his expulsion?”
“He threatened to denounce Joam Garral as being Joam Dacosta, if he
declined to purchase his silence.”
“And at what price?”
“At the price of his daughter’s hand!” answered Manoel
unhesitatingly, but pale with anger.
“The scoundrel dared to do that!” exclaimed Benito.
“To this infamous request, Benito, you saw the reply that your father
gave.”
“Yes, Manoel, yes! The indignant reply of an honest man. He kicked
Torres off the raft. But it is not enough to have kicked him out. No!
That will not do for me. It was on Torres’ information that they came
here and arrested my father; is not that so?”
“Yes, on his denunciation.”
“Very well,” continued Benito, shaking his fist toward the left bank
of the river, “I must find out Torres. I must know how he became
master of the secret. He must tell me if he knows the real author of
this crime. He shall speak out. And if he does not speak out, I know
what I shall have to do.”
“What you will have to do is for me to do as well!” added Manoel,
more coolly, but not less reolutely.
“No! Manoel, no, to me alone!”
“We are brothers, Benito,” replied Manoel. “The right of demanding an
explanation belongs to us both.”
Benito made no reply. Evidently on that subject his decision was
irrevocable.
At this moment the pilot Araujo, who had been observing the state of
the river, came up to them.
“Have you decided,” he asked, “if the raft is to remain at her
moorings at the Isle of Muras, or to go on to the port of Manaos?”
The question had to be decided before nightfall, and the sooner it
was settled the better.
In fact, the news of the arrest of Joam Dacosta ought already to have
spread through the town. That it was of a nature to excite the
interest of the population of Manaos could scarcely be doubted. But
would it provoke more than curiosity against the condemned man, who
was the principal author of the crime of Tijuco, which had formerly
created such a sensation? Ought they not to fear that some popular
movement might be directed against the prisoner? In the face of this
hypothesis was it not better to leave the jangada moored near the
Isle of Muras on the right bank of the river at a few miles from
Manaos?”
The pros and cons of the question were well weighed.
“No!” at length exclaimed Benito; “to remain here would look as
though we were abandoning my father and doubting his innocence–as
though we were afraid to make common cause with him. We must go to
Manaos, and without delay.”
“You are right,” replied Manoel. “Let us go.”
Araujo, with an approving nod, began his preparations for leaving the
island. The maneuver necessitated a good deal of care. They had to
work the raft slantingly across the current of the Amazon, here
doubled in force by that of the Rio Negro, and to make for the
_embouchure_ of the tributary about a dozen miles down on the left
bank.
The ropes were cast off from the island. The jangada, again started
on the river, began to drift off diagonally. Araujo, cleverly
profiting by the bendings of the current, which were due to the
projections of the banks, and assisted by the long poles of his crew,
succeeded in working the immense raft in the desired direction.
In two hours the jangada was on the other side of the Amazon, a
little above the mouth of the Rio Negro, and fairly in the current
which was to take it to the lower bank of the vast bay which opened
on the left side of the stream.
At five o’clock in the evening it was strongly moored alongside this
bank, not in the port of Manaos itself, which it could not enter
without stemming a rather powerful current, but a short mile below
it.
The raft was then in the black waters of the Rio Negro, near rather a
high bluff covered with cecropias with buds of reddish-brown, and
palisaded with stiff-stalked reeds called _”froxas,”_ of which the
Indians make some of their weapons.