o firearms--neither gun nor revolver. In his belt only one of those
weapons, more sword than hunting-knife, called a _"manchetta,"_ and
in addition he had an _"enchada,"_ which is a sort of hoe, specially
employed in the pursuit of the tatous and agoutis which abound in the
forests of the Upper Amazon, where there is generally little to fear
from wild beasts.

On the 4th of May, 1852, it happened, then, that our adventurer was
deeply absorbed in the reading of the document on which his eyes
were fixed, and, accustomed as he was to live in the forests of South
America, he was perfectly indifferent to their splendors. Nothing could
distract his attention; neither the constant cry of the howling monkeys,
which St. Hillaire has graphically compared to the ax of the woodman as
he strikes the branches of the trees, nor the sharp jingle of the rings
of the rattlesnake (not an aggressive reptile, it is true, but one of
the most venomous); neither the bawling voice of the horned toad, the
most hideous of its kind, nor even the solemn and sonorous croak of
the bellowing frog, which, though it cannot equal the bull in size, can
surpass him in noise.

Torres heard nothing of all these sounds, which form, as it were, the
complex voice of the forests of the New World. Reclining at the foot
of a magnificent tree, he did not even admire the lofty boughs of that
_"pao ferro,"_ or iron wood, with its somber bark, hard as the metal
which it replaces in the weapon and utensil of the Indian savage. No.
Lost in thought, the captain of the woods turned the curious paper again
and again between his fingers. With the cipher, of which he had the
secret, he assigned to each letter its true value. He read, he verified
the sense of those lines, unintelligible to all but him, and then he
smiled--and a most unpleasant smile it was.

Then he murmured some phrases in an undertone which none in the solitude
of the Peruvian forests could hear, and which no one, had he been
anywhere else, would have heard.

"Yes," said he, at length, "here are a hundred lines very neatly
written, which, for some one that I know, have an importance that is
undoubted. That somebody is rich. It is a question of life or death
for him, and looked at in every way it will cost him something." And,
scrutinizing the paper with greedy eyes, "At a conto (1) only for each
word of this last sentence it will amount to a considerable sum, and it
is this sentence which fixes the pric