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were busy chopping them down at that very moment.

It was hot outside, so we were enjoying lying in the cool, dark room. Karl, never content to remain idle — a talent Kevin and I were cultivating to a fine art — looked around restlessly for something to do. He gathered up Marcus's and Kevin's shoes, the soles of which had fallen almost completely off. He took up a hammer and nails and with great diligence pounded holes through the leather uppers and the rubber soles. He wove wire through the holes, pulling it good and tight, just like sewing. Then he looked over his own boots. The soles had been lost long before in the jungle. He went out into the village to scare up a piece of leather that he could use to make new soles. He haggled a while over the price and finally traded one of the small pocketknives that we had brought along to give to the Indians for some deerskin. He cut the skin precisely to the shape of the boot, made holes all around its edge, and finally stitched it to the boot with fishing line.

'There's hardly anything that these two hands of mine can't do,' he boasted. 'You never can tell when you might need to call on a certain skill.'

Karl spent the afternoon with Don Jorge's father-in-law, questioning him closely about gold in the region. The old man answered his questions patiently. Karl learned that Don Jorge's younger brother, Pablo, had stumbled upon a large gold nugget on the riverbank. Following his discovery