Nothing detained the band longer at Sausipata.  The ten days of hunting, botanizing, butterfly-catching and sketching had been an agreeable relief, and young Aragon had assumed, with sufficient grace, the task of attentive host and first player on the charango.  The returning porters had scarcely enjoyed two hours of repose when the caravan took up its march once more.

As usual, the interpreters assumed the head of the command:  the Indians followed pellmell.  Observing that some of them lingered behind, Mr. Marcoy had the curiosity to return on his steps.  What was his surprise to find these honest fellows running furiously through the farm, and devastating with all their might those plantations which were the pride and the hope of the nephew of Aragon!  They had already laid low several cocoa groves, torn up the sugar-canes, broken down the bananas, and sliced off the green pineapples.

Indignant at such vandalism, Marcoy caught the first offender by the plaited tails at the back of the neck.  “What are you doing?” he cried.

“I am neither crazy nor drunk, Taytachay” (dear little father), calmly explained the peon with his placid smile.  “But my fellows and I don’t want to be sent any more to work at Sausipata.”  As the white man regarded him with stupefaction, “Thou art strange here,” pursued the Indian, “and canst know nothing about us.  Promise not to tell Aragon, and I will make thee wise.”

“Why Aragon more than anybody else?” asked Marcoy.

“Because Senor Aragon is nephew to Don Rebollido, the governor, and Sausipata belongs to Rebollido; and if he were to learn what we have done, we should be flogged and sent to prison to rot.”

The explanation, drawn out with many threats when the Indians had been driven from their work of ruin and placed once more in line of march, was curious.

The able gobernador of Marcapata had had the sagacious idea of making the local penitentiary out of his farm of Sausipata!  It was cultivated entirely by the labor of his culprits.  When culprits were scarce, the chicha-drinkers, the corner-loungers, became criminals and disturbers of the peace, for whom a sojourn at Sausipata was the obvious cure.  Aragon, the nephew, shared his uncle’s ability, and visited the plantation month by month.  But the life in this paradise was not relished by the convicts.  The regimen was strict, the food everywhere abounding, was not for them, and the vicinity of the wild Chunchos was not reassuring.  Often a peon would appear in the market-place of Marcapata wrapped merely in a banana leaf, which, cracking in the sun, reduced all pretence of decent covering to an irony.  This evidence of the spoliation of a Chuncho would be received in the worst possible part by the gobernador, who would beat the complainant back to his servitude, remarking with ingenuity that Providence was more responsible for the acts of the savages than he was.