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Guapo could not assure him on this head; he had been so long absent from the Great Montaña that he was ignorant of the places where the tribes of these parts might now be located. These tribes often change their homes. He knew that the Chunchos sometimes roamed so far up, and they were the most dangerous of all the Indians of the Montaña, haters of the whites, fierce and revengeful.
Guapo lost no time in turning his turtle inside out, and converting part of it into a savoury supper, while the remainder was fried into sausage-meat, and put away for the following day. But on that following day a much larger stock of sausage-meat was procured from a very different animal, and that was a "cow." "How?" you exclaim, "a cow in the wild forests of the Amazon!
Now Leon had finished his operations on such trees as Guapo had already cut down, and not finding a good seat near, had walked towards the precipice which was farther up the hill, and sat down upon one of the loose rocks at its base. Here he amused himself by watching the parrots and toucans that were fluttering through the trees over his head.
The "coca," upon which Guapo made his supper, and which contented his stomach perfectly for the night, was an article very different from either the cacao which makes chocolate, or the nut of the cocoa-palm. You are now impatient to hear what sort of thing it was, and I shall tell you at once.
Don Pablo and the rest were about to pass on and leave the ais to their leaf diet, but Guapo had other notions on that subject. Ugly as these creatures were, Guapo intended to have one of them for his dinner. He, therefore, begged Don Pablo to stop a moment until he should get them down. How was this to be done? Would he climb up and drag them from the tree?
But there was no fear of Guapo losing it. A hound could not have followed it more surely. Suddenly Guapo stopped then went on a few steps then stopped a second time, and made a sign for Leon to come up. Without speaking, he pointed to a little thicket of scrubby bushes, through the leaves of which they could just make out some large brown object perfectly at rest.
Had it not been perfectly straight, Guapo would have bound it to a post and made it so; but it happened to come quite right without further trouble. The tube of the lesser one was now cleaned out thoroughly, and polished by a little bunch of the roots of a tree-fern, until it was as smooth and hard as ebony.
It was like a voice repeating the word "Guaco!" They all listened. "Guaco Guaco!" again came the voice. "Hola!" cried Leon, "Guapo Guapo! there's some one calling you, Guapo. There again! no it's `Guaco' listen! `Guaco Guaco! What is it, I wonder?"
On the head there is the helmet, the back is shielded by a corslet, and even the limbs are covered with greaves. Of course, this armour is arranged differently in the different species, and there is more or less hair upon all, between the joinings of the plates. These points were not touched upon by Guapo, but others of equal interest were.
He had heard, moreover, that it was far superior even to the ants' nests of Cayenne, which form an article of commerce and are highly prized in the hospitals of Europe. Guapo, therefore, ran off and robbed the green ants of their nests, and speedily returned with the full of his hands of the soft "yesca."
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