230 EXPLORING FOR CASTILLO A RUBBER 



Castilloa growing everywhere, and many a stiff climb Lucas gave us 

 before the choice growths were reached. Afterward he explained that 

 he took us only to the easy places, as from some where he went alone, 

 we would never have returned alive. Even up here I found stumps of 

 huge Castilloas that had been cut down to get all of the milk. The 

 largest trees then standing did not measure more than from sixteen 

 to eighteen inches in diameter, but there were many of them, and 

 thousands of a lesser size. 



Pressed later for a definite statement as to what he gathered daily 

 when rubber hunting, Lucas said that two years before six of them 

 had, in this region, in .seven days, gathered four hundred pounds of 

 dry rubber. As they never work Sundays, that would mean six days' 



CATTLE RANCH AT THE LLANOS. 



[Don Ramon in the Foreground.] 



work, that is, unless they loafed three of them, which is probable. For 

 an experiment, we sent out four men late one morning, who were back 

 by midday with fifteen and one-quarter pounds of milk that after coag- 

 ulation and drying made about eight pounds of rubber. As they nor- 

 mally get fifty cents a day, silver, equal to twenty-five cents, gold, that 

 was not a bad return. 



It is due to the man who first told how bees collected rubber latex 

 as well as the rubber itself, from the cuts in the trees, that he receive 

 apologies of all skeptics, for the story is true. I saw hundreds in all 

 parts of the peninsula, and they not only love rubber, but almost every- 

 thing else, and are a great nuisance in camp. What they do with the 



