Free Banco: The Further Adventures of Papillon by Henri Charrière Page A

as being in the bush and well armed. He has the feeling of being as much part of the landscape as the wild animals. He moves cautiously, but with unbounded self-confidence. He seems to be in the most natural of all possible elements, and all his senses are on the alert--hearing, sight and smell. His eyes dart perpetually from point to point, sizing up everything that moves. In the bush there is only one enemy that matters, the beast of beasts, the most intelligent, the cruelest, the wickedest, the greediest, the vilest and also the most wonderful--man.
    We traveled all that night, going fairly well. But in the morning, after we had drunk a little coffee from the Thermos flask, my whore of a mule started dragging its feet, dawdling along sometimes as much as a hundred yards behind Jojo. I stabbed its ass with all kinds of thorns, but nothing did any good. And to aggravate matters, Jojo started bawling out, “Why, you know nothing about riding, man. It’s easy enough. Watch me.” And he would just touch his creature with his heel and set off at a gallop. And he’d stand in his stirrups and bellow, “I’m Captain Cook,” or “Hey there, Sancho! Are you coming? Can’t you keep up with your master, Don Quixote?”
    This riled me, and I tried everything I could think of to make the mule get along. At last I hit on a terrific idea and right away it broke into a gallop. I’d dropped a lighted cigar-end into its ear. It tore along like a thoroughbred, and I rejoiced, full of glee; I even passed the Captain, waving as I went flashing by. But a mule is such a vicious brute the wild ride lasted only the length of the gallop. The animal rammed me up against a tree, nearly crushing my leg, and there I was on the ground, my ass filled with the prickles of some plant. And there was old Jojo, screeching with laughter like a child.
    I won’t tell the whole story of chasing the mule (two hours!), or of its kicking and farting and all the rest. But at last, out of breath, full of thorns, perishing with heat and weariness, I did manage to hoist myself onto the back of that cross-grained, obstinate bastard. This time it could go just as it chose: I was not going to be the one to cross it. The first mile I rode not sitting but lying on its back, with my ass in the air, trying to get the fiery thorns out of it.
    The next day we left the pigheaded brute at a posada , an inn. Then two days in a canoe, followed by a long day’s walk with packs on our back, brought us to the diamond mine.
    I dumped my load on the log table of an open-air eating house. I was at the end of my rope, and I could have strangled old Jojo--he stood there with no more than a few drops of sweat on his forehead, looking at me with a knowing grin. “Well, pal, and how are you feeling? Okay?”
    “Fine, fine! Is there any reason why I shouldn’t be feeling fine? But just you tell me this: why have you made me carry a shovel, a pickax and a sieve all day long when we aren’t going to do any digging at all?”
    J ojo put on a sorrowful air. “Papillon, you disappoint me. Use your noggin. If a guy turned up here, not carrying these tools, what would he have come for? That’s the question everybody would ask--all these eyes that watched you coming into the village through the holes in the wails and the tin roofs. With you loaded as you were, no questions. Do you get it?”
    “I get it, man.”
    “It’s the same for me, since I’m carrying nothing. Suppose I turn up with my hands in my pockets and I set up my table without doing anything else: what are the miners and their girls going to say, eh, Papi? This old French type is a professional gambler, that’s what they’re going to say. Well now, you’ll see what I’m going to do. If I can, I’ll try and find a secondhand motor pump here in the village; otherwise I’ll send for one. And twenty yards of big piping and two or three sluices. A sluice is a long wooden box with divisions, and these divisions have