Arthur O. Friel

“ Neither White nor Juana was with them.
They told their tale briefly to Juancito, who sat for a time looking solemnly at the edge of the forest. Then he spoke a few words. The five went to the house and put away their weapons, and the chief walked slowly away by himself, his face giving no sign of his thoughts.
“They have followed Juana and found her,” one of the men with me explained in Spanish. “She was with el blanco. The white man who now is black takes no rest by day. He goes on and on and does not stop. He seems not to know or care where he goes. She walks behind him. ”

“ They looked at my big black gun-muzzle, at the man gasping and writhing on the ground—some one had kicked him in the stomach, and he was struggling for breath—and broke away. I stood over him and roared at them.
“Mad!” I repeated. “You made him so. Now you try to kill him because he is what you made him. You are snakes! You are poisoners! Are you murderers too?” ”

“ I sat him down in his hammock and stood looking at him. In a dazed way I felt that this was why he had itched so badly last night; it was the change in his skin. And faintly I seemed to hear again the words spoken at the camp where we met the black Indians:
“In one day they had fever. In three days they turned black. They never can turn light again.”
I remembered, too, the things of which I had thought that night when I puzzled about the changed skins. And now, some how, I knew why this had been done to those men, and why it now was done to White ”

“ Man after man reeled and sprawled under the blows of those black fists. But other men surged in like maddened peccaries attacking a tigre. They yanked him backward, kicked his legs from under him, threw him down and swarmed on him. ”