forest, had reined in their horses near the stream, and had gazed for
the first time upon the jungle-grown solitude of the gorge. The head of
a palm rose here and there. In a high ravine round the corner of the
San Tome mountain (which is square like a blockhouse) the thread of a
slender waterfall flashed bright and glassy through the dark green of
the heavy fronds of tree-ferns. Don Pepe, in attendance, rode up, and,
stretching his arm up the gorge, had declared with mock solemnity,
"Behold the very paradise of snakes, senora."

And then they had wheeled their horses and ridden back to sleep that
night at Rincon. The alcalde--an old, skinny Moreno, a sergeant of
Guzman Bento's time--had cleared respectfully out of his house with his
three pretty daughters, to make room for the foreign senora and their
worships the Caballeros. All he asked Charles Gould (whom he took for a
mysterious and official person) to do for him was to remind the supreme
Government--El Gobierno supreme--of a pension (amounting to about a
dollar a month) to which he believed himself entitled. It had been
promised to him, he affirmed, straightening his bent back martially,
"many years ago, for my valour in the wars with the wild Indios when a
young man, senor."

The waterfall existed no longer. The tree-ferns that had luxuriated in
its spray had died around the dried-up pool, and the high ravine was
only a big trench half filled up with the refuse of excavations and
tailings. The torrent, dammed up above, sent its water rushing along
the open flumes of scooped tree trunks striding on trestle-legs to the
turbines working the stamps on the lower plateau--the mesa grande of the
San Tome mountain. Only the memory of the waterfall, with its amazing
fernery, like a hanging garden above the rocks of the gorge, was
preserved in Mrs. Gould's water-colour sketch; she had made it hastily