Murray Leinster

“ The jungle vanished save for the wall of the clearing, where leaves and occasionally the mottled trunk of a jungle tree were pricked out by the dull red flames. Small noises began in the jungle. Little, furtive creepings.
The canoe was unloaded. The small clearing about Juan’s hut was tacitly adopted as a camping place. The equipment of the three men was old and worn out. The hammocks were laced together with strips of untanned hide where they had ripped. Had they been Indians they would have been no worse provided. ”

“ But this was the voice of the dark man, the man with boots, and Juan trembled.
He hastened to kindle a fire and cook humbly, while that man watched him ominously. That one man frightened Juan more than any of the others. He was all too familiar a type; the type of certain saturnine, hard-bitten men who rove the backwaters of all the new countries of the world. They are not amiable persons, and they are not especially moral persons, but they obtain their desires in highly effective fashion from the natives of backward nations. ”

“ We’ve found the Inca’s emerald mines and we can’t pay for a dollar’s worth of grub! Can you beat it? We’re millionaires and we can’t pay—”
He rolled upon the sand while Juan stared, with stray articles of food in his hands. Thirteen-sixteenths of Araucanian blood do not sharpen a man’s sense of humor anyhow, and Juan quite simply classed these men as maniacs. The gray eyed Yanqui bubbled over with laughter likewise and pointed at Juan and gasped out:
“The s-solemn m-mummy! He—he don’t know what we’re talking about! He th-thinks we’re crazy!” ”

“ The red headed man’s tone was harsh, by that immutable law which fixes every man’s emotion upon his greatest desire. When hungry, emeralds did not matter. They were encouragement, yes; a means of forgetting starvation by providing dreams.
The man with the boots moved back a little into the shadows as the gray eyed Yanqui slowly unfastened the intricate wrappings of untanned hide and unfolded the stiff and stinking cover of that guarded parcel. ”

“ They had been beautiful boots once, and a man who is mostly Araucanian Indian looks upon boots as the distinguishing mark of the superior race. In Bogota, which is in Colombia, a gentleman is a man with a collar on. In Lima, there was a time when a gentleman was a man with a cane. But in the small jungle towns and the sierra of Peru, and most especially to a man who is more Indian than white, a gentleman—why, a gentleman is a man who wears shoes. ”

“ A very few drops indeed of the superior blood of the white man will make a vast change in an Araucanian Indian’s potentialities. Juan regarded his guests with new eyes, though his stolidity was unchanged. ”

“ Once, when the man with the boots moved behind him, Juan cringed as if expecting a kick, and his eyes were agonized. A man who is mostly Araucanian Indian can tell you stories which do not redound remarkably to the credit of the white races. ”