Surely a stranger sight was never seen on the streets of Concepcion than that of a tired, dusty pack-horse bearing a live monkey, a dead god, and an equally dead devil on his back! Mrs. Sorrows was overjoyed to see me return, and earnestly told me that my first duty was to hurry down to the store and buy two colored candles to burn before her saint, who had brought me back, even though I was a heretic, which fact she greatly lamented. We had been given up as lost months before, for word came down that I had been killed by Indians. Here I was, however, safe and fairly well, saving that the ends of two of my toes had rotted off with jiggers, and fever burned in my veins! Mrs. Dolores doctored my feet with tobacco ashes as I reclined in a hammock under the lime trees surrounding her hut. I did not buy the candles, but she did; and while I silently thanked a Higher Power, and the _ta-tas_ burned to _her_ deity, she informed me that my countryman, the prodigal, had been carried to the "potters' field." Not all prodigals reach home again; some are buried by the swine-troughs. For some time I was unable to put my feet to the ground; but Pancho, ever active, tied in a fig tree, helped himself to ripe fruit, and took life merrily. Pancho and I were eventually able to bid good-bye to Mrs. Sorrows, and, thousands of miles down life's pathway, this little friend and I journeyed together, he ever loving and true. I took him across the ocean, away from his tropical home, and--he died. I am not sentimental--nay, I have been accused of hardness--but I make this reference to Pancho in loving memory. Unlike some friends of my life, _he_ was constant and true. [Footnote: From letters awaiting me at the post-office, I learned, with intense sorrow and regret, that my strange patron had gone "the way of all flesh" The land I had been to explore, along-with a bequest of $250,000, passed into the hands of the Baptist Missionary Society, to the Secretary of which Society all my reports were given.] CHAPTER XI. CHACO SAVAGES.