The Project Gutenberg eBook of Boots

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Title: Boots

a story of the sierra of Peru

Author: Murray Leinster

Release date: January 12, 2025 [eBook #75096]

Language: English

Original publication: New York: The Butterick Publishing Company, 1929

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/75096

Credits: Roger Frank and Sue Clark

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BOOTS ***

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 75096 ***

BOOTS

A story of the Sierra of Peru

By MURRAY LEINSTER

It is doubtful whether Juan was moved to his act of high courage by fear, or whether it was covetousness—which is a sin—or whether it was merely the love of a woman. He did a most amazing thing for one of his breed, and the woman who may have inspired him was marvelous. It is a pity that her name is lost to posterity. And it is a pity that no one knows what motive actually stirred Juan. But the woman was really a miracle of femininity. She was almost half white.

Juan himself was thirteen-sixteenths Araucanian Indian, which as a description means more in Peru than here. He had a tiny clearing up a small jungle stream that nobody has bothered to give a name to, and from time to time he planted something, and from time to time he gathered his crop, and from time to time he fished. In between these activities he thought about the woman and toilsomely acquired as romantic and hopeless an infatuation as a man can acquire with such diluted Latin blood. Which may be important in explaining what he did.

He was fishing when three gringos came paddling down the jungle stream from the mountains, and from the beginning he knew that they were mad. Only madmen traveled with such energy. Only madmen beamed and smiled as did the gray eyed gringo, and only lunatics splashed their paddles hilariously and sang snatches of indecorous songs off key, like the red headed Yanqui in the bow. The third man gave no such obvious signs of madness, to be sure. His expression was composed and calm. But Juan looked at his eyes, and immediately thereafter Juan was thinking in panicky fashion of certain jungle trails that he knew, and that he could follow, but which no white man could ever unravel.

Long slanting shadows fell athwart the little stream and seemed to give the jungle an expression of sardonic calm; of a quietly malicious amusement which did not in the least detract from its luxuriantly leafy beauty. The jungle is beautiful always, but sometimes its beauty is welcoming, and sometimes its beauty is sinister and secretive. Its beauty just then was like the beauty of those gorgeously flowering vines which drape themselves languorously, caressingly, about the sturdy trees they are slowly murdering.

The canoe came up to the beach where Juan fished stolidly. It touched the shore, and Juan waited unblinkingly when the three white men disembarked and disclosed themselves as scarecrows, as tattered, ragged, nearly naked men whose only apparent claims to consideration were weapons in their belts and skins still lighter than Juan’s coppery hide. One of them wore boots.

It was the red headed man who grinned and made a totally incomprehensible demand.

“Hello, old scout! Trot out the feed bag. Bring on the pâté de foies gras and the duck canapé. You’ve got cash customers!”

The words were a jumble of harsh sounds to Juan, whose throat was attuned to the nearly impossible gutturals of Araucanian speech. Juan’s Spanish, even, was limited to the irreducible vocabulary needed for avoiding kicks.

He blinked stolidly as the red headed man went off into a fit of unreasonable laughter. He was afraid, of course. These men were white men, and they were mad, and Juan was internally in a panic. But he blinked at them without expression.

The Yanqui with gray eyes addressed him in Spanish. It was halting, stumbling Spanish, nearly as insufficient as Juan’s own. But Juan understood a word here and there. “Pez ... carne ... frijoles.” These were reasonable demands. He had none of them, but he could understand them, anyhow.

The man with the boots spoke in the unintelligible language these men used among themselves. He was subtly native to these wilds, as the others were subtly alien, and Juan feared him by instinct.

“He won’t have anything you asked for, Walker.” Juan heard the meaningless syllables in an anguished unease. “We’ll just have to do with what he’s got.”

Juan debated anxiously whether the sounds he had just heard referred to him, whether they indicated an intention to kill him. These were madmen...

The Yanqui with gray eyes chuckled suddenly.

“How’ll we pay him? We’ve no money, no shells, nor any tobacco. How’ll we pay him?”

Looking from one to the other, Juan felt momentarily reassured. He lumbered to his private larder. Yuca, and maize, and various roots. He began to grub among them while the red headed gringo laughed uproariously. He had to sit down on the beach and laugh. Juan stared stolidly at him as he slapped his knees.

“We can’t pay him!” he panted hilariously, rolling on his back to laugh at the graying sky. “We—can’t pay him. We’ve found the Inca’s emerald mines and we can’t pay for a dollar’s worth of grub! Can you beat it? We’re millionaires and we can’t pay—”

He rolled upon the sand while Juan stared, with stray articles of food in his hands. Thirteen-sixteenths of Araucanian blood do not sharpen a man’s sense of humor anyhow, and Juan quite simply classed these men as maniacs. The gray eyed Yanqui bubbled over with laughter likewise and pointed at Juan and gasped out:

“The s-solemn m-mummy! He—he don’t know what we’re talking about! He th-thinks we’re crazy!”

When the gray eyed man laughed at him, Juan did not think of the hysteria that comes of good fortune at last secure. Juan thought explicitly of madmen. They were unpleasant things to have about. It was frequently necessary to shoot them or do something else drastic to them, just in case they became violent. These men were assuredly insane. Ragged and emaciated and laughing while they rolled upon the beach ... It was not the babbling of fever. It was madness. And Juan thought wistfully of certain tortuous jungle paths it was dangerous to try to reach—while these white men had guns—and then he thought desperately of a long Araucanian bow in his shack behind him. Juan was nearly one-fourth Spanish, but he owned no gun. If he had ...

A voice spat an order at him. It was in Spanish, and only a fraction less comprehensible to Juan than the gibberish in which these gringos spoke to one another. But this was the voice of the dark man, the man with boots, and Juan trembled.

He hastened to kindle a fire and cook humbly, while that man watched him ominously. That one man frightened Juan more than any of the others. He was all too familiar a type; the type of certain saturnine, hard-bitten men who rove the backwaters of all the new countries of the world. They are not amiable persons, and they are not especially moral persons, but they obtain their desires in highly effective fashion from the natives of backward nations. Those same natives, as a rule, fear them a great deal more than whatever local devils there may be. And, as a rule, with much more reason.

The man with the boots watched Juan coldly while he cooked. Juan’s hands trembled a little. He sweated more than the heat would call for; at the same time he shivered. Once, when the man with the boots moved behind him, Juan cringed as if expecting a kick, and his eyes were agonized. A man who is mostly Araucanian Indian can tell you stories which do not redound remarkably to the credit of the white races.

With an exterior showing only the most impassive stolidity, Juan was nevertheless nearly a nervous wreck from pure terror when the food was cooked; yet all that the dark man had done was to look at him. But considering that Juan knew the man’s breed and dreaded them sane, and considering that he considered this man probably mad, Juan’s terror was as understandable as it was abject.

When they began to eat Juan was a quivering bundle of nerves beneath an appearance of Indian stolidity. He squatted down beside his hut because he was afraid to run away, and he waited in anguished terror for them to discuss the food.

But a slow amazement began to fill him. These men ate as if they were starving. They wolfed down the unappetizing mess he had brought out as his best. They fed themselves eagerly, hungrily, hugely. They grunted with satisfaction as they thrust huge chunks of tough and insipid roots into their mouths.

And Juan watched in bewilderment. He lived upon such victual in private, of course. But up this nameless little jungle stream it was not necessary to live up to his fraction of white blood. In San Teodoro De Los Angeles, naturally, Juan paraded his descent from hypothetical white men. In that metropolis of forty houses, Juan himself would scorn such food with a lofty scorn as befitting only Indios, and not worthy of a man in whose veins ran, however diluted, Spanish blood. But these men ate it without even cursing him for having nothing better.

Incredible doubts assailed him and slowly turned to convictions. Unthinkable thoughts occurred to him and became unassailable facts. And in Juan’s slow brain there formed comforting opinions. His fraction of white blood asserted itself for pride. The pride became the starting point for scorn. A very few drops indeed of the superior blood of the white man will make a vast change in an Araucanian Indian’s potentialities. Juan regarded his guests with new eyes, though his stolidity was unchanged.

These men were ragged and gaunt. Their shirts were in shreds and showed the sun scorched flesh beneath. In the case of the red headed man bones showed, sticking almost through the skin. Their trousers were ripped, were shredded to almost nothing below the knees. Two of the three men wore what were hardly more than sandals made from uncured hide.

It was at this moment, with his new formed scorn hot within him, that Juan first really noted the dark man’s boots. He had seen them before, but then he was an Indian and the gringos were white men. Now Juan thought of his own white blood, and the gringos ...

He regarded the boots for a long time. Then he went into his hut and found a jug of chicha. He drank of it, wiped his mouth and went out to look again.

The white men were still eating wolfishly. He could inspect the boots at ease. They had been beautiful boots once, and a man who is mostly Araucanian Indian looks upon boots as the distinguishing mark of the superior race. In Bogota, which is in Colombia, a gentleman is a man with a collar on. In Lima, there was a time when a gentleman was a man with a cane. But in the small jungle towns and the sierra of Peru, and most especially to a man who is more Indian than white, a gentleman—why, a gentleman is a man who wears shoes.

Juan looked at the boots unwinkingly for probably ten minutes. Then he went in and took another drink of chicha.

Juan, of course, was in love. And in love all men are alike. They desire to shine in the eyes of the woman they temporarily worship. And the woman of Juan’s desire was a marvelous woman. She was unquestionably the belle of San Teodoro De Los Angeles, which contained forty houses and was the largest town Juan had ever seen. A miracle of femininity. She was almost half white.

The boots stirred when the three men had stuffed themselves to bursting. Juan remained squatting by his hut. He was still stolid, still absolutely impassive as far as appearance went. But it was not at all the same Juan who thought his own thoughts while the white men spoke in the language that was only a babble to him.

“D’you suppose we can get enough grub from him to see us through?”

The voice was the voice of the red headed gringo.

“Only one more day’s travel down this stream,” said the man with the boots. “Then we can get all we want at San Teodoro.”

His tone was curt. It would have made Juan shiver, ten minutes before. Now his eyes shifted to the red headed man as he spoke again.

“But how will we pay him?”

With food in their bellies, the exaltation of spirits the white men had displayed had now gone curiously flat. “We haven’t a damned thing he’d want. Of course an emerald—”

The man with the boots laughed. It was more like a bark.

“He wouldn’t know what it was.”

Juan returned his gaze to the boots. He ignored the uncouth sounds issuing from the lips of the white men. Wearing such boots as these, he would be envied. Even Pedro, though he boasted a Spanish surname and was full three-eighths white, possessed no such footgear. And he would be admired by all the women. The economic factor in feminine admiration bulks large in every climate.

The white men talked, and Juan heard the syllables, the combinations of consonant and vowel sounds, but they meant nothing. He looked at the boots.

“With a belly full,” said the red headed man, “I can think. And I tell you, it looks good. What d’you think we’ve got there? How much cash?”

The booted man shrugged.

“No use guessing,” he said curtly. “Plenty.”

“It was a cache,” said the red headed man wisely. “We hit on the place where they stored ’em. We got the product of the mine for a couple of months, maybe. All ready to send down when old Pizarro seized the Inca and orders went out to cover all workings.”

The dark man stood up suddenly. He flung a word over his shoulder.

“Smokes.”

He advanced toward Juan. And Juan raised his eyes from the boots, and they traveled up the dark man’s ragged, dilapidated costume, and they penetrated the innumerable rents and tears—the white man’s clothes were even worse than Juan’s—and Juan’s eyes were not at all humble when they reached the white man’s face.

Juan veiled his eyes and sat stolidly still when the white man went into the hut. He remained motionless when the white man came out bearing a handful of Juan’s precious native-made cigarros and the jug of chicha from which Juan had just drunk twice.

And he watched while the three white men lighted his cigarros and smoked with avid enjoyment, and while they drank his chicha with the intense pleasure of men who have been deprived of the luxury of any stimulant whatever for a very long time. In every gesture, in every sign, they acted like beggars suddenly possessed of plenty. Even the man with the boots was smoking with a fierce satisfaction.

“Ah!” said the red headed man, “this is something like comfort!”

The gray eyed Yanqui smiled a little.

“You forget,” he said dryly. “I’ve heard you swear no decent cigar could be had under half a dollar. What would this sell for?”

“I said it,” said the red head, “and I’ll never smoke another one under a dollar! We’ve earned some luxury now!”

Darkness was settling down. The man with the boots was gazing somberly at the end of his cigar. His features were curiously harsh in the flickering light of the fire Juan had made.

The gray eyed man arose.

“Get in some wood,” he said briefly. “It won’t take long.”

Juan remained squatted, unnoticed in the shadow of his hut, while the two white men brought in wood. It did not take long. The red headed man sang while he tugged his burden back. The gray eyed gringo came into the firelight loaded down and smiling. The dark man’s face was as harsh and as hard as if carved from granite. He stared at his cigar until the wood went down with a crash. He jumped, then, and Juan noted that his eyes were burning.

Darkness fell silently and very suddenly. There was still no breath of wind. The night was hot and humid, as the day had been one of stifling heat. The stream contracted to a little space of smooth and oily water, illuminated by the camp-fire. The jungle vanished save for the wall of the clearing, where leaves and occasionally the mottled trunk of a jungle tree were pricked out by the dull red flames. Small noises began in the jungle. Little, furtive creepings.

The canoe was unloaded. The small clearing about Juan’s hut was tacitly adopted as a camping place. The equipment of the three men was old and worn out. The hammocks were laced together with strips of untanned hide where they had ripped. Had they been Indians they would have been no worse provided. One single package from the canoe alone was carefully wrapped and anxiously watched by all three until safely deposited in their midst.

Juan was lost in the darkness. He was motionless, he was silent—and he was eventually forgotten. Now and then fugitive gleams from the small camp-fire glinted on his eyes. But the thoughts behind the bronze mask of his face were strange thoughts for one of his breed. The white men had eaten of his food without cursing its quality. They had smoked his cigars with a passionate pleasure. They had brought in their own firewood—white men!—while an Indian was nearby idle.

An Indian ... But he, Juan, was part white himself. His skin was dark, it was true, and no white man had admitted parental interest in the past two generations of his forbears. But boastful myths concerning imaginary forefathers recurred to him. A putative ancestor had been great among the white men, a jéfe, no less. A greater man, probably, than these. Certainly a greater man. He would have worn shoes every day and other white men would have called him señor. Yes. Certainly. And these were madmen, no less, and beggarly madmen at that, and it was not fitting that the descendant of a white man whom other white men had called señor should go barefoot while madmen wore boots ...

“We’ll take our evening look,” said the red headed man. His voice was strained. And Juan, observing, found the words a mere jumble of sounds or else he might have realized that the hilarity with which these three men had come paddling down the river was a protective hilarity, a constant dwelling upon good fortune for the forgetting of hunger. There was certainly no hilarity in the voices now. The red headed man’s tone was harsh, by that immutable law which fixes every man’s emotion upon his greatest desire. When hungry, emeralds did not matter. They were encouragement, yes; a means of forgetting starvation by providing dreams.

The man with the boots moved back a little into the shadows as the gray eyed Yanqui slowly unfastened the intricate wrappings of untanned hide and unfolded the stiff and stinking cover of that guarded parcel. Other wrappings were inside the first. Juan, squatting motionless in the deepest shadows and quite forgotten, saw the faces of the two men stiffen and grow tense. The face of the third man was invisible.

Juan caught a glimpse of greenish pebbles in the firelight. The men regarded them with hypnotic attention, with a feverish intensity. As one of them moved, Juan saw the pebbles more clearly. Dull, uninteresting small stones. Colored, to be sure—but uncut emeralds are not articles of surpassing beauty. Even by the handful they are not impressive.

The still and silent figure in the shadows found scorn increasing. Juan’s impression of these men’s madness now was certified. The men were staring at the stones in utter silence. The gray eyed Yanqui began to speak monotonous, meaningless words—

“One, two, three, four, five ...”

His voice went on, while the sodden heat of a breezeless jungle night made sweat pour out on a man’s flesh, and while stars glowed luridly overhead, and while dancing moths and night flies from the jungle flittered drunkenly in the ruddy light of the camp-fire before they plunged crazily down into its coals.

Small, slithering sounds in the jungle. Small, furtive lappings from the stream. Tiny, crackling sounds from the fire. The monotonous, rhythmic murmur of a man counting tediously in the stillness. That was all.

The dark man’s face was hidden, but his boots were limned clearly in the firelight. Juan’s motionless figure was in a position where his eyes could remain fixed upon them. But visions were flitting through his brain. Of himself, in the metropolis of San Teodoro De Los Angeles. As he would be, wearing those boots. Haughty. Condescending. And there was that woman who was the acknowledged belle of San Teodoro.

The counting came to an end after a long, long time. There was stillness. Then the voice of the red headed man—

“We’re rich men!”

Slowly, painstakingly, the Yanqui with gray eyes was replacing the dull green pebbles in their malodorous packet.

“Yes, we’re all rich men,” he said quietly.

“I wonder,” said the red headed gringo harshly, “if you’re thinking that if they didn’t have to be divided, one of us would be richer.”

The man with gray eyes looked steadily across the firelight.

“I’ve thought of it,” he said evenly. “Of course. But don’t be an ass. We’ve only got another day’s paddling, and we’ll be out in the main stream. Then we’ll be safe from the jungle and temptation together—if it’s a temptation to you.”

The red headed man swore irritably, as if ashamed.

“It hasn’t been, until just this minute. And it won’t be again.” He stopped, and said suddenly, “I’ll tell you something. Back up in the mountains we were all nearly crazy. You know it. And I got to thinking about Norma. She’s waiting for you. She’s going to marry you when you get back.”

The other man nodded.

“I was crazy, I guess. I figured that if you died, back up there, I’d have a chance to win her myself when I got out. I got out of my hammock to kill you ... And that was the night that damned jaguar chased us out into the middle of the river and kept us there till daybreak. He saved your life.”

The other Yanqui shrugged and bent again to his wrapping.

“You see what a fool I am,” said the red headed man savagely. “I’m sorry. Do you want me to let you keep my gun?”

The wrappings were nearly complete about the dull green stones. The gray eyed man shrugged.

“Don’t be a fool. You’re cured.” He smiled suddenly. “There’s not a shell among the three of us, anyway.”

He put the package carefully down. He stood up and stretched and climbed unconcernedly in his hammock, slung only a few inches from the ground.

“Go to sleep,” he said dryly. “We’re all fools.”

He was still. The red headed man sat staring into the fire for minutes. Then he, too, stood up. But he stared down at the wrapped and laced package of uncured hides. He frowned. The frown became a scowl. Suddenly he kicked the package and growled inarticulately. Within thirty seconds thereafter he was in his hammock. But tossings that continued for a long time showed that it was not easy for him to sleep.

Juan squatted in the darkness. The flickering firelight fitfully glinted red upon his eyes. They moved from time to time, as he gazed alternately from the tossing hammock to the hide wrapped bundle, and from the bundle to the boots. Juan was wholly scornful now, and his three-sixteenths of Spanish blood was wholly in the ascendant. These men were plainly mad. They made much ado over small green pebbles not even bright enough to be used for beads. They made a long recitative over them in a monotonous voice. They rewrapped the green pebbles, and one then kicked the package. Madness. Pure madness!

A burned-through stick collapsed and sent up a slender fountain of sparks. The dark man had been silent, had been as motionless as Juan himself. Yet Juan had seen his eyes darting from one to the other of his companions. He remained motionless now, but his eyes moved from one hammock to the other, and then to the wrapped hide package on the floor.

The stillness was so complete that a sudden snore caused even Juan to start a little. That snore came from the hammock of the gray eyed man. And Juan saw the dark man rise slowly. Juan saw his face clearly, and it was the face of a devil. He saw the long hands work strangely, saw them go to the revolver in his holster, saw them drop away again. And the Indian in Juan felt death in the air.

The jungle may have found the next few moments subtly humorous to watch. As the dark man reached his full height, Juan moved very quietly. As the dark man moved soundlessly toward the hammock in which the wakeful man lay, Juan began to crawl with infinite stealth into his hut. He vanished within its doorway as a startled voice said—

“What’s the matter?”

And Juan was feeling his way very delicately about the abysmal blackness of the hut when the man outside hissed sibilantly for silence. No one knows, of course, just why Juan first looked for and found a second jug of chicha from which he took an encouraging draught. It may have been that Juan was afraid, or it may be that he was covetous, or it is of course possible that he was merely in love with a woman. Chicha, however, is helpful in all three of those emotions.

He looked out of the doorway and saw the dark man close by the hammock of the red headed gringo. He was talking in an urgent low tone. Tumbled, incomprehensible syllables reached Juan’s ears. And Juan could see the dark man’s face as demoniacal in the fire glow.

“Listen to me,” he was saying softly. “Last night, Walker proposed that we should kill you and divide the emeralds two ways instead of three.”

Juan felt the chicha begin to warm his inwards. He felt for and found another possession of his, in the hut.

“I pretended to fall in with him.”

The sounds meant nothing, but Juan could see the dark man whispering when he looked out of the hut again. His head was close to that of the man in the hammock. Juan could not see the expression of the red headed man. He could not see a look of horror and unbelief changing slowly to one of dawning suspicion.

“We were to play with you until tomorrow,” the whisper went on, while Juan did certain things which were only possible by virtue of a dash of Spanish blood. “That was so you’d help paddle the last stretch. And tomorrow night—”

While the red headed Yanqui listened, staring, the lean fingers of the dark man darted out. There was a little sound—not enough to waken a sleeping man no more than two yards away. And then a horrible, silent, struggle began. The dark man bent over the hammock like some monstrous vulture. His hands were closed about the throat of the man with red hair, who fought frenziedly in the toils of his hampering hammock to tear away the grip that shut off his breath. There was no sound at all except the ghastly rustling of the hammock cloth. Juan deliberately waited as the struggles slackened, as the writhings of the red headed man became less. After all, these men were madmen ... And the cause of Juan’s calmness may have been chicha and the motive for his action may have been love of a woman, or covetousness, or it may have been pure fear. But Juan had fitted a long arrow to the string of the tall Araucanian bow in his hands. Standing in the darkness, he drew that arrow to his ear. He released it.

And then everything was very quiet.

Dawn was breaking as the gray eyed Yanqui woke. He tumbled out of his hammock. He stared about him. He stiffened and looked about in what was almost terror. He plunged through the ashes of a dead camp-fire toward his companions.

The red headed man was breathing. A little. A very little. The gray eyed man brought him slowly back to life. For the dark man, of course, nothing could be done. An arrow stuck out a foot beyond his back.

The red headed man could not talk, because of his swollen throat, but by gestures he told what he knew. It was only then that the gray eyed gringo looked for the packet of emeralds. Juan had opened that package, and he had fingered the stones, and he had flung them contemptuously aside. Juan, you see, was not a madman. Juan was gone. And so were the dark man’s boots.

“M-my God!” said the gray eyed Yanqui shakenly. “M-my God! You’d have killed me for a girl, and—he’d have killed both of us for the emeralds—and—and that damned Indian killed him for his boots!”

Which, somehow, seems to point a moral of some sort. But it is elusive.

Transcriber’s Note: This story appeared in the August 15, 1929 issue of Adventure magazine.

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