She pounded
corn in a mortar with a hardwood pestle, and made me another baking
of chipa, with which we further burdened the pack-horse, and away we
started again, with affectionate farewells and tears, towards the
unknown.
Next day we were joined by a traveller who was escaping to the
interior. He plainly declared himself as a murderer, and told us he
had shot one of the doctors in Asuncion. Through being well
connected, he had, after three weeks' detention in prison, been
liberated, as he boasted to us, con todo buen nombre y fama (with
good name and report). The relatives of the murdered man, however,
did not agree with this verdict, and sought his life. During the day
we shot an iguana, and after a meal from its fat tail our new
acquaintance, finding the pace too slow for his hasty flight, left
us, and I was not sorry. We met a string of bullock carts, each drawn
by six animals and having a spare one behind. The lumbering wagons
were on their way from the Paraguayan mate fields, and had a load of
over two thousand pounds each. Jolting over huge tree-trunks, or anon
sinking in a swamp, followed by swarms of gad-flies, the patient
animals wended their way.
Here and there one may see by the roadside a large wooden cross, with
a rudely carved wooden rooster on the top, while below it are the
nails, scourge, hammer, pincers and spear of gruesome crucifixion
memory.
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