98 OUR SEARCH FOR A WILDERNESS. 



Don Quixote and the Caracas newspapers and playing 

 dominos. 



They had provided themselves with elaborate costumes for 

 the role; they carried big revolvers and wore huge green and 

 white cork helmets, khaki riding clothes, puttees, spurs, and 

 carried riding whips. There was not a horse within iifty 

 miles! No horse, even had there been one, could penetrate 

 the tiny forest trails about Guanoco. 



In the dancing sunlight and shadows and the orchid- 

 fragrant air it was hard to picture spilt blood and intrigue and 

 treachery, and harder still to prophesy the sad times that were 

 to come upon Guanoco. Yet while we were there the air 

 teemed with revolutionary rumors. The Jcfe civil, as the 

 chief magistrate was called, was off day after day investiga- 

 ting first one suspicion and then another, returning utterly 

 spent with the exhaustion of unresting days and nights upon 

 the trail. Revolutionists had attempted to land guns on the 

 near-by coast. There had been a skirmish and several men 

 had been killed. 



All the available guns and ammunition were gotten together 

 and every night the doors were barred securely; for what the 

 revolutionists chiefly needed was money, and should there be 

 an uprising in northeastern Venezuela, the Pitch Lake head- 

 quarters would be the first point of attack. It was in charge 

 of Castro sympathizers, there might be large sums of money 

 in the Company's safe and it was practically unprotected. 



In the meantime diplomatic relations between our United 

 States and Venezuela had been severed and one morning a 

 United States battleship was discovered lying rpiietlv in the 

 harbor of La Guayra. The numbers of la Constitucional — 

 a month old when they reached us — were beginning to talk 

 of war and to boast of the ease with which Venezuela would 

 erase the United States of America from the face of the 

 globe. Bitter things were said about the sister republic in 



