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Updated: May 10, 2025
Two days before we ourselves started with our mule-train, a train of pack-oxen left, loaded with provisions, tools, and other things, which we would not need until, after a month or six weeks, we began our descent into the valley of the Amazon. There were about seventy oxen. Most of them were well broken, but there were about a score which were either not broken at all or else very badly broken.
Don Luis pointed. "Straight ahead, as I am showing you," he added. "We saw the lights of a train last night," Tom went on. "I judged that the mule-train came from the mines above. Yet the mule-train did not follow the direction that you have just shown me. The road runs crooked, I take it." "Oh, yes," nodded their host, as carelessly as Tom had spoken.
Compared with it, struggling with a mule-train all day through the mud and rain, working with pick and shovel on the fortifications, charging an enemy's solid line-of-battle, appeared light and easy performances. He would have gone at either, on the instant, at the word of command, or without waiting for it, with entire confidence in his ability to master the situation.
That night a mule-train crept slowly down the mountain side and entered the little city, for no one who came with them knew of the plague. The caravan had come from the east across the great plains, and not from the west, which was the travelled highway to the sea. Among them was a woman who already was ill of a fever, and knew naught of what passed round her.
Three carretas, drawn by oxen and driven by dusky peons, followed the mule-train, making noise enough to frighten even the coyotes that behind skulked through the coverts of mezquite. A dashing horseman mounted upon a fine black steed rode in advance, who, ever and anon turning in his saddle, looked back with a satisfied glance upon the fine atajo. That horseman was Carlos.
From Barbadoes we beat up for Jamaica, and anchored in Kingston Harbour just forty-five days from home. The next morning we said farewell to the ship, and were rowed ashore to a good hotel, where we spent a lazy week in email excursions, while Captain Branscome busied himself in hiring a mule-train and holding consultations with a firm of merchants, Messrs.
Cunningham held out his hand. Some thirty minutes later Cunningham, Mahommed Gunga, and the five, with a much-diminished mule-train bumping in their wake, were headed westward on a dry, hot trail, while the time-expired and convalescent escort plodded south. The escort carried word that Cunningham had heard of trouble to the west, and had turned off to investigate it.
"You would soon tire yourselves out. The mine is a dirty hole." "By the way, sir," Reade went on, carelessly, "how far do you have to send ore to have it smelted." "About sixty miles." "By mule-train, I suppose." "Yes, Senor Tomaso." "It must be costly shipping." "So it is," sighed Don Luis, "and yet the ore is rich enough to bear easily the cost of shipping." "In what direction is the smelter?"
Dunstan was pointing to what he saw; so Gilbert looked, too, and he perceived a gleaming, very far off, that moved slowly on the white road beside the shining river. "They are expecting a fight to-day," said Gilbert, "for they are in mail and their mule-train is behind them."
They were short of literature, by the way a party such as ours always needs books and as Kermit's reading-matter consisted chiefly of Camoens and other Portuguese, or else Brazilian, writers, I strove to supply the deficiency with spare volumes of Gibbon. At the end of our march we were usually far ahead of the mule-train, and the rain was also usually falling.
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