Free The Bridge in the Jungle by B. Traven

anything to know where that cow might be at this time of night.

12
    A boy called for Manuel. After a while Manuel came out of the dark and I went closer to hear what the boy wanted of him.
    'It isn't true at all, Manuel, that Carlos rode to Tlalcozautitlan,' the boy said. 'I know that Carlos and another boy have ridden to Pacheco, and they did not ride a horse, but just a burro.'
    'Did you see that? ' Manuel asked sceptically.
    'Sure, I saw it or I wouldn't be telling about it. Do you think me a liar, or what?'
    'Why didn't you tell it before?'
    'Simply, I didn't know that those two boys had told you Carlos had ridden to Tlalcozautitlan.'
    The Garcia heard his last words. She jumped up and ran over to us.
    Shaking the boy wildly by his shoulders, she cried: 'What did you say right now?'
    The boy repeated his tale and swore by all the saints that he had seen Carlos riding away with another boy on a burro and that they had taken the trail which leads to Pacheco.
    The Garcia let her head sink between her shoulders. Her whole body shrank. Her mouth was wide open and her eyes flickered like a madman's.
    The pump-master grasped her by the arm and shook her. He said: 'Now, don't you get excited over nothing Carmelita, please, calm down. Don't let your worry eat you up. Wait until your man is back from Tlalcozautitlan. There is nothing, absolutely nothing you can do until he has returned.'
    The woman said nothing. It was obvious she had heard not a word.
    One of the mule-drivers who were camping there said: 'I know the way to Pacheco. It's an awful trail by day and ten times worse at night. If you don't know it very well, you have no chance to return at night. Now, I say, if somebody will lend me a mule — a horse won't do — I'll ride over to Pacheco and look for the kid. Our mules are tired, they can't make it, not that trail, tired as they are.'
    A mule was offered immediately. When he mounted, a boy riding a burro came up and said that he wished to accompany him because he, too, knew the trail.
    'Have you guys enough matches?' the pump-master yelled after them. They would have to make torches to light them across difficult stretches on that hard trail.
    'We've plenty,' they shouted.
    The Garcia looked into the darkness into which those two had just disappeared. She dug her fingers into her hair and turned round to face again the pump-master's hut. The little shred of hope she had had for a few minutes, when everybody was so confident that the kid must be in Tlalcozautitlan, was gone entirely. Her hope was never very strong anyway. That certainty she had had the first minute she missed the boy seized her again. What nobody else under heaven could know, she, his mother, knew right away, that the boy was never coming back. Her heart and her instinct, that instinct of a primitive, of an Indian mother, told her the truth. Everybody else here might doubt, but she no longer doubted. In fact she had never doubted. She had only been playing so as to keep herself from going mad.
    And now, being certain, she became herself once more. The flickering disappeared from her eyes. She pulled herself together as if by a resolute decision. There was work to do now. She had to do something for her baby. She had to get busy. Whatever might have happened, she had to see her darling once more, once more she had to hold him in her arms, press him against her heart, and cover his sweet little face with kisses. She had to get him, even if she should have to drag him out of the clutches of hell. But she had to get what was left of him.
    With firm steps she hurried across the bridge back to her hut. One minute later she was crawling with a lantern in her hand among the shrubs along the opposite bank of the river. Now she disappeared deeper into the bush, now she returned to the bank. With the lantern dangling from her hand she stretched her arm over the river to light up the muddy water. She called her baby by the sweetest names she could think of or her