“When you did not return that evening, señor, Pita and I went out to search for you. We knew where you generally sat, but you were gone. We went to the mission, got some torches, and searching in the sand between the rocks we found traces of Indians’ feet, and were able to follow them up to a point nearly a mile below the falls. There they ceased, and we were sure that you had been carried off in a canoe. As we found no sign whatever of blood or marks of a struggle we felt sure that you had not been wounded, but concluded that you had been suddenly seized, bound, and carried off. We roused some of the mission Indians, and I with three of them took to our canoe and paddled down the river for twelve hours. As we had no weight to carry and had four paddles, we felt sure that by that time we should have overtaken you had they held on down the river, for we concluded by the footmarks that there were but three of them, and they had your weight in the boat. “They could hardly have counted on being pursued so closely, and would not, therefore, have made any special effort. Then we turned and paddled back, keeping close to the trees in hopes of getting some sign of where the canoe had entered the forest. We found none, and as soon as we got to the mission, I set out to follow Pita, who had started inland. We thought it likely that the Indians had come across the inundations, and that he might obtain some news as to which tribe they belonged to. Of course he followed the high ground and passed through several Indian villages, but he was sure that they had not come from these, for in that case they would have gone on foot to the mission instead of taking the trouble to pass through the forest in a canoe. He walked sixty miles the next day and then reached the farthest edge of the inundation, and leaving the high ground followed it. “He had taken with him a bag of flour from the mission, and kept on for a week; then he thought he must have gone beyond the spot where you had been landed. He had walked, he thought, fifty miles a day, and was more than three hundred from the high ground, and concluded that unless the canoe had come a long distance up the river they would never have made so long a passage through the forest. Then he went back again, keeping further away from the water. Four days later he came upon a group of Indian huts, and there heard that a strange white man had arrived at a village twenty miles distant, two days before. None knew from whence he came, for he had fallen down as soon as he arrived, and was lying ill. Pita could not understand how you could have arrived in such a state, unless indeed you had killed your captors after landing, and had then wandered in the forest until you chanced upon the village. He hastened there, greatly disturbed in his mind, in the first place, at the thought of your illness, and next because the tribe was a very savage one and ate human flesh.