Alves understood that he’d made a mistake, and turning green he muttered something and left. But Longhi in turn understood that the struggle was no more than begun and that Alves wouldn’t leave it at that.

And in fact six days later the expected catastrophe fell on the heads of Guaycurú and the inspector—our nocturnal traveler, that is, as all will have understood by now.

The climax came one morning near noon, and its incidental cause was the following: Among the innumerable laborers at the camp there was an Indian called Guaycurú, who as a child near death had been abandoned by his parents in the woods, and whom an old woodcutter from Corrientes had taken in and raised. At first the Indian—an excellent logger, by the way—had looked upon the new inspector with suspicion, which was perfectly understandable. Inspectors, as a rule, measure wood in such a manner that they always find a way of recording a lesser amount: instead of four meters, two and a half; rather than eighty square feet, fifty—and so on in the same vein. It’s useless for the lowly woodcutter to defend the inches that have cost him hours of agony, of heat, mosquitoes, and snakes in the back country; the inspector starts laughing or warns him that if he keeps on causing trouble he’ll be obliged to blow his brains out. The woodcutter lowers his head, hands over his lumber without a word, and so on till the next log. What can he do? Sometimes there are tragic attempts to settle the score, but the terror inspired by the boss is usually too great.

As one might expect, Longhi was too much of a man to lend himself to such thievery, all the more vile since its victim was a poor godforsaken laborer, of whose privations and harsh labors to earn a sack of fat or beans he was only too aware. So by the end of the second week he had won the affection of the peones—but in spite of themselves, since, accustomed as they were to the endless plunder and bad faith of the lumber inspectors, they thought that his fairness was merely apparent, concealing some kind of trick. Longhi recognized the legitimate suspicions of those hapless creatures, grieving for them from the bottom of his heart.

The Indian, especially, had always been the enduring victim of the inspectors. In the great helplessness of his race and humble condition, he had never been able to get credit for even half of his lumber. They always found that his beams were badly squared, or had wood-borers, or had been felled during a rainy period—always something bad for him. Mutely, the Indian would go back to his job, which hardly brought in enough to keep him from dying of hunger, and by now his stringent misery had lasted for twenty years.

So when the new inspector measured his lumber without robbing him of a centimeter, his surprise was without end. Like the other peones, he inevitably believed it was nothing but some sort of ruse, but when he delivered another log, and another and another, and saw them all measured fairly, in the dark soul of the savage the divine light of blind trust in another human being slowly began to shine.

And that wasn’t all. One afternoon as Longhi finished measuring his log and while the Indian was watching him, the inspector raised his eyes and saw that he was shivering, with his head sunk between his shoulders.

“What’s the matter?” he asked him. “The fever?”

“Yes,” replied the other laconically, looking away. In his gaze there was a cold, bitter sadness, that of a sick man disillusioned and as lonely as a stray dog.

“Why don’t you take quinine?”

The Indian didn’t answer.

“Don’t they have some in the store?”

“Yes,” murmured the Indian, “but it costs a fortune.”

“How much?”

The Indian said something in a low voice.

The inspector let out a cry of indignation.

“What a crime!” he exclaimed, looking at that human being fatefully condemned to be consumed in his fever, and feeling a tenderness for the poor pariah that came up from the very depths of his manly fortitude. He finally left, and Guaycurú watched him walk away with a look of painful irony.

“Like all the rest,” he muttered.

But the next day he had the surprise one might suppose when he saw the inspector arrive at his thatched lean-to, deep in the woods.

“Here you are,” he told him, holding out a large box. “Take two, an hour before the attack. There’s forty of them. If it doesn’t go away, let me know.”

The Indian took the box without looking at him, and without saying a word.

“See you tomorrow,” said the inspector simply as he drew away.

When he had already walked a hundred yards or so, he heard the noise of footsteps, and saw the Indian coming towards him. His brow was contracted as though he were in pain.

“I want to know what this costs,” he said in a muffled voice.

“It doesn’t cost anything,” the inspector replied.

The Indian knit his brow still more, examining his fingernails one by one.

“It’s not poison?” he muttered, looking at him out of the corner of his eye.

The inspector understood the whole sum of sufferings, injustices, and suspicions that had soured the logger’s soul to the point of making him question the simplest act of kindness.

“No, it’s not poison,” he answered gravely.

Seeing that the Indian kept his head down, he drew away again, but after a few steps felt his hand pressed hard against a mouth, and heard a voice broken by sobs saying:

“You’re a good man, boss, a good man.”

Longhi took his hand away, laughing to disguise the deep emotion he felt.

From that moment on, no loyalty and faith were greater than those of the Indian. The inspector was simply a god to him, the object of that absolute fidelity to be found only in the savage when he surrenders his elusive soul.

And this devotion to the inspector, added to the sympathies he inspired in the other peones, was the reason Alves found for avenging to the dregs the bitter bile Longhi had forced him to swallow. His hostility toward the inspector, which had begun with jealousy of the respect his workers had for him, burst into total flame when he found out how much Guaycurú loved him, and especially when he learned that Longhi didn’t rob his woodcutters. Of course the natural thing would seem to be that he summarily fire an employee who held down his profits; but, aside from the fact that what he paid Longhi was a lot less than usual, Alves simply wanted to take revenge.

So it came about that one afternoon the most trivial pretext added fuel to that venomous vengeance.

Alves was coming back from the port on horseback when he ran into Guaycurú. The boss reined in his mount.

“What are you doing at this hour dilly-dallying along the trail?” he reprimanded him.

“Nothing. I’m going to the store to get flour,” replied the Indian as he came to a stop, trembling with fear.

“Flour? Didn’t you get some on Saturday?”

“Yes, but it got wet on me.”

“It got wet on you! Damn your hide! Did you deliver lumber?”

“Yes.”

“How much?”

“One lapacho.”

“How much was that?”

“Twelve feet.”

Alves brought down his fist in a violent blow against the saddle-tree.

“Sure,” he said snidely, “twelve feet. Don’t let me catch you on the trail again, bandido!”

With his head still lower than before, the Indian murmured:

“I delivered wood on Saturday too . . .”

“What do I care about your Saturday and your wood? What I want is for you to work. Hear that? Come with me! Let’s go see your stupid log.”

They started out. Alves wasn’t talking, but his ignoble face remained constricted. When he arrived he dismounted and threw the reins violently to the ground, certain that there were a dozen people there who’d rush to pick up the reins of boss Alves, and went down to the dock with the Indian.

He looked over the log prepared by Guaycurú, and finally raised his head, staring at him with a gaze lit up by sullen fire, which announced a storm of wrath.

“And this is the wood you brought in?” he said, with a slight kick at the beam.

The intimidated Indian didn’t open his lips.

“Who accepted this wood?”

“Boss Longhi.”

“Around here there’s no boss but me, bandido!” cried Alves, turning red. “You hear? The only boss here is me, me! All the rest are a mess of bandits, all of them! You get that? All of them!”

This last was addressed to the laborers and other employees who were listening a short distance away. Such was the tyrannical control Alves held over his people that not one of them lifted his forehead.