2 THE ANDES OF SOUTHERN PERU 



years. Yet lie had no fault to find with the religious system of 

 which he had once formed a part; in fact he had still a certain 

 curious mixed loyalty to it. Before I left he gave me a photo- 

 graph of himself and said with little pride and more sadness that 

 perhaps I would remember him as a man that had done some good 

 in the world along with much that might have been better. 



"We shall understand our interpreter better if we know who 

 his associates were. He lived with a Frenchman who had spent 

 several years in Africa as a soldier in the "Foreign Legion." If 

 you do not know what that means, you have yet all the pleasure 

 of an interesting discovery. The Frenchman had reached the sta- 

 tion the year before quite destitute and clad only in a shirt and 

 a pair of trousers. A day's journey north lived a young half- 

 breed — son of a drunken father and a Machiganga woman, who 

 cheated me so badly when I engaged Indian paddlers that I should 

 almost have preferred that he had robbed me. Yet in a sense he 

 had my life in his hands and I submitted. A German and a native 

 Peruvian ran a rubber station on a tributary two days' journey 

 from the first. It will be observed that the company was mixed. 

 They were all Peruvians, but of a sort not found in such relative 

 abundance elsewhere. The defeated and the outcast, as well as 

 the pioneer, go down eventually to the hot forested lands where 

 men are forgotten. 



While he saw gold in every square mile of his forested region, 

 my clerical friend saw misery also. The brutal treatment of the 

 Indians by the whites of the Madre de Dios country he could speak 

 of only as a man reviving a painful memory. The Indians at the 

 station loved him devotedly. There was only justice and kind- 

 ness in all his dealings. Because he had large interests to look 

 after, he knew all the members of the tribe, and his word was law 

 in no hackneyed sense. A kindlier man never lived in the rubber 

 forest. His influence as a high-souled man of business was vastly 

 greater than as a missionary in this frontier society. He could 

 daily illustrate by practical example what he had formerly been 

 able only to preach. 



He thought the life of the Peruvian cities debasing. The 



