we came to
moorings. He would be going on under the stars, full of unquenchable
hope, stumbling on the bones of kings. He would be wading across bogs,
through rivers and swamps, through unutterable and deathly places,
singing some songs, and thinking of the golden city. He was a pilgrim,
a poet, a person to reverence. And if he got there, if he found El
Dorado--but that was absurd. I thought of him sadly, with the feeling
that he had learned how to live, and that he would die by applying his
knowledge. I wondered how he would die. He would be alone there, in
the tangle, stumbling across creepers. The poisoned blow-pipe, from
the long, polished blow-pipe, such as I had seen in the museums. He
would fall on his face, among the jungle. Then the silent Indian would
hack off his head with a flint, and pickle it for the Lima markets. He
would never get to the Caqueta. Or perhaps he would be caught in an
electric storm, an aire, as they call them, and be stricken down among
the hills on his way to Chito. More probably he would die of hunger or
thirst, as so many had died before him. I remembered a cowboy whom I
had found under a thorn bush in the Argentine. Paul Bac would be like
that cowboy; he would run short of water, and kill his horse for the
blood, and then go mad and die.

I was in my bunk when he went ashore at Payta, but a fellow in the
other watch told me how he left the ship. There was a discussion in
the forecastle that night as to the way the heads were prepared. Some
said it was sand; some said it was the leaf of the puro bush; one or
two held out for a mixture of pepper and nitrate. One man speculated
as to the probable price the head would fetch; and the general vote was
for two pounds, or two pounds ten. "It wouldn't give me no pleasure,"
said one of us, "to have that ginger-nob in my chest." "Nor me, it
wouldn't," said another; "I draw the line at having a corpse on my
tobacker." "And I do," said several. Clearly the Frenchman was
destined for a town museum.

It was more than a year after that I heard of the end of the El Dorado
hunter. I was in New York when I heard it, serving behind the bar of a
saloon. One evening, as I was mixing cocktails, I heard myself hailed
by a customer; and there was Billy Neeld, one of our quartermasters,
just come ashore from an Atlantic Transport boat. We had a drink
together, and yarned of old times. The names of our old shipmates were
like incanta