Page:Hugh Pendexter--Tiberius Smith.djvu/211

 lated from his ancestral Incan tongue means "the Bug," I believe. He'll be our flute-voiced interpreter. Besides," and the old chap looked pesky self-sufficient, 'you know my simple mind is vaguely freckled with a knowledge of the Spanish jargon these unfettered children toy with. Why perturb, my boy? In a trice I'll deposit you on the Broad White Way with a thirty-three-week engagement to lunch on.'

"I insisted we didn't know a caoutchouc-tree from an isosceles triangle, and were intended by nature for the ten, twenty, thirty houses only, and that it would be but a pastime for some pellucid-eyed gazelle in a bark shirt to unload a grove of Southern pine on us.

"‘In these adulterated days,' he defended, 'no one knows the real article. If my stout stick rebounds when I chastise a tree, it's rubber. If it doesn't, we'll laugh derisively and pass on.'

"It was with this chaotic assortment of knowledge, sir, that we ultimately turned our narrow pagais into the little-known and shivery Beni, a short distance above Villa Bella, where the Bolivia boundary-line on the maps shades into a rich green.

"For several days Wogo had acted peevish. He had believed we were to eschew the Beni and run up to the Mamore missions. And when Tib insisted the real plums grew in the wildwood and ordered