OH, SHOOT! 



negro named Victor. He knows every reef 

 and key; he has traded with the Indians and 

 he speaks the language. I'll have him meet 

 you at Playa Damas. But pictures moving 

 pictures!" Wilcox was frankly doubtful. 

 "You may get some, and you may not. No- 

 body has ever even snapped them except by 

 stealth. They're shy, you know." 



I did know, or, at least, I had heard. I had 

 heard many things about the San Bias tribe, 

 even on an earlier trip to Panama, and what I 

 had learned at that time had so interested me 

 that I straightway wrote a San Bias story 

 and sold it. That which had particularly in- 

 trigued me was the statement that no white 

 man had ever slept on the San Bias shore, 

 that no San Bias woman had ever been to 

 Colon, and that the San Bias blood had never 

 been crossed. In reading the chronicles of 

 Padre Somebody-or-other, I learned that the 

 early Spanish explorers had found an amaz- 

 ingly industrious race of aborigines occupying 

 the Darien coast, and had reported the steep 

 slopes of the mountains, which there cling 

 close to the Caribbean, to be in a highly in- 

 tensified state of cultivation. I encountered, 

 also, an interesting account of a shipwrecked 



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