo’s helpful hand in my collar, for the mud had a trap-like clutch on my legs. Bidding me squat forward, the boy settled back on his knees and began to ply his pole. The loftiest great lake in the world has no timber on its shores, and with the mighty forests of the Yungas five days off no one is going to think of paddles. Plain contorted poles of the iron _cupi_ are far more easily brought over the Andean passes, and they have to suffice.

Slowly, with Pablo poling into the mud behind, the clumsy balsa slid through the _totora_, whispering as it went with its brother rushes—for itself was simply a great bundle of _totora_, _totora_ bound, with _totora_ sail and sheets. There was no other thing about it; no nail nor cord nor wood, save only the cupi mast. The mossy tangle of yachu, which feeds the cattle of Titi-caca that graze all day shoulder deep in the lake, hampered the soggy prow and fastened upon Pablo’s stick. Sometimes, with that and the grasping mud, I looked to see him dragged back overboard. But he wagged the pole sharply and held fast with his knees, and always shook free. Decidedly his eyes were right—the boy was no mouse.

In ten minutes we pushed our nose through the last _totoral_, and were in the open. The wind butted the harder in our face; the waves—no longer tamed by the rushen breakwater of the inshore—came running at us like a stampede. The slow prow kicked them and stumbled on them and pounded them into a coarse rain that pelted hard and icy. I wriggled out of my coat of oiled horsehide and bound it over the camera box to protect that from the spray—for it had been well strained by a fall of the pack mule in crossing the pass of Sorata, and was no longer so waterproof as might be wished. Pablo could now no more touch bottom; and kneeling a little higher and a little farther astern he kept his pole ish-ishing through the water, paddle fashion.

“Give me,” I said, after watching awhile the play of the round boy-chest. “Thou art too light.”

But Pablo sent down his stick the harder—so forcibly, indeed, that the effort pulled that corner of his mouth awry—and grunted:

“No, _viracocha_; leave me. Your Excellency knows the paddle—that I can see by the way you sit. But this is different. Only we of the lake know its ways, which are tricky. See, _pues_!” he sputtered, as a bucketful of water slapped us in the face and left both gasping. “For here all the winds quarrel from every way at once—as if pushed by him who was once _alcalde_ of Paucarcolla.” Pablo crossed himself, thereby “dropping a stitch” in his paddling.

“What? The—er—him that the Inquisition pursued?”

“_Si, viracocha_, that same. And yonder headland is where he disappeared in the lake, for the which none care to tarry there, since it is well known that he was the devil in person,” and Pablo crossed himself again.

As we cleared the Punta del Diablo the wind smote us with renewed force, and with every dip a fresh deluge drenched us to the bone. But for a few moments I did not think much of that. With the recession of the headland the long line of the Bolivian Andes came marching into view, and I suppose that just so wondrous a sight is nowhere else. Captained by the peak that overhangs Sorata, the giant file stood marshaled seemingly upon the very beach of the vast blue lake, itself white with that unspeakable whiteness such as befalls no other thing on earth than a far peak of eternal snow high up a clear sky. Such a rank of Titans—from incalculable Illampu and his 25,000 feet, off to where his rival, Illimani, seemed soaring out of the lake a hundred miles away! It was enough to make one forget a wet skin—and even the possibility of a wet camera box. How they possessed the firmament, these sublimated presences! And how the cumuli, puffing up from the tropic forests of the Beni, tangled about their feet and wreathed upward and dulled when their snow-whiteness lapped the whiter snow of those proud crests!

A sharp “_Umpss!_” from Pablo recalled me to shiver and to look back. A sudden flaw in the wind had caught his stroke with the full weight of the balsa, and the ironwood pole had snapped under the cross strain. Pablo looked anxious, but said very evenly:

“_Pss!_ We must break it off, _viracocha_, and use each an end; for in this wind if we keep not our head, even a balsa will not last. Being angry, the lake pounds as one with his fist.”

Indeed, it was more like that than anything else—and a most reiterant fist, too. Nowhere else is there such a “chop” as on Lake Titi-caca when the winds awake; and I have seen those who have weathered every sea and who laughed at the English channel turned deathly seasick on one of the wallowing little steamers that run from Puno to Chililaya. Now we were kicked about with battering thumps that seemed like to pound our bundle of rushes asunder. Pablo was straining and twisting at the broken pole, to part the wiry fibers. I chopped at it with my heavy, keen bowie, and at last the stubborn strands yielded; and so each had a stick some five feet long. I knelt up and drove mine fiercely down the side while Pablo, astern, kept stroke. We were at it none too soon. At one time I half fancied that we never would get her head to the wind, for the soggy craft answered slowly to our efforts with these pitiful paddles.

For some minutes we tugged in silence. At an altitude of 12,500 feet in Peru one needs all one’s breath for work—even the Serrano lad did. I glanced over my shoulder at him now and then. His lips were shut square, his serious dark eyes seemed to be taking note of everything, and the slender muscles of his arms and chest—clear drawn on the drenched shirt—played smoothly. An athlete myself, and particularly taught in the paddle, I began to feel a respect which was half awe for this manful stripling who toiled so soberly and shrewdly where only the best foreign lungs can endure any exertion whatever. And, at last, little as there was breath to spare, I could not help grunting, “_Estás lo mas hombrote!_”

Pablo’s big white teeth shone for an instant in a sober smile.

“So must we,” he answered calmly. “For here is much to do, nor room for lazies—for small though they be. When I was the half of this, my father had me to help on the balsa; and once, even then, I took it to Puno, he being sick.”

Then silence fell upon us again for a time, and we poled away doggedly. But presently there seemed to me something wrong in Pablo’s quiet, and I twisted my head to look. His stick was going steadily as a machine, but in his face was what made me call out sharply, “What thing?”

He thrust out his chin toward Illampu. I looked thither, and then back at him, uncertain.

“More wind,” he said, concisely. “Either to get to the island before it, or”—and the Spanish shrug said the rest for him.

We did not get to the island before it. Two hundred yards away the gale struck us and flattened the balsa into the waves and the waves into the level, and was like to strip us bodily from our soaked craft. After that nothing was very clear, for the winds and waves washed us fore and aft, and it was hard to say which was the colder and more pitiless; and one saw ill for that bitter pelting in the face, and the heart reeled with overwork to feed the leaping lungs. Bent forward till our heads almost touched the balsa, our knees wedged hard on the tiny roll which served for gunwale, we dug away mechanically with those nightmares of paddles that would carry us nowhere. Once, when my heart would work no more, I turned idly to Pablo. His face was gray with effort, but so sweet and composed that I shouted out, half petulantly:

“Ea! Hast thou not fear, _hijito_?”

“How not?” he screamed back up the wind. “Am I a fool, not to fear? We shall never come there, perhaps. Only if the saints will! Promise a silver candlestick, señor!”

But in my eyes were a blue eyed baby and her mother, five thousand miles away, and for that, my temper was more to fight, with shut teeth, than to be vowing candlesticks. And just then it struck me to think, in that silly maundering of the mind in stress, how peaceful Pablo would look when they should pick us up, and how they would add: “_Umpss!_ But these gringos are of ill temper, no?”

For half an hour, perhaps, we doubled to our sticks, and still the gale smote us, and still our marrow ached with the chill of the spray. There was no complaint of Pablo. He accepted fate, but still worked like a man—poised and steady in the face of death. If we were to end there, he would be found with the little chapped fists still clenching the stick. Once a motion swept on me to spring back and hug him and say:

“Son, it counts not. Let us meet it in peace. Thou’rt fit to die with!”

But then again the blue eyes came up in the mist, and my fingers cracked on the paddle and my teeth grated. And Pablo, as if he understood, gave me a grave, sweet nod. Further I noted that he drew some small object from his pouch and seemed to breathe on it.

It was so near! In a little eddy of the wind I shook the water from my eyes and peered ahead. The northern point of the island was not fifty yards away—and we were drifting past. It slipped and slipped, for all I dug savagely at the paddle and Pablo quickened his stroke with the first groan I had heard from him. Our tired arms forgot their cramps, our lungs their “stitches” in a wild strain—and still that dark shore kept drawing to our right. Ah, for the old paddle that used to spin the birch canoe! These accursed sticks—why, one might as well paddle with a poker!

“_Viracocha!_” The boy’s shrill voice split the wind like a fife. “The sail!”

I stared at him stupidly an instant. “Thou hast the power,” he cried. “Break it! Break it!”

Then I knew, and leaped upon the ironwood mast as a wolf at the throat of a fawn, and clenched it and wrenched and beat, and shoved and twisted and tugged, and with arms and knees tore it loose from its stepping in the balsa. It well nigh racked the rushen raft in twain, and we noticed that the impact of the waves no longer shook the balsa as a unit, but wabbled and see-sawed it.

I caught the cupi under my left arm and clinched tight the “sheets” of braided _totora_ around the _totora_ sail, till that was bound in shape something like a closed umbrella, and springing forward to my station stood and plied this new paddle with frantic energy. It was unwieldy and floppy, but it had more resistance than the pole, and slowly—so slowly that at first we dared not believe it—the sullen craft began to answer. New hope came in us, and we shouted “_Arre!_ Drive!” and bent till the muscles creaked. Now, even in Pablo’s face, was the fierce light of combat.

And so we made the shore. In the lee of the point the water was so still that it seemed a yard lower than its surrounding level. A lone tuft of _totora_ grew near the shore, and when we came to it I fell on my face along the balsa and clutched the pithy stalks; and there we lay at that frail anchorage till heart and lungs came back in me. Then, poling nearer, I stepped over the side and landed the camera; and came back and gathered in my arms a limp bundle, whose head drooped upon my shoulder, and so waded heavily up the beach of Sicuya.

II.

There was nothing on the island for a good fire—indeed, in all that vast plateau, so lofty and so cold, one learns the art of shivering to perfection, for fuel is enormously scarce. After an hour’s work I had assembled a tiny heap of dry rushes from the beach, and bunch grass and a few straggling bushlets. The tinder, in its oil-cloth pouch, with the flint and steel, was dry, and presently we had a swift, ephemeral blaze. It was nothing to dry us, but served briefly to toast our hands and feet and take off a little of that ghastly chill. The camera was all right, and I resumed the horsehide coat, buttoning it to my chin to pay for the woolen shirt which I had lent Pablo. As the darkness came on our poor little fire died away. We scraped a trough in the gravel and lay down in it spoon fashion, my arms around Pablo’s chest, and so wore out the night.

We were chilled and stiff and half inanimate when the sluggard sun peeped over the far peaks of Apolobamba, and got up like old men. But even the light was cheering; and presently a soft glow began to tame the bitter air and we ran clumsily and danced about and swung our arms till the blood went free again in its forgotten channels. Pablo was all right now—a boy is a hard thing to kill, and particularly an outdoors boy—and chatted leisurely and calmly, as was his way.

“But to eat!” I broke in on one of his stories, when we were fairly limbered up in body and mind. “Is there _gente_ on the island?”

“Nobody. I think the Ancients were here once, for up yonder I have seen a strong wall. But none come here now—not even seeking treasure, which must be here.”

“Bother the treasure! What we want now is food, even if it were only llama meat; for in purity of truth I’m falling with hunger. Let us hunt.”

“There will be ducks, _pues_, over in the cove. _Vamos!_”

Ducks there were, by the hundred; and mudhens, and dippers, and flamingoes, and almost every other aquatic fowl, among the rushes in the eastern cove. With the shotgun we could have mowed down a bushel of them—but the shotgun was lying with my sleeping bag and rawhide muleback trunks over in a hut on the mainland. Well, with the six-shooter we could count on one bird, anyhow; and I drew it and began to rub off last night’s rust.

“But wait me,” said the little balsero. “It is better not to frighten them, for we may need more than one. With this there is no noise.”

As he spoke he unwound the braided sling which bound his long black hair. It was the immemorial weapon of his people—even so I had taken it from the skulls of mummies of his ancestors far antedating the Conquest. Pablo gathered some smooth pebbles from the beach and began creeping toward the cove, sheltering himself whenever a bunch of _totora_ offered. The water-fowl began to edge out, and a few nervous ducks rose. But the boy knew his business and kept on at the same gait. Suddenly straightening up, he whirled his right arm thrice around, and even from where I was I could hear a twang, and then the _sh-oo-oo_ of the hurtling pebble.

There was a commotion among the birds, and a great white swan stretched and half rose from the water and dropped back in a shower of spray. Pablo was already in the water, keeping out of sight all but his head, and in a couple of rods that also disappeared. The swan suddenly redoubled its struggles, beating one wing till the water foamed, but without progress. Then it began to drift shoreward, still fighting; and in a moment I saw a dark object rise just in front of it. The swan saw, too, and aimed a stunning blow with its wing. But the head had already vanished and the screaming bird kept moving shoreward despite his struggles. Then I waited so long that it seemed impossible that one should so endure under water, when the swan’s violent pecking at his breast relieved me. Pablo, to keep out of the way of that heavy wing and beak, was holding the great bird firmly down upon the crown of his head, and when it was needful to take a breath he could thus get his nose out of water without seriously exposing himself. It was when he should come where the water was but a couple of feet deep that trouble would begin, and already I judged that he was lying upon his back and kicking along the mud. Time after time a dark fist came up to grapple that snake-like neck, but the bird was too smart and the captor got only savage bites for his pains. I ran out to help, and the swan met me with a peck that took a morsel off my hand; but a back sweep of the bowie sent the head flying twenty feet, and after a little more flopping the great fowl fell limp. The missile from the sling had shattered his left wing.