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Updated: May 5, 2025
Next morning it was still raining, but we set off on a hunt, anyway, going afoot. A couple of brown camaradas led the way, and Colonel Rondon, Dom Joao, Kermit, and I followed. The incessant downpour speedily wet us to the skin. We made our way slowly through the forest, the machetes playing right and left, up and down, at every step, for the trees were tangled in a network of vines and creepers.
All were provided with machetes, some carried rifles, and each looked as though it would afford him the greatest pleasure to cut into small pieces the stranger who had invaded their territory. "You see," said their leader, with a smile, "that you are hopelessly surrounded, and that with a nod I can have you killed."
Five men and several other dogs followed the wounded hound, and I went with them. The Marquesans had war-clubs and long knives like undersized machetes. Every Islander carries such a knife for cutting underbrush or cocoanut-stems, and usually it is his only tool for building native houses, so that he becomes very expert with it, as the Filipino with his bolo or the Cuban with his machete.
Forcing down the desire to turn a handspring, he slipped one of the six-shooters in his empty holster and patted it lovingly. "Old friend, I'm shore glad to see you, all right. You've been used, but that don't make no difference." Searching further, he opened a full box of machetes, and soon after found cartridges of many kinds and calibres.
We all three went into the forest on foot toward where the shot had been fired. It was dense jungle and stiflingly hot. We could not see clearly for more than a few feet, or move easily without free use of the machetes. Soon we heard the ominous groaning of the herd, in front of us, and almost on each side. Then Benedetto joined us, and the dog appeared in the rear.
One was a picture of the bodies of six Cuban pacificos lying on their backs, with their arms and legs bound and their bodies showing mutilation by machetes, and their faces pounded and hacked out of resemblance to anything human. The other picture was of a group of Spanish guerrillas surrounding their leader, a little man with a heavy mustache.
On the ninth day after leaving the canoes, having done, as I reckon, about a hundred and twenty miles, we began to emerge from the trees, which had grown smaller until they were mere shrubs. Their place was taken by an immense wilderness of bamboo, which grew so thickly that we could only penetrate it by cutting a pathway with the machetes and billhooks of the Indians.
Even the chief could not boast of such a superhuman feat. The undergrowth this morning was not so thick as it had been, and the machetes of Lourenço and Pedro stayed in their sheaths. The ground, too, was more level and the footing more firm. After some three hours of walking the Americans found that they had come into a faint path.
No harm done so far, though, and if old man Calisaya, or whatever his name is, wants to act nasty we can send him and a few others along the road to glory with our gats. We'll travel the same road, of course, but we'll take company with us." "Si, senhor," Pedro agreed. "And besides your pistols we still have our machetes. Yet I believe Lourenço's words to the chief Monitaya will make all well.
It took him but a few minutes to make his selection and cram his pockets with them. Then he filled two Colts and two Winchesters and executed a short jig to work off the dangerous pressure of his exuberance. "But what an unholy lot of weapons," he soliloquized on his way back to Johnny. "An' they're all second-hand. Cannons, too an' machetes!" he exclaimed, suddenly understanding.
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