Jules Verne (28 page)

What a night it was for the passengers from the fazenda! Masters and
servants had been affected by the blow! Were not the servants of the
fazenda members of one family? Every one of them would watch over the
safety of Yaquita and her people! On the bank of the Rio Negro there
was a constant coming and going of the natives, evidently excited by
the arrest of Joam Dacosta, and who could say to what excesses these
half-barbarous men might be led?

The time, however, passed without any demonstration against the jangada.

On the morrow, the 26th of August, as soon as the sun rose, Manoel and
Fragoso, who had never left Benito for an instant during this terrible
night, attempted to distract his attention from his despair. After
taking him aside they made him understand that there was no time to be
lost—that they must make up their minds to act.

"Benito," said Manoel, "pull yourself together! Be a man again! Be a son
again!"

"My father!" exclaimed Benito. "I have killed him!"

"No!" replied Manoel. "With heaven's help it is possible that all may
not be lost!"

"Listen to us, Mr. Benito," said Fragoso.

The young man, passing his hand over his eyes, made a violent effort to
collect himself.

"Benito," continued Manoel, "Torres never gave a hint to put us on the
track of his past life. We therefore cannot tell who was the author of
the crime of Tijuco, or under what conditions it was committed. To try
in that direction is to lose our time."

"And time presses!" added Fragoso.

"Besides," said Manoel, "suppose we do find out who this companion
of Torres was, he is dead, and he could not testify in any way to the
innocence of Joam Dacosta. But it is none the less certain that the
proof of this innocence exists, and there is not room to doubt the
existence of a document which Torres was anxious to make the subject
of a bargain. He told us so himself. The document is a complete avowal
written in the handwriting of the culprit, which relates the attack in
its smallest details, and which clears our father! Yes! a hundred times,
yes! The document exists!"

"But Torres does not exist!" groaned Benito, "and the document has
perished with him!"

"Wait, and don't despair yet!" answered Manoel. "You remember under what
circumstances we made the acquaintance of Torres? It was in the depths
of the forest of Iquitos. He was in pursuit of a monkey which had stolen
a metal case, which it so strangely kept, and the chase had lasted a
couple of hours when the monkey fell to our guns. Now, do you think that
it was for the few pieces of gold contained in the case that Torres was
in such a fury to recover it? and do you not remember the extraordinary
satisfaction which he displayed when we gave him back the case which we
had taken out of the monkey's paw?"

"Yes! yes!" answered Benito. "This case which I held—which I gave back
to him! Perhaps it contained—"

"It is more than probable! It is certain!" replied Manoel.

"And I beg to add," said Fragoso, "for now the fact recurs to my memory,
that during the time you were at Ega I remained on board, at
Lina's advice, to keep an eye on Torres, and I saw him—yes, I saw
him—reading, and again reading, an old faded paper, and muttering words
which I could not understand."

"That was the document!" exclaimed Benito, who snatched at the hope—the
only one that was left. "But this document; had he not put it in some
place of security?"

"No," answered Manoel—"no; it was too precious for Torres to dream of
parting with it. He was bound to carry it always about with him, and
doubtless in that very case."

"Wait! wait, Manoel!" exclaimed Benito; "I remember—yes, I remember.
During the struggle, at the first blow I struck Torres in his chest, my
manchetta was stopped by some hard substance under his poncho, like a
plate of metal—"

"That was the case!" said Fragoso.

"Yes," replied Manoel; "doubt is impossible! That was the case; it was
in his breast-pocket."

"But the corpse of Torres?"

"We will recover it!"

"But the paper! The water will have stained it, perhaps destroyed it, or
rendered it undecipherable!"

"Why," answered Manoel, "if the metal case which held it was
water-tight?"

"Manoel," replied Benito, who seized on the last hope, "you are right!
The corpse of Torres must be recovered! We will ransack the whole of
this part of the river, if necessary, but we will recover it!"

The pilot Araujo was then summoned and informed of what they were going
to do.

"Good!" replied he; "I know all the eddies and currents where the Rio
Negro and the Amazon join, and we shall succeed in recovering the body.
Let us take two pirogues, two ubas, a dozen of our Indians, and make a
start."

Padre Passanha was then coming out of Yaquita's room.

Benito went to him, and in a few words told him what they were going to
do to get possession of the document. "Say nothing to my mother or my
sister," he added; "if this last hope fails it will kill them!"

"Go, my lad, go," replied Passanha, "and may God help you in your
search."

Five minutes afterward the four boats started from the raft. After
descending the Rio Negro they arrived near the bank of the Amazon, at
the very place where Torres, mortally wounded, had disappeared beneath
the waters of the stream.

THE SEARCH had to commence at once, and that for two weighty reasons.

The first of these was—and this was a question of life or death—that
this proof of Joam Dacosta's innocence must be produced before the
arrival of the order from Rio Janeiro. Once the identity of the prisoner
was established, it was impossible that such an order could be other
than the order for his execution.

The second was that the body of Torres should be got out of the water
as quickly as possible so as to regain undamaged the metal case and the
paper it ought to contain.

At this juncture Araujo displayed not only zeal and intelligence, but
also a perfect knowledge of the state of the river at its confluence
with the Rio Negro.

"If Torres," he said to the young men, "had been from the first carried
away by the current, we should have to drag the river throughout a
large area, for we shall have a good many days to wait for his body to
reappear on the surface through the effects of decomposition."

"We cannot do that," replied Manoel. "This very day we ought to
succeed."

"If, on the contrary," continued the pilot, "the corpse has got stuck
among the reeds and vegetation at the foot of the bank, we shall not be
an hour before we find it."

"To work, then!" answered Benito.

There was but one way of working. The boats approached the bank, and
the Indians, furnished with long poles, began to sound every part of the
river at the base of the bluff which had served for the scene of combat.

The place had been easily recognized. A track of blood stained the
declivity in its chalky part, and ran perpendicularly down it into the
water; and there many a clot scattered on the reeds indicated the very
spot where the corpse had disappeared.

About fifty feet down stream a point jutted out from the riverside and
kept back the waters in a kind of eddy, as in a large basin. There was
no current whatever near the shore, and the reeds shot up out of the
river unbent. Every hope then existed that Torres' body had not been
carried away by the main stream. Where the bed of the river showed
sufficient slope, it was perhaps possible for the corpse to have rolled
several feet along the ridge, and even there no effect of the current
could be traced.

The ubas and the pirogues, dividing the work among them, limited the
field of their researches to the extreme edge of the eddy, and from
the circumference to the center the crews' long poles left not a single
point unexplored. But no amount of sounding discovered the body of the
adventurer, neither among the clumps of reeds nor on the bottom of the
river, whose slope was then carefully examined.

Two hours after the work had begun they had been led to think that
the body, having probably struck against the declivity, had fallen off
obliquely and rolled beyond the limits of this eddy, where the action of
the current commenced to be felt.

"But that is no reason why we should despair," said Manoel, "still less
why we should give up our search."

"Will it be necessary," exclaimed Benito, "to search the river
throughout its breadth and its length?"

"Throughout its breadth, perhaps," answered Araujo, "throughout its
length, no—fortunately."

"And why?" asked Manoel.

"Because the Amazon, about a mile away from its junction with the Rio
Negro, makes a sudden bend, and at the same time its bed rises, so that
there is a kind of natural barrier, well known to sailors as the Bar of
Frias, which things floating near the surface are alone able to clear.
In short, the currents are ponded back, and they cannot possibly have
any effect over this depression."

This was fortunate, it must be admitted. But was Araujo mistaken? The
old pilot of the Amazon could be relied on. For the thirty years that he
had followed his profession the crossing of the Bar of Frias, where the
current was increased in force by its decrease in depth, had often given
him trouble. The narrowness of the channel and the elevation of the bed
made the passage exceedingly difficult, and many a raft had there come
to grief.

And so Araujo was right in declaring that if the corpse of Torres was
still retained by its weight on the sandy bed of the river, it could
not have been dragged over the bar. It is true that later on, when,
on account of the expansion of the gases, it would again rise to
the surface, the current would bear it away, and it would then be
irrevocably lost down the stream, a long way beyond the obstruction. But
this purely physical effect would not take place for several days.

They could not have applied to a man who was more skillful or more
conversant with the locality than Araujo, and when he affirmed that the
body could not have been borne out of the narrow channel for more than a
mile or so, they were sure to recover it if they thoroughly sounded that
portion of the river.

Not an island, not an islet, checked the course of the Amazon in these
parts. Hence, when the foot of the two banks had been visited up to the
bar, it was in the bed itself, about five hundred feet in width, that
more careful investigations had to be commenced.

The way the work was conducted was this. The boats taking the right and
left of the Amazon lay alongside the banks. The reeds and vegetation
were tried with the poles. Of the smallest ledges in the banks in
which a body could rest, not one escaped the scrutiny of Araujo and his
Indians.

But all this labor produced no result, and half the day had elapsed
without the body being brought to the surface of the stream.

An hour's rest was given to the Indians. During this time they partook
of some refreshment, and then they returned to their task.

Four of the boats, in charge of the pilot, Benito, Fragoso, and Manoel,
divided the river between the Rio Negro and the Bar of Frias into four
portions. They set to work to explore its very bed. In certain places
the poles proved insufficient to thoroughly search among the deeps, and
hence a few dredges—or rather harrows, made of stones and old iron,
bound round with a solid bar—were taken on board, and when the boats
had pushed off these rakes were thrown in and the river bottom stirred
up in every direction.

It was in this difficult task that Benito and his companions were
employed till the evening. The ubas and pirogues, worked by the oars,
traversed the whole surface of the river up to the bar of Frias.

There had been moments of excitement during this spell of work, when
the harrows, catching in something at the bottom, offered some slight
resistance. They were then hauled up, but in place of the body so
eagerly searched for, there would appear only heavy stones or tufts of
herbage which they had dragged from their sandy bed. No one, however,
had an idea of giving up the enterprise. They none of them thought of
themselves in this work of salvation. Benito, Manoel, Araujo had not
even to stir up the Indians or to encourage them. The gallant fellows
knew that they were working for the fazender of Iquitos—for the man
whom they loved, for the chief of the excellent family who treated their
servants so well.

Yes; and so they would have passed the night in dragging the river. Of
every minute lost all knew the value.

A little before the sun disappeared, Araujo, finding it useless to
continue his operations in the gloom, gave the signal for the boats to
join company and return together to the confluence of the Rio Negro and
regain the jangada.

The work so carefully and intelligently conducted was not, however, at
an end.

Manoel and Fragoso, as they came back, dared not mention their ill
success before Benito. They feared that the disappointment would only
force him to some act of despair.

But neither courage nor coolness deserted the young fellow; he was
determined to follow to the end this supreme effort to save the honor
and the life of his father, and he it was who addressed his companions,
and said: "To-morrow we will try again, and under better conditions if
possible."

"Yes," answered Manoel; "you are right, Benito. We can do better. We
cannot pretend to have entirely explored the river along the whole of
the banks and over the whole of its bed."

"No; we cannot have done that," replied Araujo; "and I maintain what I
said—that the body of Torres is there, and that it is there because it
has not been carried away, because it could not be drawn over the Bar of
Frias, and because it will take many days before it rises to the surface
and floats down the stream. Yes, it is there, and not a demijohn of
tafia will pass my lips until I find it!"