first mail steamer was to begin a regular and rapid service, and it
would then only take a week to ascend the Amazon, on which it had
taken the giant raft so many months to drift. The important
commercial negotiations, ably managed by Benito, were carried through
under the best of conditions, and soon of what had formed this
jangada–that is to say, the huge raft of timber constructed from an
entire forest at Iquitos–there remained not a trace.
A month afterward the fazender, his wife, his son, Manoel and Minha
Valdez, Lina and Fragoso, departed by one of the Amazon steamers for
the immense establishment at Iquitos of which Benito was to take the
management.
Joam Dacosta re-entered his home with his head erect, and it was
indeed a family of happy hearts which he brought back with him from
beyond the Brazilian frontier. As for Fragoso, twenty times a day was
he heard to repeat, “What! without the liana?” and he wound up by
bestowing the name on the young mulatto who, by her affection for the
gallant fellow, fully justified its appropriateness. “If it were not
for the one letter,” he said, “would not Lina and Liana be the same?”