Alves.”

The Brazilian, in terror, fell to his knees.

“Perdón, perdón!” he shouted.

“Just that is what Guaycurú asked from you.”

“I won’t do it anymore!”

Longhi smiled imperceptibly.

“Guaycurú,” he said to the Indian, “come near so he can get a good look at your face.”

But Alves leaped to his feet.

“Bandits!” he yelled. “I’m not dead yet! I don’t care a damn about the Indian! And this is for the robber of my lumber!”

And quickly grabbing his revolver, which he had unconsciously returned to its holster, he fired it at Longhi. His aim, thrown off by his haste, failed to score.

“Sr. Alves,” said Longhi in a trembling voice, “get in the middle of the trail.”

There was such indignation and strangely unshakable will in the voice of Longhi that Alves obeyed like an automaton.

And in a second he was thrown to the ground. The lioness, at a signal from Longhi, had leaped and fallen on him, and was holding him down with her powerful claws. Longhi, with his hands in his pockets, came up and stopped beside him.

“It’s killing me, it’s killing me!” wailed Alves.

“Not yet,” answered Longhi calmly. “In a quarter of an hour.”

In that quarter-hour, under the claws of the motionless beast, whose doleful eyes, fixed on his own a few inches away, were driving him crazy, Alves lived an eternity of terror.

“There’s a minute left,” said Longhi.

Alves, hoarse, could yell no more.

“Ten seconds left,” said the same unyielding voice.

In each of his final seconds, Alves paid back every scrap of what he owed for his thirty years of plunder. Suddenly Longhi gave the lioness an imperceptible pat on the back, and breaking the silence there spread down the trail, cold and white with moonlight, the crunching noise of Alves’ head, which had just been split between the teeth of the lioness.

With a new palm-stroke the animal gave up her prey, still growling. Longhi, unmoving, stared at Alves’ corpse for a while, and then with a sigh moved off. Guaycurú and the lioness went with him.

On the bluff above the river, Longhi and Guaycurú waited for the steamboat to come. When the smoke from one of its stacks was visible in the distance, Longhi went into the woods and tethered his lioness. What did he say to her? Was there any troubled tenderness he hadn’t felt upon leaving his animal, whose life, tightly fettered to his own for five months, he’d just sealed to his life with blood?

When he came out of the woods his face was drawn. The steamboat was coming now, and Longhi waved for it to stop. The scow came moving in and Longhi got ready to get on.

“Good-bye, boss . . . ,” said Guaycurú in a hoarse voice, lowering his eyes.

But Longhi, deeply moved, embraced him warmly. From here on they’d never see each other again. He got aboard. A moment later he reached the steamboat and it continued downstream.

Longhi kept his eyes fixed on the shore, where the Indian stood mute and desperate, till the distance erased his image. Then, as the steamer went down the river, leaning on the rail and looking at the dismal jungle, he relived all the anguish of those final months in which he’d left behind so many hopes that now he’d never retrieve: a dark and faithful friend, and a puma who, hoarse by now, roared desperately after the master who was deserting her.

The Contract Laborers

Logging-camp workers Cayetano Maidana and Esteban Podeley were returning to Posadas with fifteen comrades on the riverboat Sílex. Podeley, a woodcutter, was coming back after nine months, his contract fulfilled, and thus with his passage free. Cayé, a laborer, was arriving in the same circumstances, but after a year and a half, the time he had needed to work off his debt.

Skinny, disheveled, in short pants, their shirts torn in long slashes, barefoot like most of the others and dirty like all of them, the two mensús devoured with their eyes the capital of the woods, Jerusalem and Golgotha of their lives. Nine months up there! A year and a half! But they were coming back at last, and the still painful axe-blow of life in the logging camp was barely the graze of a wood-chip in view of the grand delights they could smell in the city.

Of a hundred peones, only two get to Posadas with any money. For that one week of bliss to which they are swept downstream by the river, they count on the advance on a new contract. Waiting on the beach, as collaborators and intermediaries, is a group of girls, joyous by disposition and profession, at the sight of whom the thirsty laborers let out their ¡ahijú! of urgent lunacy.

Cayé and Podeley got off the boat reeling with the foretaste of orgy and, surrounded by three or four girls, in a moment found themselves in the presence of more than enough rum to satisfy a worker’s longing for that potent beverage.

A little while later they were drunk and signed to new contracts. For what kind of work? Where? They didn’t know, and didn’t care either. They did know that each had forty pesos in his pocket and the right to spend much more than that. Docile and awkward, drooling with relief and alcoholic bliss, they both followed the girls to shop for clothes. The shrewd maidens led them to a place where they had a special arrangement for a certain percentage, or perhaps to the store of the very company that had contracted them. But in one or the other the girls renewed the extravagance of their glad-rags, nested their heads full of combs, strangled themselves with ribbons—all of it stolen as coolly as can be from their royally drunk companions, for the only thing a mensú can really call his own is a drastic detachment from his money.

For his part, Cayé bought many more extracts and lotions and oils than necessary to perfume his new clothes to the point of nausea, while Podeley, more sensible, opted for a flannel suit. Possibly they paid an inflated bill, only half understood, and backed by a fistful of papers thrown on the counter. But anyhow, an hour later they were flinging their brand-new selves into an open carriage, wearing boots, ponchos over their shoulders (and .44 revolvers in their belts, of course), their clothing stuffed with cigarettes that they clumsily tore apart between their teeth, and the tip of a colored handkerchief hanging from every pocket.