tight grip to which Mr. Brewster responded firmly.

“That’s how Lew and I always shook hands,” declared Nara. “I guess you and Lew were friends all right, or he wouldn’t have shown you that grip.”

Ubi was bringing gourds of water. Nara waited until Biff and his father had slaked their thirst. Then, with a chuckle, the white-haired man remarked:

“I guess Lew must have told you about the time he and I went to Lake Titicaca down in Peru to look for Inca gold?”

“No, Kirby never told me that,” returned Mr. Brewster, “because you never went there. He said you planned the trip but gave it up. You came up this way instead.”

“And where would we have found gold near the headwaters of the Rio Negro?”

“I can tell you in two words: El Dorado.”

That convinced Joe Nara. He opened a door beneath the short forward deck and revealed a compact kitchen galley. He heated up a pot of feijoada, a Brazilian dish of black beans cooked with dried meat. With it he served bowls of mandioca, a mush made from the pulp of the cassava.

Simple though the fare was, it tasted so good that Biff eagerly accepted the second helping that Nara offered him.

“I was really hungry,” said Biff. “I feel as though I had been asleep for hours.”

“You were,” returned Nara. “That stuff you inhaled is a secret Indian brew that acts like chloroform. Gives you an appetite, though, when you do wake up.”

“And just why,” asked Mr. Brewster dryly, “did you happen to try the stuff out on us?”

“I’ll tell you why,” asserted Nara. “Every now and then, I come down from the mine with Igo and Ubi to buy supplies. Whatever I buy, I pay for with these.”

From his pocket, Nara brought some small nuggets of pure gold which clinked heavily when he trickled them from one hand to the other.

“People have been trying to trail me back up to the mine,” continued Nara, “so I bought this boat, the Xanadu, from a rubber outfit that had gone broke. I decided to come downriver to see who was spying on me. Before I even got to Santa Isabel, I saw a crew unloading supplies at an old abandoned camp.”

“Whitman’s crew!” exclaimed Mr. 

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