III (continued 2)

Men like O’Brien are called here, quite respectfully, “bad men,” and “land sailors.” The lawless lands of the South American republics—lawless in this sense, that their laws need be little reckoned by the daring, the strong, and the unscrupulous—seem particularly attractive to men of the O’Brien type. I got to like them. I found them, when once used to their feral minds, always entertaining, and often instructive, for their naïve opinions cut our conventions across the middle, showing the surprising insides. They dwell without bounds. As I have read somewhere, we do not think of the buffalo, which treats a continent as pasturage, as we do of the cow which kicks over the pail at milking time and jumps the yard fence. These men regard priest, magistrate and soldier with an indifference which is not even contemptible indifference. They are merely callous to the calculated effect of uniforms. When in luck, they are to be found in the cities, shy and a little miserable, having a good time. Their money gone, they set out on lonely journeys across this continent which show our fuss over authentic explorers to be a little overdone. O’Brien was such a man. He told me he had not slept under a roof for years. He had no home, he confessed to me once. Any place on the map was the same to him. He had spent his life drifting alone between Patagonia and Canada, looking for what he never found, if he knew what he was looking for. His travels were insignificant to him. He might have been a tramp talking of English highways. As he droned on one evening I began to doubt he was unaware that his was an extraordinary narrative. I guessed his unconcern must be an air. It would have been, in my case. I looked straight over at him, and he hesitated nervously, and stopped. Was he wasting my time, he asked? Prospecting for his illusion, his last journey was over the Peruvian Andes into Colombia. He broke an arm in a fall on the mountains, set it himself, and continued. On the Rio Japura an Indian shot an arrow through his leg, and O’Brien dropped in the long grass, breaking the arrow short each side of the limb, and in an ensuing long watchful duel presently shot the Indian through the throat. And then, coming out on the Amazon, his canoe overturned, and the pickle jar full of gold dust was lost. He put no emphasis on any particular, not even on the loss of his gold.

He was pointed out to me first as a singular fellow who kept doves; a tall, gaunt man, with a deliberate gait, perhaps fifty years of age, in old garments, long boots laced to the knees, and a battered pith helmet. He strolled along with his eyes cast down. If you met him abroad, and stopped him, he answered you with a few mumbles while looking away over your shoulder. His big mouth drew down a grizzled moustache cynically, and one of his front teeth was gold plated. Before he passed on he looked at you with the haughty but doubtful stare of an animal. He seemed too slow and dull to be combustible. I ceased to credit those tales of his berserker rage. He always moved in that deliberate way, as if he were careful, but bored. Or he stood before his doves, and made bubbling noises in his loose, stringy throat. He embarrassed me with a present of many of the trophies he had secured in years of travel in the wilds. One day a negro and O’Brien were in mild dispute on the jetty, and the negro called the white a Yankee. The river was twenty feet below swiftly carrying its logs. O’Brien took the big black, and with vicious ease threw him into the water. The negro missed the floating rubbish, and struck out for the bank. No one could help him. By good luck he managed to get to the waterside; yet O’Brien meanwhile had hurried his long legs over the ties of the skeleton structure, his face transfigured, and was waiting for the negro to emerge, a spade in his hand. But under other circumstances I have not the least doubt he would have fought the Brazilian army single-handed, and so finished, in defence of that same negro.