after the girl. As he reached the shales he saw
her far in the distance at the mouth of the trail. She turned, and
waved her hand to him. Then the dark trail swallowed her, and he saw
her no more.

For a moment he stood like a statue, striving with futile gaze to
penetrate that black opening in the dense bush that had engulfed his
very soul. His bloodshot eyes were wild. His lips fluttered. His hand
closed convulsively over the paper which the girl had left with him.
Mechanically he opened it and read:

"Dearest, dearest Padre, these four little Bible verses I leave
with you; and you will promise your little girl that you will
always live by them. Then your problem will be solved.

"1. Thou shall have no other gods before me.

"2. Love thy neighbor as thyself.

"3. Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in
heaven is perfect.

"4. Whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die.

"And, Padre, my dearest, dearest Padre, _God is everywhere_."

His hand fell. His brain reeled, and he swayed like a drunken man. He
turned about, muttering incoherently. Dona Maria stood behind him.
Tenderly taking his arm, she led him back to the forlorn little house.
Its ghastly emptiness smote him until his reason tottered. He sank
into a chair and gazed with dull, stony eyes out over the placid
lake, where the white beams of the rising sun were breaking into
myriad colors against the brume.

CHAPTER 37

The two hundred miles which lay before Rosendo and his little band
stretched their rugged, forbidding length through ragged canons,
rushing waters, and dank, virginal forest. Only the old man, as he
trudged along the worn trail between Simiti and the Inanea river,
where canoes waited to transport the travelers to the little village
of Boque, had any adequate conception of what the journey meant. Even
the _cargadores_ were unfamiliar with the region which they were to
penetrate. Some of them had been over the Guamoco trail as far as
Culata; a few had ascended the Boque river to its farthest navigable
point. But none had penetrated the inmost reaches of the great canon
through which the headwaters tumbled and roared, and none had ever
dreamed of making the passage over the great divide, the _Barra
Principal_, to the Tigui beyond.

To the Americans, fresh from the luxury and convention of city life,
and imbued with the indomitable Yankee spirit of adventure, the
prospect was absorbin