They forgot about Pizella for the rest of the voyage, however, mainly because Pizella did not again appear above decks. Hal quickly forgot his hasty suspicions and was lost in the charm of the country on either side of the river. The landscape changed two days after they entered the Amazon, and in place of the low-lying swamps, a series of hills, the Serra Jutahy, rose to their right.

After leaving the hills behind, they caught a brief glimpse of two settlements, larger and more important than most of those they had seen. The captain pointed out the first of these, Santarem, which lay near the junction of the Amazon and Tapajos, the latter an important southern tributary.

“Santarem,” the captain obligingly explained, “should interest the Señors.”

“Why?” Hal asked immediately.

“It is full of the romance of a lost cause,” said the captain. “After the Civil War in your great United States, a number of the slave-owning aristocracy, who refused to admit defeat and bow their heads to Yankee rule, came and settled in this far-away corner of the Amazon.”

“A tremendous venture,” said Denis Keen. “I dare say their task was too much for them.”

“For some, Señor. Some of them returned to your fair country broken in body and spirit, but others held on. Only a very few of the older generation live, but there are the sons and grandsons and great-grandsons to carry on—yes? A few of these families—they have scattered up this stream—down that stream. One of them that is perhaps interesting more than the others is the Pemberton family. Everyone familiar with the Amazon has heard their sad story. It began when Marcellus Pemberton, the first, settled in Santarem along with several other old families from Virginia.”

“Marcellus Pemberton, eh?” said Denis Keen. “That certainly smacks of Old Virginia.”

“He was a very bitter man, the first Marcellus Pemberton. A very young man when he went to fight against the North, he fled from his home after the War rather than bow to Yankee rule. He settled in Santarem with other Virginia families, took a wife from one of them, and had many children. All died but his youngest son—even his wife got the fever and died. Marcellus and his youngest son left the settlement then and went to live a little way up the Rio Pallida Mors. And so it is with that son that the story centers, even though he married an American señorita from Santarem.”

“And they had 

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