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Updated: May 10, 2025
When I reached the door of it on the blank main street, he was sitting on a wooden bench in the hallway with a dozen old women and peons. We were admitted immediately after, as befitted our high social standing.
Hanbury, and after making him acquainted with my circumstances, he generously rendered me his assistance, paid my servants' wages that were in arrear, and kindly advanced what I thought sufficient to defray my expenses, having previously sent my peons back to Madras, and supplied me with fresh ones to proceed with me to Hydrabad.
When Harry put this question to the peons who remained with him he was laughed at good-naturedly and assured that, in the first place, there were no brigands in Peru, so far as they were aware; and, in the second place, that if perchance there were they would probably not have contented themselves with simply carrying off seven men, six of whom would be only an encumbrance to them, but would almost certainly have attacked and sacked the camp some time during the hours of daylight, when it was left comparatively unprotected.
There was always a peculiar stillness over all the scene. Groups of sandaled mine peons wound noiselessly away, a few rods apart, along undulating trails, the red of their sarapes and the yellow of their immense hats giving the predominating hue. In the vast landscape was much green, though more gray of outcropping rocks.
Some time elapsed before the mules were brought to the door. Our horses were led by halters; and, that they might be as unencumbered as possible, their saddles and bridles were carried on the backs of peons. Everything being ready, we started; the porters, with the loads on their backs, keeping up easily with the mules.
A surging mob of vacant and wondering peons, bearing a singular resemblance to the wild cattle and horses which intermingled with them in blind and unceasing movement across the Plaza and up the hilly street, and seemingly as incapable of self-government, were alternately dispersed and stampeded or allowed to gather again as occasion required.
Another rural came out of the bushes and when they turned over the body Kit saw a dark face and a long, thin knife clenched in a brown hand. He understood now that the blanket had been meant to entangle his arm or head; half-breed peons often carry a rolled-up blanket of good quality on their shoulder. "It is Gil Ortega," the rural remarked. "A good shot that will save us some trouble, comrade!"
Peons obsequiously lifted their hats when I passed, which they do not to a man afoot; a solemn stillness of rough-and-tumble mountains and valleys, with deep-shadowed little gorges scolloped out of the otherwise sun-flooded landscape, broad hedges of cactus and pitching paths, down which the animal picked its way with ease and assurance, alternated with mighty climbs over a dozen rises, each of which I fancied the last.
Here the horse finds it so hard to keep his feet, and is in such constant danger of falling, that at length the rider dismounts and, leaving the horse standing, presses forward as though anxious to get to the other side of the wood, his peons following and whispering eagerly together.
On another side of the quadrangle stood another long, low white building with a red-tiled roof; this held the kitchen and the living-rooms of the upper-grade peons, the headmen, the cook, and jaguar-hunters, with their families: dark-skinned men, their wives showing varied strains of white, Indian, and negro blood. The children tumbled merrily in the dust, and were fondly tended by their mothers.
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