III THE STORY OF POIT In the interior of South America, with the rivers Parana and Paraguay to the east, with Argentine to the south, and Bolivia to the west, there is a vast, low country called the Gran Chaco, about as large as the state of Texas and inhabited by Indians. The country is flat and there are grass-lands, swamps, and forests of palm trees. There are many different animals with which the children of the North are not familiar but of which they may have seen pictures, among them the tapir, the marsh deer, the otter, the peccary, and the armadillo. There are some savage animals such as the jaguar, the puma, and a very large wolf with a long mane. There are also some of the queerest animals in the world, especially the ant-eater, a bow-legged creature seven feet long from the tip of his snout to the tip of his hairy tail. There is a queer little opossum about the size of a mouse, with enormous black eyes, fan-like ears, and a long tail, which runs about in the trees like a squirrel. Most interesting of all is the lungfish which can live either in the water or in the air. In the wet season he stays in the swamps and eats and eats, and when the dry season comes and the swamps disappear, he burrows in the ground and lives without eating anything, by using up the fat he has stored. There are many birds both large and small, from great ostriches down to tiny hummingbirds, and there are insects of all kinds, ants and crickets and mosquitoes and beetles and locusts, and there are twenty-four different kinds of frogs, each with a different croak. For many weeks no rain falls, and the Indians have a hard time to get along; then when the rain comes they have more than they need to eat, water-birds, fish, and, by-and-by, their harvests. They do not mind having to tramp round in deep water, because wet weather brings plenty. Among the Indians in this strange country was a young man named Poit. One morning in December Poit awoke with a frightened, anxious heart. It was not because he was too warm, though in December in Chaco the mornings are hot, nor because he had not slept comfortably on his bed on the ground nor because he was hungry; it was because he plotted a wicked deed. Today Poit planned to do the most dreadful thing anyone can do, he was going to kill his best friend, the missionary. Though these Indians lived so uncomfortably, they did not want to change their ways, and they killed everybody who came to explore their country or to search for silver or to tell them of the love of God. Even soldiers sent to conquer them by force failed because they were so fierce and cunning.