He was reduced now to the direst misery. His captors, some degrees cruder and more bestial than the men he was governing, took him by forced marches across a spur of the Andes, giving him food of such revolting nature that he became deadly ill. At last they were compelled to carry him, and, using such limited reasoning faculties as they possessed, allowed him to save his life by cooking and eating portions of animals freshly killed. Their object in making him a prisoner, he gathered, was to divert his magic to their own district so that his incantations might increase their herds. When he failed to accomplish this laudable purpose offhand, they became violent, and threatened to burn him alive. On the homeopathic principle, an abnormally dry and scorching spring came to his rescue. Some species of noxious insect, whose bite was fatal to horses and cattle, multiplied exceedingly, and the tribe lost half their stock. A wily candidate for the chiefship spread the notion that the white god had caused this misfortune, and that the person who really ought to be burnt alive was the chief who counseled the raid. This was duly done, and heavy rain fell that night, effectually disposing of the insect pests. The new chief, who would have been an acquisition to certain political circles in more temperate climes, saw that, although he had scored heavily, the dangerous wonder-worker might be associated with evils yet to come; so, on his suggestion, Power was taken through the mountains by a secret pass, and left on the eastern slopes of the range to fare as best he might. The Indians were afraid to gratify their instincts by murdering him outright; but, seeing that he was absolutely unarmed, and without a scrap of food in his possession, there was no misunderstanding the malevolent grin with which their leader pointed out the path he must follow. These very aborigines, despite their animal lore concerning edible roots, and their readiness to dispute with vultures for a carrion meal, knew that no man could traverse those leagues of foothills without arms and a commissariat of some kind. No semblance of a track existed. Power and his guards stood on a scree of loose stones and shale not far below the snow line, and well above the first precipitous valley in which even the hardiest pines reached a stunted growth. The steep hillside was covered with the strange snow shapes known to Spanish South America as penitentes, weird wraiths like sheeted ghosts, and more than one broad track torn through these awesome sentinels showed where avalanches of rocks and ice had thundered down from the heights that very day.