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Title: Caravans to Santa Fe
Author: Alida Malkus
Illustrator: Marie A. Lawson
Release date: August 18, 2025 [eBook #76701]
Language: English
Original publication: New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1928
Credits: Roger Frank and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This book was produced from images made available by the HathiTrust Digital Library.)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CARAVANS TO SANTA FE ***
CARAVANS TO SANTA FE
[Illustration: Quivering with rage, Consuelo stood still.]
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CARAVANS TO SANTA FE
By ALIDA SIMS MALKUS
WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY MARIE A. LAWSON
Harper & Brothers Publishers
New York and London
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CARAVANS TO SANTA FE
COPYRIGHT, 1928, BY HARPER & BROTHERS
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
------------------------------------------------------------------------
[Illustration: a map]
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CARAVANS TO SANTA FE
CHAPTER I
AN OUTPOST OF SPAIN
A hundred years ago, in a valley that lies on the slope of flame-shot
mountains, a little town of ancient crooked streets slept in the sun,
entirely shut away from outside civilization--a bit of old Spain, lying
in rare and mellow beauty in the mountains of the Sangre de Cristo.
Beyond the Cordilleras lay other ranges of rocky, snow-capped peaks, and
beyond these again stretched hundreds of miles of barren desert,
succeeded by still other hundreds of miles of rolling plains--a land of
red men and bearded bison.
Through the streets of the adobe-walled _Villa_, the town of Santa Fe,
life flowed with a sluggish content or took siesta. At this moment it
was taking siesta. The cook slept with her bare toes spread in the cool
mud beneath a dripping _olla_, the wood boy and his _compadre_, the
burro slept within a few feet of each other, the burro standing in the
sun, the boy lying in the blue shadow of a wall. Doña Gertrudis Chaves y
Lopez slept with open mouth, through which issued contented little
whistles of escaping steam. Don Anabel Lopez himself slept, but not even
sleep could relax the pride of his hawk nose, the defiance of his
well-bred snore.
But Consuelo Lopez did not sleep; she lay in her bedroom, sulking. She
was bored as only sixteen can be bored, and waved a naked foot in the
air in rage. “_Bestia!_” she exploded, venting her angry thought.
“_Moribundos!_ The dead ones!” Reaching under her pillow, Consuelo drew
out a silver case from which she extracted a cigarette. Slipping to a
window where one long dazzling shaft of sunshine pierced a crack in the
shutter, she held a small burning-glass over a wisp of paper. It flamed
in a moment; the cigarette was lit, and she resumed her pose. A step
sounded outside the door. Consuelo threw the cigarette disdainfully
behind the bed, but the step passed on and she recovered it again before
it had time to go out. It was fortunate that Doña Gertrudis was so
insistent upon her daughter’s beauty sleep. Consuelo would be permitted
to indulge her boredom undisturbed for another hour. A raging boredom
she rather enjoyed, but not a languid one.
“They think it enough for me to sit here and twiddle my fan. To sit here
and listen to Manuel! Tink-a-tinkaa, tink-a-tink, Thy heart so true!
_Caramba!_ I know everything he can say by heart. Rather would I marry
myself to one of the rope-haired trappers or the barbaric Yanqui
caravaners that come over the plains a-trading. _They_ are men. What if
they do lack _cultivacion_, and cannot roll their r’s. They appeal to
me. Yes!
“Ah, would but Don Tiburcio Garcia arrive, with something of the outside
world about him, and the latest news from Chihuahua and Mexico City. And
clothes, ah, what clothes! What will he think of me?”
Consuelo stretched herself reflectively upon the bed, tossing aside a
hand-woven coverlet of drawn threads, and lifted the bare foot to catch
a breeze stirring through deep-silled windows. She took from the carved
chest of drawers beside her a wrought-gold mirror studded with pink
semi-precious stones and carefully regarded her face from this angle and
that. The sole imperfections that appeared within its frame were those
of a cracked mercury back. Consuelo considered and approved the mirror’s
various reflections. They were more pleasant than her thoughts. In fact,
her mirrored face was all that she cared about at the moment. Hers was
that most charming of Spanish types, which in profile is straight-nosed,
delicately cut, but which in full face appears childish, the nose short,
a trifle broad, the eyes large and heavy-lidded, the lips full,
petulant. There was strength in the squaring of the jaw and in level,
heavily marked brows, scowling now with her rebellions.
Everything one wanted to do was prohibited--to dance with the
caravaners, for example. Only disagreeable things were permitted. How
could one consider one’s suitors seriously if they were like Manuel, her
second cousin, so eager that he bored beyond insults? He would be on
hand this afternoon, singing his interminable verses. Well enough to
have him as a sort of permanent court, even though Luis did make all
sorts of fun of his cousin. But then, Luis was critical of everything;
brothers generally were. He’d be a bit more respectful when he heard
about Don Tiburcio! A _caballero_ from the City of Mexico, a veritable
Spanish grandee? Consuelo did not dream, after Don Tiburcio had visited
Santa Fe the summer before, that he could ever again be interested in
her. Yet he had sent word to Don Anabel that he was coming, and had made
special inquiry for her. She blushed with embarrassment when she thought
of the outrageous manner in which she had treated Don Tiburcio; she’d
slapped his face when he raised her hand and was about to implant a kiss
upon it!
But then, she was only a little girl last year. Now she could appreciate
what it meant to have so courtly and traveled a suitor. In a few days
his pack train should arrive from Chihuahua and life would be vastly
more exciting. There would be new clothes for her, too. Kid shoes--oh,
she would be furious if they were not lefts and rights--brocade, perhaps
some sapphire earrings.... It was time to dress for the afternoon. Still
Consuelo lay looking idly from her mirror to the windows. Who knew at
what moment one might hear the call, “The caravan is coming!” and she,
with every other girl and woman in Santa Fe, would dash to window or
door to gaze at the Yankee traders as they rode into town. Then there
would be the delight of new goods to buy from those unknown lands beyond
the rising sun, new faces to see, new thoughts to think upon.
The very thought brought Consuelo to her feet. Throwing off the ancient
blue Chinese mantle brought in for her from the Orient by her father,
she tried the effect of a high comb in her hair. Dipping a wide-toothed
tortoise comb into the tepid water that still stood in a heavy silver
washbasin by her bed, she ran it through the dark waves till they curled
crisply, with a shining order. Pulling at the sides till a few loose
ringlets detached themselves, she set the comb atop the coiled mass,
draped over it a white lace mantilla, and stood entranced. She would
wear it to the _baile_ when the caravan came.
Somehow a greater thrill lay in the advent of the lean, ruddy strangers
from America than in the coming of the Spaniard’s train. From the
arrival of one caravan to another she could scarcely wait--the creaking
wheels, the clatter of chains, the shouting and talking, the strange
English tongue. She introduced herself before the mirror and smiled
demurely at the imaginary gentleman she was meeting.
Then tossing comb and lace aside, she threw herself on the bed again and
shouted, “Fay-lee-cita! Fay-lee-ee-cita!” It was some time before
Felicita, Consuelo’s peon slave, appeared; she was met by a small red
shoe thrown at the door, but hitting the girl squarely as she entered
the room.
“Why do you keep me waiting for my water every single day?” Consuelo was
shouting; but she stopped now, a bit abashed. “How could I tell you
would come this time so soon? But I must be dressed, quick!” She had
suddenly remembered that at five some young trappers would be down from
Taos to talk with her father on business, and she wished to be dressed
and sitting in the _patio_, from where one could see and be seen when
visitors entered the _zaguan_ and sat with Don Anabel in the living
room.
Felicita backed out of the door and fairly ran after the water, and
Consuelo began to throw clothing about the room, already disorderly, but
quaint and full of charm, a curious combination of luxury and crudity.
Large and high-ceiled, its adobe walls were tinted a salmon pink; the
two windows, square-paned, deeply recessed by the three-foot walls, were
curtained with lace, and the great carven bedstead was draped with
rose-red damask hangings from Spain. On the high chest of drawers were a
pair of silver candlesticks, and above hung a heavily framed mirror of
old Spanish make. Before a small corner fireplace with an Indian chimney
lay a thick and enormous buffalo skin, and the rough board floor was
strewn with other peltries. On each side of the bed lay a tinted white
Angora sheepskin. At the foot of the bed stood a high carven chest in
which lay Consuelo’s clothing, gowns brought over many weary hundreds of
miles, packed securely on the backs of burros that wound mountain
passes, crossed ravines, and plodded over deserts in the long journey up
from Vera Cruz, the eastern port of Mexico.
There were many shawls, black Spanish lace from Seville, a bright
embroidered peasant challis, gold and salmon flowers on a white ground,
fine merinos and cashmeres of European peasant patterns. Consuelo chose
now a white dress of sheer batiste, embroidered heavily in white,
full-skirted, with a short plain bodice. She donned the red shoe that
still lay under the bed, and when Felicita had brought her the other
from the doorway, she permitted the peon woman to throw the flowered
shawl over her shoulder, and stepped out into the _corredor_. Then she
turned impulsively and ran back. Snatching a silk scarf from the bed,
she draped it over Felicita’s head.
“Here. Did I hurt your tummy? Take this.”
Her mother was waiting for her in the living room. Across the table from
Doña Gertrudis sat Manuel, plucking his guitar tentatively,
persuasively. Not everyone in New Spain rose when a lady entered the
room, but Manuel always stood when Consuelo appeared in the doorway. Her
mother did not glance up from the altar-piece which she embroidered; it
was the only work that her plump fingers had ever been engaged upon.
Doña Gertrudis was fat, small-boned, her chin lost in the amiable
creases which had engulfed the beauty of her youth. In spite of the heat
of the August day, she was dressed in the favorite black of the Mexican
woman of Spanish descent. Heavy rings of yellow gold, set with garnets,
roughly cut but of marvelous color, covered her fingers, a bracelet to
match weighted her small wrist, and weighty gold earrings pulled down
the lobes of her fat little ears. Her dress of black silk was voluminous
and hung straight from her shoulders,--a fact which the shawl about her
shoulders could not hide.
“And we shall have roast young pig, joint of young antelope,
guinea-fowl, when Don Tiburcio arrives,” she was saying as Consuelo came
in. “Manuel has a new _copleta_, Consuelo _querida_, composed specially
for you, today,” she went on. Doña Gertrudis had been a famous coquette
in her own time, and although the announced visit of Don Tiburcio Garcia
had opened up wider vistas matrimonially for her daughter than New Spain
had previously afforded, she had a family fondness for her cousin’s son
and was too diplomatic to slight him.
Manuel, taking silence as assent, was already strumming, and intoning
his new _copleta_ in a plaintive nasal tenor. But his presence and his
plinking were quite ignored by the girl, who swished to a chair near the
window and looked steadfastly out, leaving Doña Gertrudis to keep time
with her foot and dream of love.
* * * * *
As to Don Anabel Lopez, _hidalgo_, master of the house and lord of vast
lands granted to his family by the Spanish crown a century and a half
before, he was not at all pleased with the prospect to which Consuelo
looked forward with secret delight and anticipation. The coming of the
Yankee traders across the plains with their freighted caravans of mules
and covered wagons, was an event to be tolerated only for the gain it
brought. Bitterly Don Anabel resented the intrusion of the hated
“English” into the province conquered by Spain two centuries before.
Yet he could trade the pelts of beaver, lynx, fox, the robes of buffalo
and of deer, brought in to his post by trappers white or red, at a
profit that would have made Connecticut Yankees wince had they known
that he himself had acquired them for a handful of tawdry merchandise,
and stores that were cheaper from New Orleans and St. Louis than from
Vera Cruz and Mexico City.
On this warm and sunny afternoon of late summer Don Anabel stood before
the door of his store and warehouse, scowling. He could look up the
little winding street to the Mountains of the Blood of Christ, as they
had been passionately and piously named by the early Conquerors, and
red-streaked they were now even in the yellow light of the afternoon
sun. Don Anabel looked to the passes that led north and east; he was
perturbed.
“Luis,” he called sharply to the young man who lounged through the
doorway, a languid cigarette hanging from his lips, “I see a rider
coming down the trail from Lamy. Can you see any one following? I
believe it must be either an advance of the caravan arriving over the
Santa Fe Trail or else the trappers I expected down from Taos, coming by
the lower route.
“I only hope it is the trappers, for I would like to get their business
over with before the _caravan_ arrives. This Gringo trade from beyond
the mountains has cut so largely into our own rightful business within
the province that we must make whatever profit we can out of the goods
they take back with them. The peltries they buy are cheap at the price,
anyway.”
“What is the Governor charging them a load this year?” asked Luis, who
was rather a handsome young fellow of eighteen or twenty, with a
straight nose and loose, full lips.
“Just what was charged two years ago when the first _caravana_ of wagons
entered the territory--five hundred dollars each wagon-load; and, Santa
Maria! it is little enough.”
“Little indeed,” assented Luis, indifferently. “When does the excellent
Don Tiburcio arrive? Have we been taming the little sister so that she
won’t scratch this time?”
“I expect Don Tiburcio at any time now. That may be the dust of his
caravan. He is bringing camlet cloth and silken grogram, shawls, combs,
white sugar, ammunition, the usual merchandise. And Heaven send he
arrive before the Americanos with their cargo from the United States,
and have his goods disposed of.”
“And my linen shirts?” Luis inquired with more animation than he had yet
shown. He followed his father back into the storeroom.
Don Anabel nodded, a trifle annoyed. “I believe he brings linen. But
with the four frilled camisas which I gave you at Easter-time you should
have no urgent need for more shirts at present. By the way, you do not
wear the ruby ring which your parents gave you at Christmas.” He eyed
his son keenly. Luis flicked an ash from his cigarette and replied,
evenly: “Not all the time. It is a trifle large, and much too fine a
stone to run the risk of losing.”
“So I thought when it was presented to you,” remarked Don Anabel, drily.
“How does it happen, then, that I find it on the finger of the gaming
friar of Albuquerque----?”
Luis flushed. He did not reply, but looked away in embarrassment.
“The usual thing? Tell me no lies, Luis.”
“I exacted the promise that I might redeem it, and expect to do so very
shortly now.”
“Well, I trust that you will. But not from the _fray_. Come to me when
you are ready.” Don Anabel drew his hand from his pocket and, opening it
palm upward, showed a splendid garnet ring, set in dull heavy gold. “It
has cost me three hundred duros to get back your pledge, several times
the amount of your losses; but it is too fine a gem to have imported but
to lose.”
His words were cut short by a commotion outside in the streets, and
shouts coming down the canyon road.
“They are coming! They are coming!” shouted ragged children capering in
the roadway.
“Who comes? Who comes?” the cry went up from doorway and street. People
poured out into plaza and lane, siestas abandoned for so great an
occasion.
“A caravan, from Mexico.” A rider came galloping down the street and
drew up in a cloud of dust before Don Anabel’s warehouse. He leaped from
the sweating horse, bowed low before Don Anabel, and spoke, “Don
Tiburcio Garcia follows on the trail, and his _caravana_ is but a short
distance behind him.”
Hastily Don Anabel sent a messenger to his house with the news, but
already it had traveled ahead, and as the entire establishment had known
for days just what was to be done for the guest from the capital, all
was immediately thrown into a fury of activity. The great open square in
the center of the Villa became suddenly alive, the loungers before the
palace of the Governor all hurried up the street; blanketed Indians from
the pueblos followed in leisurely dignity; girls and women flocked to
windows and doors; and shouting filled the air.
“Here comes the cavalier from Mexico. The cavalcade of Don Tiburcio de
Garcia is arriving.”
Now that the moment was at hand, Doña Gertrudis flew out of her
customary placidity like a nervous ground bird fluttering about its
nest. She toddled hither and thither on her ridiculous little feet,
scolding, all but weeping; she smelled the distilling coffee, threw up
her hands, shrieking. “What miserable _café_! Tepid water!” The beverage
was in reality almost a pure caffein that had distilled and dripped for
two hours, a potent drug.
“And make the chocolate thick, do you hear, Concha? Three eggs in
it--three--and beaten a half-hour.” Concha knew well how to make the
chocolate, the favorite drink of Spaniard, and of ancient Aztec before
him. It was her special province to make it, rich, thick, sweet, beaten
like a mousse. Doña Gertrudis tasted the red-hot chili, ordered the
house servants this way and that. The corral behind the kitchen was
filled with the squawking of unfortunate fowls being chased to their
destiny--_arroz con pollo_ (chicken with rice).
Having thoroughly demoralized the slow but eventually sure processes of
Lupe, the cook, Doña Gertrudis bustled into her bedchamber to put on
more jewels and daub a fine white flour over her cheeks and neck, while
she chattered like a parakeet through the doors to Consuelo, who had
abandoned Manuel for her mirror.
When the mirror had told her that the necklace of tawny topaz was
prettier with white than was the opal chain, she lingered till the sound
of horses and a company of men so excited her curiosity that she had to
pull back the _persianas_ and peer out. Herded by the shouts of the
_arrieros_, a caravan of a hundred mules and burros was being crowded
into the plaza. Had they brought her new satin shoes and brocaded skirt?
There was Don Tiburcio! In the high hat, a wrought leather jerkin over a
gold-embroidered vest, a wide copper-studded belt, and as he dismounted
a bit stiffly from his lathered horse Consuelo took note of beautiful
tight-fitting trousers, fawn-colored, over which were riding leggings of
Mexican leather. All this in a flash, then Consuelo’s eyes swept to the
travel-worn face of the southern Don.
A true son of the Conquerors of the New World was Don Tiburcio de Garcia
y Mendoza. A dark, lean man of thirty, who looked ten years older, he
was tall, and hatchet-jawed, with a nose of perfect aquilinity, and a
thin mouth made somewhat prominent by large even teeth. The mouth seemed
harsh, cruel even, till it broke into a smile. His brow was high and
narrow, and his well-cut ears lay close to his aristocratic head. Don
Tiburcio was filled with the adventurous spirit of his forbears or he
would not himself come trading at the head of his caravans up the
Cordilleras from Mexico, enduring every sort of physical hardship and
running the gantlet of fiercely treacherous Indian tribes.
His father, Don Diego Alvar Roybal de Garcia, never left his broad
estates in Guadalajara not even to travel north to the immense cattle
ranches of the Garcias in Chihuahua. The supervision of all that he left
to his son, and as the caravan journeys to the north proved highly
gainful, he made no objection to them. Romance called to the young man.
The lure that first brought the Spanish Conquistadores up through this
country had drawn him--gold and gain, perhaps undiscovered treasure
waiting there--and, indeed, at the end he had found beauty, too. Nowhere
in the southern provinces had Don Tiburcio seen a face to compare in his
estimation with that of the little hoyden who had slapped him the summer
before. And to speak truthfully, it was the conquest of that untamed
child which had lured him back this time over the hot stretches of
desert between Santa Fe and Chihuahua as urgently as the money to be
gained in trade.
Night had fallen before arrangements for the caravan had been disposed
of and the weary pack animals relieved of their cargo. Don Tiburcio
refreshed himself and removed the stains of travel, making ready to
present himself in the candlelit _sala_ of Don Anabel’s house and to
meet the ladies. He made a fine figure in his velvet short jacket, his
silver-buttoned breeches, and a pair of excellent boots with inch heels.
He was taller than either his host or Luis, both of whom wore their best
heeled boots also, and their finest shirts of frilled white linen, their
handsomest serapes and sashes, brought from Mexico the year before.
Father and son stood until their guest had seated himself in a heavy low
chair. A slippered servant brought small silver goblets and a pitcher,
and Don Anabel poured a fragrant drink. “My peach brandy, señor,” he
offered. “_Saludes_ [Your good health]! It seems to me that it has an
exceptional flavor. The peaches are from the Valley of the Rio Grande.”
The visitor from Mexico sipped critically and settled down with the
appreciation of the connoisseur. “It is quite perfect, señor. And well I
remember the most excellent grape of last year.”
“You shall taste of a still older vintage at supper, Don Tiburcio.”
“And is not that the _indiana_ we brought you last year?” Don Tiburcio
nodded at the red calico tacked shoulder high about the whitewashed
walls to protect the backs of those who sat around the room. The simple
hangings looked, in the glimmer of yellow candlelight, like a rich
tapestry, a proper setting for the heavy, brass-studded chairs, for the
florid oak table, the massive candlesticks. The rough floors were
covered with buffalo robes and with rich Mexican shawls, serapes, and
serapes also draped the sofas at each side of the room. On the wall
above the mantle of the low fireplace hung a painting, dark and old and
cracked and priceless. Don Anabel prized it above all his possessions,
claiming it was a Murillo; and because of his affection for the
painting, which he related had been brought over a century and a half
before, his family also venerated the canvas. It was a Madonna and
Child, with cherubim. Don Tiburcio looked for and found the painting.
“Two possessions of yours I would like to take away with me, Don
Anabel,” the Mexican visitor said with that air of courteous compliment
of the grandee.
“_Mi casa es suya, señor_ [My house is yours],” Don Anabel was repeating
the formal phrase of Spanish hospitality.
“This painting is one,” Don Tiburcio continued, knowing well that it was
almost the last thing in the world that Don Anabel would part with, “and
the other----” His words remained unspoken, for at this moment the
ladies entered the _sala_, Doña Gertrudis first, billowing in
importantly, glowing with rose garnets and pearls. Consuelo followed
demurely, decorously, with lowered eyes, yet inclining her head to Don
Tiburcio’s bow. Within her bodice her heart was beating furiously, but
from the tail of her eyes she watched the distinguished visitor.
“It is a great pleasure to see you once again, señora, and you,
señorita. Your servant.”
“_Igualmente, igualmente_ [Equally, equally], señor!”
“And now let us sup.” Don Anabel led the way toward the dining room,
which was at the rear of the house, near the kitchen. They passed
through the entrance hall, out into the patio, and crossed to the other
side. Don Anabel’s house, like all large Mexican houses, was a square
built about an inner court, into which most of the rooms opened. Into a
long cozy room they stepped, where dining and serving tables were heaped
with the efforts of the good Lupe. Every dish was of purest silver,
plate and goblet, bowl and salver; candlelight; linens of finest
drawnwork; a young roast pig served whole on a massive platter; chicken
and rice flanked with squash; stewed corn; melon cooled in the fountain;
wines from the grapes of the Tesuque Valley near Santa Fe; pickled
watermelon; apricot pastries. It was a scene of mediæval plenty. The
guest tasted everything, to Doña Gertrudis’s satisfaction, and ate well,
slowly, savoring the feast after the rough fare enforced during the long
journey up into the province.
“I am reminded,” he addressed Doña Gertrudis, “that I captured far to
the south of here, señora, a number of young _javalinas_ [peccary], and
I have brought one alive for you. I think you will like the flavor, for
it is even more delicate, if possible, than the shoat here.”
Thus the talk turned to his voyage. The Indians to the south, while not
on the warpath, were far from being peaceful. Acoma, that strange Indian
pueblo perched upon the high rock, held a deadly hatred for all
Spaniards, the visitor said, and there were, southward a few days’
travel, bands of plains Indians that strayed over from eastward, who
were more fierce than any he had yet seen. But the country was rich and
fertile. Corn he had seen fourteen feet high; peaches that would not
enter a pint cup; and beaver enough to line all the capes of all the
crowned heads in Europe. He held the company enthralled with brave tales
of many perilous escapes upon this journey, and strange sights that he
had seen in the desert.
When he had left the northern part of Chihuahua behind and was looking
for the Valley of the Rio Grande he had somehow missed it, his scout not
having recognized the river bed, in that season bone dry, and he had
gone some miles to the east, following up a strange spur of mountains
which resembled the carven spires of a church or the colored pipes of a
great church organ. Not finding a pass over this rocky spur which lay
between him and the river valley, he and his caravan had kept along the
foot of it, going northward for perhaps sixty _leguas_. Then they had
come upon the strangest sight that ever it had been his lot to behold in
the desert country. At first Don Tiburcio related he had thought he was
seeing a mirage; it seemed to him he saw snow. As he went nearer and
nearer, and snow it still remained, he doubted but that he must be mad.
Yet when they had reached the place there rose before them a great hill
of dazzling white stuff which had the brilliance of snow in sunshine,
and which the light desert breeze blew off in a fine white mist. And
this curious salt, for such he deemed it to be, drifted in waves, and
whatever was lost in it was nevermore found--so the Indians whom he had
encountered above the spot had told him. And in those mountains which he
had skirted was silver, aye, and even gold, so vowed a Pueblo Indian
from the place called Isleta!
“And you did not remain there to discover whether or not it were so,
señor?” inquired Luis, aghast.
“Ah no! We were weary, and the animals needing water, and there would be
gold aplenty--and other matters more important at my journey’s end.” Don
Tiburcio replied, suavely, and looked directly at Consuelo.
Flushed with excitement, she flashed and sparkled now, plying the Don
with eager questions about his trip. And so the evening passed, and when
she lay upon her pillow late that night Consuelo wondered if with that
lean, fascinating _caballero_ lay her future and her fate. Impersonally
she dreamed, stirred from the monotony against which she had been
rebelling; but somehow her fancies were not real to her, no pictures of
the future arose to her sleepy brain. Yet as she slipped into a
dreamless slumber that future was shaping, moving toward her as rapidly
as the lumbering feet of oxen could move.
CHAPTER II
STEVEN MERCER
The city of New Orleans, even after the French sold it to the United
States, remained a place of gilt-braided social life, where the
brilliant creole “quality” held bright levees. It was, too, a port of
intrigue and of commerce that swirled about the wharves and up and down
the great Mississippi.
Had the society that frequented his mother’s drawing-room in the lovely
old French city not been so brilliant, the ladies so entertaining, the
gentlemen so distinguished, Steven Mercer would have rebelled quite
openly against a life that seemed to him mainly frills and lace. He was
happier on the river than anywhere. For one reason only would Steven
stay at home, his keeled boat moored idly at a delta wharf: to hear
epauletted gentlemen recount the thrills of the War of 1812; to listen
spellbound while naval celebrities who had been with Decatur told of
that immemorial engagement in the Tripolitan harbor. That had been in
the year of Steven’s birth. It was a bitter disappointment to a boy of
seventeen to reflect that those days were over.
“Steven prefers combat,” his mother lamented; “now that there are no
more wars, he wants to run away to sea, to trade, I am sure!” She was
always afraid of this vulgar reversion.
“Why not?” Hamilton Mercer would reply to his wife. “Steven is a man
grown. This country is new. It breeds men.” He looked with pride on his
son’s six feet, on the breadth of him. When Steven was twenty-one he
would take him into the business of Mercer & Co., the largest mercantile
importing house in Louisiana. Let him do as he wished until then, aside
from his studies.
But his gay little French _maman_ made many demands upon Steven. She was
exacting as to his manners, but for the rest did not trouble about
whether he roamed the plantation or studied his Greek. As a child she
had been content to turn him over to his governess or his tutors. Now
that he had grown into a tall, muscular youth, and a handsome one, he
must attend her levees, escort her at times. And although Steven admired
his mother very much and had been brought up to the life, it must be
confessed that he preferred his father’s wharves to his mother’s
drawing-room.
Quick enough at goods and figures, still he went less often to the
offices of Mercer & Co. than to the riverside. Yet trade was already
claiming him for her own, to tread in the footsteps of his paternal
ancestors--ship captains, merchants, and merchant owners of good vessels
all--whose blood stirred restlessly in his veins, calling him to new
markets and to adventure.
Down on the wharves, where vessels from strange ports were putting in
with their merchandise for the warehouses of Mercer & Co., that was
where Steven had always loved to be. Where the negroes talked in their
own river talk, and fought the English-speaking blacks of the West
Indies. Where one could talk in villainous Portuguese with equally
villainous-looking, ear-ringed sailors, with salty first mates from
Lisbon, Calcutta, Hong-Kong, Liverpool. Across the Gulf to Mexican ports
went their cargoes, and up the river to that wide inner country searched
by the sinuous fingers of the great Mississippi, the Father of Waters.
Scarcely a quarter of a century had passed since Napoleon had sold to
the United States “Louisiana,” the French territory stretching from the
Mississippi westward to the Rockies, and from the Gulf of Mexico
northward to Canada; a buffer against the British which Napoleon himself
could not hold and sold for a song. France had counted on Spain’s
keeping the American colonists out of the West, and had secretly ceded
her vast territory to the Spanish crown, but British traders from
Montreal dispatched their bateaux down the Mississippi and up the Des
Moines and Arkansas Rivers, undisturbed by the Spanish galleys sent
against them. Spain abandoned the land she could not hold.
She thrust it back upon France, busy with the wars that Napoleon
provided for her at home. Hence New Orleans became an American port. The
mouths of the mighty Mississippi were no longer closed to the ships of
the United States. The inland empire which the great stream watered,
bottled up no longer by the Spanish and French, was filling rapidly with
the land-hungry settlers of the new United States. It was less than
fifty years since the Revolutionary War, and yet already the thirteen
original Colonies had expanded across the Alleghanies, west to the
Mississippi. Even under French occupation there had been more Americans
in St. Louis than French.
At New Orleans docks bale after bale of goods from New York or from
Charleston, from Massachusetts or from New Jersey, was shifted to the
new keeled boats of the river. Up the Mississippi to St. Louis and
beyond they went, branching off upon the Arkansas to push into the west.
And down the river, borne with the incredible speed of that mighty
current, came the flat-bottomed bateaux, laden with pack after pack of
lustrous furs.
“Where are they going?” Steven always asked the river captains as he
watched the new boats, that went by steam, loading for the upstream
voyage. “To the Oklahoma fur-traders at Fort Gibson, to Leavenworth for
the Rocky Mountain Fur Company,” or, “For the Indians, for New Spain.”
Fascinated by the broad bosom of the river as he was, Steven was a dozen
times on the verge of running away up the Mississippi to see for himself
the tribes of Indians living a wild free life on the plains. Something
always happened to prevent. His mother had had a _fête champêtre_ at
their country place at Pas Christian the last time he was so tempted.
That was when he was thirteen; and the country beyond still remained a
mystery.
Persons of interest and importance came sometimes to the offices of
Hamilton Mercer as well as to the _soirées_ of Madame Mercer. And on the
day that Steven arrived at seventeen, and at a restlessness that could
no longer be endured, two such were destined to present themselves at
the merchant’s establishment. Hamilton Mercer had gone up the river to
Pas Christian to oversee his plantations, and Steven was attending to
some minor matters of business.
He found conversing with Mr. Morley, his father’s chief clerk, a
dark-bearded Frenchman in the habit of the _voyageurs_ who came down the
river at the helms of their fur-laden bateaux. The man’s appearance and
dress fascinated Steven. He waited around until Monsieur Delmar was
presented to him. The Frenchman represented a group of Western traders
and was arranging for a large shipment of merchandise of a commoner sort
than that usually handled by Mercer and Co.
It was for the far Western trade, he said, in Mexican territory. The
customer told of the commerce that had grown up during the past four
years with New Spain, that province of Mexico; a vast, far territory,
lying a good five months’ travel away, beyond the Rocky Mountains. Great
caravans were crossing the continent every six months, he said, carrying
thousands of dollars’ worth of merchandise into New Mexico, to the Villa
de Santa Fe. Last year the government had built a new fort way up above
St. Louis, upon the Missouri River, just to protect the people from the
Indians.
The route to the West lay from this Fort Leavenworth in the Kansas
country, to Santa Fe in Mexico--a three months’ journey, more or less.
“So soon as this goods I buy now reach the place from which they start,”
Monsieur Delmar explained, “the caravan will set out. Many wagon, maybe
twenty, thirty, forty--and mules. A big train, so to be safe against
those Indian who fight across the plain.
“This year my fr’en’, Colonel St. Vrain,” he told them, “build with the
brothers Bent a large fort and trade station in that Mexican country, on
the River Arkansas; safety is there for _les voyageurs_.”
The Frenchman was eager to be on the return. He had come down the river
from St. Louis at the rate of from fifty to a hundred miles a day, borne
on the bosom of powerful currents, but it would take longer than usual
to ascend the river, swollen as it was with the melting snow and rain.
Under the fire of Steven’s eager questions the Frenchman expanded on his
theme. It was the tale of the Trail that he told--the Santa Fe Trail
that watered with blood the growth of an empire to the west. Attacked by
savage red men on the long overland journey, oftentimes at the end of
the Trail thrown into prison by hostile Spanish governors, still they
came, trader and trapper. “Some day, by Gar! we see who own that land.”
Steven sat entranced while his carriage and horses waited below. This
was better than stories of the past; it was going on right now. This was
adventure, a life for men. This was a conquest that lured him. He knew
then that he must ask his father to send him with a shipment of goods
across the plains.
“Could I join the caravan that will leave this spring?” The request came
almost before he realized it.
“_Pourquoi pas?_” Monsieur Delmar would give the boy a letter to Colonel
St. Vrain. The colonel would take him in his train without doubt. The
Frenchman was leaving New Orleans at once, the following morning, and
the letter was therefore written upon the spot, and Monsieur Delmar took
his departure. With the missive thrust into his pocket Steven prepared
to leave the offices and return home to wait his father’s arrival. They
would talk the project over.
As he donned the tall hat of the dandy of the day, Mr. Morley rapped,
ushering into the room a gentleman who wore a wide hat pulled down over
his eyes. A dark cloak thrown over his shoulder was held across the
lower part of his face in spite of the warmth of the day.
“You will see the gentleman?” inquired the courteous Morley.
The visitor waited until the door closed behind the clerk, and then,
without removing his hat or releasing his hold on the cloak clutched
beneath his chin, took the chair Steven proffered.
“Señor,” he began in Spanish, “I expected to see a grown man, pardon,
and you are but a youth.”
“You are looking for my father, sir,” Steven replied. “I am Steven
Mercer, _a sus ordenes_, at your service,” for Steven spoke Spanish as
well as French. He bowed. “May I not serve you in my father’s place?”
At this the visitor removed his hat, threw back his cloak, revealing a
long dark face with an extremely high forehead. “Señor,” he repeated, “I
am Gomez Pedraza, recently elected President of the Republic of
Mexico”--Steven gasped and rose to his feet--“and still more recently
abdicated. I am fleeing to England because military force and the
machinations of my opponent have forced me from the position to which I
was rightfully elected. I have but a short time here in New Orleans,
and, to be brief, I have a favor to ask of your father. I have been
assured by faithful friends that he is a man of the utmost probity,
and”--he eyed Steven keenly--“I am inclined to believe that one may
repose the same confidence in the son.”
Curiously affected by the statement of Señor Pedraza, Steven was
actually trembling as he replied, “Señor, I will try to serve you as my
father would were he here, and I beg of you to tell me in what way that
may be.”
“I wished to learn,” replied the visitor, “whether your father is
engaged in an expedition of trade to our northern province of New
Mexico. There is an overland route from this country, the Santa Fe
Trail--you may have heard of it--over which much goods are being carried
to our northern territories. Has Señor Mercer dealings with any trader
in whom he has implicit trust--one who is trading with New Mexico?”
“My father himself does not send goods to the West,” Steven replied,
“but he sells to the merchants engaged in trade on the prairies and at
the fur-trading stations. Just today he has supplied enough for several
loads to a buyer for the traders to New Spain.”
“Do not say New Spain,” interposed Señor Pedraza. “The province is New
Mexico. But, alas! Mexico is less independent since she threw off the
yoke of Spain but six years ago than she had been for two hundred years
under the Spanish vice-regents. To return to my mission, however--is
there, then, no chance of your father sending any of his own men over
the plains? For I have a mission that I would intrust to him.”
“Yes,” answered Steven, boldly and without a moment’s hesitation. “I
myself am going to take the trip. I shall probably travel with the
caravan of one of the great traders of the plains.”
“Then”--the deposed President of the troubled country across the Gulf
leaned impressively nearer the young man--“then, Señor, will you accept
the mission? Will you carry a dispatch for me to one whom you will
encounter at Santa Fe? When he will arrive I do not know--sometime
within the next few months--but the message must be delivered _into his
hands_. His name is upon the inner envelope, which you will discover
upon your arrival. It is a matter of great moment to Mexico.”
“I will do it, señor.” With the impulsiveness of youth Steven rose,
accepting with no further ado a mission of apparently grave importance.
The two clasped hands.
“When will you be leaving?” Pedraza lowered his voice.
“As soon as may be señor. It will take time to make all arrangements,
but the caravan leaves, so monsieur tells me, sometime in the spring,
and as it is now January I shall have to make haste.” As the words fell
from his lips Steven felt an inner exultation, coupled with amazement,
that this could indeed be he. To take upon himself such a decision,
without so much as consulting his parents, without obtaining his
father’s permission! Why, he didn’t even know whether he could have any
merchandise! But the desire of youth overruled any other consideration.
The deposed President of Mexico drew close to the boy. “Señor, you are
young.” He spoke in a low voice. “But I have the confidence in you. Some
day I shall be returning to Mexico; then, you may be sure, the interests
of the American traders from New Orleans shall not be slighted. Señor,
_adios_!” He thrust a sealed letter into Steven’s hands and, once more
muffling his face, opened the door before which an attendant awaited
him, and took his departure.
Steven stood before the closed door, his blood singing in his veins, the
packet already hidden in an inner pocket. There was no doubt about it
now. He was cast for adventure. It was as good as done. He hurried home
to the birthday festivities in his honor, and many an older soldier of
fortune that night envied his youth, his shining face, seeing in him the
potentialities of fresh achievement.
“And as to your brave days of eighteen twelve,” cried Steven to the
toast of the gilt-braided officer, “we are living in brave days. There
is plenty of work for a man of mettle today, too----” He caught himself,
lest some word escape him. The evening passed at length. Steven lingered
in his father’s study.
The thing must be talked over. All Steve’s instinct was to pack his
luggage and depart; but he was too well brought up, too faithful,
seriously to consider such a course. Of course, his mother would say no.
His father would have to be relied upon to win her over. But to win his
father’s consent. Out with the question! that was the only way.
“Would you consider, sir, sending a wagon of your own for the trade upon
the Western prairies?” he began, most business-like.
Hamilton Mercer considered. “Why, no, Steve, I’ve never leaned toward
making any investment there,” he replied, slowly. “The hazards are too
great. And although the rewards are said to be fabulous, I know
personally no one whom I would intrust with the handling of several
thousands of dollars’ worth of investment.”
“How about myself?” Steven looked straight at his father, meeting his
eyes coolly enough, albeit with a rising color and a pounding heart. Mr.
Mercer rose in astonishment; he considered some moments before replying.
“Steven, no, my son. I do not think that you are prepared for the
hardships, the enmities, the dangers, of such pioneer enterprises. I
could not say that I would outfit a caravan for you.”
“Very well, sir.” Steven took the rebuff quietly, hiding his acute
disappointment. “But a man must know life sometime.” That was all there
was to the conversation. Two days later Hamilton Mercer found a note
upon his study table. “I have gone, father, to join the caravans leaving
from Independence. Tell _maman_ not to have any worries about me.” And
so Steven Mercer had run away, not to sea, but to follow in the wake of
the prairie schooner.
* * * * *
Nearly three months later a tall youth, with reddish-blond hair, a
straight nose still peeling under the blistering rays of the river sun,
deep-set blue eyes, and an enviable burn, stepped off a river boat at
Westport Landing. He carried two heavy bags, while a small darky
struggled after him with another. Steven had been fortunate in catching
the American Fur Company’s steamer which was plying the river between
New Orleans and St. Louis.
Arriving at St. Louis, he had had to disembark and continue his trip by
bateau. The freight destined for Fort Leavenworth and for Independence
had been loaded aboard the flat-bottomed river boats, and the slow pull
upstream begun. Steven had learned, on the afternoon after his
conversation with his father, that at midnight that night one of the
Astor Company’s steamers would start up the Mississippi, laden with
provisions. He determined at once to take it. There remained but a few
hours before it left and his preparations had been hurried and stealthy,
of necessity. He had thrust into two bags all the clothes that they
would contain and into the other such of his personal treasures as it
seemed to him he might need: books, a brace of rather ancient pistols, a
hunting-knife, a set of chessmen and a board. And so here he was, for
once eager to leap ashore, and the next thing to find Colonel Ceran St.
Vrain and the caravan he expected to join.
Independence! the spot from which the westward-moving train was to set
out. How was he to reach the place? He hung around the landing, watching
the bales of goods unloaded from one bateau after another, looking for
some one who might be going his way. A trapper in buckskins and beaded
moccasins yelled profanely and ardently as the oarsmen battled against
the current and struggled for a safe landing. Not far away stood his
mules, waiting for their loads.
“Independence?” nodded the half-breed. “You ride over with me, Pierre
Lafitte. Sure, you ride my white mule, Céleste.” Buy a horse at
Independence. No time to stop now or they would miss the caravan, if
they had not already done so. Pierre had but a small amount of cargo,
and soon they were trotting through the streets of the new settlement, a
little place of frame houses at the juncture of the Missouri River with
the Kansas, later to be known as Kansas City. It was only about eight
miles to Independence, and as the trapper pushed straight ahead they
would reach it in an hour or so.
“Why do you think we might miss the caravan?” asked Steven, his heart
sinking at the thought. “I thought it would not leave till May or June.”
It would be a fearful disappointment, a disaster, to fail to connect
with the caravan, he felt. It might be six months before another would
be leaving for Santa Fe, and he would have the opportunity to cross the
plains to that mysterious country of New Spain. He felt for the stiffly
folded packet which he carried always beneath his vest, the missive
given him by President Pedraza. The sense of importance and
responsibility which it gave him was at times almost too weighty. What
was this mission of national import which he had engaged himself to
perform? This thought was running through his head now.
“One caravan have already leave,” said Pierre in reply to Steven’s
question. “The Indian are very bad this year. Ute, Pawnee, Cree,
Comanche, no like the way white men shoot back.”
Pierre’s tongue had been loosened by several pulls from a flask, and as
they jogged briskly along he unburdened himself with talk of the trade,
of the American Fur Company and its nefarious ways. “Bribe the Indian
with weesky,” he said, “an bad weesky at that.” You never knew what you
would get for your furs; lots of trappers frozen out by changed prices.
Supplies so high; six dollar for an ax, five dollar for an iron kettle.
Sometimes your winter’s catch lost or stolen. The Rocky Mountain Fur
Company just as bad. That General Ashley of St. Louis, belonging to the
Rocky Mountain Fur Company, had stolen a cache of furs up north, planted
by Skeen Ogden of Hudson Bay Company, just because he himself have bad
luck. In four years Ashley had grown very rich, and sold out to Smith
and Sublette of St. Louis.
Pierre was depressed. After ten years’ trapping he was only $550 ahead,
and he’d had to come way down from the Colorado River to collect what
was due him at St. Louis. The trader who staked him with supplies had
tried to cheat on him, and had sent Indians after him on the Trail to
kill him before he could get down to St. Louis and get his account
straightened out with the company itself. He’d gotten off with his life,
but not much else. It was a hard trade. But he wanted to get away from
this civilization and be back on the upper Colorado.
Having unburdened his soul, the trapper relapsed into a taciturn
silence, and it was so that they completed the journey, jogging into the
little town of Independence, where before the big general store and
hotel they saw at once that a caravan was making ready. Steve drew a
breath of relief, and the suspense which he had felt let down.
“There is Colonel St. Vrain,” and Pierre pointed out a stocky figure in
the fustian suit of the townsman of the period, and a broad Mexican hat.
A few minutes later Steven stood before him, a heavy-set man with wide,
pleasant face.
“Colonel St. Vrain?” The colonel looked up to see a burned young man of
twenty-two or three, he judged (so much had three months on the river
done for him), who towered head and shoulders over himself, and took an
instant liking to “Steven Mercer of New Orleans, at your service
monsieur.” Busy as he was--the _arrieros_ were loading the mules with
their packs, and everywhere wagons were being charged with their
cargo--the colonel stopped to listen to Steven’s request and to read the
letter of introduction, upon which he again shook hands with Steven.
“But certainly, my lad, if you wish to cross the Trail with us you are
welcome. And welcome you surely are, for another few hours and we should
have left. We have waited here six weeks for this merchandise while
William Bent, my partner, went ahead with the other caravan, escorted by
Major Riley from Fort Leavenworth, and three companies of soldiers. We
shall sleep on the prairies tonight, so make haste. But,” and the
colonel eyed Steven keenly, “I see you bring no equipment, no
merchandise?”
Steven reddened beneath his burn. “No, monsieur, my father is not yet
convinced of the possibilities of trade westward to Santa Fe----”
St. Vrain nodded energetically, not displeased, perhaps, at that. “Are
you driver, guide, trapper? _Non!_ You are not. I pay you no wages, but
all who are of the caravan must do what they can to make themselves
useful, _n’est-ce pas_?”
“Oh, I shall pay my own expenses, _mi coronel_,” protested Steven. The
hospitable but practical St. Vrain was at this moment called away to
supervise a wagon-load and Steven was led off to the store by Pierre to
pick out his outfit. They opened Steve’s luggage to take stock of what
he had. Three flannel shirts of the kind that the river men down on the
Mississippi wore, some heavy socks, that was all of a frontiersman’s
outfit that his bags yielded. He closed them quickly, a bit ashamed to
have the guide see the fine linen underthings, the starched shirts, an
extra suit of fustian, and one of silk, also a pair of smartly turned
city boots.
“I can leave these bags here,” he said, and was all for discarding them
grandly.
“But, no,” cautioned Pierre. “Take them with you. If you do not wish to
wear the clothes, you can sell them out there. The Mexicans will buy
everything.”
Steven emerged from the store transformed, wearing Mexican leather
breeches open from the knee down, plainsman’s boots, and a shirt shipped
from his father’s warehouse. It had taken the whole of his month’s
allowance to outfit himself--gun, ammunition, his rations of beans, salt
pork, coffee, and flour, which were added to the general commissary of
the colonel’s outfit. He deposited $200 in all with the storekeeper, and
his remaining $300 Steven tied tightly in a leather pouch and hung it
inside his shirt.
With his grips and new outfit he reported back to the colonel, was
assigned a seat in the wagon following the colonel’s own, second in the
caravan, and took his stand at one side while he watched the
preparations for departure, hoping to be called upon to do something,
ready to jump for such service.
Here were swarthy Mexicans, whom the boy from New Orleans recognized, as
he had talked with many off the ships from Vera Cruz, swearing and
sweating as they made ready the mule pack train which would make up half
of the caravan. A _mula de carga_ was brought up to where the cargo lay
upon the ground, the sheepskin pad and saddle-cloth thrown upon its
back, the _aparejo_, the hay-stuffed saddle of leather which protected
the animal’s back from the cargo, set on top, and cinched with a wide
grass bandage as tightly as the shouting, straining _arriero_ could draw
it, while the mule groaned and grunted. It seemed to Steven raw cruelty,
but he kept his own counsel, watching one animal after another saddled
in this way, swiftly, expertly. The _cargador_ and his assistant, using
their knees as levers, deftly heaved the heavy bales of goods up on to
the mules’ backs, lashing them firmly with a stout rope passed under the
belly of the animal, while a vicious-looking crupper passed beneath
their scarred and lacerated tails further served to hold the whole
tight. In five minutes a mule was loaded. “_Adios_,” shouted the
_cargador_, slapping the animal on the rump. “Good-by.” The assistant
would sing out, “_Vaya_ [Go].” “_Anda_ [Walk],” the cargador would
answer, upon which the animal would trot off to feed until the rest of
the train was ready.
There were thirty wagons in this caravan, drawn by mules, with the
exception of two belonging to the colonel, which would carry three tons
of goods each, twice as much as the others, and which were each drawn by
twelve oxen. This was something new on the Trail and the colonel was
most particular to see how the oxen served. The remaining six wagons
belonging to St. Vrain carried one and a half tons each and were drawn
by eight mules. The rest of the caravan was made up of eight-mule wagons
and the mule train, with thirty or forty extra mules and horses that
would bring up the rear of the caravan, as usual.
The colonel had been chosen captain of the traders, and his word would
be law on the voyage across the plains. He rode back and forth now,
directing the loading of his own wagons and superintending the work of
all. Steve’s bags were packed under the seat of the wagon in which he
was to ride. The caravan was falling into line before he realized it. No
time to lose; the train had waited as long as it dared for the goods
from New Orleans, and, now they were ready, they would go.
“All’s set,” was heard from one teamster after another.
“Stretch out,” shouted the _mayordomo_ (who was next in command) as the
muleteers ran along, cracking their whips and driving the grazing mules
into line. “Catch up! Ca-aatch up!”
The driver of Steve’s wagon leaped to his seat, curled the whip over the
backs of his eight mules, yelling and gee-hawing at them; there was a
great shouting all down the line, an answering accolade from the
populace of Independence which had all gathered in the square to watch
the departure, and they were off, to the jingle of chains, the rattle of
yokes, the yee-hawing of balky mules, rolling down the incline that led
away westward, with a flourish and a bravery, right into the setting
sun.
CHAPTER III
DISPUTED EMPIRE
To Santa Fe, seven hundred and fifty miles ahead--with but one white
settlement in all the distance--lumbered the caravan. There were fifteen
wagons, fifty men, and more than three times that many animals. Before
them stretched the undulating prairies, waving with deep grass; behind
wound the tail of the caravan. Above, the skies were richly blue,
gorgeous with vast white clouds.
Four nights on the plains, under the stars, listening about the camp
fire to talk of trader and trapper. Steven was filled with tales of the
Trail, and of the fortunes that lay already mined and minted over the
far mountains--theirs for the journeying after. Seated now in the lead
wagon beside St. Vrain, Steven wondered if in all that vast wilderness
of land there could be other living beings than the fifty men and near
two hundred animals of their caravan.
“Ha! you think not,” said the Frenchman, chatting now in French, now in
English. “In this land”--he swept his hand about the horizon--“live many
great nations of red men--Kaw, Kansas, Pawnee, Arapahoe, Kiowa,
Comanche, Apache, Cheyenne. Many tribes, two to ten thousand strong.” It
was the fur-traders, St. Vrain remarked with pride, who had taught the
Indians to need white men’s goods--calico, whisky, looking-glasses, and
gunpowder.
“Not so many people in Santa Fe,” said St. Vrain, “just about two
thousand souls, but, _mon Dieu!_ there were near fifty thousand in the
state, all told--Mexicans and Pueblo Indians--and that was worth risking
something for. The Spaniards had been shipping everything but the
foodstuffs of the land up from Mexico for almost three hundred years.
And they have further to come than we. What could be easier than this?”
“It is wonderful,” Steven agreed, “yet I wonder if those new
steam-driven engines which they ran on a track in Maryland last winter
will not be crossing this plain some day. Think, they could pull all
this freight without any effort at all.”
“I doubt if ever,” St. Vrain shook his head skeptically. “They could
_never_ lay the track, and could make but little better time. We’ve come
fast. We’ll be nooning at One-hundred-and-ten-mile creek. Day before
yesterday I showed you where the Oregon Trail branched off; now the way
lies straight ahead till we strike the Arkansas at the Bend. Your
Senator Benton, and President Monroe, too, have been good friends to the
traders, getting the old Trail surveyed. This is the way lad, that the
first fellows who found that country yonder traveled. They followed the
sunset, the Spaniards, till they struck a river flowing from the west,
the Arkansas. And that’s the way the first traders, La Lande and
Pursley, came twenty-five years ago; they’re still living in Santa Fe,
doing business. And Captain Pike, exploring for the United States--I’ll
show you a great peak named after him when we reach the mountains. But
poor Pike got onto Mexican territory and built him a winter fort,
thinking it was the United States, and they threw him into prison in
Santa Fe as a spy. Lots of those who came after him met the same fate;
and since they blazed the way many traders have come.
“I’ve heard it said out yonder”--the colonel nodded towards the
sunset--“that those early Spaniards thought they were going to find
cities with streets paved with gold! Seven of them!” The fat Frenchman
threw back his head and laughed appreciatively. “But the gold is in the
pocket, not in the street; and it’s _silver_, bar and bullion and minted
coin.” He slapped his thigh, roaring heartily. “That is what the trader
finds in honest trade where the Spaniard failed with all his bloodshed.
Yet do you know, they hate us like pizen! Many a man who found his way
across this trackless plain and through the mountain passes wasn’t able
to find his way back. Rotted in Mexican jails like McKnight and his
party back in 1812, that lay for ten years in Chihuahua carcels, their
goods confiscate; _mais oui!_”
“How did this Pursley happen to be allowed to live in Santa Fe
unmolested?” asked Steven, curiously, a trifle uneasy at such a record.
“They wouldn’t let him leave. He knows where free gold lies thick in
those mountains,” the colonel replied. “He won’t tell where and they
wouldn’t let him get away. They always hope to find out where. Some day
he may tell and there’ll be a trail broader than this worn to the
diggings, mark me.”
The colonel flecked the backs of his oxen to speed their measured
pacing. “My countree she give up an empire here,” he said at length in
English. “Two hundred year she been here, up and down the Mississip.
England push down from the Great Lakes, from the Hudson Bay, but she
can’t push the _voyageur_ off the rivers and _lacs_. Those Spanish they
lie safe behind those mountains, like the dog in the mange; cannot hold
this land and don’t want anyone else to. The Mexican, and now the Texan
South, they get as bad as the Indian every year now. Don’t want traders
to pass through Texas.
“But two hundred and fifty thousand dollars’ worth of goods have been
carried over this trail this year, my lad.” The colonel nodded
impressively. “I talk with all the traders who buy for forts and with
fur-traders as well. And that is not all. Colonel Bent tells me that
seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars’ worth of trade has been taken
in to Santa Fe from Mexico this year from everywhere. For this reason I
myself and Charles Bent have made our move to Taos this year. Colonel
Bent stays on the Arkansas. Too bad there is no river to Santa Fe. See
how many trading stations and forts already on the Oklahoma.
“But come, I see you are more interested in stories of adventure. Is it
not so? You shall have enough of it before you have finished.” Steven’s
eyes lit with delight. “Last year a company of young men from Franklin,
Missouri,” the colonel continued, “reached Santa Fe, sold their goods,
and months later came staggering back to Independence on foot, almost
dead. They’d been attacked almost from the moment they left Santa Fe,
their mules stampeded off. They had finally to hide nearly all the money
they’d made, ten thousand dollars silver--cached it on Chouteau’s island
on the border.
“Will they go back for the money? I bet you _que oui_! Some of them are
with that caravan ahead with Bent. Major Riley will guard them to the
cache. Oh, you’ll have adventure aplenty my lad.”
“Tonight I stand guard for the first time”--Steven was hugely
pleased--“but everything has been very quiet so far, Colonel.”
“Let us hope it will continue to be so,” replied St. Vrain, fervently,
“as we have no military escort. We’re but four days out and there is a
six weeks’ journey at least before us. Do you see that dark streak
yonder on the horizon? That’s buffalo, a hundred herds, likely.”
To Steven the endless, treeless prairie stretching away before them held
all the lure of the sea for the sailor. His eager eyes looked over its
waves, anticipating what lay beyond. A natural road, surveyed five years
before as far as the Mexican border. But through the mountains beyond,
where there were no roads--that was where the survey was needed; where
many a good man was killed from ambush in some narrow canyon.
Great clouds were massing to the south and rolling up into the sky,
their fleecy whiteness shadowed by heavy, rain-filled masses. The
_mayordomo_ rode forward from the rear to consult with the colonel. They
decided that, with so heavy a storm brewing, it would be well to halt
and have supper over before the rain began. The cry went down along the
line of the small army that stretched out for a mile in the rear, “Catch
up, ca-aa-atch uu-up!”
The colonel ordered his outfit to make a halt immediately and the cook
went about making a fire of caked buffalo dung, which he lit with the
dried grasses of the prairie. Soon coffee was steaming in enormous pots,
salt pork and beans were warming in huge iron kettles, and flapjacks
were mounting on a hot iron griddle. There were many individual parties
in the caravan who cooked and ate by themselves, but the colonel’s
outfit had a cook. The colonel carried with him a small tent, which was
not always set up, a camp table and folding chairs, so that upon
occasion he could eat with comfort and style. But tonight he and Steven,
the _mayordomo_ and Pierre, squatted about the camp fire, and in the
queer half-light that hung below the clouds, now rumbling and thundering
ominously, they quickly dispatched their food. The colonel at once set
about making his wagon shipshape for the night, and the _arrieros_ ran
about, covering their cargoes and _aparejos_. The mules and oxen were
turned into the improvised corral of the caravan train; the wagons were
driven into a circle and locked together by running the long tongues
under the beds of the wagons ahead. This had scarcely been accomplished
when with a great drive of wind that set loose rope and canvas
a-slapping and whipping, the storm was upon them.
As he could not reach his own wagon, Steven ducked for the colonel’s
tent, which was pitched just outside the circle of wagons and in a
little depression against a hill. He found the colonel sitting in the
center of his bed, a pipe in his mouth, a lantern already lit, and a
huge limp map spread out upon his knees. It was a buffalo hide upon
which was drawn in charcoal and in colored rock a plan of the Rockies
and of certain passes that lay beyond. While the thunder cracked over
their heads and the little tent rocked and swayed in the gale till
Steven thought it must surely collapse, St. Vrain unconcernedly examined
his map, shouting to Steve, “We’re takin’ a new trail over the mountains
this side Santa Fe; old buffalo and mountain-sheep trail. _Les animals
sylvestres_, wild critters, knew it was the easiest way, but no one on
two legs had sense to find it out till by accident recently.”
Each word was interrupted by terrific peals of thunder, and flashes of
lightning, and after a short time by a cloudburst directly over the
caravan, which let loose such a deluge that the colonel’s lantern was
doused, while at the same time a flood of water ran over the floor and
left the bed islanded in the center. Steven wished he were in his wagon,
well above the flood, but he had no thought of venturing out in the
storm to reach his own bunk.
“Time to go on watch.” In the darkness the colonel set his mouth to
Steve’s ear and roared. Amazed, but none the less ready, Steven
struggled out through the whipping flaps of the tent and staggered
blindly toward the spot where his wagon stood. He collided with St.
Vrain’s _mayordomo_, who shouted, “Watch.” Steve’s buckskin shirt and
breeches were already slimily wet, but he managed to reach inside the
wagon, feel about till his hand encountered his own bundle, and drag out
a heavy, stiff, Navajo blanket. He thrust his head through the slit,
grabbed his gun, and stumbled toward the corral opening, to take orders.
Between peals of thunder that drowned the voice, and torrents of rain
beneath which even the mules hung their heads and drooped their tails,
Steve was assigned the northwest watch. He strode away to his first
post, reflecting that upon a night like this no Indian would be thinking
of attack. The thought reminded him of what he felt would be Indian
tactics, and he crouched lower as he walked, holding his gun ready,
cocked, as though charging into battle, instead of into the prairie
dark.
Beyond he could see, as the lightning flashed, a small clump of bushes
on the side of a little knoll not fifty feet from the caravan corral. He
made toward this, planning to crouch in the lee of it, where he would
not be seen in the occasional flashes of lightning. The blanket, a
poncho, was already getting in its good work, for he felt warm, if wet,
next his skin, and the coarse Navajo wool was practically water-proof.
The tail of his beaver cap performed its office nicely, but the brim
could not keep the sheets of water out of his eyes or his mouth.
As he stooped toward the bush he heard a whizzing noise from behind,
ducked involuntarily, but not enough to completely escape a blow from
the missile hurled at him. It nicked his ear and scalp, but he had no
time to notice the pain. A form rose up out of the blackness and
grappled him. His gun was wrenched away in the struggle to keep his feet
and to hold fast the arms of wire that clutched below his thighs. He
kicked forward mightily, a kick that caught the dark assailant
amidships, and down they went together, to roll struggling to the bottom
of the knoll. By which time Steve’s long arms and longer legs had done
much toward increasing the distance between himself and his attacker,
and when they reached the bottom he was on top, but straining in every
sinew, winded, his throat almost cut off from air by fingers of steel.
It infuriated Steve. The blood of fighting ancestors of the sea rose in
his brain and suffused his eyes, so that literally he saw red in the
night’s blackness. Fingers gouged his eyeballs. It was agony. With a
howl of rage he lifted his big-boned young body and lunged down with one
hundred and seventy pounds, his knees landing in the other’s stomach.
The clutching hands relaxed, the figure went limp. Steven got to his
feet, stumbling backward over the fallen rifle. He recovered the weapon
and faced about to charge the darkness and any other attacks it
harbored. A flash of lightning showed the figure of an almost nude
Indian lying before him, face turned to the sky, eyes open.
Steven felt overcome by weakness; his legs were turned to water. He
struggled back toward where the wagons must be, missed them completely,
had a sense of being utterly alone in a limitless space of storm and
prairie. Blindly and a trifle wildly he headed in the opposite
direction; then a brilliant flash showed him the wagons lying to his
left. A few moments later he bumped into the captain for the night,
pacing his rounds about the wagons. A sudden lull of the thunder and
winds had come and the rain had lessened to a mild, steady downpour.
“Indians,” Steven gasped to the captain. He pointed toward the bush
where he had taken his station. “Guess I killed him!” He sank dazedly
upon a bale of cargo, his eyeballs still tortured. Half a dozen men had
already spread in a cordon in some deep matted grass beyond the corral.
A dozen more came running; the camp was alert. There was firing, muffled
and sounding far away. Steve pulled himself together and hurried toward
the sound. The _mayordomo_ rose up out of the grass. “On guard!” he
barked. “At the gate!” and without any inquiry into Steven’s condition
slunk on all fours round to the other side of the wagons.
The wind stopped, and the lightning. The rain descended in a warm,
steady stream. Curiously warm, thought Steven, as he wiped his dripping
face. Repressing an involuntary shudder that shook him, he tried to
pierce the darkness, watching this side and that, his rifle presented,
nerves tense. The rain stopped. Hours passed, hours during which Steven
grew rather faint, with a strange nausea at the pit of the stomach. He
longed to lie down, to sleep, and fought the shameful stupor that crept
over him, and was conquered, only to settle again. He would be
disgraced, and the penalty unnamable, were he to sleep at his post. He
had a vague feeling of remorse that he had not said good-by to his
father and mother before he left New Orleans--so long ago, so far away.
He must not go to sleep.
St. Vrain, the _mayordomo_, and some others appeared suddenly out of the
gloom. St. Vrain held up a dark lantern which he had been carrying under
his cloak, and in the barely perceptible light looked at Steven. “Come
on into my tent. He’s relieved from guard duty.” He nodded to one of the
trappers, and Steve followed him a trifle uncertainly. In the tent the
colonel drew out a kit with bandages and salve, a rude equipment but
skillfully handled with the deftness of long practice.
“Tomahawk cut; leetle further and he shave off your ear. Leetle further
and he shave off the top of your head--Kiowa,” the colonel explained
when he had finished the job. “Treacherous and fierce. Out scouting. You
put fear in the spy. He run, run his horse, but we get him. Morning is
nearly come now; you will go to catch some sleep.”
Steven managed to reach his bunk in the wagon just in time. Clambering
over the seat, he sank with a reeling head to his couch on the bales and
his senses swam off to blissful unconsciousness the moment his head
touched the blanket pillow. How much time had passed when he was waked
he could not imagine. The sun was shining straight in his face, but he
could have slept the clock around. “Breakfast,” he could hear the cry.
“We’re off in a half hour.”
He had been asleep but a few hours and ached in every muscle. Then he
remembered his tussle with the Indian the night before. He dragged
himself out to the camp fire, where scalding coffee and corn bread were
being passed out hurriedly. The coffee was bracing, and St. Vrain’s
hearty reception even more so. Steven noticed for the first time that
the front of his coat and his sleeve had literally been soaked with
blood, and his poncho was still damp and stained a dull red.
The _arrieros_ were shouting to the mules, which came running and stood
each beside his own equipage and cargo, waiting to be saddled, except a
few unruly ones who kicked up their heels and dashed off before the
pursuit of their drivers. The oxen went readily into their yokes, and in
an incredibly short time the caravan was once more moving over the
prairie, not so smoothly this morning, for the road was gummy and
slippery with mud. It was heavy and the ruts became deep.
“There’ll be no nooning today,” St. Vrain announced as he rode by on a
mule. “We’ll make Cottonwood Creek by night and go into camp there.” But
an unexpected occurrence was to set even the captain’s decision aside.
They had passed out of the storm-soaked area into a dry region where
apparently not a drop of rain had fallen.
Almost unperceived by Steven, a vibrating trembling of the earth became
apparent. It developed rapidly into a roar like distant thunder. Steven
listened, surprised; there was something elemental, alarming, in the
tremor. A number of hunters and trappers were riding by at a dead run.
“Buffalo! buffalo!” the shout went up. Leaping from his seat, Steven ran
ahead in time to see a cloud of dust come rolling over the crest of a
slope about a quarter of a mile beyond and to the right of the caravan.
Out of the dark cloud a black moving mass came thunderingly forward. It
was a herd of perhaps thousands of buffalo charging straight down upon
them. The caravan train was thrown into a panic. The oxen pushed forward
mightily, lowing in their fear. The mules went crazy, pulling out of the
ruts and dashing madly away from the oncoming stampede, while the
drivers yelled, lashed with their long whips, and pulled back on the
reins. The driver of Steven’s wagon leaped out, thrusting the whip into
Steve’s hands, and he found himself shouting at the crazed animals,
lashing them on the off side while the driver tugged at their heads on
the nigh side, trying to turn them from the Trail, straining to keep the
wagon from overturning, while to the right the stampede came nearer and
nearer. He had a momentary impulse to jump, but realized he was safer
right on the wagon. He was more frightened than ever he had been in his
life before.
The men who had ridden forward were trying to turn the avalanche of
buffalo, but it was impossible to swerve more than a portion of the
herd, and, borne on by their own momentum, a horde was sweeping down
upon the pack train. It looked as though they must pass directly over
the caravan. Snorting, their little eyes blood-shot, blood streaming
from the nostrils of many that had been shot, they came straight towards
Steve’s wagon. The mules in the path of these monarchs of the plain went
wild, rearing, bucking, their heavy cargoes notwithstanding, while some
of them bolted off the Trail and clear out of sight. His oxen lowing
frantically, Steve managed to pull out of the road. The hunters, who had
wheeled and were riding along beside the massive animals, were firing
into their ranks. It seemed as though bullets must be less than grape
seed against the hairy leather hides, yet one after another fell, but
without affecting the charge, for the rest stampeded on over them.
The shooting of the lead bulls, however, parted the mass and the ponies
galloping alongside caused a division in the ranks; while one part
swerved off at right angles, a great herd passed right through and over
the ranks of the caravan. Two wagons were upset and beneath the
thundering hoofs of the irresistible mass many of the mules were
overtaken and went down. When the buffalo had passed over the spot
nothing remained to be seen of mules, cargo, _atajo_, saddles. They were
ground into the dust.
St. Vrain was dashing up and down on his horse, trying to keep the whole
caravan from utter demoralization, while the hunters bore hard on the
flanks of the swerving beasts, dropping many of them, and diverting them
off and across the plains, following the rest of the herd. The caravan
was finally brought to a halt. It took hours to pursue and bring back
the stampeded mules that had escaped and to repair the damage. When this
was done and order somewhat restored, all fell to with alacrity at
skinning buffalo and butchering the fresh meat. It was very welcome, as
it was the first of any consequence they had had since leaving
Independence.
While they were cutting out the tenderest parts, Steve helping, and
learning how to wield a knife, his hands covered with grease and gore, a
sound the like of which he had never before heard, and which he was
never to forget, split the air. A troop of Indians mounted on pinto
ponies rode over the hill, and bore down on the still disorganized
caravan.
“I thought so,” said St. Vrain. “That herd was stampeded down upon us.”
The band of feathered red men now approached circuitously at a canter,
their demonstrations friendly. There must have been fifty or sixty of
them. Each brave held up both hands as a signal not to shoot, while they
came nearer and nearer until they were able to see lying on the plain
the large number of buffalo that had been killed, and to take in the
extent of the caravan. Because of the rolling character of the country
through which they were now passing it was impossible to tell how far
the train might extend, or whether beyond the rise in the near distances
a military escort might be following.
Steven was thrilled at so close a view of Indians, the first he had ever
seen with the exception of the redskin he had knocked out the night
before. He admired their splendid physiques (they were naked above the
waist), but saw that both cunning and cruelty showed in their faces. As
the braves came forward St. Vrain stood up, the men all laid hands on
their rifles, waiting for the Indians to make the first move. “How!”
grunted the leader, and there was “Howing” on both sides, ending with
the Indians dismounting. The _mayordomo_ came inconspicuously forward,
having ridden the length of the caravan, bringing back the stragglers,
making sure that those who had gone in pursuit of either mules or cargo
had returned. If they were cut off from the rest they might lose what
was more important than cargo or horses; and it was necessary to be
ready to take a united stand should the Indians open an attack.
St. Vrain, having butchered three buffalo and taken choice bits from
half a dozen others, offered the Indians the remainder of the carcasses.
This was highly agreeable to them, as it offered meat and hides without
a round of their own ammunition having been fired, and as St. Vrain and
the _mayordomo_ gave the signal to go on, the red men dismounted and set
swiftly to work to skin the fifty or sixty odd carcasses that lay thick
about them. The _mayordomo_ informed the Indians that they were making
haste to overtake a mythical division of their caravan which was ahead
of them.
And so the caravan passed on without a shot having been fired, or a drop
of blood having been sacrificed, other than that of the great bison.
It was late that night before Steven had the opportunity of satisfying
his sharp appetite upon one of the juiciest, most delicious steaks he
had ever eaten. An abundance of food now offered itself to the
caravaners. Quail and grouse started up from underfoot, and at Diamond
Springs, and later at Cottonwood Creek, the fish were so plentiful that
they could be almost scooped out with the hands. But the caravan did not
linger here nor make a camp as planned. Instead they forded the stream
by moonlight. It proved deeper than the drivers had thought, so that the
oxen had to swim with the heavy wagons behind them, and it was several
hours before the entire caravan got safely across. There was no
bivouacking until nearly dawn, by which time everyone was nearly
devoured with mosquitoes. But nothing more was seen of Indians. They
camped that night on a branch of the little Arkansas and the mosquitoes
continued like a plague.
From that time on good progress was made, at least fifteen miles each
day. And this in spite of, or perhaps because of, the torment of flies
which took the place of mosquitoes. Some of the mules ran off, wild with
the fly-bitten sores for which there was no healing under the
circumstances. They saw frequent bands of wild horses and traveled with
buffalo constantly, sometimes parting the herds as they passed through
them. The plains in the distance were dark with the shaggy coats of
thousands of grazing beasts, moving in small herds of fifty to one
hundred. Thousands of month-old buffalo calves frisked beside their
mothers and the prairies were covered with great “buffalo rings” trodden
in the grass by the vigilant bulls, circling the mothers and their young
in defense against wolf and coyote.
The caravaners often shot buffalo from the wagons as they passed and
paused only long enough to cut the tidbits from the carcasses,
especially the tongue and the hump. St. Vrain frowned on this wantonness
however, and gave orders not to shoot unless food was needed. Some of
the trappers dried a quantity of the meat, stringing small strips and
tying a lineful along the sides of the wagon to dry in the sun and air.
Steven joined the buffalo-hunters a few days after their encounter with
the Indians, and brought down a bull. Swept along by a trained pony in
company with the racing herd, thrilling with an excitement greater than
any he had yet experienced, he drew bead after bead, but his shots went
wild until, by chance he was honestly persuaded, a foolish creature
swerved into the path of his bullet and fell. Nevertheless, it gave the
Southern lad a standing with the hardened trappers and traders, along
with his exploit with the Indian on his first night guard.
“Lad,” said St. Vrain one night as he sat before the fire and rolled
himself a cigarette in the thin inner husk of corn, “you seem to take to
the life, but you’ve had but a taste. There are hardships ahead. We stop
at Cow Creek tonight, and tomorrow afternoon we should strike the
Arkansas at the Great Bend. Pawnee Rock lies not far beyond. Ah, that is
where, my young fr’en’, I have encountered great dangers. It is the
battleground of Cheyenne and Pawnee, the hunting-ground of all. Two
years ago we stood with a caravan there for three whole days, fighting
off a band of Pawnees. Forty-two men we were, and twenty-six mule
wagons, with a bunch of loose stock. We were without water two nights
and nearly three days till at length I ordered to hitch up and drive on
to Pawnee Forks, where the trail crosses the Arkansas. We made it, a
double crossing, for the river bends like a horseshoe, as you will see.
But the wagons were smashed up, and when we reached the other side the
Indians began firing on us from the bluffs. We cleaned ’em out and lost
but four men, with seven wounded. Twenty mules were crippled and a dozen
killed.”
“There was another young fr’en’ of mine on that trip”--St. Vrain puffed
at his cigarette reminiscently--“Christopher Carson. ‘Kit,’ we call him.
Just a boy, Steven, make half of you, but fight like a mountain cat.
Those bloodthirst’ Pawnees got to know him.”
“Are all the Indians so hostile?” asked Steve.
“No. The Comanches and Utes nearer the border of Mexican territory are
much more friendly. We deal squarely with the Indians with whom we
trade, and they with us. And the Indians of the towns, the Pueblos, as
the Spaniards say, who live beyond the mountains only, in New Mexico,
they do not fight unless attacked or treated badly. They cultivate the
land, they work, they are good people.”
“Except when the Mexicans set them on the Americanos,” said Pierre, who
was sitting near. “Between Indian and Spaniard, though, monsieur, I
rather deal with the Indian, me!” He spat disgustedly. “How many
thousan’ mile I travel to get my wage after ten year. I no longer work
for American Fur Company. I work for Rocky Mountain Fur Company. _Hein_,
St. Vrain? I work from Taos to Bent’s Fort.”
A day later the caravan had entered the rich and beautiful valley of the
Arkansas, following the Trail where it swung in toward the Big Bend,
through a hunting-ground that abounded in all manner of game. Thirteen
miles beyond lay Pawnee Rock. There were signs of a caravan having
preceded them by not many days. St. Vrain and the _mayordomo_ discussed
the possibility of its being the army detachment that had followed
Bent’s caravan. Every man was supplied with plenty of powder, two good
muskets, a pouchful of balls. They threaded the valley of the Arkansas
prepared for a surprise attack.
Steven, like all the other men, had for weeks been sleeping with his
loaded gun by his side. Night alarms were frequent, yet the only attacks
were those of mosquitoes, against which guns were useless.
There was an incessant scratching and brushing and switching of tails to
keep off horse flies and a giant and bloodthirsty mosquito. Steven’s pet
riding-mule ran off insane with the flies and never came back. Steven
was so eager to bear his part that he slept little; as a consequence,
when his turn came for night watch it was all that he could do, even
with the help of the mosquitoes, to keep his eyes open and not disgrace
himself eternally by falling asleep at his post. After midnight,
however, it was not so difficult, but next day he drowsed and nodded on
the wagon seat and slept outright while Pierre drove beside him.
He was roused when the trapper yelled out, “Pawnee Rock,” and opened his
eyes to see looming high before them the rock of bloody record, as gory
a stone of sacrifice, according to the colonel’s stories, as that famed
in old Mexico for the slaughter of Aztec victims. As they passed below
the face of the cliff the colonel came riding by to see what might lie
beyond on the far side. But for once the sentinel of the plains harbored
no dead, no skeletons. There was no sign of a struggle having taken
place there, and the caravan continued onward to the Forks with a breath
of relief. At the Forks they left the southern trail that followed the
river so closely, and took to the northern route, which the colonel
thought less open to ambush.
The Forks was the last water seen for two days. They passed out of the
verdure that followed the level river banks and into a sweltering land
where the mosquitoes were still unbearable. The caravan plodded along
until on a dazzling midday, when the order came to halt for a mooning,
the animals stood with open, panting months. A large white ox that was
yoked to St. Vrain’s wagon lay down in the shade of the Conestoga, as it
was called, and the colonel helped Steve stretch a blanket from two
poles to give the beast some relief from the heat of the sun. The
colonel was distressed at finding that the oxen upon which he had
counted so much could not, apparently, withstand as much drought as the
mules. But he learned that the animal had not had its fill at the Forks
and had been suffering patiently. Steve begged to be allowed to go off
with Pierre to fetch water for the ox, as they were not more than a few
miles inland from the river, and St. Vrain agreed. That night they crept
on hands and knees through the deep grass, their pace accelerated by the
giant gnats and buzzing of their constant companions. The river lay
beyond. There was scarcely a tree along the level banks, and to approach
it would mean exposing themselves. They would be seen, without doubt,
for a bright moon was shining now. Pierre, fortunately, struck one of
the numerous buffalo trails that had been trodden through the grass by
the passage of many hoofs, and following it, still on hands and knees,
they came out at the river’s edge where the trail was worn in a deep and
narrow cut through the bank. In the shadow of the cut they could not be
seen. They flung themselves down, drank their fill, and filled the
canteens. On the other side of the river reared high white sand dunes
that gleamed in the moonlight. The full moon, riding like a lantern over
the prairie, showed them for a few moments three feathered riders on the
opposite bank. They dropped, and retreated for a mile on flat stomachs.
Reaching the caravan again, Steven poured one canteen after another into
a basin for the panting creature on whose life depended their means of
locomotion and the transportation of a part of that valuable cargo for
the sake of which death in the desert, torture by Indians, were being
defied. The ox looked up at them gratefully and drained the basin at one
suck. Before long it was sufficiently revived to stagger to its feet and
graze. “We return to the river again tomorrow night,” said St. Vrain,
“and two days later will be at Cimmaron Crossing. We’ll cross the
Arkansas there and take the shorter, southern trail straight to Santa
Fe.”
This trail led through a desolate stretch of desert, a high arid
plateau, swept by blistering winds. Steven was disappointed that they
would leave the Arkansas behind and not make Bent’s Fort.
CHAPTER IV
THE RED TRAIL
A breathless dawn hovered over the desert, that, having exhaled
throughout the night a withering heat stored by day, now lay swooning.
For four hours the caravan had been encamped, having traveled from
sunset till midnight. Now they must again bestir themselves and make
what time they could before the sun was high. Just as that fiery rose
peculiar to sunrise flushed the sky a cool breath of air was wafted over
the desert.
The oxen widened their nostrils and lifted their heads in deep, throaty
lowing. Steven sprang to his feet with a bound, and at once the whole
encampment seemed to be astir. There was no making of fires, for the
heat was too great and the desert had not even a tumbleweed upon it, nor
yet the usual buffalo chips. There was little water left. The men
nibbled at their hardtack and crackers as they harnessed up, and the
mules snatched at the meager leaves of the scant mesquite, or the spikes
of the Spanish dagger as they were whipped reluctantly into line. For
three days they had plodded through the burning sands without meeting
watercourse or pool--sixty-three miles between the great river and the
next tiny stream it was, but now, on the fourth day, they should be
nearing water. Pierre Lafitte came up from the rear, on foot, driving
his string before him, and took the lead.
“Pierre has a great nose for water,” St. Vrain explained when Steve
asked the purpose of the change in the order of the caravan. “He takes
the lead, for the red men are between us and the Lower Spring of the
Cimmaron. If Sand Creek ahead of us has not gone dry, we’ll be all
right, otherwise we may not be able to get water for several days. Thank
God,” he added, “that there are no women along on this trip.”
The train moved sluggishly along as the sun rose in a fiery haze. Even
the first rays smote Steven with incredible power. The tufts of gramma
grass and Spanish dagger had dwindled away, and only an occasional bit
of sage was seen, at which the mules grasped with twitching lips as they
passed. It could not yet have been eight by the sun when Pierre came
running back and stopped beside the colonel’s wagon. Comanches had been
on the warpath, he said, not later than yesterday, and he had found a
still bloody scalp dropped by some hasty rider. Urging the oxen to what
speed they could, St. Vrain pushed on to the edge of a dune ahead.
Steven drove the wagon following. As they cleared the summit they saw
beneath them a small caravan, maybe a dozen wagons, drawn into corral
formation; not a sign of life about it.
“_Mon Dieu!_” ejaculated the French traders who came up behind St.
Vrain. “_Dios Mio!_” The Mexican mule-drivers crossed themselves
fervently and rolled their eyes heavenward. The colonel raised a
cautioning hand. The wagons had not been burned; that meant either
Indians in ambush or survivors. Silently they rolled down over the brink
into the arroyo. But as the inevitable rattle of chains and creak of
wagon frames broke the silence, all at once a cry went up from that
still circle of wagons. Out of the covered hiding-places rose a score of
heads. Almost hysterically the caravaners came running forward; in
relief they threw themselves upon Pierre and the colonel.
From between the curtains of a covered wagon a delicate face looked out,
pale as the yucca flower, and as lovely, with startled eyes of gentian
blue and smooth fair hair--a young girl, not more than sixteen. Her arms
were tight about the shoulders of a boy of ten or eleven years. Steven
Mercer found himself looking toward those parted curtains, and the
colonel’s eyes, too, were drawn to the spot. “Sss-acré-dam’,” he drew
the breath between his teeth. “A woman like that, a girl, here, on the
worst spot of the Red Trail!”
There were but fourteen of them, all told, after all. An old woman was
inside one of the wagons, very sick. There had been thirty. Bound for
Santa Fe, attacked shortly after they left the Cimmaron Crossing,
pursued here where they’d taken a stand, their mules stampeded and run
off, only six that were tied remaining, and two of those they had been
forced to eat. They’d been here in this corral for three days and
nights; not a drop of water since yesterday noon. Every night the
Indians came and rode circles around them. But now they knew that the
white men had plenty of ammunition and so did not open fresh attack.
They did not dare abandon the wagons and walk on to the lower Cimmaron
Spring, for there were hundreds of Cherokees and Apaches from Texas
waiting there.
“Your only chance nevertheless,” said St. Vrain, brusquely, “was to have
pushed through. Let the child and the young woman ride; cache your
goods. Now we are come, it is best for all to turn back. It is as far to
Cimmaron Springs, farther, with red men in between, and the way
altogether harder, than to return to the Arkansas. We will cut across
the desert and take our chance.” He consulted the buffalo map upon which
he had chalked the desert wastes and the Cordilleran wildernesses.
“Right here we are at the nearest point to the river, nearer than to
Cimmaron Crossing, even.”
And so it was agreed. The muleless caravan placed itself under the
captainship of the colonel. They were in the hands of their rescuers,
and, although one of them objected, they were forced to abandon all but
six of the wagons. The water was divided among the sufferers. The spare
horses and mules were brought up from the rear of the caravan and as
quickly as possible the six wagons were drawn out of the corral and
hitched up. Whatever of the goods they contained that could not be
crammed into the other wagons and redivided among the survivors was
hastily hidden in holes in the dry sand and the caravan driven over the
place to obliterate all signs. The girl and her brother remained in the
wagon in which they were. It was driven by her father, a lean,
thin-featured man. The old woman was transferred to St. Vrain’s own
wagon and the caravan turned about in the mounting heat and struck off
across a trackless desert at right angles to the direction from which
they had come. In this way they should at sundown be nearer the upper
course of the little trickle called Sand Creek than they were now to the
lower crossing. The men of the party said there was water in Sand Creek,
but the Indians had driven them back from it before they had drunk. The
caravan would go into corral and barricade itself at noon, while after
sunset Pierre and some of the hunters would, under cover of darkness,
hunt water at the creek.
Then Steven learned what the desert was. The heat of ten thousand
burning ovens rose from the scorched sands at his feet; for with the
heavier load on his wagon he had to walk. Singing cicadas and locusts
flew up and struck stingingly on the face. He thought of that pallid
girl behind those closed wagon flaps, as lovely as the Dresden china
figures in his mother’s cabinets--so far away, so very far away. He grew
light-headed, and fancied he was drinking long cool glasses of sparkling
water. He was not really suffering so far, but was drawing on the
reserves of untried young strength and full-blooded veins. He sang as he
walked, humming gay little French airs, and St. Vrain himself came
running back and spoke to him, harshly, gently, soothingly, marching
with him from time to time, while Steven showed him every now and again
where he saw water.
At a high white noon there came a cessation of the slow moving, the
mules slunk with drooping heads, the oxen lay in the shade of the
wagons, and the men lay beneath. The girl within the covered wagon was
silent, but the little lad cried out in delirium and the old lady
moaned. St. Vrain then repaired to his very last resource, his hidden
canteen, and poured the last of it out for the old lady, for the girl,
and for the boy. The man who lay beneath their wagon reached up for the
drink and would have fought with St. Vrain, but the captain of the
caravan silenced him with an oath and a shove and he sank back confused.
Stupor followed, a merciful stupor that descended upon man and beast
alike, and that ended only with the reviving of sundown and the awakened
torments of thirst and thickened tongues. Now Steven was keenly normal
except for the swollen, burning lining of his mouth.
“Keep it shut, my lad. Keep it shut,” St. Vrain kept reminding him.
He would go to the very mountains for water. With Pierre, then, and two
of the trappers, José and Marcel, Steven set out almost due south. They
had not traveled so far as he feared they must before they came to the
bed of a stream. Dry! Dry as a bone! Sand Creek indeed! But Pierre,
kneeling in the arroyo, dug a small hole into which water welled slowly.
It was incredible. They threw themselves flat and pressed their cracked
lips to the fluid, cool even as it rose from the sun-caked earth;
swelling from some inner stream jealously absorbed by the thirsty sands.
They filled the canteens, let the mules suck their fill--a slow
process--and as the stream continued to well they wet their shirts.
Marcel, a native of New Mexico, remained to guard the spot while the
others drove the mules back with the precious canteens, and upon their
return St. Vrain and a number of the _arrieros_ drove a bunch of mules
over the caked earth to the watering-spot. Everyone who could walk
visited the little spring.
Just in time to escape the flooding moonlight they returned. And then
for a few hours the caravan lay still in the white light, like a part of
the desert dunes among which they cowered. Before dawn they were again
moving across the caked sands, almost due north. “If we could keep
going,” said St. Vrain, “we’d make the Arkansas by midnight. But I’m
afraid it will be another day before we can do it.”
It depended upon whether the animals could stand the lack of water. It
had now been nearly forty-eight hours since they had drunk their fill at
the Arkansas; the small amount taken at the tiny spring would merely
tide them over for the time being. As the sun rose over that high desert
the caravan moved with a forced speed across the cracked earth.
Desperation drove them on. A tender chivalry rose in Steven for the
girl, who was again looking out between the flaps in the wagon that
followed his own. Why, she was driving the mules herself! Women needed
to be attended; girls needed to be offered a glass of water when it was
hot. But there was none. “Am I becoming light-headed again?” Steven
reflected, angrily. The sun had risen; he handed the reins to a driver
and, jumping down from his seat, strode back to the wagon following,
doffed his wide hat, and asked, “Is there anything I can do, ma’m’selle,
to be of service to you?”
The girl turned wonderingly; she was surprised and dazed. In the clear
morning light she saw the young ruddy youth, an Achilles, whom now she
looked at with seeing eyes for the first time. He appeared quite
beautiful to her, young, with that companionable quality that she had
found only in the little brother whose head was pillowed on her lap. She
looked at Steve and he saw in the blue eyes, that were fringed with dark
silky lashes, an expression he had never seen on a woman’s face, a look
which he was to learn meant suffering and discouragement, with courage
and hope to carry on. She gazed at him silently. He was embarrassed and
would have gone on ahead, but she spoke in a moment:
“How nice. No, sir, they ain’t anything anyone can do, is there? Do you
think we’ll ever get there?” She spoke softly. “Doren is sleeping good
now”--she nodded to the child in her lap--“and papa is asleep back in
the wagon. He needs it; he never slept all the time we were back there
after they ran the mules off. He couldn’t bear to give up the freight.
It was--terrible.” Tears stood in her eyes.
Steven had been walking along beside the wagon, but now he jumped up on
the seat and took the reins from her. Of course they’d make it. St.
Vrain said they’d left the Indians behind now, and once they reached the
Arkansas they’d be fairly near Bent’s Fort, and then they’d be safe.
Papa had put everything they owned into the goods, the girl went on,
stonily. Sold their home, all mamma’s furniture she left. She had
thought the trip might do Doren good; his lungs were weak. They’d come
all the way from Hartford, Connecticut, by way of the Lakes and then
down the Mississippi to St. Louis. A wonderful trip that was, but this
last journey had been like a nightmare. Weren’t there any folks at all
in this country, but Indians? She and Doren had lain in the bottom of
the wagon while the fight with the Comanches was going on, and two of
the men who had been shooting from the back of their wagon had been
dragged out and killed and their hair cut off right before her eyes.
“Scalped!” Steven nodded. “I know.” He felt the scar above his ear
reflectively. “Why don’t you try to lean back against the bales there
and close your eyes and sleep?” he suggested. He made a place for her
head.
She did not speak again, and Steven drove on through the heat. A fine
alkaline dust hung over the desert, settling upon men, mules, and
wagons, and sifted in upon the face of the sleeping girl. Far away
spirals of whirling dust appeared, and died down. The horizon was lost
in a vague haze and the universe seemed to be all one feverish, infernal
plain. About eleven o’clock Pierre came back along the line, giving the
signal to halt. Hardened men as they were, traders and trappers,
Mexicans born to the desert sun, they were ready to stop, yet so unusual
was the respect felt for Ceran St. Vrain, and so effectual the
discipline which he had always been able to maintain, there had not been
a single instance of insubordination at his orders for the march. Yet
now many could no longer stagger.
The mules were nearly perishing of thirst, and Steven had to turn his
head away from their agonized faces. He would have liked to pour the
last drops in his canteen over the caked muzzles, but the water must be
guarded for the girl lying in the wagon behind him. St. Vrain came back
to see how they were doing. He beckoned to Steve. The old woman had just
died. They would bury her there. Her husband was delirious; the poor old
fellow did not comprehend it, mercifully.
Some of the men from the rear of the caravan were pushing ahead on foot
in pursuit of phantom water-holes--mirages. St. Vrain sternly ordered
them back and took counsel with the oldest scouts and drivers, to the
end that, leaving Steven as his _mayordomo_ in charge of the spent
caravan, the colonel himself went ahead on foot, following his great
white ox, which stumbled forward, head low to the ground, neck
outstretched, as though it scented moisture on the glimmering air. It
was the last hope for the faithful beasts, which had been denied their
fill at the tiny Sand Creek. Without wagons or food the men of the party
might make the Arkansas River after nightfall. But what of the girl and
the little fellow?
Which of them was it tossing and moaning beneath that flimsy shelter
now? Steven stepped upon the axle and peered within their wagon. He saw
the man, raised upon one elbow, draining the last precious drops in the
canteen which Steven had placed there for the girl. He uttered an
involuntary protest, but it was too late. The man sank back once more in
a stupor, and at that moment a thin cry went up, carrying along the
palpitating air: “Water! water!”
New life was given the caravan. The mules strained at the wagons; the
men plodded beside them; they pushed ahead with their last strength and
came, after interminable striving, through a living furnace that
consumed with flameless heat, upon a great circular depression in the
alkaline plain--a buffalo wallow, at the bottom of which was water.
Water, thank God, muddy but not stagnant, thick and slimy as it was,
precious to that caravan. Canteens were filled first, hastily,
tremblingly, and then the oxen were released from their yokes and led
down to the muddy hole where the _arrieros_ were restraining their mules
from falling into the pool or from lying down in the wet, hot mud. Two
of the animals tottered at the brink, died, and fell down the slope,
whence they had to be hauled back and away. It was not a lovely sight,
nor were the men who drank. Steven strained the contents of his canteen
through a fine nainsook handkerchief which he extracted with difficulty
from his things, and after filling his own mouth to wash down the muddy
fluid which he had first drunk, and blessed, he hastened to the wagon
where the girl lay.
White as death, her lips cracked, she was half conscious, but took the
water pitifully, eagerly. The boy had refused, shaking his head, “Sister
first,” he whispered. “She gave all the rest last night to papa and me.”
Steve looked about for the man, but he had been one of the first at the
water-hole, lying on his stomach till he could drink no more. He was
tending the mules now, which he did faithfully.
Not until after dark did they move, when a cooler air had come creeping
over the alkali to take the place of the hot air that rose from the
desert. The water-hole, once a large salt lick in which the rains had
gathered, had saved their lives. Toward dawn they stumbled upon the
banks of the Arkansas, where the animals waded into the clear stream,
and the men, clothes and all. Steven half carried, half led, Doren and
his sister down to the water.
At sundown the next evening it was a different lot of beings who sat
about their camp fires under the great cottonwoods that lined the river
bank. Young grouse were roasting on a turning spit, and fish from the
river. A short way up a little tributary stream Pierre had caught a
beaver which he skinned at once. Having roasted the body whole for the
men, he now prepared that great delicacy, the tail, for the young lady.
He thrust the stick into it and, holding it over the fire until the
large scales puffed up, he peeled it and in a moment offered it on a tin
plate. Coffee bubbled, and unleavened bread was flapped on the hot
stones.
St. Vrain now talked with the men of the rescued caravan, none of whom
he had ever seen before, and learned something of the history of each.
Three were from Franklin, Missouri; several were from Pennsylvania or
New England; and the remainder were traders from the South. None of them
had ever before been on the Santa Fe Trail, although two of them had
been by boat up to Fort Gibson, Oklahoma, at the Three Forks, where they
had traded with the Indians.
The father of the girl introduced himself as James Bragdon, of Hartford,
Connecticut, and though he was a man of rather wry face and expression,
he made himself agreeable. He introduced his “little gel,” Hope,
affably, and his little lad, Doren. Yet Steven could not like the man.
The Mexicans and the bronzed trappers all came up, as though casually,
to gaze at the girl. Among those burned and weathered faces her fairness
shone like a white yucca moth at night. Yet there was stamina behind the
seeming fragility; food and water had revived her, brought a coral color
to her lips, so ashen upon the desert trip. She was pretty, Steven
thought, though, being used to fair women, he was not so startled by her
exceeding blondness as were the men of the caravan, accustomed to darker
Frenchwomen and Indian squaws, so that this girl seemed almost of
another species of being.
She wore a plain little figured print dress, somewhat short-waisted,
reflecting still the Empire style, but with leg-o’-mutton sleeves, a
broad collar, and a wide blue slat sunbonnet. Doren was a nice-looking
boy, rather fair himself, with delicate even features. He adored his
sister and still took refuge from his father’s discipline with her. She
in turn worshiped and mothered the boy, quietly but with a passionate
fierceness, but to everyone else she was indifferent.
One of the trappers came up with the gift of a buffalo robe for her and
a smaller robe for the boy, already smoked and softened. St. Vrain kept
a sharp eye on Bragdon’s daughter, and cautioned her not to step as much
as fifty feet from the wagons. The trail ran westward almost parallel to
the banks of the Arkansas, which was flowing now through cottonwood
groves, and tree and shrub offered ambush for prowling savages. The
caravan rested profoundly that night. Steven took a watch for six hours,
and then spread his blanket in the cool grass beside the river.
The caravan did not start until toward evening of the following day, for
both beasts and men were exhausted from their march in the desert and
the strain of the long fast from water. Refreshed by food, drink, and
rest, they set out to make ten miles that night, and by a bright
moonlight this was accomplished. A keen watch was being kept for
Indians, and St. Vrain hoped that possibly they might encounter Major
Riley of Fort Leavenworth, returning from Chouteaux Island at the
Mexican border, whither he had escorted Colonel Bent’s caravan. But they
saw no sign of him, and Pierre was sure that he saw fresh tracks on the
Trail just beyond their first night’s camp by the river, tracks leading
back over the Trail. As indeed they were, for the major with his three
companies had passed while St. Vrain was on the desert.
But as day followed day and no Indians were seen, they began to breathe
easier. The river here was from five to six hundred feet wide, flowing
through a rolling plain which stretched away for hundreds of miles
without a tree, apparently. Yet the stately trees upon the banks of the
river and along the bottom land were enormous and ancient. Sometimes the
river narrowed and flowed between banks of shale and limestone, but they
had left the gleaming white cliffs of sand far behind. They were
ascending steadily in altitude, approaching the slopes of the Rockies
before them. The hunters brought in rabbit, beaver, quail, antelope, and
even bear meat. They knew every foot of the land, every small stream,
every haunt of the four-footed. Buffalo was varied with black-tail deer,
the finest venison in the world.
This was the land of the Shoshones, the Snake Indians, the greatest of
the Indian nations, who were of the same race as the wild Comanches to
the south. They were a fine and friendly people, said St. Vrain. Steven
was now joining the short hunting forays by means of which the trappers
kept the caravan supplied with meat. He was learning from them the ways
of the wild, in which the wily and seasoned white men surpassed even the
Indians.
He never failed to stop and ask at the girl’s wagon how she fared and if
there was anything that he might do for her. But beyond a feeling of
pity and sympathy, and a growing dislike for the father, he had little
conversation with Hope Bragdon after their escape in the desert. This
was a world for men; he pressed heels exultantly into his mare’s flanks
and rode ahead over the road in advance of the caravan, scouting. ’Twas
adventure he had come for, not ladies’ company. They were making speed
as they neared Bent’s Fort, although it was a constant ascent to a
higher altitude. Beyond them lay the Rocky Mountains, blue and jagged.
Sometimes Doren rode with him on a gentle pony. Hope Bragdon’s austerity
softened before his kindness to the boy and she grew to look for Steven,
her face lighting at his approach. Hope Bragdon’s life so far had not
departed from the hard and sterile traditions of her New England
heritage. She was used to enduring, to going without, to repressing any
desire that might be regarded as an indulgence. Even her passionate love
for the little brother whom her mother had thrust into her tiny arms
when she lay dying had to be curbed. But it only burned the more
fiercely for that. If she petted him when as a little fellow he ran
crying to her with a hurt, it only earned him a slap or a harsh reproof.
The tiring round of household tasks left Hope with little enthusiasm;
her nature reflected the cold, repressed, dreary outlook of her life.
Steven felt this lack of grace and did not realize why it was or notice
that her face did lighten when he dropped by to talk, because she
invariably became more repressed and unresponsive. Yet as the caravan
halted on that last night before they made the Fort the two blond young
people stood talking for a moment in the shafts of the late afternoon
sun. St. Vrain eyed them shrewdly, and later, pulling at his pipe, he
spoke unexpectedly:
“I wish you’d marry her, lad. It’s not safe for a woman like that to be
in this country loose like. French trapper’s likely to stride up when we
make the Fort and offer her father a couple of hundred fox or beaver,
and some horses thrown in, for her, and from what I’ve seen of the old
man he’s likely to take it--and hand her over.”
Steven was aghast; then he smiled weakly. “You will have your jest,
Colonel Ceran. I have no thought of maids or matrimony yet. I am not
eighteen.”
“_Non!_” the colonel was surprised. “_Est-ce possible?_ There is plenty
of time, true, before thee. But wait till you get to the Fort”--he
tapped down the tobacco in his red Indian pipe--“you will see something
more of this land, of this life of men and beasts on the frontier. You
will see the kind of women to which the men become accustomed, also. And
you will see something of trading, real trading.”
Twenty-four hours later they rounded a curve in the river bank and came
upon the new Fort, begun just the year before, and scarcely more than a
third finished now. All about the heavy walls of the main building were
pitched dozens of tents, made of buffalo skins, or deerhide stretched
over saplings for the briefest sort of shelter. Blanketed Indians,
fringed trappers, a duke in fustian who turned out to be Colonel Bent
himself, turned the encampment into a busy community.
Shouts of welcome greeted the train led by St. Vrain as it came at a
run, pellmell, down a short hill and up the slope to the trading
station, already made famous by the name of the Bent brothers. Some of
the men of the rescued party were weeping with relief and the let-down
of emotions after their exhausting journey. Yet Hope Bragdon, pale and
with trembling lips, only held tighter to the tired boy beside her.
French trappers and Mexican _arrieros_ swore in their respective
tongues, horses whinnied, oxen lowed, the mules brayed. There was a
mêlée as the caravan gradually came to a stop in the open space beside
the half-finished buildings, and the unloading began.
St. Vrain immediately introduced Steven to Colonel Bent, and at the same
time informed him that there was a young woman with the caravan. Was
there any white woman at the Fort at the time who could go to her? There
wasn’t. Then would Steven go and say that a room in the Fort would be at
her disposal? Steven went, and found Hope hovering anxiously over Doren,
who felt sick at his stomach, he said, and lay listlessly on the
blankets, his slender face quite sallow under the tan. Hope was trying
to get her fire to burn in order to heat water for the boy, to make him
a comfortable bed, and to start food for her father at the same time,
while Bragdon attended to his animals.
Hope was made the more nervous because outside her wagon a circle of
Indian squaws had gathered, watching the young white woman intently.
Their stolid demeanor could not hide their wonder and curiosity. St.
Vrain spoke to them in a voice of authority, ordering them away with a
wave of the hand, with the exception of one young woman whom he
instructed to wait upon the white girl and attend to her wants. The
Indian was a Pawnee, a pleasant-faced girl, who spoke and understood a
little English. In a few moments she had the fire burning well and had
laid a soft couch of white pine boughs. Hope was afraid to move Doren,
who seemed to have collapsed with exhaustion. The Indian girl brought a
broth made of fresh venison with herbs for the boy, and roasted quails
with new corn for Hope and her father. Hope fed Doren with a spoon
first; he was too far gone with fatigue to be fully roused.
When he had made sure that Hope was comfortably taken care of, Steve
hurried back to St. Vrain and Bent, who had gone on into the great room
of the Fort where business was transacted and traders and trappers ate
and lounged and smoked. Here the _engagés_, the trappers employed by St.
Vrain and the Bents, passed their time when they were not out on the
ranges, hunting. The room was crowded now with as many Indians and
hunters and trappers as could squeeze into it, and the air was filled
with the smoke of Indian pipes and Mexican cigarettes. Against the
smooth adobe walls hung colored blankets. The ceilings were dark beamed
with heavy, hand-hewn cedar timbers from the mountains; the floors were
roughly boarded. Great fireplaces at either end of the room threw out
enough heat to warm the entire place in winter, and now their warmth was
such that all the doors were open. Colonel Bent and his brother George
slept in small adjoining rooms, and on the other side of the main hall
lay the only other completed room, a large _bodega_, or storehouse.
A babel of Spanish, French, English, mingled with the strange, halted
gutturals and intoned syllables of several Indian tongues. Steven was
stirred with that keen delight that he had always felt on the waterfront
of the Mississippi, where dark-skinned East Indians and yellow Chinese
ate bananas from some South American port. In these faces he fancied he
saw strange racial resemblances--the dark, fine aquilinity of the far
East in a Cheyenne brave; the broad cheek bones and narrowed eyes of the
Japanese leered at him in the blanketed redskin holding out some
silverwork for his inspection.
“That is Sleek Foot, the Navajo, the slickest fur-trader that ever
wandered from his hogan,” warned St. Vrain. “Take nothing of him....
There’s to be no trading till morning, Sleek Foot.” The Navajo grunted a
protest. “Colonel Bent’s orders. Then you’ll see something, Steven, my
lad, that’ll show you the art of trading.”
Through the open doors there now came Indian women bringing great pots
and platters of food. Roast fowl of all sorts was heaped on the table,
stewed squash and corn bread, the dark beans to which Steven had long
since become accustomed, and last of all great hunks of bear meat. As a
special feast Colonel Bent had coffee served with that greatest of all
delicacies and delights, sugar. The braves and French ’breeds sat on the
floor about the wall, and ate with their hunting-knives and fingers from
the food that was heaped upon a huge tortilla before each. When they had
at length finished, they ate the tortilla and drank from tin cups. The
traders sat on benches about the long rough table, and under the
swinging lanterns they fed as men should feed. Colonel Bent knew well
that to keep the Indians and the trappers well-fed brought to his
shelves many a pelt that meant good gold on the Mississippi.
When the hairy white men and the unbearded savages had their fill and
lay or squatted with gorged stomachs before the flaming logs a fiddle
struck up. There was buck-and-wing and high stepping and Indian
clogging, and some of the gay French lads took turns with the pretty
Cheyenne maidens. A French trapper chucked a pretty squaw under the
chin. It was Pierre Lafitte, _mon Dieu_, already celebrating his return
and the money in his pockets. Out flashed a tomahawk, and a friendly
Arapahoe was just in time to save Pierre’s skull from falling into two
pieces. The trappers began their gaming before the fire.
“Little enough to lose tonight,” shrugged Robert Bent, “tomorrow when
the trading’s over they’ll squander their winter’s catch. Pierre,” he
called out, “save out enough to stake yourself. You don’t want to go in
debt for provisions for next winter.”
“So you have thrown in your lot with the traders, my boy,” said Colonel
Bent, kindly, to Steven. “My friend St. Vrain tells me that you are no
tenderfoot; _au contraire_, that you tackled the Kiowa scout on the
night of your first watch. It was perhaps just as well that you did not
overtake our party, for we were attacked when nearly here, and two of my
fr’en’s shot before my nose, almos’. And that with Major Riley jus’
behin’ us and Captain Felipe Cooke ahead. You did not meet him
returning? Nor hear the news?
“I have heard from a returning guide that the ten thousand dollars which
the young traders from Franklin cache at Chouteaux Isle was all there.
They find it all uncovered! The dirt had been washed away by the river
and the rains; it was safe and sound, yet anybody could have taken it.”
St. Vrain roared with laughter at such a tale of buried treasure, and
Steve’s eyes were almost as round as a child’s.
“We have had little trouble with the Indians,” Bent went on, seriously,
“until just these past few years since the free traders began to come
over the Trail. If you treat the Indian right he will treat you fair
enough, I have found. I go everywhere, alone, up into the country among
all the tribes, and am away for months at a time. But when your
government breaks treaties, like where they give the Cherokees’ land on
the Arkansas and the Verdigris to the Creeks, you see what happens!
Reprisals, like the attack on the caravan you rescued. And traders are
careless; go away from their wagons alone, get shot. Then the others
shoot at all Indians, good or bad, and something is started, because
some unfriendly Indians of a different tribe maybe kill one fellow off
by himself. They do not behave that way with me. I have more trouble
with the Spaniard,” he laughed; “but be careful in Santa Fe, _mon
fils_.”
“I have heard something from Colonel Ceran of the history of the traders
to Santa Fe,” Steven replied.
“Do not get entangled with Mexican politics,” warned Colonel Bent. “Do
not be embroiled in anything, so you will not prejudice the foreign
trade, and find yourself enchained for a bagatela. Above all,” he smiled
broadly, “be careful with the beautiful señoritas.” With which cheerful
advice he bid them goodnight and Steven followed St. Vrain outside to
his tent. In spite of forebodings about the message he carried, he fell
asleep almost in an instant, drugged with the rare air of the foothills,
the scent of pine knots burning, and all the fresh strangeness of
glorious mountains that loomed above them.
He knew that morning had come because, after a conscious interval, he
felt tinglingly alive. Opening his eyes upon the buffalo hides that
tented him, he realized that he was in a different land, that he was at
an elevation far above the sea level which he had always known, that he
had at last crossed the plains. Steven leaped to his feet and thrust his
head between the flaps of the tent, intent on getting himself water for
bathing. His eyes were caught by a strange pantomime going on just
beyond, in front of Bragdon’s wagon. A Cheyenne chief stood before the
Yankee with a horse at either hand. Bragdon was holding out a jug and a
sack of something or other. The Indian shook his head and gestured, but
as the white man continued merely to stand and look at him the Indian
threw at his feet a large bundle of beaver pelts. Bragdon stepped back
to his wagon and started to pull forth more of his wares; but just at
this moment Hope appeared in the door of the tent. The chief stepped
forward, caught her by the hand, and pulled her over to where her father
stood, making signs and talking rapidly, while he pointed at the
shrinking girl.
It was unmistakable. There was an expression of greed on the Yankee’s
face as he stooped to examine the pelts before he concerned himself with
his daughter, and Steven wondered for a moment if he would actually
consider parting with Hope for a good trade. The Indian evidently
thought it a settled thing. Two horses for a squaw! And beaver to boot!
When a Cheyenne maiden was won for two! Yet as Bragdon seemed to
hesitate the brave called to an old woman puttering near at her fire and
she waddled over to interpret. “No more unless the maiden is strong and
good to work,” translated the squaw in careful measured English. At this
juncture Steven stepped into the picture, forgetting his morning
ablutions. Hope had torn her hand away from the brave, and now she
turned with relief at sight of Steve’s tumbled tawny head.
“He wanted to buy _me_!” she cried with more than a trace of fright.
“I don’t wonder,” replied Steven; “so would many. Too bad that we don’t
do it that way.” He grinned as he looked at Bragdon, but there was
dislike beneath the smile, and the older man flushed with annoyance and
embarrassment.
“The greasy savage,” he muttered. “Do they think they can get a white
girl for a few mangy beaver skins?”
“You sound, sir,” said Steven, forgetting caution in a sudden rage
against this man, “as though it were the amount only that deterred you;
the number of skins only that you were regretting!”
“Mind your own business and I’ll tend to mine,” replied Bragdon,
harshly. “We’re white, ain’t we?”
“I beg your pardon,” Steven replied, stiffly. Yet he could not, for all
that, get over the feeling that Bragdon’s fingers itched for the furs or
more like them.
Hope was feeding Doren some of the ground Indian meal prepared by the
Pawnee girl, and smiled shyly at Steven as he passed, “as though she
really had something to be grateful for, poor child,” he thought, and
was touched, for it was the first time that he had seen her act
naturally, without a stiff reserve when anything was done for her.
He found the three traders taking coffee, bacon, pan bread, and fried
Indian mush at the table in the big room, and joined them. The trading
was to begin shortly, and already a crowd of Indians was gathered
outside the rear door of the establishment. It was Colonel Bent’s custom
to deal thus, spreading his wares before the door, and permitting no one
to come inside but the chiefs.
By mid-morning the trading was well under way. Colonel Bent was
exchanging only a portion of the goods which St. Vrain had brought with
him and the balance of what he himself had transported over the Trail a
few weeks earlier. The independent traders who had been in St. Vrain’s
train, and those whom he had rescued, were at liberty to dispose of
anything they did not wish to reserve for the Santa Fe trade. Steven was
amazed to see buffalo robes, beautifully cured and sometimes bound, sold
for one dollar. Even on the plains they brought a dollar and a half,
while in the cities, where they were now very fashionable, they were
sold for not less than thirty-five dollars. The Indians brought forward
their pelts, the lustrous silver fox, rich mink, and beaver, otter,
deer, and golden tawny cat of the mountains, the lynx, the white and
prairie wolves full plumed. Beside the silky little prairie fox lay
antelope and buffalo, and the striped panther of the Rockies shone
beside the pelts of grizzly and cinnamon bear.
The red man spread his furs upon the ground before himself and his
horses, all of his wealth to be exchanged for the white man’s
goods--flannel and beads, whisky and tobacco, sugar, whistles, mirrors,
knives, or guns. The trade was on. Colonel Bent knew his Indians and
could speak their tongues, but when one of a nation whose language he
did not know came forward, the deal would be made through using a bundle
of sticks to represent the goods.
The Navajo whom Steven had seen the night before came forward and laid a
buffalo robe upon the ground. William Bent laid down two sticks,
indicating the equivalent in goods for the robe; the Navajo insisted on
another stick, a smaller one again, and the colonel appeared to relent.
He gave in, when the deal was concluded to the Navajo’s satisfaction.
For beaver the Indians got three dollars a pound; there were fifty packs
each made up of sixty pelts that would bring five dollars a pound in St.
Louis. But Colonel Bent was disappointed. “Ashley got one hundred and
twenty-three packs last year,” he complained.
For a land otter three dollars was paid, and one dollar for a buck, two
doe, or four ’coon skins. The braves were already tottering about, drunk
from the whisky they craved and from tulapai, that heady distillation
from the giant cactus made by the Apaches. St. Vrain swore and William
Bent was angry, for he could see that before the day was half over there
would be knifings and quarrels. Where had they gotten it?
“A nice way, this, to repay our help,” fumed St. Vrain. “Some of the
traders in the other caravan have been selling them liquor.” Alcohol was
sold from two to five dollars a pint, but it was against the law to sell
to Indians.
Some of them were buying tobacco at a dollar and a half a plug, and
Steven could scarcely credit his eyes when he saw an Indian give a
dollar and sixty cents for a pint cup of gunpowder, while for the same
measure of steaming coffee he paid nothing at all at Colonel Bent’s,
although at any other trading station even the trappers were obliged to
pay one dollar and twenty cents for the drink, sweetened.
Steven bought from a young Pueblo Indian who had come up from Taos a
beautiful lynx robe, for which he paid in silver. The Indian was
delighted with the exchange and naïvely offered additional skins, which
Steven refused. He bought also a strange garment made by the Cheyenne
squaws of sewed rabbit skins, the only fabric that plains Indians had
until the traders came, and for this he gave silver money. “A bad
precedent, for a trader,” he was warned.
By the time night fell there had been half a dozen brawls, and when
Steven entered the big room of the Fort at dusk he saw his friend Pierre
gambling with a slight, sandy-haired trapper in fringed buckskins, a lad
not much older than Steve and not nearly so tall or so broad.
“My fr’en’ Kit Carson,” St. Vrain introduced. “I have tol’ you of the
trip we take together two year ago. He’s just back from the Picketwire,
as these here folks call Le Purgatoire, the River of Los’ Souls.”
The stranger bowed gravely and said with a sad smile, “I’m aimin’ to
keep my friend Peer here busy till he gets his fill of playin’; ’cause,
if he gambles his nine years’ stake away, isn’t nothin’ will save some
one’s getting knifed before mornin’.”
Carson was to guide St. Vrain’s party over the Raton Pass and down to
Santa Fe, a ten-day trip, ordinarily. Three mornings later they were
off, ascending into a rarer air and a rocky grandeur that filled the boy
from New Orleans with a headiness like wine. Carson dropped alongside
Steven often and rode beside him, pointing out spots of interest.
“Beyond that far peak yonder”--he nodded northwest--“you see that blue
shadow? That’s Pike’s Peak. They get you, you know, the mountains,” he
added, reflectively, “You can’t never leave ’em, once you’ve known ’em.”
“Kit’s a great lad,” said St. Vrain. “Already he knows every inch o’ the
land for a hundred miles; the sources o’ streams, which way they flow;
every peak and pass. He’s a fearful fighter, too, lookin’ sweet as a
woman, yet he can get along with Indians, even at his age, better than
anyone else except William Bent.”
On the third or fourth day they struck Raton Pass, and at that altitude
Steve felt a ringing in his ears and an exultation forever to be
associated with the grandeur of the country that lay before them as they
emerged, and thereafter as they wended their way over hemlock-darkened
slopes and saw beyond the bare reaches above timber line the distant
jagged structure of snowy peaks. Santa Fe lay below, they told him. The
caravan threaded narrow canyons and ascended to high trails from which
they could look down into vast valleys in the bottom of which molten
quicksilver flowed in narrow ribbons. Across the empty spaces the blue
light of the heavens hung motionless, amethystine in the shadow of
titanic hills or the eclipse of a far cloud.
Down mountain roads strewn thick with stone and perilous to the feet of
oxen the heavy wagons rocked and slid, with locked wheels, through
fertile level valleys, and one bright morning they awoke in a land that
shone red as an inferno, where earth and rock alike were red, the color
of the red man’s skin. The stunted cedar, the cloudless turquoise sky,
alone remained familiar to make the stranger know he was still upon this
earth.
“Why is it so red?” Steven marveled.
“It’s the blood that’s been shed here,” replied St. Vrain, solemnly,
“and the red Indians that’ve lived and died and been buried in this
land.”
“Glorieta!” yelled the mule-drivers. “Glorieta!” answered the echoes.
“Santa Fe tonight,” shouted Kit Carson. “Santa Fe! Santa Fe!” The echoes
must have carried almost across the hills.
CHAPTER V
THE COMING OF THE CARAVAN
It had been a long while for Consuelo Lopez to await the coming of the
caravan from the East. She was not conscious, perhaps, that she was
waiting, nevertheless the summer days had passed in an expectancy that
held off Don Tiburcio’s wooing. It was an effective barrier. He himself
felt that Consuelo was waiting for something. He hoped that it would
prove to have been for him.
On this late and golden afternoon of midsummer she sat on a bench in the
garden which was Doña Gertrudis’ pride, and smoldered while Manuel
gathered little roses for her. Against the adobe wall stood a sentry of
hollyhocks, and in a wide bed each side the path rioted zinnia, in all
the extravagant colors with which God has pigmented a richly mineral
soil. Geranium and bougainvillea rioted against the “Madonna” blue of
the doorway, and honeysuckle vied with Mexican pinks--“clavelitas”--that
most winsome, exquisite, and spicy fragrance.
Consuelo herself was dressed for a garden. Don Tiburcio’s bales had
yielded this yellow pineapple cloth from the West Indies, and China had
sent the lemon-colored shawl, embroidered in crimson and soft jade. An
amber necklace circled her throat, and tremulous pendant amber swung
from golden filigree at the lobes of her pretty ears. She seemed like
imprisoned sunlight and Don Tiburcio’s heart would have been less than
human had it not quickened as he stepped through the blue gate and came
toward her, bowing with deep courtliness.
Consuelo has learned within a few weeks to restrain her impatience. The
talk is polite, “And your grandmother? I trust she also slept well?” Don
Tiburcio concludes his inquiries after the health of the family. At this
point Doña Gertrudis must call Manuel within the house and Consuelo and
Don Tiburcio are left alone. Consuelo parries for a desperate hour the
question in Don Tiburcio’s eyes, with animated talk of Mexico and the
far lands of which Don Tiburcio has knowledge. Of the carven stone
balconies of the City of Mexico, the music, the brilliant life of the
capital.
“In Chihuahua, too, they promenade of a fair evening, señor?”
“Ah yes, señorita. The plaza is most lively. With all the señoritas and
matrons promenading in one direction, and the gallants in the opposite
direction, many a _mirada_ is thrown from one eye to another in
passing.”
“Ah, that is like Spain, is it not?”
“It is. But your country here is more like Spain. The mountains of
Spain. When I was a lad I accompanied my grandfather there on a visit to
cousins who lived in the mountains, in towns like this.” He swept his
hand toward the pine-covered foothills of the Sangre de Cristo.
“But tell me, señorita”--the proud hidalgo’s face became suffused as he
leaned above Consuelo, sitting so stiffly upright on her bench under the
clematis vine--“when am I to have an answer to the question I asked so
many weeks ago?” He stood before her, very fine, a silk scarf thrown
over his arm, his silver-buttoned breeches flaring open elegantly from
the knee.
Consuelo swayed against the vines, against a tumult of emotions. Why
struggle longer? Her lashes drooped; she retreated, yielding.
“Soon the caravans from the East will arrive,” he pressed. “At any
moment now they may come, and I, I must not linger, once they are here.
I have urgent affairs calling me back.” Fatal words. They aroused at
once in a rebel heart the half-stilled desire for life to bring her
more, the half-acknowledged wonder as to what that Eastern land might
hold for her. She remembered again the thrill of the days when the
caravans came. Hesitated, and was lost, to Don Tiburcio at least, wholly
for that day.
“_La Caravana!_” she exclaimed, all glowing animation at once. “How
exciting! One would have thought that the Comanches or the Apaches had
them all. Why, then, do they delay so, when they are keeping you
waiting, señor?” Consuelo’s lashes fluttered disturbingly. Having
yielded not an inch, poutingly she dared Don Tiburcio’s gaze. _Coqueta!_
Minx! What was he to think? Did she want him? How much more must her
vanity be flattered? Perhaps Don Tiburcio himself was a little bit tired
of the waiting. Disconcerted, he said no more for the moment, and was
rewarded by an utterly ravishing smile.
Bees droned through the sunlight and a silence like molten honey. Beyond
the adobe wall and across the “sakey” at the end of the garden suddenly
there rose a shouting that ran through the town. “_Aqui vienen los
carros. La Caravana!_ [Here come the wagons. The caravan].”
Don Tiburcio rose quickly to his feet. “Pardon, señorita, I must go to
meet them at once. _Hasta luego, pues_ [Till later, then].” He bowed his
departure almost unnoticed by Consuelo, for the tumult in her chest. She
ran through the house. It was almost deserted, except for old Lupe and
for Doña Gertrudis, who had already taken her seat beside the front
windows and was peering discreetly, but with avidity, through the
blinds. Consuelo flounced across the courtyard, through her own room,
and into a room beyond.
It was Felicita’s, and the window there was neither barred nor
curtained. A high window, with a tiny railed balcony from which one
could see way up or down the street. But it was already filled with
Felicita, who found herself pulled down by the skirts, while Consuelo
clambered up on a chair and disposed her own person for a fine view in
either direction.
Just in time. The dust of the caravan came rolling along to the
accompaniment of shouts of greeting, of long whistles. On it came in the
late afternoon sun, like a special cloud of gold; and now from the cloud
emerged the first wagon, lumbering and swaying behind three teams of
great white oxen that to Consuelo’s ravished gaze seemed to snort blood
and to be harnessed with gilded leather. Strange, clear-cut voices rang
out among the familiar _gritos_ of the _arrieros_. How they pierced the
consciousness! On came the _carros_, and the laden mules, helter
skelter, right down their street. _Madrecita mia_, what luck! And then
all the rest of the caravan melted away into the golden haze of dust,
and Consuelo’s gaze was riveted upon one figure on horse, trotting
briskly, side-stepping, as though he and his rider had not been ready to
die of fatigue an hour before. A blond, hatless Americano, with hair
like burnished metal in the sun, and a face--a face! The caravan halted,
some difficulty turning in the narrow street ahead, or a jam of mules,
and the rider drew up almost beneath her window. He passed a kerchief
over his warm brow and lifted his head to look about. His glance
traveled toward Consuelo, peering over the funny little crooked balcony.
He may have heard the involuntary exclamation that had escaped her.
They gazed straight at one another. Steven thought, “What an uncommonly
bewitching face,” and instinctively bowed. “Señorita,” he saluted,
“_Buenas tardes_,” and rode on, surprised that such a radiant picture
should have risen out of the dust to frame itself in the window of a
square adobe house. Consuelo saw him pass with a moment of dismay, as
though this buckskin-clad young god might be riding on out of her
picture--and then, for her eyes were still filled with his smile, saw
nothing more, not even the swaying Dearborn wagon that followed close
upon the dust of the youthful trader, nor the pale girl who sat on the
front seat, tears of relief streaming down her face, a boy held close in
her arms.
Consuelo scrambled down from her perch and away to the _sala_ in search
of news. Oh, if she could but run out into the street and hear for
herself, and see! Bah! What restrictions! Perhaps from the dining room
she might catch again a glimpse of them as they turned down the street.
She ran into the _comedor_, bumping full into Luis, who jumped as though
a snake had rattled at him, and turned a trifle angrily, setting down
the silver pitcher which he held. He recovered at once and, holding his
sister at arm’s-length, remarked, pleasantly, fondly: “How lovely we are
looking! All ready for the dance tonight, eh! But where so fast?” Ah, so
there would be a _baile_! Enchanting! Consuelo smiled happily and
unaffectedly at Luis, grateful as always for a moment of real affection
from him.
“Oiga, little sister, listen. Say nothing of having seen me at home
after siesta, wilt thou not? I should be at the _bodega_ right now,
receiving any new goods. Eh?” She nodded, and he kissed her good-by,
hurrying off through the rear of the house.
It was quite dark and late, nearly nine o’clock, before Don Anabel
returned from the warehouse with Luis and found Doña Gertrudis fuming
and fluttering. The roast was entirely burned up, they would be late to
the _baile_, which was always at ten, and her powder was already pure
paste. She fluttered before them into the dining room, where a special
effort had been made for the occasion when, she hoped, Consuelo would at
last announce to the family what they so much wished to hear. The good
Doña Gertrudis adored her daughter, and she was a trifle afraid of her,
too, of her youth, her beauty, her wit, though Consuelo’s tongue was
always dutiful to her parents. Nor would Don Anabel have tolerated any
lack of that obedience and respect which every true Spaniard demands of
his children. He would not have forced a marriage that was against his
daughter’s heart, yet he was pleased with the idea of this union. But
Consuelo made no occasion to tell him that the matter was settled. In
the garden, just as crepusculo fell, Don Tiburcio, returning, had found
Consuelo and in a moment had his answer clearly, “No.”
Extra candles graced the table, and a silver goblet stiffly crammed with
yellow roses. The best leather-backed chairs were placed before six deep
silver plates, inside which were laid, on one side the fork, on the
other the spoon. Knives were used only in the kitchen or by the hunter
on the trail--such vulgarity as carving one’s food at the table was
unknown. Don Anabel took his place at the head of the board; Don
Tiburcio followed him; Luis slipped in hastily; the ancient _abuela_,
the grandmother who had come up from the country to visit her daughter,
was assisted by two servants to a place of honor; and all were seated.
At once all was chattering and conversation so swift that none but the
accustomed ear could have understood. Don Anabel’s was not one of those
establishments where the women of the family rarely if ever ate with the
men. He was a cosmopolite, he averred, as he poured the red grape from
the finely chased pitcher and filled the glasses for the second, or was
it the third, time? Consuelo drained her goblet, but ate little. The
harmless vintage deepened the color in her cheeks, brought an extra
sparkle to her eyes. At the moment when she was raising the copa in
_saludes_ to her grandmother, Roman, the doddering old _moso_, appeared
in the doorway with a tall figure at his back. “Here he is,” mumbled
Roman, and retreated just in time to escape Don Anabel’s wrath at the
intrusion.
Eating, drinking, and talking paused for the moment while Don Anabel’s
family turned to glance politely at the visitor. He stood in the
doorway, tall, reddish blond, an Americano. Loutish, dressed in soiled
buckskins, a trader, perhaps only a trapper. What did the fellow want?
Don Anabel rose haughtily to dispose of this unwelcome intrusion. The
visitor was bowing from the waist with rather surprising good form. In
excellent Spanish he inquired:
“Don Anabel Lopez? You will pardon the intrusion, I trust. I was shown
in by the _moso_. I was sent by Colonel St. Vrain to inquire if we could
obtain further warehouse space from you this evening. He----”
At this point Steven’s eyes were drawn, as though compelled, to the girl
seated there in the mellow candlelight. She was looking at him, too. The
girl, the same girl, he had seen that afternoon. She lived here, then.
His heart quickened at sight of her, and he was not conscious that he
stared, that he had not finished his speech. The whole scene bewildered
him. After the crudities of the trail, and the primitive life at Bent’s
Fort he was unprepared for this luxury, this glowing, beautiful scene.
Why, they did not eat from silver dishes even in New Orleans, where
there were silver doorknobs in his father’s house.
Don Anabel’s voice came coldly, with finality. “Colonel St. Vrain had
better secure space from our amiable Viscarra. I have none available.”
Steven found his tongue. “Colonel St. Vrain said to say to you, señor,
that Colonel Viscarra, whom we encountered on the road just outside
Santa Fe this afternoon, instructed him to get accommodations from you,
stating that he knew you would, at his request, be most happy to--to
make them available. Colonel Viscarra said he would not return to Santa
Fe for some weeks, perhaps, as he was going down among the Indians of
Texas.” At this hint from the _jefe politico_ of Santa Fe, Don Anabel
could only bow silent assent. “Very well. If Viscarra wishes it, St.
Vrain may use the space which I reserve to be at the _jefe’s_ disposal.”
He turned back to the table, but Steven refused the evident dismissal,
addressing his unwilling host again.
“Señor, pardon once more if I intrude. But can you tell me aught of one
Tiburcio de Garcia? I have some small business with him.”
Don Tiburcio himself rose. He had taken the measure of the youth and now
came forward. “Señor, I am Tiburcio Garcia, _a sus ordenes_.” He looked
inquiringly at the young man.
Steven again bowed and said, quietly, “Señor, might I see you later in
the evening for a moment?” And lower, “I bear a message for you from
Orleans.”
Don Tiburcio’s eyes gleamed, but his reply was inaudible to those at the
table. He showed the young man out with every courtesy.
* * * * *
To the _bailes_ of New Spain came young and old, rich and poor, peon,
Indian, trapper, and the proudest Castilian blood. A long, low room--one
of those in the rear of the Governor’s palace, now inhabited by Colonel
Viscarra--with whitewashed walls and few windows, warm and crowded on
this gala night of the arrival of the caravan.
The matrons in their black mantillas sat against the wall on one side of
the room; the younger women sat beside them or in chattering clusters in
the corners, while the young girls preened, and coquetted across the
bare floor at the men and boys lounging and smoking on the other side.
The music had not yet begun, but the fiddler and the mandolin-player
were tuning up, and the _guitaro_ was being lovingly scraped by the
blind musician whose magic would set the feet of the town moving to
irresistible accompaniment. Ah, that guitar! deep, full as a ’cello,
that could weep, and make lovers set their wedding date on the morrow;
that turned the knives of trappers to cutting fringes and posies instead
of throats and scalp locks, over cards or a girl.
Now, with a tentative last plucking of strings, suddenly it swept full
into a valse, rollicking, tender, sensuous. The young men stepped forth
on the floor. No introductions were necessary here. It was customary to
ask whomsoever one liked. Strangely enough, the formality of Spanish
etiquette laid no ban on a dance with a stranger. True, there were
those, like Don Anabel Lopez, whose pride would not permit such
condescension, especially when it came to Americans.
And now came Ceran St. Vrain, with the men of the caravan in his wake,
and at his side a tall youth whose face was suspiciously clean shaven,
even flecked with blood here and there. He wore a dark suit that caused
even Luis Lopez to pause with interest and to regard with envy, though
he flecked the ash from his cigarette disdainfully and folded his arms
comfortably over his own scarlet-and-gold bolero, settling a crimson
sash more snugly about a trim waist.
The last of the caravaners entered the hall; they spread out, and in the
center appeared a girl. Blonde, Santa Maria but she was blonde! like the
white gold of a sacred chalice. And her faded blue dress, over which a
white silk fringed shawl was thrown, but made her fairer. The girl took
her seat beside an elderly woman who had come in with them, and looked
about timidly, almost apprehensively, yet with a certain delight. It was
the first dance of any kind that Hope Bragdon had ever seen. She would
never have dared suggest going, but her father was occupied, Doren was
already sleeping safely, and Mrs. Trenour, the only white woman then in
the Villa, had persuaded her to come.
“My father will not like it, Mrs. Trenour,” Hope protested, “I have
never looked upon dancing, or cards, or any sinfulness. My father does
not tolerate it.”
“Is that possible?” Mrs. Trenour had commented, dryly. Perhaps she had
her doubts on the matter. “This is different, however. Everyone goes to
the _bailes_ in this country. It is the only way you can see everyone.
Besides, I’ll tell him you had to accompany me. Haven’t you anything to
put over that muslin frock?”
Yes, there was a white shawl of her mother’s in the bottom of her little
tin trunk; and she had a right pretty piece of blue moiré ribbon to tie
round her hair (it was the ribbon that first caught Consuelo’s eye), in
hair that at night was more silvery than gold. A woman, a blonde woman.
She had heard of them, but the fairest creature she had seen up till
this time was the baby of Anita, who had married the English trapper.
Its curls were flaxen yellow, its eyes blue. But no woman remained this
white and gold. Consuelo gazed fascinated and a disturbing jealousy
arose in her heart. So this creature had come in the caravan with the
tall Americano of the ruddy hair. She had traveled with him across the
plains. Was she then his sweetheart? His sister, perhaps? No, not that,
she knew intuitively.
Don Tiburcio was asking for the valse. She rose in relief and they spun
in dizzying circles, faster and faster, at length subsiding with the
music for the march about the room. Luis was standing before the
Americana’s chair, bowing. Would she promenade? Evidently urged to do so
by the older woman, still the girl hung back. Luis retired, flushed with
fury at the rebuff. Consuelo’s eyes never left the blond trader except
when her back must be turned; even then she was intensely conscious of
him. Did he dance? He must dance with her. Steven still stood against
the far wall, looking on. Now Consuelo and Don Tiburcio were passing
again before the chair of the fair-haired Americana and Don Tiburcio was
looking at her, a sidelong glance. Ah, he too had noted the little
blonde! As they passed on he bent to Consuelo’s ear, “You are sure,
señorita, of your answer?” His voice seemed uncommonly agitated.
“Quite sure, señor,” flashed Consuelo, with unexpected spirit. “Do not
molest yourself to ask me again, I pray, or I may accept, and then you
will not be able to promenade with the Americanita, either.”
Diablo! What a little temper she had! And what _perspicaz_! Don Tiburcio
stared straight ahead in his amazement and desire to disprove Consuelo’s
accusation. What, jealous already of another’s beauty? He had scarcely
glanced at the girl. Devil take it how women caught on! Consuelo was
leaving him before the promenade had finished. Reaching her seat, she
flounced down upon it. Now the American gentleman could come and get
her. Consuelo spread her full skirts, adjusted her veil over the high
comb, and sat wide-eyed, confident, smiling bright invitation across the
floor at Steven Mercer. Now he could come and get her.
Ah, so that was the reason. Don Tiburcio de Garcia had a bit of pride
himself. This open flouting did not soothe his vanity. _Muy bien!_ With
a deep ironic bow he wheeled, crossed the floor, and stood directly
before the Americanita. Like a delicately tinted saint in a niche she
was; sweet, remote, white and golden beyond any woman he had ever seen.
His attention was one of sheer deference and gallantry. Just as he
reached her, however, the girl rose and laid her hand on the arm
proffered by Steven Mercer. They moved away. The room was buzzing, for
of all the flirtations brewing and sizzling at the _baile_ this double
one was the most conspicuous and exciting. Santa Fe was becoming used to
the rough advances of the trappers, half-filled with drink, drunk with
music and play and the heady response of plump señoritas with flashing
eyes and teeth. Yesterday they had faced death on the Trail; tomorrow or
next week they would again be claimed by mountain or desert; but tonight
was playtime, dangerous playtime. There were always knifings and bull
fights before a _baile_ was over. Ceran St. Vrain stood near the door.
“Are you dancing any more?” he asked as Steven and Hope passed.
“Just once. With the Señorita Lopez, I hope,” Steven replied. “Is there
anything that you wished?”
“Don’t do it. Don’t do it!” warned St. Vrain in a low voice. “Stay on
the safe side. And don’t even promenade with Miss Bragdon any more.
Young Lopez is wild. He’d knife you so easy as not. There’ll be trouble
before the evening’s over. Remember, we don’t want to land in the
_carcel_.”
A threat was enough to set Steven at defiance. What, not dance with whom
he chose! He looked towards the spot where the Señorita Lopez had been
sitting; he was sure she would valse with him. But the music had already
struck up a wilder note and she had already risen to take the arm of a
native gallant. It was a round dance playing. Steven brought Hope to her
seat, and as he turned about Consuelo danced past him and stared
straight past his nose without a glance of recognition. Don Tiburcio
appeared at his elbow at this moment, demanding, after the manner of
their world, an introduction to the American señorita. She laid her hand
in his and he bowed over it with what English he could muster.
Consuelo, whirling by with her partner again, looked full into Steven’s
eyes with an expression that he could not understand. The round dance
was forming, swinging up and down the hall. Steven caught a Mexican
maiden and swung her, too, planning to catch Consuelo in partners’
change. Consuelo came nearer; another couple to swing, and they would
meet. Consuelo’s heart pounded, and her outstretched hand met--that of
Manuel--eager, hot, his face came unpleasantly near. Steven had dropped
completely out of the dance, and all that could be seen of him was his
back, disappearing through the door.
Quivering with rage, Consuelo stood still. Her hands clenched, she could
have stamped her feet in fury and hurt. She would bring that American to
her feet and tramp on him! But now she was caught up and swung round and
round by a jovial partner, and then--the dance went out with the lights.
“Some _apache emborrachado_ (some drunken apache),” stormed Doña
Gertrudis, “unaccustomed to the entertainment of civilization.” There
was roaring and laughter in the darkness, and the music of the drunken
fiddler which never stopped.
Outside the dance hall Ceran St. Vrain hurried his party down a side
street, halfway along which he pulled back abruptly. By the faint light
of the rising moon they could see half a dozen cloaked figures hovering
at the corner. St. Vrain pushed open a door and they hurried through a
_zaguan_, out into a cluttered and used corral, thence into the other
street. A few moments later they stood within the colonel’s quarters,
where Bragdon was waiting for his daughter. The ladies were escorted to
their rooms across the courtyard, where they bid them good night.
“A close call,” said St. Vrain. “When the lights go out watch out. Luis
Lopez runs the young bloods of this place, and he had his eye on Miss
Bragdon. Sorry, but if I hadn’t plucked you out, Steven, my lad, you
would have had a nice knife fight on your hands. And I need you to get
the ladies home safely, too.”
There was a light knock upon the door at this moment. The colonel laid a
hand on the pistol at his hip, and blowing out the candles, stepped to
the door, threw back the bolt, and opened it an inch. A solitary tall
figure stood outside. It was Don Tiburcio Garcia. At St. Vrain’s word he
stepped quickly inside. Steven relit the candle and, the shade being
drawn, the three men sat down.
“You departed just in time,” remarked Don Tiburcio, smiling.
“So it seems,” Steven agreed. “The colonel says there was a party lying
in wait for us at the corner.”
“Yes,” Don Tiburcio nodded. “I saw them and took two men on the other
side in case there was fighting, but our friend here was too adroit for
Luis and his men.”
“And the other young lady?” asked Steven.
“Her mother and a duenna escorted her safely home. Nobody would dare
molest the Señorita Consuelo, anyway.”
St. Vrain was pleased at this opportunity to talk business with a
Mexican gentleman of Don Tiburcio’s wealth and spent an hour smoking and
chatting. Then the colonel rose, remembering a mission among his
mule-drivers, and Steven and Don Tiburcio were left together.
CHAPTER VI
DON ANABEL AND HIS FAMILY
Don Anabel Lopez was proud of his station in the secure and far-flung
territory of New Spain which his forbears had first found and conquered
nearly three centuries before his time. He claimed descent straight from
a Spanish grandee who had accompanied the expedition of settlement of
Juan de Oñate in the latter part of the sixteenth century. Don Anabel
felt that the riches of this vast territory belonged rightfully to those
who had held it through so many generations for the glory of the Spanish
crown, which at last, in this year of grace 1828, had been thrown off
through a treaty of independence with her colony, Mexico.
Don Anabel’s sheep grazed over a range of a hundred miles. The
unnumbered buffalo were his cattle; his slaves the peons that lived upon
the extensive lands granted his grandsires. To Don Anabel’s warehouses
the Indians brought the pelts of beaver, lynx, fox, the hides and robes
of buffalo and deer. These he exchanged with the great fur-traders of
the north at a profit that would have made them wince, had they known
that he himself had acquired them for a handful of tawdry merchandise
and home-distilled liquors.
Every six months his caravan of burros labored up the Cordilleras from
the City of Mexico, bringing all manner of merchandise for the people
and for the aristocrats of New Spain. Always there were luxuries brought
from Spain and from the far markets of the earth. The Mexican hidalgos
prided themselves on having none but imported furniture in their
establishments, but Don Anabel considered this an affectation, as it was
obviously impossible for the dons of New Mexico.
Don Anabel was proud of living in a way that his Spanish forbears might
have lived in that Old Spain which was so like this New Spain. His great
adobe hacienda might have been considered only a vast mud house by the
European, but it covered nearly an acre of ground. The patio within was
fifty feet square, and if the inner walls were whitewashed instead of
carved and paneled in fine woods, yet they were hung with brocades and
strangely beautiful fabrics now no longer woven, which were made from
the silken hair of Peruvian llamas or spun from some flax-like Mexican
plant. The carved furniture had a rude and florid beauty that was
mediæval, and, like the native Aztec lords of Mexico, the proud
Montezumas, Don Anabel’s table was served with dishes of purest silver
only.
Don Anabel was feared and respected by his servants, his tenants, and
his family. Indulgent in all that made for material comfort, he exacted
a deference, not only towards himself as head of the family, but among
one another. He was autocrat and despot, and though his courtesy was as
exquisite as that of any courtier diplomat of the outside world, his
discipline was harsh; cruel even. He had never whipped his children, but
had punished Luis, when he was a naughty, wilful, kicking child, in ways
that made the lad subservient, secretive. For who would court a bath in
the snow in winter merely to practice the dubious virtue of
truthfulness? He was stoic, for who would cry when water was poured down
his throat till he drowned, strangled, and his screams and throbbing
head were drenched to shuddering, smothered sobs.
Perhaps the example of Indian discipline had had its effect on Don
Anabel, although towards his small daughter he practiced no such heroic
measures. Yet they were not necessary. Fear of her father’s displeasure
was sufficient to still one of Consuelo’s tantrums. His solemn entrance
upon the scene of biting, scratching, shrieking, spitting, and other
infantile atrocities was enough to secure trembling silence, proper
behavior, and the obedient reception of oil of the castor bean, or
whatever else it was that aroused Consuelo’s displeasure and her violent
_disgusto_.
Doña Gertrudis de Chaves y Lopez was exactly the wife for Don Anabel.
Her pansy-like beauty when she had come to the hacienda as a bride of
sixteen was never marred by tempests. She bloomed, had eight babies,
only two of which lived, and grew fat, all without ever questioning her
husband’s authority. In her own domain she grew highly excited on
important domestic occasions, such as involved the vast responsibility
of perfectly bleached sheets, properly seasoned enchiladas, and claret
with the venison if the archbishop came to dinner.
It was thought due to her common origin that she molested herself with
such things, and Doña Gertrudis made a great pretense of never stepping
within the kitchen--save us, no! For there were those who said that Doña
Gertrudis was not of pure Spanish blood; that her grandmother had been
Aztecan, descended from an Aztec lord. You could see for yourself that
her hair was not fine and wispy like Don Anabel’s, but heavy, coarse,
though lustrous. But no breath of that! Doña Gertrudis was most devout
and her devotions occupied a large part of her time. She did, indeed, a
great deal of secret good, and followed often behind Don Anabel’s visits
to his ranchos with a soft touch to smooth the sternly dispensed
justice.
If Don Anabel’s word was law within his own home, his influence extended
no less outside his estates. His father had been a governor of New
Mexico, and Don Anabel’s word carried great weight with the successive
_jefe politicos_ of the territory of New Mexico. Chihuahua, the seat of
government of this province, of which Santa Fe was the chief city,
numbering as it did a thousand souls, was three months’ travel to the
south. The capital of Mexico was more than nine hundred leagues to the
south. Little did the President of the new republic interfere with the
overlordship of the _jefe politico_ of the northern territory. At one
time Mexican officials had intervened jealously over the intrusion of
venturesome Yankees from beyond the mountains, who came exploring and
were followed by trains of fresh traders.
They dared to bring in from eastward the goods that Mexico had always
supplied to the farthermost parts of New Spain. The luckless ones had
been thrown into prison, had languished in Chihuahua jails for a decade,
but as soon as they returned to their northern homes it was but to send
more and more pack animals back across the deserts.
Don Anabel himself had from the first resented these intruders bitterly.
To him the white men from across the plains were still colonists of the
hereditarily hated English. They were thrown into the _carcel_, hindered
in every way, yet still they came! And in the end Don Anabel traded with
them, as every one else did. It was to his advantage. He could not
afford not to.
On the morning after this last invasion Don Anabel, straight,
forbidding, stood in his warehouse, taking stock not only of
merchandise, but of things in general. Luis, a trifle nervous, but much
quicker than usual to anticipate his father’s moods and requests, stood
by with pencil and pad, while the clerks ran hither and thither.
“And ten bolts of the cotton cloth, with but two more of the linen,”
concluded Don Anabel. “They are an ill-mannered lot,” he resumed his
grievance, “bursting into a gentleman’s house while he is at dinner with
his family. Turning the dances into low brawls. El Coronel St. Vrain is
the only one with any measure of dignity or discretion.”
“Discreet indeed,” murmured Luis, sarcastically. “We had better hurry if
we are to get the best of the goods.”
“And your mother tells me that while she was at the _baile_ another
piece of silver disappeared from the cupboard. You remember that the
last time a caravan arrived the same thing happened. I’ll shoot the next
sneaking _ladron_ I lay my hands on.”
“It is terrible,” assented Luis, unmoved, as he checked over the bolts
of cloth. “Well, shall we go on to the trading?”
They left the warehouse in charge of an overseer and walked down the
crooked street, crossed the bridge below which the Santa Fe River
flowed, a sparkling racing little stream, and after several turns came
to the plaza. There in a large bodega the caravaners had set out their
goods. In a short while business would begin. Luis’ eyes searched the
Americans assembled in the bodega. Colonel St. Vrain, his young friend,
Steven Mercer, Bragdon, a small boy who was the brother of the
fair-haired girl--ah, the sister had not come, then. Just as well. He
would contrive better opportunities to see this disdainful _exquisita_.
The traders were spreading out their merchandise on the long low tables
that served for counters. Several of them were disposing of their goods
outside, from the wagons, which were surrounded by Pueblo Indians from
Tesuque, above Santa Fe, from Taos, and from the pueblos down upon the
Rio Grande. Silver exchanged hands rapidly within the bodega, while
outside furs and supple deer hides were bartered for the manufactured
articles coveted by the Indians.
Bragdon had already disposed outside of the wagonful of goods which he
had acquired on the Trail through the death of the two New England
traders. He had earrings, rope, paint, cheap knives and good knives,
liquor, and sugar. He had increased the amount of his whisky by diluting
a gallon at least one half, and obtaining for the diluted pints a
buffalo hide each, or the equivalent in the nearer pelts of the Rockies.
The sugar had been amplified by a method all his own and appeared to
satisfy the unaccustomed palate of the Indian just as well as the purer
product. Bragdon worked quickly and had as quickly retired into the
bodega, where he was now ready to dispose of his higher-grade goods.
A line of nankeen trousers was interesting the young men of the town.
They sold out rapidly, and the majority were donned at once. Bragdon’s
shoes did not meet with approval, however, and Luis scornfully laid down
the pair he had been considering when he had discovered that they were
neither rights nor lefts, but straight lasts, to be worn on either foot.
“What! These are not _de modo_. Does he think we know nothing here?”
Bragdon was much taken aback, but later was able to convince other
purchasers of the advantages of the good old-fashioned shoe that would
go on either foot. His snipe toes, Bonapartes, goose-and-ganders, Swiss
hunting, were soon disposed of. And then came Bragdon’s prize. He opened
a case in which were numerous small boxes. Opening one, he extracted a
sliver of wood tipped with a yellow and blue substance. Calling
attention to what he was about to do, he struck the small stick upon a
wall and immediately it flamed, burning like a tiny taper with a full
flame, and emitting a sulphurous odor. Bragdon set the flame to his
pipe, puffed in, and lit it; then taking a cigarette from the hand of
the astonished Steven, he lit that too before the flame flickered and
died out, having consumed the small stick.
“_Diablo!_ What is it?” The Santa Feans went wild.
“Matches,” said Bragdon, “they are called; a new thing, just discovered
in England last year. I have with me here some of the very first packet
brought into the United States. You will see that they are
phosphorescent?” he held up one proudly.
“_Fosforo!_” shouted some one, and the name stuck. Everyone gathered
round to see the miracle. Fire in a minute. No scratching of flintlocks,
no need of burning glasses.
“_Por mi vida_ (By my life),” said St. Vrain to Steven, “it is a pity
that he could not have produced one of those little boxes that wet night
when we could not strike flint or rub a stick to heat a bit of broth for
his own young. _Sacré!_”
The packages went like tortillas, and Bragdon had at length to admit
that there were no more. Don Anabel was himself enormously interested,
and pleased, too, with this new fancy, though it was his opinion that
the things were not in the least practical and would never be of much
real use or value.
It was annoying, but he had to pay the tall youth, who was again thrust
upon him by St. Vrain, at the rate of four dollars a yard for the two
bolts of linen which he decided to take, and in the end he was induced
also to buy for his own use and for the use of Doña Gertrudis a piece of
cloth, a fine black it was, at twenty dollars the yard. Luis did a good
piece of work here in forcing the American down a dollar a yard. This
exertion was not at all distasteful to Luis. It appealed to the gaming
instinct which every youth of Mexico or New Spain had.
St. Vrain, on the other hand, had been forced that morning to pay thirty
dollars apiece for the ten mules which he was taking back to Taos with
him, where he and Charles Bent would need them in conducting their
branch of the trade that had grown up about Bent’s Fort. Salt at five
dollars a load was not difficult to dispose of, although any New Mexican
could haul it himself from various places for even less than that
amount. St. Vrain showed Steven a pretty little mare which he bought at
once for eleven dollars and of which he at once became very fond.
By noon everyone was ready to stop. A good deal remained to be disposed
of, and yet an extremely good business had been done. “I do not mind
paying thirty dollars for the mules,” St. Vrain confided to Steven, as
he locked his warehouse door behind him, “as long as I am not forced to
buy back my own mules as those poor chaps did last year. Not four days
from La Villa their mules were all stampeded off, nearly three hundred
of them, and, having been forced to return to Santa Fe on foot to
purchase more, they were offered their own animals and had to buy them
back. And they are not nearly so good, either, these mules of New
Mexico, as your large Louisiana jackass. Did you notice that Bragdon had
six of his mules die in harness just as they reached the end of the
Trail?”
“No wonder, with the load he carried and the way he pushed them.”
“Trade is not nearly so good this year as it was last,” St. Vrain
considered. “It’s due to such treatment here in Santa Fe and to the
terrible ferocity of the Indians. Why, last year there were a hundred
wagons to the thirty of this summer. The amount of merchandise brought
in and the business done was more than three times as much as for this
summer.”
They were walking up the narrow street and Steven now was getting his
first real glimpse of Santa Fe. There were no sidewalks and the walls of
the houses rose straight from the road. There were occasional glimpses
into green patios, and fragrant sprays of deep pink tamarack drooped
occasionally over the walls, waving their plumes against a very blue
sky. When it wished, the reserve of Old Spain was well housed behind
those shuttered windows and crooked little doors. Yet when so disposed
it could overflow merrily into the street, or peer intimately from
windows through which a hand could thrust to pluck at one’s cloak as he
passed, to pick one’s pocket, or to drop a note within the hand.
One may imagine Steven’s surprise to feel a crumpled piece of paper come
into contact with his palm. He closed his finger upon the fragment and
looked swiftly down. But only the barred shutters of a little blue
window were there, and he walked on with scarcely a halt in his stride.
“Indeed!” he replied to the colonel, politely, and answered
intelligently upon matters of the trade until they reached the house,
where the colonel went to see that lunch was forthcoming at once, before
siesta. Then Steven opened his hand and spread out the crumpled paper,
half foolishly, half expectantly. Was it from Don Tiburcio de Garcia?
In a fine, painstaking script the note ran thus:
Señor Estevan Mercer: Will you not come below the _balcon_
where first we met yesterday, at the tenth hour tonight?
I should esteem it a favor, as I have a word for your safety.
Consuelo Lucero Lopez y Chavez.
Steven was looking for intrigue. But political, not the intrigue of
lovely ladies. Still, pleased and puzzled, he revolved the matter in his
mind for a moment. Ceran St. Vrain had warned him against girls, this
girl in particular. Colonel Bent had warned him against political
entanglements. And here he was getting nicely tied up in both, it
seemed. For of course he would be beneath the _balcon_ at the stroke of
ten. Oh well, time enough yet. Here he was, and he hadn’t done anything,
so far. He’d been forced to slight the señorita the night before, and
not of his own accord or liking, either. He must make apology for that,
in any event. A wonder she would bother about him at all.
Steven’s modesty was not greater than that of the average decent youth,
perhaps, yet to tell the truth, as he was unfamiliar with the manners of
this new old world, he had not realized that Consuelo was indicating any
special favor for him by her actions of the night before. He had seen
her twice before that day, and she was smiling at him in pleasant
recognition. He had already asked Hope Bragdon to promenade. In New
Orleans he had been well schooled in the proper thing to do. Well, at
all events, he would be under that balcony at ten.
Had Consuelo been able to know of that decision it would have saved her
much suspense. Relegated to her room for the day, she was in disgrace.
Yet it was a relief to be there, away from the incessant agitation of
Doña Gertrudis’ tongue. Scarcely had the wavering candles been relit in
the dance hall the night before when Doña Gertrudis, sweeping her
daughter before her, and surrounded by their elderly neighbors and their
cousins and their aunts, poured out of the place and down the street,
_duennas_ and _muchachas_, chaperons and girls. While some were
frightened and many were elated, they themselves were in reality in no
danger. The indignant clatter of Doña Gertrudis’ tongue would have
caused every drunken trapper or jovial Spaniard to give her a wide
berth. When they had reached their own home she poured out her
indignation again to Don Anabel.
Imagine, Consuelo, ungrateful daughter of no consideration, had again
this night insulted such a noble gentleman as Don Tiburcio. “_Si!_ I saw
with my own eyes.” And moreover, she had smiled openly at the Americano,
the very trader who had been at their house that same night. At the
first of these charges Don Anabel became very stern and dignified. At
the second he flew into a fiery rage.
“I will myself have this young scoundrel thrown into jail,” he stormed.
“But what for, papa?” Consuelo protested, aghast at the storm her
behaviour had evoked. No matter. She should keep to her room the whole
of the following day and learn better how to conduct herself with her
inferiors. And so she had, alternating between regret and fury that the
ruddy-haired trader had not danced with her. Shortly before noon the
faded and faithful Felicita came tiptoeing in, to report all the news.
After recounting the events of the morning’s trading, what her father
had bought, and how the father of the blonde girl had made fire with
naught but a tiny splinter (and she knew, therefore, that he must indeed
be in league with the devil), Felicita’s pock-marked face blanched at
this, she whispered, “The _caballero_, the young gentleman who stopped
beneath the balcony yesterday afternoon--your brother Señor Luis, has
threatened that if that one does not abandon the white girl he, Don
Luis, will attend to the Yanqui’s funeral himself.
“Yes, and even Don Tiburcio, señorita, is enchanted, they say, by the
fair-haired American, and followed the merchants to their house last
night. Surely there will be trouble for the handsome lad.” Felicita
sighed, for, though old at thirty, romance had not departed from her,
and when peeping over the window ledge the day before, she had seen the
youth stop, look up and smile at her mistress--as who did not--and bid
her good afternoon.
Consuelo’s rage against Estevan Mercer, if that was what they called
him, melted into a swift flow of concern. How terrible! She had brought
all this upon him. This was a pleasanter thought than that he had
brought it upon himself or that Luis was merely visiting his wrath upon
Steven.
“What will Luis do, Felicita?” Consuelo barely breathed the question.
“He will shoot or knife him, señorita, the first time he catches him out
at night.”
“Oh, I must tell Don Estevan! Where is the American now, Felicita? At
the warehouse? Good! good! Quick, Felicita! Give me pencil and paper.”
Felicita flew; her young mistress was educated, she could write. This
was important.
Consuelo wrote, folded a tiny missive, thrust it into Felicita’s hands.
“Here, run with it to the house of my aunt Juana on the street leading
from the bodega to the house of Doña Katarina. See if you cannot catch
him if he passes that way. I must warn him.” She pushed the willing
Felicita out the door just as Doña Gertrudis’ step was heard coming in.
Consuelo flew to the bed, and when Doña Gertrudis entered was lying with
her head pillowed on her arm, fast asleep.
Siesta; and a long afternoon that dragged through hot, golden hours.
Later, in the garden, when there was no trading for the day, Don Anabel
sat with Don Tiburcio, drinking a bottle of berry wine that had been
cooling in the acequia since that morning.
“It is extraordinary, the amount of goods that those Yanquis pulled out
of their wagons this morning,” said Don Tiburcio. “It is incredible,
actually. I should have judged that a wagon could have carried but half
the amount. But it is to our advantage. Both in the quantity of the
useful goods that they bring and in the quality. Competition is
invariably a great spur to trade, Don Anabel.”
“Perhaps, as you say, this trade with the Yanquis stimulates our
business,” Don Anabel conceded, reluctantly, “but it has many other
aspects that are undesirable.”
“Yes, it has,” agreed Don Tiburcio, thinking of Steven Mercer and the
American girl. Was she in love with her countryman? He thought not. She
seemed to be in love with no one. She was a saint, as delicately tinted
as plaster, and as cold, perhaps as hard. He was fascinated; caught on
the rebound of his emotions. He realized it. Was he always to love the
unattainable? Don Anabel was talking on.
“I have never seen such a vast amount of goods produced as from those
wagons. They have already taken in a great deal of silver. But there
will be sizable duties upon it, so they will not have the clear profit
they look for. Instead of repelling this growing trade and discouraging
it,” Don Anabel was arguing, “Colonel Viscarra is doing everything to
protect the traders. He himself escorted Colonel Bent’s party from the
border to the Fort, and but just missed coming back with this caravan.
He has dashed off now to put down a border warfare with the Texans and
the Crees. Texas has been claiming, as you know, that the southern route
of the Santa Fe Trail lies through her territory. She demands the right
of _arancel_, the return-trip duties, instead of Santa Fe.” This seemed
to annoy Don Anabel exceedingly, though he’d have admitted no
inconsistency in his attitude.
“I think Viscarra has the right policy,” replied Don Tiburcio, suavely.
“We shall have to come to rely to a certain extent upon American trade.
The old opposition that the traders were sent as spies upon our
government has been shown to be without foundation.”
“I do not know,” replied Don Anabel, quickly; “certainly they were
looking into the country and the possibilities of trade. La Lande would
have gone back, only he found he could prosper here, and as the goods
with which he set himself up in business here did not belong to him, but
to his employer back on the Missouri River, he would have had to make an
accounting had he returned. Pursley--well, we all want to make Pursley’s
stay agreeable; or his departure formidable, rather.”
“Don Anabel laughed a frankly cynical laugh. He came here, you may
remember, as an emissary. Was one of a thousand men who first crossed
our northern Andes, with two thousand animals. In Pursley’s pockets were
nuggets of pure gold. He alone knew exactly where he had picked them up.
That tale returned across the Trail. But Pursley remains here.
“The question is,” Don Anabel resumed, after a moment’s sipping of his
cordial, “to whom does this country belong? To us, the Spaniards who
have held it for three centuries, ever since Cabeza de Baca first found
it, or to these upstart colonials who have been free from England’s
skirts for hardly half a century? Santa Fe is not large. She is remote
from Mexico--and its political storms”--Don Tiburcio winced--“and for
that very reason little able to withstand a horde of Yanquis coming like
bull-headed buffalo over the Trail. The more you kill, the more there
are, apparently. Will Mexico fight for us, or is she no longer Spanish?
Has she thrown off the traditions of Spain along with the yoke of
Spain?”
“I do not know,” Don Tiburcio replied, slowly. “Last winter Mexico
expelled all the Cachupines. Every Spanish-born citizen, including the
friars, even, and drove out Gomez Pedraza, the first President they had
been able to elect constitutionally. That,” he concluded, dryly, “in
connection with our treaty of independence of January last year, might
be construed as a severing of identity with Spain, and the development
of a national identity.”
“National disintegration,” declared Don Anabel. “Mexico was never united
until Cortez came. A handful of scattered tribes that even the great
Montezuma did not pretend to keep together. Spain’s imprint will never
depart, no matter how much you throw off the ‘yoke.’ This whole country
is New Spain.”
“Yet one day I think you will find that you, too, will be throwing off
Mexico; allegiance is more geographic than of blood. Your capital may be
eastward in another century.”
“No,” said Don Anabel, violently. “New Mexico this territory has been
since Antonio de Espejo named us in 1583; Santa Fe has been the seat of
government since sixteen five, and so shall they always be. Our
boundaries began at New Galicia, and extended to New Biscay, and they
shall never retreat so far as I can help it.”
“Señor,” replied Don Tiburcio, with frank admiration of the older man in
his eyes, “you may be mistaken, but you are admirable, señor.”
* * * * *
Don Tiburcio was relieved not to see Consuelo at dinner that night.
Dinner was a quiet affair, with Doña Gertrudis much subdued, Luis
abstracted. Don Tiburcio could not like Luis wholly, but there was a
certain careless gayety and deference about the boy that was most
charming. The family separated immediately after the meal and Don
Tiburcio departed up the street where Ceran St. Vrain was lodging; Luis
disappeared; and Doña Gertrudis went to see if her poor little Consuelo
had eaten her supper, and found her already in bed, so retired herself.
_Valga-me!_ it was ten minutes to ten o’clock.
No sooner had her mother departed than Consuelo leaped from her bed,
patted the bolster into her own place, pulling the covers up deftly over
it. She snatched her shoes from under the bed, flung a white lace scarf
over her tumbled hair, and tiptoed through the door at the opposite end
of the room, across the room of the sleeping grandmother, into another
chamber, unoccupied, and beyond to Felicita’s room. There stood her
slave, shivering with excitement, and steadied a chair while Consuelo
mounted to the _balcon_, where she crouched, peering between the crudely
turned bars.
A yellow harvest moon was just rising over the Sangre de Cristo. Before
long its radiance would flood the quiet street. Now it gave but a slight
glow. The street below was empty. Consuelo’s heart thumped so loudly
that at first she thought it the beat of a horse’s hoofs on the road.
_Dios!_ If he did not come. It would be simply not to be supported! She
held her breath in an agony of listening. Not a sound, not a footfall,
not a breath stirring. Desperately she peered over the railing. He was
there, below the _balcon_, close to the wall. Imagine!
She rose bravely and leaned over. “Señor, I thank you for coming. I
wished to tell you that you are in danger, señor.”
“It does not matter, señorita. It would be worth it to see you.” Was
this he, Steven Mercer, talking? _Maman_ would quite approve of his
pretty speeches.
“Ah, but not just this moment. I mean all the while, señor, when you may
be abroad at night. For that reason I wished to warn you. Do not go
unarmed at night, nor to out-of-the-way places by day, I beg of you.”
She was pleading so earnestly that Steven looked up in surprise, at once
serious.
“Have you heard anyone threatening me, Señorita Lopez?” he asked.
“Oh, I have heard of threats. My brother Luis he threatens because you
danced with the fair girl last night and she would not walk with him. He
thinks--you are in love with her, señor?----”
“And would it be his affair if I were?” replied Steven, with a trace of
asperity. “But I am not, señorita. She is my countrywoman, and I am
bound to protect her and be courteous to her. That is all.”
“I am glad for that.” There was no doubting the sighing voice from the
balcony, “but that is not all, Señor Estevan. You are American, and must
be very discreet here in Santa Fe. It would be awful to have bloodshed.
Although I suppose you are used to that.”
“Oh yes, more or less,” replied Steven, modestly. “The mosquitoes on the
Trail were frightful. I lost simply quarts to them.”
Consuelo looked startled. Felicita was pulling at her skirts from below.
“I must go, señor. I may be discovered.” She was peering over the rail
at him, and all he could see was her eyes and nose. A wave of genuine
gratitude, of pleasure, of moonlight and youth, swept Steven up to the
rail. Pulling himself up on a level with it, he implanted a kiss on the
small fingers clutching there. But somehow the kiss landed instead on a
nose.
With a little gasp Consuelo dropped out of sight. Steven slipped to the
ground, leaped to the dark side of the street, and, for a novice, lost
himself very successfully in the shadows just as the moon escaped fully
from the mountains.
CHAPTER VII
THE PIONEERS
Life had altered greatly for Hope Bragdon since that far-away day when
her father had decided that they would cross the plains in a Conestoga
wagon. That crossing seemed now like a dusty nightmare. Hope did not
like to think back to it, but rather to accustom herself to the new life
here in the Villa de Santa Fe.
Sometimes it seemed that life had just begun for her that night at the
dance. No one had ever paid much attention to her back home in
Pottsville. She had never seen so much of gayety as during that one
crowded hour. Hope would have liked to know the lovely-looking Spanish
girl whom she had seen on the night of the dance, but she did not see
Consuelo again during the weeks that followed. On the day following the
dance Bragdon moved out to a house just outside of town.
How different these thick-walled houses, made from the very earth
beneath one’s feet, from the cold frame and brick of her New England
home. Cool in the heat of the day, warm in the cool of the evening, they
were amazingly comfortable. How different, too, the life--easier for the
natives, easier even for her, daughter of a Yankee, born to look for
work. There was water in the well, there were no forests to be hewn, no
fields to clear before they had grain; crops never failed if they were
irrigated, it seemed.
Theirs were not the usual problems of the pioneer. This land had been
lived in for centuries, and the leisurely ways of ancient peoples rested
strangely upon her. Mrs. Trenour was very kind. The Mexican women were
kind. Even the Indian women of the pueblos were friendly and brought her
soft deerskin moccasins, ground corn meal, and beautiful autumn
vegetables--as much as they could carry in exchange for a cupful of
white sugar. No matter what Hope gave them as a gift, they always
brought back more in return. As soon as he heard of it, however, Bragdon
put a stop to Hope’s little attempts to requite their gifts. This did
not accord with his idea of thrift and business. What were they there
for, in this God-forsaken country, as he called it, if not to make a
good profit?
Doren, who was recovering but slowly from the hardships of the long
overland journey, was helping his father pick grapes in the sun. The
sunshine was good for him, his father said, but Hope brought him into
the house upon various pretexts to let him rest, as the heat tired him
after a few hours.
James Bragdon had not sold out his entire stock. He still had some of
the extra merchandise which fell to him when the goods of the men killed
on the trail was divided among their fellows. He had disposed of his own
more quickly than any of the other traders. Hope was surprised to find
that he still had some bolts of bright gingham and a number of boxes of
other things put away in the extra room at the end of the house. She
said nothing, as she had learned from experience not to question her
father. On the third night of their stay in the new house Hope sat alone
on the doorstep, watching the moon rise over the mountains. Doren lay
asleep inside; her father had gone into town to talk with the traders.
A rider drew up before the house, dismounted, and came toward her,
bowing. It was the young man whom she had seen at the by-lee, who had
asked her to dance when she could not. “Good evening, señorita,” he
said, softly. She understood that much, and replied, “_Buenas noches_,
señor,” a trifle timidly, yet deciding that to speak without
introductions must be the custom of this country.
“May I sit down?” asked Luis, in his pleasant, suave voice, indicating a
place beside her. She rose to bring out chairs, but, laughing, he seated
himself on a low stone. The moon rose well above the treetops and the
young Spanish gentleman looked with something of awe upon the aureole of
silver fair hair surrounding the girl’s head. Never had he seen a girl
like her. He would not have dared to touch her. She roused all that was
best in his nature--and all that was worst, too, struggling passionately
in the depths of his being. Everything he had ever wanted he had had
without any difficulty, and now that he had outgrown the wants which his
doting mother could supply, he _took_ what he wanted, if it were not
forthcoming. No girl had ever flouted him. Was he not the young Don Luis
Lopez, heir to Don Anabel himself?
So there was certainty behind his considered wooing that glamorous
night. He must not frighten this silver flower; indeed, he did not want
to.
He longed passionately to have Hope like him, and tried to amuse her
with his broken bits of English. “You-are-jung-and-lowbely,” he said,
carefully. She laughed when she saw that it did not hurt his feelings,
and tried to follow the few words of Spanish which he repeated for her.
Then she grew frightened at this unusual visit and for fear her father
would return. Luis, too, felt he had stayed as long as he dared, and
rose reluctantly to go. He wheeled his pony in the moonlight with a fine
display of horsemanship, and after caracolling around the plazita before
the house, swept off into the moonlight at a gallop.
Just in time, for James Bragdon came back along the same street within a
few minutes. “I have bought this house,” he said, “and am going to take
up some land, adjoining. I can make a trade for it and get it cheap, for
the title is not clear. Then we shall have no rent to pay and we can
raise our own garden stuff next year. We are right on the big ditch, and
there is a little river yonder, a stream from the Tesuque.”
The next day he was watering his new possessions, having shut down the
headgate below in the “sakey,” and the muddy water had already run over
his field when an irate Mexican followed by two others came posthaste
through the fields, gesticulating and threatening. Bragdon realized that
he was in trouble and made no objection when they opened the gates in
the ditch below him and went off muttering to shut the water off from
his ditch above.
Ceran St. Vrain endeavored to explain to the Yankee, that afternoon,
that the rules of irrigating in that country were sacred and that only
the master of the _acequias_ could say when to open the gates and when
not, and where the water was to be distributed. He warned him not to use
water until permitted. “But his crops he had bought in the land needed
it,” protested the man, indignantly. That might be, St. Vrain conceded,
but they knew best what could be used, and it was possible that
Bragdon’s place had no right to that water.
Bragdon that night sat outside his door, himself, and seeing some young
man riding past he ordered his daughter within the house, although the
night was glorious. So Luis had no such fortunate meeting with the girl
that night.
Hope was disappointed, for she had hoped that perhaps the dark handsome
boy would come back to amuse her and teach her some more Spanish. Mrs.
Trenour was going up to Taos the next morning with Colonel St. Vrain to
meet her husband, and Hope would be left alone except for Doren. A
number of black-shawled Mexican women had come in to see her that
morning and had talked rapidly and made polite-sounding expressions
which she could not in the least understand. Had she but known it they
were telling her about the water, warning her that her papa must not
take it, that it was not his, that at this time of the year it belonged
indeed to the Indians of the Tesuque pueblo above them. One of the women
brought an earthen jar filled with _tortillas_, wrapped in a clean white
cloth. This Hope could understand, and smiled one of her rare but sweet
smiles in gratitude. They got along famously after that, and when the
women left, each took Hope by the shoulders and laid her left cheek
against the girl’s in farewell.
Hope was thinking of this with pleasure as she sat watching the moon
riding high over the mountains. It was all very strange to this Puritan
girl. And yet her changed surroundings did not affect her as much as
they would have affected most people. Hope lived an inner life that was
inarticulate, that had built up a defensive barrier against the
disappointments of a rigorous upbringing, and that was moved only by
what happened to Doren. And by the memory of her tender, silent mother,
who had put the tiny baby brother into her arms when she was dying,
having the little girl promise always to take care of him.
Hope had no idea of being beautiful in the eyes of this new world, nor
of the excitement of which she had been the cause on the night of the
_baile_. But her father had heard of it through the traders next day,
and through St. Vrain. He was furious and swore that no Greaser rakes
should annoy his girl. Hope had been asleep for some time when a soft
strain of music crept upon her consciousness, again and again, a
repeated strain. She sprung to her feet and crept toward the window.
Never before in her life had she been serenaded, yet she knew that that
was what this must be; that this music was for her. A man’s voice was
singing. She caught the words that Luis had been trying to teach her the
night before.
“Oh, Anita, _como te amo, a ti_, ----”
But before the copleta could be finished there was a burst of profanity
from the front door of the house, and James Bragdon with a gun, shouting
and loosing his powerful mongrel dog, half wolf from the plains, at the
serenader, who perforce took to his heels. Leaping to the horse tethered
somewhere out of sight, the serenader made his escape in a volley of
flying hoofs that grew fainter and fainter and died away.
The girl, listening nervously behind the curtains, heard her father say:
“Well, I guess that will be the end of him. I’ll be troubled with him no
more.”
But to Luis the indignity of such an ignominious rout was a
never-to-be-forgotten insult. Frustrated, he strode his room in such a
fury as he had never before felt himself possessed of. His handsome
young face was suffused with blood, his ordinarily weak mouth drawn into
a straight hard line. He looked into the mirror as he passed and saw
that his white shirt was covered with the muddy footprints of Bragdon’s
dog, which had run over the freshly irrigated fields. With shaking hand
Luis brushed off the dirt and fastidiously flecked his beautiful light
cloth trousers.
“I will finish that cur of a Yankee,” he swore. He waited till he heard
Don Anabel complete his rounds of the casa, locking every door or
bolting it. When the house was quiet once more Luis slipped out through
the window and away to his familiars.
Steven rode out to Bragdon’s house the next afternoon. He thought that
Hope might be lonely, now that Mrs. Trenour was leaving for Taos, and he
had not yet called upon the Bragdons in their new home. Hope was very
much pleased, but she greeted the young man somewhat nervously, looking
at her father to see what his reception of their caller would be. James
Bragdon, however, was most cordial. He held Steven a long time talking
business.
“I should think that you could persuade your father, with his great
wealth and vast business interests,” he said, ingratiatingly, “to send
out a caravan. If he would outfit you for a trip every six months I
would gladly be your agent at this end of the line and handle all your
business.”
“If I arrived alive,” said Steven, with grim humor. “But what makes you
think my father has such vast interests?”
Oh, St. Vrain had told him, and everyone knew of Mercer & Co. of New
Orleans. Well, his father would have to be the judge of his business
ventures; Steven could only report conditions to him. It was already
getting dark, the days were growing shorter, when at last Steven was
able to break away. It was with a feeling of relief that he pressed his
heels against the mare’s flanks as she raced down the road, past low
pines and cedars. Something struck Steven across the chest, knocking his
breath clear out of him. He was swept from his mare and fell heavily to
the road, his head striking a rock so that consciousness went out with a
blaze of starry glory. The mare ran on from sheer momentum, slowing up
in a few paces and coming to a standstill; a good little beast. Then she
returned and stood patiently for a while beside the form on the road. It
did not move, and after a while she trotted along in the direction in
which she was turned, back over the road, to the place where she had
been tethered before Bragdon’s door, and stood there.
Bragdon, seated in the doorway, looked with surprise at the mare, rose,
and went over to her. Why, it was Steven Mercer’s horse! Had she run
away? Could he have been thrown? At any rate, he would want her back
again. Well, let him come and get her. A not too friendly young puppy,
anyway. But then, he was the son of a great merchant; and business must
be cultivated. Bragdon took the mare’s bridle in his hand and walked
along the road.
He was rather pleased than not when he came upon Steven, that is, after
he had ascertained that the boy’s heart was still beating. He would be
putting Steven in his debt. He lifted the inert figure with difficulty
into the saddle and, mounting behind, walked the mare back to his casa.
He carried the boy in and called Hope. “Some one has it in for him.
There was rope tied between trees chest-high across the road; a narrow
place between two trees. Guess he never knew what hit him, in the dark
and all.”
Steven came to himself painfully, with a splitting head, to find a fair,
anxious face bending over him. Strange, somehow he had expected a dark,
piquante, young person to be there, though he could not imagine why.
There was a painfully sprained arm, and Hope was surprising clever at
binding it to ease the hurt. They made him a fresh bed in a spare room
and Hope and her father helped him in. He was glad to be allowed to lie
quietly. A rope stretched across the road, eh? Who could have done it,
and was it intended for him?
He pondered this the next afternoon as he rode slowly back to his
quarters. He was still staying in Colonel St. Vrain’s place, and
boarding with Mrs. Trenour’s sister-in-law, a capable and friendly
Spanish lady with a handsome past, though she was not yet forty. The
señora shook her head when Steven came in.
“Why are you staying, señor?” she asked. “You can stay in Taos with
Ceran St. Vrain until the traders’ caravan returns next week.”
“But I am not going back on this trip, señora,” he replied. “I have no
reason to go, and several reasons for staying, as well as that I want
to. I would, if I returned to New Orleans for goods to trade, have to
convince my parents and persuade them to my return--a difficult
thing--and there is no wagonful of goods on hand at Westport Landing.
No, I am sending messages to my father, of my safety and my hope that he
will now see fit to enter into a half partnership with me”--the lad had
the grace to smile--“he supplying the goods, and I----”
“And you your life,” snorted the good Spanish lady. “Fair enough. Well,
I am glad we are not to lose you so soon.”
“You may at that, if I get any more such traps set for me as that of
last night,” Steven replied. “Well, I think I shall get a good night’s
rest, for this head gave me little sleep last night, and my arm did not
enjoy the trotting of my mare on the way back here.” The Señora Katarina
brought him a bowl of soup rich with chili and ground meat balls, and
with this warming his ribs, he stretched himself gratefully between
cooling sheets, thinking what a hard lot the poor girl Hope had, and
wondering how he should manage to see Señorita Consuelo again. She had
been right; he _was_ in danger, apparently. And she had run the risk of
letting him know--he must show her that--that he appreciated--that he
appreciated-- Steven was asleep.
He woke some time later because a light was shining right into his eyes
and a hard hand was shaking his shoulder. He struggled to throw off the
heavy slumber into which he had sunk. A bearded Mexican hung over him, a
man he had never seen before. Behind this man stood two other Mexicans,
and behind them he could see the agitated face of Señora Katarina. What
was it all about?
He would soon learn. He was under arrest. Get up, get his clothes on,
and exchange these quarters for the _carcel_. But what for? With what
was he charged? That was all right. He would know soon enough. The young
Mexican standing in the background threw back his serape and indicated
an emblem of authority on his chest. Steven was handicapped with his
wrenched left arm, and besides, there were three of them and another
outside. Best go along now, he decided reluctantly, and see what
happened. And so when he had pulled on his clothes they filed down the
dark and crooked little street and came at length to the jail, a stupid
low building no whit different outside from the corral beside it or the
houses about it, except that there were no windows at all on the street,
only the door, which was strongly barred after them as they entered.
But the “cell” into which he was thrown--for the jailer booted him in
from behind and closed the door so quickly that Steven had no chance to
make his protests felt--that was different indeed from the room he had
just left. Pitch dark, not a window in it as far as he could judge,
close and filthy. He scarcely dared stir, but, his hand encountering a
small stick, he scraped away at the dirt floor until he had cleared a
place large enough to lie down upon. Probably just as well he couldn’t
see, he consoled himself, and then proceeded to get what slumber he
could, execrating himself, meanwhile, for having disregarded the wise
advice of Colonel Bent certainly as regarding politics.
“De Garcia is responsible for this,” he thought. “I should not have
believed it of him. I should have thought he was genuine, a gentleman of
his word.”
But Steven was wrong. Don Tiburcio de Garcia had gone to Taos several
days before to see Charles Bent. Had Don Tiburcio remained in Santa Fe
all that happened might have been quite different. Luis Lopez had ways
of knowing many things. His followers were numerous and swift to report
whatever they thought might concern him. That is how he knew that Steven
Mercer had not broken his neck by that swift fall from the horse--a
simple device, the stretched rope, but one which is often
successful--but, to the contrary, had been carried back to the house of
James Bragdon. The result was that Luis went wild with jealousy and
proceeded, after some thought and a little more information from the
outside, straight to his father. He talked with him for some time. Don
Anabel was a ready listener.
“But how do you know that this American is a spy,” he asked, “and what
proof have you that he is arranging to ship arms into New Mexico for an
insurrection, or to take Santa Fe, as you say?”
“This,” replied Luis, triumphantly. “He comes first with no merchandise
of his own at all. He is no _mercader_.”
“He sold me cloth for twenty duros,” put in Don Anabel, skeptically.
“_Esta bien._ He sold only for Colonel St. Vrain, as a blind. But he
sends back way to New Orleans for a shipment of two thousand _pistoles,
entiende Ud., Señor_? Two thousand pistols, of the new kind, he
specifies, whatever they may be; revolver, to turn around, he writes.”
“How do you know this?” Don Anabel turned a shade paler under his fine
brown skin and leaned tensely forward.
“Because the letter which he intrusted to one of the traders who left
here five days ago, and which was to have been carried to Fort
Leavenworth and from there sent down the Great River somehow to the
father of the boy, a _mercader_ himself, says so. Here it is.” He spread
on the table before his father a folded paper that he had drawn from his
sash.
“How did you come into possession of this letter?” asked Don Anabel,
after he had read it.
“Well, frankly, it was brought to me by one of my _arrieros_ who
accompanied the returning caravan part way on the Trail.”
“You mean he held it up?” demanded Don Anabel. “At your orders?”
Luis nodded. “I suspected the Yankees, señor, and--_you see_?” he
shrugged eloquently, and struck nonchalantly one of the new matches to
light his cigarette.
Don Anabel did not reply. He was thinking fast. The _jefe politico_ had
not yet returned. He was still off fighting Texans. As an influential
private citizen he, Don Anabel, could get the sheriff, _el alguacil
mayor_, to arrest the suspected youth and put him in the _carcel_. That
would keep him safe, and it would be a thousand times harder for him to
get out again than for them to get him in. Yet Don Anabel would not give
the order till after dinner. Luis chafed, but he knew enough to hide any
undue eagerness. The matter was discussed at the table.
“What, the handsome Americano a spy!” The sentimental Doña Gertrudis
could scarcely believe it. “_Un espio, un emisario secreto!_” Consuelo
ceased the busy and healthful plying of spoon and fork from plate to
mouth. Her eyes widened, her lips parted, she put down her sopped piece
of tortilla. _Ay, madrecita de Dios!_ They were actually going to arrest
him and put him in that filthy _carcel_, with the _piojos_, yes fleas,
from every unwashed peon ready to leap upon him. But what for, what for,
papa? They had a letter which proved that he was a spy? But how could
one know the Americano had written that same letter? Even after Luis had
departed with his father in search of the _alguacil_ Consuelo would not
believe it.
It is not strange that Consuelo should have been a headstrong product of
the same upbringing as her brother. From an adored infancy she had had
her way. A wave of small fat arms and two nurses scurried to bring what
she wanted. Tears, and even Don Anabel gave her anything she wept for.
As she grew older almost every wish was gratified before she had time to
pout about it, and it was nothing short of a miracle that with all this,
still the Spanish virtues of filial courtesy, respect to one’s elders,
and strict observance of the manners of the day were instilled into her.
Though she rebelled, she observed them. When she was most rebellious
Father Filemon Hubert, the French padre, could always quiet her; a walk
in the peace of his lovely quaint garden, a talk with his quiet, gentle,
saintly self, and the tantrum would pass.
But she could not seek Father Filemon tonight, and she wanted this youth
to play with. She wanted him. He was the first interesting thing that
had happened in her life, but yes. He should not be taken away from her.
She had been extraordinarily good on the day after her incarceration in
her room, and the day after that had wondered all day long what the
Americano was doing, where he was. He had told her that he did not love
the pale girl. _Muy bien_, she could not free this youth by crying, but
she could perhaps by trying.
She kept Doña Gertrudis up by one pretext and another till her father
and Luis returned, well satisfied with the evening’s work. Well, that
was that. The plotter had been taken and was even now in the _calabozo_.
He had exchanged his comfortable bed at Señora Katarina’s for the bare
floor of the _carcel_, as a reward for his scheming.
Don Anabel set forth on the nightly round of his house, locking up.
“Did he not fight, the Americano?” Consuelo questioned Luis, as Doña
Gertrudis slumped back in her chair.
“He was asleep,” grinned Luis, “and also has a bad arm--hurt by a fall.”
“_Covardes!_” hissed Consuelo, and made a face that her mother might not
see. “Cowards, not satisfied with arresting him you must take him
asleep. I knew it!”
Luis gazed at his sister in astonishment. “_Valgame dios!_ What do you
care? What is he to you, this Americano _espiador_? He was visiting his
country woman the night before; was coming from there when he was hurt,
strangely, and they carried him back to her house, where she herself
bound his wounds and cared for him. He returned to his quarters but this
evening.”
It gave Luis a peculiar cruel relief to stab Consuelo, as his sharp
sense told him he was doing, thereby sharing and relieving his own
stabbing jealousy. He watched her face as he spoke and then coolly lit a
cigarette while she glared at him, her hands clenching under his nose.
“What is it to me?” she gasped, in fury. “I will show you. I will prove
that he is no spy. It is _you_ who love the _Guerita_. Did I not see you
the night of the _baile_? Have I not heard of your threats? Bah!” Tears
trembled in her eyes.
Unmoved, Luis replied, cynically, “Ah, so it is you who are the little
spy, eh?”
“It would take no spy to know that you were angry at the _baile_,” came
the hot retort. “Oh, Luis, he does not want the Americanita. He has told
me. Why did you do it?” She wept openly.
This put a different light on the matter. Luis was genuinely sorry. He
put his arms sympathetically about his sister and kissed her. “Don’t,
little one. See, Luis will help you.” At this moment Doña Gertrudis
roused from her napping, Don Anabel returned, and the family bid one
another a formal goodnight.
The following night, after the longest day that he had ever spent in his
life, Steven lay in momentary cessation of his attack upon strange
little scorpions that kept running out from a corner into the one shaft
of light that came through one window which daylight had discovered. The
jailer, who had thrust a plate of beans and a jar of water through the
door around noon had vouchsafed no information except that Steven would
stay right where he was till the _jefe politico_ returned; maybe one
month, maybe two. _Quien sabe?_ May be the _jefe_ might be killed and
never return.
A careful inspection showed Steven that there was no way to get out,
short of digging through five feet of sunbaked adobe with his finger
nails. In addition to that was the trifling consideration of his feet
being chained together. He spent the time examining the walls of his
jail by the ray of sunlight that came through the little high barred
window. Various rings were inbedded in massive beams sunk in the adobe.
One for the throat, two for wrists, very suggestively. The dirty walls
still held here and there bits of whitewash, which were scratched up
with verses and threats inscribed by prisoners. From the ceiling hung
two rings that also suggested possibilities from which Steven turned
with a sick feeling at the stomach. In one of them a lock of human hair
could still be seen. There were bloodstains upon the wall.
From these gloomy contemplations and from a thousand plans for making
his escape on the morrow, Steven was roused some time after dark by a
turning of the lock in the one door. The bolts were shot back and the
jailer appeared, with a covered candle lantern.
“Get up,” he ordered, “_Seguido._ In a hurry. Follow me.”
“How can I?” Steven protested. “Undo this thing.” The jailer stooped and
fumbled with a rusty and primitive padlock. Steven stood up and followed
the man out. He stood in a small bare courtyard in the light of the
sinking moon. “Over there,” pointed the jailer. Steven saw a cloaked
figure, a woman, who came quickly forward to meet him.
“Señorita Consuelo! Again you have thought for me!” Steven really
trembled as he looked down upon her. She _was_ small, he remembered,
though he had not stood beside her before. She told him briefly, and
with creditable clarity, all she had heard at dinner of the
circumstances of his arrest. So they had held up poor Twombley, the
trader from St. Louis, and taken his letter. Steven smiled grimly.
“What did Señor Don Tiburcio have to say?--Oh, he was in Taos?”
“But you are not a spy?” Consuelo pressed.
Steven laughed. “I have never had a thought of such an office. That was
just some business.”
“It doesn’t matter, I wouldn’t care if you were,” she said, softly,
looking away. Steven peered in amazement upon the small shadowed face;
he looked over his shoulder. The jailer had disappeared. He put an arm
around Consuelo’s shoulders and with one hand turned her face up to his.
“Consuelo, when I am out of this, and can--I will tell you something.
Will you trust me meanwhile? Since I first saw you in the
window--I--I--I wanted to dance with you that night, awfully. But I
could not, for Colonel Ceran insisted on my leaving and I had to go for
fear of causing trouble. There was a lady with us, you know. My
countrywoman. I shall get away from here tonight, and go to Taos, to see
St. Vrain and Don Tiburcio, but I shall get back as soon as possible.”
She would send Felicita’s husband, Juan, to guide him. Juan would be
waiting at Estevan’s door in an hour. “You will be back?” murmured
Consuelo. “When? In a week? Ten days?”
“In a week.” His ears were thrumming, his heart violently knocking his
ribs, “unless I am shot through the back, I shall see you. No?” He
longed to say, “I love you; I have just realized that I loved you from
the moment I saw you in the window.”
She nodded solemnly. “In a week, then, from tonight. At ten. At my
balcony?”
He must not come home with her now lest they be seen. Felicita waited
beyond the wall to escort her. Consuelo snatched a blanket from under
Felicita’s _reboso_ and Steven threw it over himself and walked calmly
out of the corral beside the two, through the dark lanes, out upon a
moonlight-flooded street--to the garden gate of Don Anabel’s house. He
lingered but a moment to bend over Consuelo’s hand, then strode away to
his own place, where he had nearly to pound the door down to waken the
good Doña Katarina and get in.
Two days later Steven was riding through groves of golden, trembling
aspen down the mountain slope into Taos. Juan had taken him by the upper
trail so that they could ride under cover. The mountain-side was a glory
of autumnal yellow, each leaf like beaten gold. The streams ran cold and
clear, and full of rainbow trout. The beauty of the world fitted well
with Steven’s mood. He was joyously, rapturously, in love. Past the
white pyramid of the pueblo of Taos, rising against sky and mountain in
great steps, they rode through low thickets of willow and copper-tinted
cottonwood, into San Fernando de Taos. The little Spanish town snuggled
in the valley, its houses festooned with ropes of scarlet chili, its
fields stacked with golden grain and yellow corn.
Steven sat, the next morning, at breakfast with Ceran St. Vrain and told
of what happened. “But six of the traders carried letters in duplicate,”
he boasted, “so unless all perish my father will have news of me.”
St. Vrain nodded approval, pulling on his long pipe. “Señor Garcia has
already returned to Santa Fe. He left yesterday morning, but by the
lower route; yet I would not trust him overmuch. He is a wise, secretive
man, and would do as much as suited his purpose. No more.”
“You mean he would use me? And then I might pay the piper?”
“I think so. As you have missed the return trip, I would stay here with
us in Taos until another caravan comes, when you can return East, or
stay and cast in your lot here, trapping, trading, building up a
business yourself in case your father does not care to send you any
merchandise. I will take you on as an _engagé_ if you decide so.”
“I will stay--for two or three days,” Steven smiled, “but I must return
to Santa Fe in any event.” He could scarcely wait for the night of his
meeting with Consuelo. “After that we shall see.” At any rate, Don
Tiburcio had told no one of his transactions with Steven, and Steven
would for his part keep his word, too, and not reveal them. St. Vrain
regarded Steven keenly. “Do not break your heart over a Spanish girl,
_mon fils_. Nothing can come of it.”
But no persuasion, nor the fascination of the lovely and peaceful upland
valley where Charles Bent and Ceran St. Vrain were doing flourishing
business could keep him from starting back on the morning of the fourth
day. Juan rode with him, solemn, yet friendly; but they talked little as
Juan was a Pueblo from the Indian village of Santo Domingo, and his
Spanish was even less fluent than his English.
The sun hung low the following afternoon as they came down through
Tesuque and approached the western road into Santa Fe. Juan became more
talkative. Indians did not like all Americanos, he vouchsafed. The man
with the white daughter he was one they did not like. He Juan, had heard
that they would drive that man out, and the two other traders who had
settled next him. All of them, _si_. They were thieves; they took the
water of the Indians. They sold flour for sugar, and water in whisky.
Sometime this day they would be driven out, he thought.
“What makes you say that?” Steven pressed. Had Juan heard for sure?
Don Luis had said it; he had told the Indians to go ahead. They must
make haste, then, for the American girl might be in danger. Juan was not
eager to press ahead, but followed Steven, and they covered the last few
miles at a quick canter. The sun had set and it was growing dark when,
on the last stretch before they came to the ranchitos where the
Americans had taken up their homesteads, they saw smoke beyond.
Spurring ahead with impatience, Steven saw that Bragdon’s place was
belching flames and that clouds of smoke were rolling up from his
fields. Juan rode up beside him, interested but not concerned. They saw
that there was fighting, heard an occasional shot. “Stop here,” Juan
insisted. “No good go straight to the door. We come up behind. No good
to be dead.” They skirted the base of the hill under cover of the smoke.
Behind the L of the adobe house Hope cowered with Doren, dry-eyed, their
clothing drenched. She had fought fire in the fields with her father and
the other white men until she saw flames coming out of the house. Then
she had carried water from the little well in the yard and thrown it on
the woodwork, till there was no more water. They did not know when the
fire had started, or how, until, as they fought the flames and began to
drive them back, a row of Indian heads rose up from the _acequia’s_ rim
and a tomahawk neatly swept Bragdon’s hat from his head. The Indians
pushed the handful of white men back and back. Hope emptied her father’s
shotgun down the hill without avail, and now the men had their backs to
the flaming house and the last shot had been fired at the assailants,
who still kept under cover.
The Pueblos saw that the white men had no more ammunition with them, and
a half dozen men sprang forward. Hope, peering round the corner, did not
know whether to snatch this opportunity to run towards Santa Fe with
Doren or to try to hide among the hills. Just as the Indians and white
men grappled, a new fighter appeared suddenly and sprang into the fray,
tripping, kicking, shooting. After a few minutes of panting struggle the
Indians melted away, the shouting died down. It was quite dark now. Hope
ran around the house with Doren and up to her father. Bragdon sat on the
ground, a bullet sunk in his leg. Juan came running out of the house,
bearing in his arms the remainder of the fire--a mass of inflammable
stuff which had been carried in and set in flames inside--and when he
and Steven had beaten out the flaming, smoldering cloth and woodwork
within they all retreated into the house. The Americans all were
exhausted. The skirmish had been going on all day. They had not eaten
since early in the morning. The walls were standing, but the place was
ruined, and the rancho of the settlers below was probably in ashes. The
two other Americans had come to Bragdon’s help when they saw fire, and,
unable to get back, had had to watch their own places go up in smoke.
Theirs was the greater loss, for they had worked for two years now at
their homesteads.
One of these neighbors kept watch with Steve’s loaded gun while Juan and
Steven helped the trembling Hope to prepare some food. They covered the
two windows with blankets and stuffed the chinks in the door. In the
hot, stifling, smoky room, Hope cleaned and bound her father’s leg. The
bullet had been probed for and extracted. Bragdon moaned for a drink
from the jug which he had secreted; he took his drink and fell asleep.
Doren was fed and made to lie down on the last blanket, and then Hope,
Steven, and the men made their supper from the beans and tortillas. The
moon was sinking behind the mountains when at last Steven peered out. It
was at least twelve o’clock. He had missed his rendezvous with Consuelo.
CHAPTER VIII
FOR HIS TREASURE
Don Tiburcio de Garcia was indeed all that Ceran St. Vrain had said of
him. He knew how to move silently, unobserved. He knew how to wait. He
had thus been delaying his departure from Santa Fe, despite his final
dismissal by Consuelo, for two reasons. One reason was the message from
ex-President Pedraza, delivered to him by Steven on the night of his
arrival in Santa Fe. The other reason was Hope Bragdon. He had no
intention of being dismissed from her company so briefly and summarily
as on the first occasion of his seeing her.
On the afternoon after Bragdon had set the dog on Luis, Don Tiburcio,
having made sure that the Yankee was not at home, had himself ridden by
the house, stopping there for an hour. He had, however, previously
prevailed upon Doña Katarina to precede him by half an hour in a call
upon the American girl. The three of them chatted gayly with Doña
Katarina as duenna and interpreter. The callers departed together,
leaving Hope a little bewildered, but smiling. The Spanish gentleman had
asked permission to call again upon herself and her father, as soon as
he should have returned from a trip to Taos, whither he was going, he
said, on the morrow.
Then had come Steven’s visit, and its disastrous outcome, and Hope saw
no more of him for a time. On the evening before the terrible raid on
their home Don Tiburcio again appeared, and though he regretted much the
absence of Señor Bragdon from the house, he dismounted and sat down upon
the doorstep, playing with Doren. He made the boy a present of a fine
Indian bow and arrow, also of a pair of Mexican leather chaps. Doren was
delighted and Hope’s heart warmed as it could not have been in any other
way.
They did not see Don Tiburcio again until the day after the attack. He
learned of the calamity from Doña Katarina as soon as he got back.
She had heard the news through Steven the morning following the fire and
fight. Don Tiburcio hastened at once out to the parched ranchito. He
came dressed in his most elegant clothes, with two servants riding
behind, and with gifts of food and fine blankets. James Bragdon greeted
him cordially from his bed in the living room--a wealthy Mexican
gentleman, a merchant of Chihuahua too.
They talked of New Spain and Old Mexico. Don Tiburcio spoke of the
silver placers south of Santa Fe, the bullion of Chihuahua, the riches
of Old Mexico. In his eagerness to seek such wealth James Bragdon could
have kicked off the bedclothes and started out at once, but for the
wounded leg. He grew impatient with the thought of ranching, especially
after the attack of the day before. He would go prospecting.
Don Tiburcio, who never lifted a finger to wait upon himself, whose
servant followed him even upon the Trail, drew water from the little
well for Hope. He spoke to her in his carefully rehearsed English and
presently said: “You are like a white flower. But you are cold; you do
not live; you do not love. I love you. I will care for you so that you
will learn how to smile.”
But Hope remained as silent and impassive as ever. She seemed to shrink
from such speech. Don Tiburcio went quietly away after a while. He must
give her time. He would return. Later he sought Don Anabel in his
garden. “Señor, _amigo_,” he began when they had drunk a glass each to
the other’s health, “this youth, this American who came with the
traders, Estevan Mercer,”--Don Anabel showed such signs of choler that
Don Tiburcio hurried on--“he is not guilty of the charge brought against
him by the _alguacil_. I had not spoken to you before, but it was
concerning a matter of business with myself that the order for firing
arms and ammunition was sent East by the youth. If ever it arrives it
shall be shipped down to Mexico for the supporters of Pedraza.”
Don Anabel listened with the formal courtesy that is _decoroso_ between
Spanish gentlemen. “The incident is then closed,” he answered. “I regret
that the young man should have been forced to spend a day and a night in
the _carcel_, and yet had you not spoken he would probably have spent
another night there tonight. I had just learned that he had returned
from Taos, whither he had escaped. The jailer here is no good; I have
had him lashed.”
Don Tiburcio could not control his surprise. “Yes, while he may have
ordered firing arms and ammunition at your request and for your
purpose,” Don Anabel continued, “he has also provided himself with a
shipment which may arrive in Santa Fe any day now, according to this
letter to Colonel Bent intercepted by one of my guides and just brought
down to me this week which could refer only to your young--associate. He
was advised that, should a shipment of arms come by caravan to the Fort,
he was to forward it to Taos, where it would be called for by the right
party.”
Don Tiburcio flushed. “This is the inside of the matter, Don Anabel,
which has come to your attention. The truth is that the boy has served
me well bringing me a secret letter from Pedraza, whom you know our
family supports, to the effect that I am to await here a shipment of
arms which he is having sent from St. Louis by way of Westport Landing.
As you know, the usurper holds all the ports of Mexico, so any help to
our party must come through overland shipments from the north. I make no
doubt but that Pedraza sent word also to Colonel Bent, in the event that
aught should happen to the youth. It is this shipment for which I am
waiting, señor, now that your beautiful daughter has rejected my suit.”
Don Anabel started with surprise and disappointment. “Señor, I was not
aware of that.”
“Partly to remove my presence from Consuelo,” Don Tiburcio continued,
“and partly to confer with Colonel St. Vrain I went to Taos myself to
learn whether he had news from Bent’s Fort of the caravan of guns, as it
had not yet arrived here. I thought he might know whether it had taken
the northern or the southern trail. I shall wait for still a few days,
perhaps a few weeks, the arrival of the caravan. But I beg of you”--Don
Tiburcio was genuinely disturbed--“I beg of you to permit that I remove
my embarrassing presence from the so kind and lavish hospitality of your
house.”
To this Don Anabel finally acceded with much regret. When Don Tiburcio
had departed with all his personal possessions, Don Anabel sat for a
long time smoking. He was tempted to send for Consuelo, but affection
overcame his disappointment. Consuelo had been curiously subdued of
late, at times pettish, at times gentle.
“The poor child does not know her own mind,” Doña Gertrudis excused.
“She has no need to marry so young, like a common peona, after all. In
Chihuahua they do not marry till eighteen, nineteen often. Let her take
her time.”
No wonder that Consuelo was distracted. Each day of the week that had
passed had dawned with hope and ended in despair. Secretly she looked
for some word from the Americano. He had not been seen about the Villa.
Felicita could vouch for that. The _alguacil_ had been looking for him
for several days after his escape. Doña Katarina swore he was not there
and all but spat in the face of the sheriff. Had he gone away again? Was
he in trouble? Or had he simply neglected her? The uncertainty was
maddening.
Don Anabel was deeply disturbed at learning from the lips of Don
Tiburcio himself that Consuelo would not consent to marry him. He smoked
for some time and then went in to his office, where shortly an
evil-looking barefooted peon, clad only in his cotton camisa and
pantaloons, was shown in to him. They were closeted for more than an
hour, and when Don Anabel had dismissed the man he sent for Consuelo.
She was only too glad to be excused from the necessity of sitting longer
in the garden with Doña Gertrudis, Manuel, and their neighbors, Elena de
Guevara and her brother Felipe Ladron de Guevara.
Don Anabel came at once sternly to the point. She, Consuelo, had been
seen to talk, on a certain night, with the Americano from her balcony.
And more recently, not ten days ago, she had been observed standing with
him outside the garden gate. It was incredible. She must understand that
not only she herself, but the foolish youth, too, must suffer for these
indiscretions. Don Anabel would see that this youth received a flogging
that same night. Consuelo repressed an involuntary scream. Flogged! With
those blood-letting rawhides! But whipping had not been since she was a
child of seven! Pride struggled within her. How could she confess that
it was she who had made the first advances--that the American had come
not to serenade her, but at her summons. No; he was a man, let him take
the flogging. She tossed her head. Others had endured more for her sake!
But she could not. “Papa, it was not the fault of the Yanqui. I sent for
him, to warn him to have a care, as I had heard threats for his safety.
And the last time, he met me--he met me on the street, returning from
Doña Katarina’s with Felicita I was--and like any _caballero_ would, he
brought us home. Will you flog him for that?”
Deeply chagrined that his daughter had gone probably to a rendezvous
with the American, Don Anabel sent her to her room till he should give
her leave to join the family again. He left the house at once, riding
away in great agitation on his fastest mare.
Consuelo wept, enduring such pain as only sixteen can feel. It was not
alone the disgrace with the family. Alas, no. Everything faded before
the fact that this golden youth, brought by the Trail to her very
window, and whom she had liberated from the _carcel_, did not care for
her. He had broken his promise. He had stayed at the house of the girl
called Hope until way past the hour of their promised meeting. Consuelo
had trembled at the window till nearly midnight, Felicita at her feet.
Now Consuelo clung to her oft-abused Felicita as she had when a tiny
imperious little thing, when Felicita had been slave indeed to her whims
and charms. The caress of Consuelo’s tiny hands had enchained the
childless bond-woman then, and through the years had softened the sting
of Consuelo’s raging rebukes, the slaps and unreason. For all this
Felicita was now repaid as Consuelo poured out her grief. At length she
sat up and dried her tears.
“It is well, Felicita. Go take siesta, _pobre de ti_ [poor thee]. How
good and kind to your wicked ungrateful one all these years.” She pushed
her gently through the door.
As the hot afternoon wore on the house of Don Anabel lay steeped in its
customary respite from the trials of this world. The rooms were silent,
deep in siesta. Lupe slept, Doña Gertrudis snored, Consuelo tossed. But
there was one who did not take siesta. A figure stood in the darkened
sala in stockinged feet, motionless. There was not a sound. Good; the
family slept. Consuelo, however, was finding no repose that hot
September afternoon. Something urged her out into the patio. The smell
of water on earth came refreshingly to her aching head. She leaned
against the leafy trellis of the trumpet vines, looking idly beyond
toward an open window of the sala. Who had carelessly left it open
during the heat?
A moving shadow caught her eye. Quick as a flash she slipped along the
wall and peered round the casement. Ah, it was only Luis. What was he
doing, thrusting out that long rolled-up package through the window bars
so quietly. Before Consuelo could speak a waiting hand had grasped the
package and Luis had slipped into his shoes and stepped quickly through
the _zaguan_ to his own room. Consuelo, left alone, returned to hers.
She did not dress that afternoon. Her pillow was wet with tears when
Felicita crept in again. As the woman moved softly about the room,
pouring out the tepid water from Consuelo’s silver basin, laying away
her clothes in the carven chest, she talked in a low voice. At what she
had to say Consuelo sat bolt upright, clenching the down pillow in her
fists, her face paling with new misery. Then she sank back with a moan,
covering her eyes.
“Felicita, it cannot be true. Luis! What will he do next! Tell me, tell
me carefully.” Luis had sent two men after the Yankee Bragdon, who had
gone South prospecting, to overtake and kill him. He wanted to get him
out of the way so that he could have the daughter. It was revenge, too,
Felicita said. The Yankee trader had insulted Luis unforgivably. The
little boy? Well, if he died or if he survived it did not matter. He
would be abandoned. They would not actually kill him.
But the stain of foul murder would be on Luis’s soul. Luis, he was only
twenty. How happily they had played together on the banks of the stream
such a few short years ago. Luis had always been kind to her then. She
looked up to him, was so proud of him, and suffered so when he was
punished. A rush of feeling from deep wells within her rose--tenderness
for Luis, a weakness toward his sins.
Then suddenly something else smote her. He must be saved from this. And
the little boy, the helpless little boy, he must be saved. She had a
plan. “Quick, Felicita. Come, we will go to Father Filemon Hubert. He
will tell me what to do.” Vespers was tolling from the old bell as they
ascended the steps of the church at the end of the plaza.
Steven had indeed not been seen about the streets of the Villa. He had
kept close to his rooms, tossing with a fever ever since the night of
the fire and fight, guarded by the good Doña Katarina much more
effectually and comfortably than by the jailer. Some infection, Doña
Katarina swore, from the filthy _carcel_; probably the water he was
given to drink there, for he had been ill within a week afterward.
He was surprised, on the afternoon after his return from Taos, to
receive a visit from Don Tiburcio.
“I regret very much,” said that gentleman, earnestly, “that our business
together should have been the cause of your having spent so
uncomfortable a twenty-four hours. I have just come from Don Anabel
Lopez and have explained the nature of the letter which you sent back
East and also of the message which you brought to me. I am sure that, as
a man of his word, he will cause you no more trouble on that score.”
Steven was glad of that. He felt, indeed, that he would be unable to
cause any one else any trouble for a time himself. He was sick,
wretched, and a part of his wretchedness was caused by the thought of
having failed to meet Consuelo the night before. And she had helped him
to escape. He did not like to owe that to a girl. His head would surely
stop whirling so dizzily by evening and he would go to Consuelo’s house;
get some word to her.
But Doña Katarina came in and put him back on his bed, where he stayed
unromantically put for a week, slightly out of his head, caring little
about intrigue of any sort for the weakness and nausea that held him.
But his hardy youth was not to be disposed of by whatever lurking
illness had poisoned him. When he was able to sit up again and gaze with
some slight degree of enthusiasm at a bowl of chicken soup, Don
Tiburcio, who had come to his room every day, came in and sat down
rather wearily.
The seasoned _caballero_ seemed rather depressed, but he was more
friendly, more confiding, than he had ever been. “My young friend,” said
he, “I am leaving Santa Fe tonight. I trust that fate may again bring us
together. I am your debtor and I would gladly discharge the debt.”
They parted with sincere regret, and Steven determined that it must be
because of Consuelo that Don Tiburcio was leaving.
Three nights later Doña Katarina came in when Steven was sitting in a
chair, bearing fresh news. Señor Bragdon had gone off prospecting with
the boy, in spite of his daughter’s protests. Señorita Bragdon was
nearly crazy. The Yanqui said he needed the boy to drive the mule, and
it would do him good. Doña Katarina was all fury and sympathy.
“That is pretty bad,” agreed Steven, seriously. “Which way did he go?
Does anyone know?”
It was south, she thought, following the trail of Don Tiburcio Garcia.
He expected to overtake the Spaniard; began to get ready as soon as he
heard Don Tiburcio had left Santa Fe, and started out, himself, the next
night although his leg was still not well enough to walk much on.
Señorita ’Ope Bragdon had told Doña Katarina that Don Tiburcio had been
telling her father all about the placers south of Santa Fe, the silver
bullion of Chihuahua, and some strange silver sands he had seen on the
way up. The Yanqui got all excited about it.
“Do you know,” Doña Katarina beamed in the knowledge she was about to
impart, “Don Tiburcio asked the Yanqui for Señorita ’Ope’s hand in
marriage, and Senorita ’Ope would not. The Señor father was very angry
at her.”
“Why, then it was not Consuelo?” Steven was amazed. He was sorry for Don
Tiburcio, and for Hope, too. She was a good little thing.
“Yes, she is good,” Doña Katarina put in, warmly. “Her father left some
goods here. He was keeping them till he could get higher prices, after
all the other merchandise had gotten worn out, but ’Ope--Esperanza, I
call her--has already given it to the Indians who got flour mixed with
their sugar, in place of the money or skins they traded for it.”
Steven had passed a restless afternoon. His recovery had been very
rapid. Doña Katarina had insisted, however, that he remain inside until
after sundown. But now the sun was set, it was already growing dark and
he made ready to go out. As he reached his door Doña Katarina returned,
“An Indian is waiting here to see you, Señor Estevan,” she said.
It was the silent Juan, who squatted on the floor beside Steven’s chair
and rolled his cigarette without saying a word. He rolled another which
he offered Steven and smoked for a few minutes before he spoke. The
Señorita Lopez wished the young gentleman to come, Juan said, if he
would be so kind, on a matter of importance concerning one he loved--to
come that night at the tenth hour. He, Juan, would escort him to the
place. Steven’s heart leaped. Adventure had been kind to him. But this,
ah, this was something new and strangely sweet.
How soft a little town can be under moonlight, under starlight. What is
more endearing than little houses with candlelit windows, glowing
whitely under the moon! How lovely a garden; a nightingale singing in a
flowering tamarack above the _acequia_. Down the banks of the little
silver river, to the foot of the garden, went Juan and Steven, and up
over the wall. _Caramba!_ There was broken glass set there. Careful,
señor. Had he cut his hand? A _bagatela_.
Then down on the other side of the wall and Consuelo standing in the
starlight, hooded but unmistakable. Steven stepped eagerly forward, but
the straight figure, something in the poise of her head, restrained him.
“Señor Ess-tev-an,” she spoke almost in a whisper, “I would not send for
you again, thus boldly, but that I have learned something touching us
both most closely.”
“May I not tell you first, Consuelo,” Steven pleaded, “what befell me
the night I was to have met you?”
“I have already heard, señor,” she replied, with vast dignity. “It is
unnecessary to speak of it further when time presses so. Señor, I have
heard from my faithful Felicita that the father of the Americana, Señor
Bragdon, has gone off to prospect for gold and silver, with the young
one, the boy.”
Steven nodded. “I know.” But Consuelo hurried on. “He is--he is to be
followed, to be killed, you understand. To be gotten out of the way so
that his daughter may be married by some one. The man has enemies. He is
not pleasant, it seems, nor just. But the child will be left to perish
if the man is killed.”
“Who, who would do such a thing?” Steve gasped. “Murder, murder an
innocent child!”
Consuelo nodded violently; her hand clutched her throat; she could
scarcely speak. “But they can be overtaken, for Juan knows how to follow
by the river much faster than they can go by land. They go to the Silver
Sand of which Don Tiburcio told us; and the men who follow left but this
afternoon. Juan knows them. It is an even chance to overtake them, and
buy them off, for they have been pledged silver. Or to overtake the
Yanqui and save him.... Ess-tevan, will you go?
“It is not for myself I ask this, señor, but for those who are dear to
us both. I know no one else I can trust, but you and Juan.” She could
whisper only. How tall, how fair, how fine, he looked standing there.
And he loved the Yanqui girl; she had even refused Don Tiburcio for him.
“Did we love one another I could not ask such a sacrifice, but”--she
could not see the sudden hurt that came over the face of the tall youth
before her--“but, for the sake of that girl and the boy you will go, you
will follow Bragdon tonight, and save them if you can?”
Steven would not have hesitated a moment in any event, except to learn
the way to find a guide. “I will go,” he replied, “for the sake of the
child and Hope Bragdon and--” he swayed toward her, and she, who had
with difficulty restrained her sobs, toward him, but at his words she
recoiled. Only the young, only first love, can be so mistaken.
“Señorita,” Steven tried again, “when last we met I made you a promise
that I was unable to carry out. Please----”
A tiny light appeared in a window in the silent house at the garden’s
end. Consuelo lifted a warning finger, and with a warm pressure upon his
hand fled down the banks of the irrigating ditch and disappeared within
the shadow of the tamaracks.
Steven heard Juan whistle on the other side of the wall and vaulted over
quickly. They walked rapidly up the street. In his rooms Steven wrote a
note to his father, another to Doña Katarina. There was nothing to write
to Consuelo; she did not love him.
On the same morning that Doña Katarina stepped into the spotlessly kept
room where her lodger slept and found the bed unrumpled and a note upon
the chest of drawers, Don Anabel Lopez awoke and went through his house,
having been absent during the preceding afternoon and late into the
night at his ranch below in the valley. And shortly thereafter the noise
of his wrath went through the house like a storm bursting.
The household was assembled in the sala and its awed gaze directed to an
empty frame where once had hung the Murillo “Madonna and Child.” Don
Anabel’s face was white with anger and deep concern. He spoke quietly to
his household now, describing what would be the consequences to the
thief if he did not at once repent, and promised lenience if he did.
Then began a rigorous examination into all the circumstances surrounding
the moment when the picture had last been seen by each member of the
hacienda. Consuelo had been in her room all week. Luis and Doña
Gertrudis had together seen the picture just before siesta the day
before. Doña Gertrudis had herself wakened Luis, but they noticed
nothing later, for they had gone to supper through the patio and had sat
at dinner late. It all came to nothing. He himself had been the last to
see his cherished canvas, as far as he could learn.
“_Dios mio!_ Had Don Tiburcio not departed four days before, I should be
tempted even to think that his love for the thing had overpowered him.”
Who else had left the Villa? Come, here was a path to follow. At length,
among sundry trappers, Indians, peons, and one Franciscan friar, it was
learned that the American youth was missing. Don Anabel seized upon his
name at once as being in very likelihood the thief. To Consuelo the
knowledge had come in a flash the moment her eyes rested upon the empty
frame. Luis, the afternoon before. He had rolled up the canvas and
passed it through the window. From that ordeal, Consuelo the child
emerged Consuelo the woman. Luis did not leave the house that day,
curiously enough, but lounged about in his room. Consuelo sent for him
late in the afternoon.
He heard her brave accusation brazenly, flippantly, but at the end he
broke like a bad small boy. Yes, he had taken the painting, since she
had seen him. But he pleaded on his knees that she would not betray him.
He wept. He kissed her hands and face. Luis feared only one person in
the world--his father. Consuelo, in turn, pleaded with her brother to
get the painting back again. It would age their father. He could not, he
swore. It was impossible. Impossible, he told her. But he would not say
what he had done with it, why he could not get it back.
When she had promised with grief, not to betray him, for the sake of
their father, she came to the greater guilt. But feeling safe now, Luis
grew hard. Murder? The dog of an American deserved it. The man had set
the dogs on him, Luis. The girl would be better off without this father,
anyhow. “She likes me,” Luis swelled. He had called upon her the night
before and was to go again tonight.
“But the child, the child?” Consuelo almost screamed. Luis shrugged.
They would not harm him. He’d told his men to let the boy go. Luis would
stay for no more words, but went off impatiently. Consuelo took her
black shawl--her father had given her leave now to go out--and as she
passed through the sala was very gentle with the querulous questioning
of Doña Gertrudis, sitting plump and pathetic alone there, totally upset
by the calamity to her husband.
Consuelo passed out into the heat that still rose from the dust of the
streets and radiated from the sun-soaked walls about. She came to the
garden of Father Filemon. Her face was stricken. In these few days life
had turned from a soft easy round of hot chocolate, cool wine, fresh
frocks, a looking for new gifts to be brought to her through the
unconsidered labor and pain and bloodshed of others, to this sorrow and
shame and sacrifice, so near to the hearth and the heart.
And she had sent away the brave and honest American to do what Luis
himself should have done. She’d sent him down into a dangerous land
unknown to him, where the Apache and the Sioux and the very corn-growing
Pueblos were unfriendly. In her pride she had sent him away, this tall
young man whom she loved, without listening to a word he had to say to
her. She had shielded her brother with his good name, and he unable to
defend himself because he had gone on her mission. And now she knew that
he had loved her. She knelt before the padre.
CHAPTER IX
THE WHITE SANDS
Steven and Juan were lost in the world of vast sand dunes; yellow dunes
that rose like titanic anthills, while they were the ants, to labor up
one side and down the other. In order to make speed and if possible to
overtake Bragdon, they had descended the Rio Grande from a point just
below Albuquerque in a bull boat, a canoe made of scraped buffalo hide
drawn taut over willow boughs. On the wide muddy stream, burdened with
tons of the erosive soil through which it flowed, they wound southward
at the rate of thirty, sometimes forty, miles a day, swirling between
low wooded banks beyond which blue mountains lay always in sight.
They were forced to portage around one beaver dam after another. Every
moment afloat demanded the watchful care of both Steven and Juan.
Countless branches imbedded in the viscous, sandy bottoms, reached out
to pierce their hide-covered boat. Eddies and whirlpools caught at them
at unexpected turns in the current, which swung its channel erratically
from left to right of the river’s course. Sometimes they were stranded
on sand bars, for the shallows could not be seen through the muddy
water. Steven had twice sunk into quicksands when he got out to lighten
the boat and push off from a bar. Only through Juan’s skill and prompt
action could he have gotten free.
In between these delays they flew south with the stream. The river was
almost never used by the Pueblos, Juan said. Only an occasional trapper
who was used to shooting rapids and handling a canoe dared launch his
bull boat on the treacherous Rio Grande. On the second night it rained
heavily all night and they slept beneath their boat, which made a very
good tent. Steven had never thought of his illness since the night he
had left Santa Fe. The open air had apparently aided nature in restoring
him completely. After the rain the river was so swollen with the deluge
that had cascaded down the hillsides that the water rolled in great
combers. It meant that they could go very fast, yet they were in
constant danger of capsizing. They strapped their guns tightly across
their backs and fastened their ammunition belts securely so that these
should not be lost. Steven carried also a money belt filled with silver
delivered him by Juan from Consuelo in case they should overtake the
paid murderers.
Toward dusk they were looking for a good landing spot where they could
go ashore and make a fire on some wooded bank, when a greater danger
than the river threatened. Rounding a sharp curve in the stream they saw
a great dark form breasting the combers ahead. As they were swept nearer
they saw the massive head and shoulders of a great grizzly rising high
from the river. His coat was heavy with the muddy water, yet he split
the waves as though their current were nothing. They were nearly abreast
of the beast when he struck shallows and rose in his height beside them
for a moment; then began to sink.
“Quicksand!” shouted Steven, and the Indian paddled violently across
current and away from the grizzly. The bear with a mighty effort lunged
free from the sand, but there was not enough depth for him to swim in,
and he made straight for the canoe, floundering, but gaining ground. His
paws reached the stern of the bull boat. Juan beat at them in the
gathering darkness. The canoe tipped and the prow rose under the
pressure of the great bear of the Rockies. Steven seized a small hatchet
and, leaning back as far as he dared, he chopped at the paws which were
inundating them. There was a roar of rage and pain, and the bear dropped
back, sinking below the surface for a moment. _Gracias a Dios_ they had
struck the main channel again! The current bore them on to the far side
of the river and in the darkness they left the bear behind.
But dangerous as it was to be swept along by night on that black and
swollen stream, Juan would not attempt a landing for another half hour.
When they had drawn their canoe up on a small strip of sandy beach and
lit a fire, they saw the giant claws of the grizzly imbedded in the
blood-stained thwart of the boat. Steven wondered if they would ever
survive to find Doren and his father. To Juan their progress was not
unusual or eventful; he pointed out how much better time they were
making, with no Indians to attack them on the way, than the Yankee
possibly could, traveling overland with mules.
It seemed as though every four-footed creature of the Rocky Mountain
country came to the banks of the river, and wild fowl of all kinds were
there for the shooting--duck, geese, swan, bittern, crane, heron. On the
third day Juan pointed to a certain peak rising from a low-lying range
east of the river. That was where they were bound. The river had now
become unnavigable, for the deep channels disappeared at times and they
were forced to make portages in midstream, so to speak. Great
dun-colored hills, bare and without a sign of vegetation, closed them
in.
“It is there, to the Mescalero, where the Apaches are,” said Juan, “that
we must go. By this time the Señor Yankee may have reached that country,
and as he sought gold and silver, it is in the mountains that we will
find him, not in the river valley. His pursuers cannot have overtaken
him yet, unless he stopped by the way, in which case we would have been
too late, anyway. As it is, we are ahead of them at least.”
To Steven this appeared like a monstrous valley of death. Not a living
thing was to be seen, except the leering faces of carp poking their evil
heads, with whiskers like tentacles, from the muddy waters. On the land
where they abandoned the bull boat a few small lizards scurried away.
High in a turquoise vaulted heaven soared those scavengers of death, the
buzzards. Underfoot stirred one living thing that rattled as Steven
passed. It too spelled death.
And then they entered those baffling dunes, carrying enough game and
water to last for that day and the next, and Steven became one with the
desert in another of its forms. Again and again Juan would climb to the
summit of the highest foothill to locate some blue peak, and would
descend to thread those deceptive winding ways at their feet.
Miraculously, it seemed to Steven, they emerged from the dunes at the
end of the second day just as Juan had said they would, and thereafter
they bore eastward, directing their footsteps toward a pass in the
nearer range, which, because of the height of the dunes, could not be
seen at all before.
Here they came upon a tiny village of Pueblo Indians, nestling beside a
clear stream upon the sloping side of the mountain. Juan found that he
could speak their tongue; they were of Queres stock, as was his pueblo.
They made inquiries for Bragdon and Doren, but the Indians said that the
two had not passed that way. The Pueblos were a friendly, farming people
and there was no reason to doubt that they were speaking the truth.
For a small bar of pure silver Steven and Juan took their fill of the
best of corn cakes, of savory kid stew cooked with little wild onions
and green beans of native raising, and rode away upon two frisky mares,
saddled and bridled with rope and blanket only, it is true, but worth
ten bars of silver to Steven’s blistered feet. Over the mountain passes
they rode, through a pretty winding canyon filled with flowers and small
pine, and came out upon a wide flat plain, across which they cantered as
upon a level table. Gleaming sand and hard yellow clay gave back like
castanets the sound of their mares’ unshod hooves. And as they trotted
ahead the mountains rose before them, up and up from the mesa till they
towered even above the foothills that came rippling graciously down to
the plain. They slept on the desert and went on at dawn.
The tents of the Apaches clustered thick upon the grassy slopes of the
mountain-side. The chiefs of the Apaches welcomed them with tobacco and
with the white meat of fish that a short time before had been leaping in
the sunlight from the crystal-clear streams of Mescalero. With signs,
and with his few words of Apache, Juan of Santo Domingo made clear the
purpose for which they had come. To find a white man and child. An
Apache chieftain who came forward to listen nodded and, speaking and
gesticulating rapidly, gave Juan to understand that a white man and a
boy child had passed that way, had lingered along their streams, shaking
the basin which yields gold and silver, and had departed but yesterday.
Where had he gone, and why? The chieftain said they had forced the man
to give them half the dust which he had found with his placer mining,
and that, not being content with this arrangement, he had gone off to a
place where he thought he would find more silver and have to part with
none of it. This seemed to provoke much amusement among the staid
Apaches; the younger braves rocked with merriment. Taking Steven and
Juan to a high point of rock upon the mountain-side, the interpreter
pointed their gaze across the plain south and westward, where a shining
space was seen upon the desert. He spoke rapidly.
Juan turned to Steven. “He says that below lie the White Sands. They are
a place of death. Naught grows there, naught dwells there, but the
spirits of the departed and of the desert. There is a legend that the
shining sands are half silver; that if sifted they would yield pure
silver dust. See how they shine from here, he says, and on windy days
the white grains have been borne clear across the desert and up into the
mountains, where they have lain thick on the tepees of the Apache. It is
the spirits of the desert seeking to return home to the mountains, many
say.”
That was where James Bragdon, the Yankee, had gone with his little boy.
Why bother to kill the white man? The desert would attend to him; and if
he escaped its embracing sands--two of the half-bloods from the northern
town Indians, they who had mingled with the Spanish, would find him.
These two had come but a few hours after the white man left and had
followed on his trail. Footsore and angry, for they had thought to
overtake him within a day or two days of their starting, and they had
been after him now for nearly a moon.
Blood silver they sought to gain, but they could not lay it across their
itching palms until they had the white man’s scalp to show in proof of
his death. Yes, the half-breed Mexicans had told the Apache chieftain
all about it, offering turquoise and wampum for this same information of
the white man’s course.
As Steven stood upon the mountain-side, looking out over that vast
plain, seventy-five leagues from one mountain range to another, his
imagination pictured the face of the boy Doren rising in the shimmering
heat waves. He gave the Apache the silver beads which he wore beneath
his deerskin shirt, and he and Juan turned back down the mountain trail.
They could not hope to reach that far place of gleaming death until
another day had dawned, nevertheless they kept their horses moving
steadily until dark fell. They ate, and rode again, until the bright
moon sank behind the mountains and the mesa was plunged into darkness.
The sun had been up for several hours and the desert was already a
little heady in its palpitating warmth when Steven and Juan stood beside
the bank of gleaming gypsum that rose sheer fifty feet from the plain--a
desert within a desert. A light breeze blew off a thin mist-like spray
from the wind-carved edges of the sands, so that their mystery was
veiled, dazzling. Before them the tracks of feet, human feet both big
and little, showed in the trail of burros’ hooves, went on to the edge
of a gradual slope ascending the sands, and were lost, while the tracks
of the burros turned about and went away back over the desert.
Juan stooped, and with his eyes close to the ground examined the tracks
intently. When he rose he spread his hands in an eloquent gesture, then
folded his blanket tightly about him and stood with uncovered head.
“Juan,” Steven demanded, “what do you find? Do you think----?”
Juan drew his blanket over his head and spoke solemnly: “The breeds have
taken the mules and returned whence they came. That means--no hope. The
man? Gone. The child? _Quien sabe!_”
Steven threw down his mare’s bridle and, taking the gourd of water from
the Indian, he threw it over his own shoulder. “Come.” He strode toward
the raised desert before them. “We must find out.”
Juan shook his head and sat down with an air of finality. He would not
venture upon that cursed place; the evil spirits of the desert inhabited
it. It was abhorred by man and beast. If the white man would enter, it
must be alone. Perhaps the spirits of the sands would not speak to him
with the words that led to madness. Juan would wait on the desert’s
brink until Estevan came out. He would need some one then to take his
hand and lead him on.
Steven saw that to remonstrate was futile. He plunged ahead up the
incline and entered the white deadliness alone. He found himself upon a
plain that shone like snow and that seemed by the strange magic of
mirage to stretch away to the very horizon, to lift to meet the
turquoise sky and the azure mountains, so that Juan and the horses and
the desert below passed out of the picture; might not have existed. All
the world was white and blue enamel, and the air swimming sunlight.
Steven tucked under his wide-brimmed hat a dark bit of cambric torn from
his sash to shield his eyes from the glare. His gaze swept the expanse
before him. Not a footstep marred the snowy whiteness. He looked back
suddenly for his own tracks. There were none. He stood alone in his own
footsteps and not a sign remained of the way he had come. This filled
him with horror. He planted his feet deeply and walked on the sheltered
side of ridges that he might leave some trace of his own progress.
Hours passed and it seemed that he must have gone further than a man
with a boy could have walked in a day. The sun was high overhead. It
must be well past midday. He was standing on a little dune when he
caught a glimpse of a dark object some distance away. By planting his
feet one straight before the other he was able to make directly toward
what he had seen. It took a long time. Then he was upon it--a man,
Bragdon, lying face down, and beside him a smaller shape. Steven turned
Bragdon over; he was dead. Whether he had been killed by violence or not
Steven did not stop to see, nor note whether he had been scalped before
or after death. He tore at the red-and-black serape which covered the
smaller shape, uncovering Doren, who lay limp and pale.
But the boy was sleeping. He slept, and the traces of tears coursed
grimily down the thin childish cheeks. Steven was dizzy. The whole
gruesome world seemed unreal. He raised a tiny tepee over the sleeping
boy, with the blanket and a stick he had carried with him into the
desert. Then with his hands he scooped a shallow grave for Bragdon and
buried him where he lay. He lifted Doren in his arms, but remembered to
give the child a drink lest he should perish of thirst. He opened his
gourd, took a drink of the tepid water himself, and slowly poured a
generous amount down Doren’s throat. The boy gulped and swallowed
automatically without opening his eyes.
Steven made, by instinct, toward the spot where he had ascended the
sands; that would be the nearest point at which to leave them, surely.
He found a few footsteps here and there, but they brought him no nearer
the edge of the white desert. Everywhere it seemed to turn up its rim
toward the sky and he would turn back baffled and try a bit further
along. Some instinct within told him that just beyond were water, shade,
rest, where he could lay the burden to which he clung. The gourd slipped
unnoticed from his back as he plodded on. Long after all conscious
reason had left him, instinct persisted through the delirium of heat and
thirst, and he kept on and on, trying to reach the crest beyond which
lay a lower, more friendly desert.
He fell often to his knees, rested a moment, rose, tumbled again, and so
often as he fell staggered up once more. Again and again he turned back
from the very edge of the drift, blinded, and then retraced his steps.
But everywhere he turned a white curtain seemed to hang before him, and
in its misty film he saw Consuelo’s face as she had looked up at him
that night, so whitely in the moonlight of her garden.
* * * * *
A small cavalcade came with leisurely paced gait through the desert,
making toward a cool spring which welled in the shade of mesquite
shrubbery at the foot of the great table of White Sand. There were
perhaps a dozen men and twice as many mules and burros. Don Tiburcio
himself rode at the head. His eyes searched the surrounding country,
picking out in the mountains beyond certain peaks beneath which lay
silver, or so he had been told on his trip north. He wanted to see
again, too, the phenomenon of this high white desert, where his men had
found water and shade after noon under the low desert palms.
For a long time as his cavalcade approached the sands Don Tiburcio was
troubled by a dark object which seemed to move about the gypsum desert’s
edge, back and forth. He remembered the strange effect of mirage which
had so impressed him before and dismissed the apparition as a trick of
sun spots, directing his gaze instead eastward. When he looked again
with rested eyes the black moving spot was gone and he made a mental
note never again to believe one’s eyes on the desert.
The sun was sinking lower, yet the heat of the day was little abated.
Soon a swift darkness would fall over mountain and plain. Then nothing
could be seen. The moon would rise early, however, and they would be on
their way to yon mountains in the cool of the night. The white desert
before him glowed rose in the dying sun. It seemed stained in blood. The
sun lingered a moment over the peaks that bound the plain to the west
and then sank below the jagged monoliths with great speed. Yet the
moment before it sank there appeared on the rim of the desert above a
figure so clear that before it too sank out of sight Don Tiburcio had
halloo’d to his men and was halfway up the slope.
* * * * *
“Estevan, _amigo_; Estevan!” It seemed to Steven Mercer that he had
heard a familiar voice commanding him sharply for a long time to wake
up, to rouse himself. His eyeballs burned like fire in their sockets.
His mouth hurt inside. His skin felt as though every drop of moisture or
oil had been burned out of it. Intermittently he felt thus, for cooling
streams of water played over his brow. Was that, too, part of the
mirage? he wished it might continue. At length he found strength to pull
himself together; with an effort he sat up and by the light of a tula
fire he recognized Don Tiburcio. This dazed him and for a moment he
grappled with memory, then asked rather, wildly, “Where is the boy?”
“There.” Don Tiburcio pointed. Doren lay not far from the fire, which
showed him dozing, fresh and placid. Juan sat beside him. “He woke,”
said Don Tiburcio, “after we had laved him and poured water down him. We
have given him burro’s milk, wafers. He fell asleep again immediately.
And you, _amigo_, how goes it? The glare of that desert has ever driven
men mad.” Don Tiburcio smiled.
They made Steven sleep again for a few hours. It was decided to cross
the mesa that night and to start from the western mountains in the
morning, crossing another mesa to the river valley that lay beyond.
Twenty-four hours later brought them to a fertile valley, where, it was
decided, they would part. Don Tiburcio had decided to return to Santa
Fe, after all, and Steven therefore determined to confide Doren to his
care. Steven knew that it would please the Mexican greatly to be able to
return the boy to his sister. He himself would continue on down to
Mexico, where he would join the movement of Pedraza’s sympathizers about
which Don Tiburcio had confided to him the details as they rode along
together. Perhaps he would make toward the coast, and would fight, a
soldier of fortune, with Santa Anna near the coast. From there he could
return, across the Gulf to his home, should he survive.
Don Tiburcio tried to discourage this determination. “Do you realize
that only in companies do travelers find any safety on this trail? It is
a three to four months’ journey to Chihuahua and you would travel
alone.”
“The trappers hunt alone for months at a time and survive for years.”
Steven shrugged.
“But not down through Chihuahua,” Don Anabel insisted. “If you must do
it, however, cling close to the Cordilleras, for in the mountains there
is always refuge.”
Steven was now so removed by time and distance from all hope of the love
of Consuelo that to plunge into wars that did not concern him seemed a
fine thing. It never occurred to Steven that Consuelo had not meant
exactly what she said. He pondered Don Tiburcio’s remark, that women did
not always mean the firmest thing they said. He wondered if Don Tiburcio
were returning with Doren because he wanted to see Hope Bragdon again,
because he still had hopes of her, or to find out if the caravan had
come with arms and ammunition. He proposed a rendezvous with Don
Tiburcio in Vera Cruz six months from that date, but Don Tiburcio
replied that he had an idea their meeting would be much sooner than that
and not so far away.
They parted, nevertheless, to go in opposite directions. Doren kissed
Steven and clung to him, brushing away his tears. Doren had never spoken
of his father but once, and when they had told him why Bragdon was not
with them he had turned silently away, his lip quivering. That was all.
He could remember nothing that had happened after they had gone up on
the White Sands, and did not care to talk about the rest of the trip. He
did say once to Steven, “My father thought that if a young boy was with
a man Indians would not kill him. They would want to take the boy for an
Indian brave when he grew up and they would let the father come along.
Don Tiburcio told me so long ago when we were in Santa Fe, and that is
why my father would not let me leave him.”
And so they parted, waving Steven good-by to the south and hastening
their own journey back to Santa Fe.
Some three weeks later the little cavalcade came clattering down the red
trail into Santa Fe, and with little acclaim made haste to the plaza.
Halting before the church, Don Tiburcio uncovered his head, as did his
men, and it was thus that Father Filemon saw them. Hope Bragdon was not
at the ranchito, he told Don Tiburcio, but here in town, staying with
the wife of Don Anabel Lopez and the Señorita Consuelo. She had been
very ill; was but just able to sit up now after two months in bed.
They took Doren in to see her, Consuelo herself having broken the news
gently. Don Tiburcio begged the privilege of taking the boy in, and led
Doren up to the bed, brown and rosy as he had never been. Hope opened
her arms with a cry and Consuelo ran out, leaving the three together.
She almost tumbled over Luis at the door, and pushed him back. “You
shan’t see her. You shan’t see her now.”
Luis made no protest. He slunk back unhappily. He had seen that the
returning party brought Doren, and Doren only. Luis was different. Since
Hope’s illness in his father’s house he had grown nervous, furtive.
There was a time when they thought that Hope would not get well at all.
She might die at any moment; the doctor bled her once and seriously
considered doing it again if she did not revive, but Felicita,
protesting violently, rushed out and brought an old Indian woman who
gave the girl a brew which brought her out of her swoon, and thereafter
fed her on broths made of the liver of young veal.
Whether it was genuine love and distress that he felt as Hope lay dying,
or merely frustration, the situation was a potent worker of change in
Luis. Even Don Anabel could not fail to note the difference in his son.
He meditated bitterly upon the irony of both his children being
infatuated with these blond foreigners. It had been an act of charity to
take the girl from the ranch house. Consuelo had ridden out one day to
see the Yankee girl and had found her tossing on the bed with fever,
thin to the point of emaciation. Doña Katarina had tried earlier to
induce Hope to come in to town and stay with her, but she would not
leave the place. She had an idea that Doren might return, might get away
somehow and find his way back, and would not know where to look for her.
If he came he would be tired out; perhaps ready to die of exhaustion.
Doña Katarina had gone with Consuelo, and together they secured an ox
cart and with Doña Gertrudis’s permission had installed the unconscious
girl in Consuelo’s own room.
Hope had passed the crisis of her fever, but had been slow and reluctant
to convalesce. She did not care whether she lived or died. At times she
seemed touchingly grateful for the care and attention given her, and at
other times she accepted it indifferently. Luis came in once to bring
her yellow roses. She turned her mournful eyes, made huge with illness
and the dark smudges beneath, hopefully toward him. She seemed to
remember the evening they had spent together as one of the few bright
spots of her new life, and asked him if he would not find her little
brother for her. Doña Gertrudis did not realize what a tender heart her
son had; with a sob of agony he ran out of the house and disappeared for
hours. Hope would never get well; she was grieving her heart out.
Yet in a week after Doren’s return the alchemy of happiness had not only
raised her from her bed, but had filled out her cheeks, brought a little
color to the sweetly curved but prim lips. Then she seemed more alive
than she had ever been. It was as though it had taken this terrible
anxiety, and the consequent overwhelming happiness of Doren’s restoral
to her, to break down the cold barriers in her nature. In her gratitude
she turned to Don Tiburcio, and scarcely two weeks after Doren’s return
Hope went with the courtly don to the cathedral, where they were married
by Father Filemon Hubert. The padre then gave them as splendid a dinner
as his kitchen could encompass, and when they had paid their respects to
Don Anabel and Doña Gertrudis they took Doren and departed southward to
select a site for a new hacienda on lands belonging to Don Tiburcio’s
father within the state of New Mexico.
In parting with Don Anabel, Don Tiburcio informed him that as an
evidence of his gratitude to them for their kindness to Hope, he wished
to present Don Anabel with a picture which, while it would not take the
place of the old master stolen from him, would still be some
consolation. It was a Goya, he said, that master of modern Spanish art
who had died in Spain only the year before, but whose work was prized
highly. Don Tiburcio’s father possessed two examples, one of which
should be sent to Don Tiburcio on next year’s caravan.
Consuelo looked after them, departing so happily, with the feeling that
if her happiness had been given for theirs, it had been done by the hand
of God through her. And although the man Bragdon had died, Hope and the
boy were in reality far better off now. Don Tiburcio was radiantly
happy, and the sister and brother were content in the possession of each
other.
Though each day Consuelo awoke with a feeling of great loss, she tried
not to weep at the thought of Steven, traveling over the ugly parched
plains to Chihuahua, perhaps to death. Perhaps the Indians had already
taken him. Against this her heart cried out in disbelief, for youth
believes mainly what it wishes most to believe. With her tears prayers
were said each day for Steven’s safety, and for his return. She knelt
longer and more often before the crucifix and little altar in her room
than ever before.
Had all her life not been so arrogant, so assured of worship that she
could brook no rivalry, no crossing of her will, Consuelo told herself,
Estevan should not have departed with no word of appreciation, no sign
of love from herself, for this tremendous deed which she had asked of
him and upon which he had embarked so unhesitatingly. How could he have
done otherwise than he had on the night of their appointed meeting? He
could not abandon his countrymen.--Father Filemon prayed with Consuelo
that the life of the Americano would be spared and that he might return
to Santa Fe.
CHAPTER X
THE FALSE FRAILE
Steven found himself, after parting with Don Tiburcio, in a level valley
fertile as an Oriental garden. Fifteen miles of sandy desert lay between
the river and the sheer spur of Rockies which they had crossed. This was
a desert land, fruitful only where the river flowed, barren save where
water touched; but in that rich strip of earth along the river banks
were groves of ancient cottonwood. The pink tamarack waved its plumes
against the blue sky, and among them nestled many comfortable little
ranchos, all Mexican, for the land of the Pueblo Indians had been left
far behind along the upper valley of the Rio Grande.
There were other Indians westward, an old Mexican told him. All beyond
was the land of the Navajo, a country of a great desert and a vast rift
in the earth, greater than any canyon man had ever seen. This painted
canyon was near the Mission of San Xavier del Bac, near the homes of the
Moquis, too. A country for one to adventure in.
But Steven’s feet were drawn where his heart lay, and, failing that,
homeward. Youth and pride and the hopelessness of first love would not
let him turn back to Santa Fe, so down to Vera Cruz, whence one could
take ship for New Orleans, and so home, he must go. Of the two hundred
silver dollars which had remained to him when he set out across the
prairies from Independence there still remained one hundred and fifty.
For if life were cheap in this land where mankind was so scattered,
living cost nothing at all, hospitality was to be had for the asking.
One evening at sunset at a place where the ditch banks burgeoned with
flowering locust and the bird-of-paradise tree, Steven came to a low
rambling ranch house whose stoutly pillared portal was framed in sweet
clematis. The place was like an oasis. He had trotted his weary little
mare over many a dusty mile across a sandy arid mesa. It was with relief
that he dismounted and took water from a gourd offered by a young girl
whose dark beauty was like a madonna’s. There was no wife in the house,
but the father, a grave, silent man, appeared in the door and offered
his house to the strange blond traveler, questioning neither his name
nor his race, his destination nor his business. An older brother to the
girl came up to take Steven’s horse. He was dark and silent, too, like
the father, with a sharp, suspicious gleam in his eye. As they talked, a
fraile, or friar, in the habit of a Franciscan, emerged from a wing of
the house and joined them with an easy, merry flow of talk.
The fraile was fat and, though well robed, was illy groomed, unshaven,
and therefore unpleasant to Steven. Yet in spite of a certain grossness
the prelate had charm, wit that was most welcome. When Steven had been
shown to a room and had washed away the dust of travel he went outside
again and sat with the men beneath the paradise trees, where the fraile
talked of many things and held his listeners’ attention undiverted. Fray
Bartolomeo had been for a number of years in Albuquerque, but he had
been recalled, _gracias a Dios_, and was going back to his beloved
Mexico.
Fray Bartolomeo rubbed his hands with unaffected gusto when the _mosa_
came calling them to dinner. This was but a farmer’s house, not that of
a poor peon by any means, but a prosperous ranchero, who was called
“Don” by his neighbors and servants, but who was not of the Spanish
hidalgos, nor made pretense of being. There was plenty of the foods to
which Steven had already become accustomed in New Mexico, but of which
he had not eaten in a week, for the poor and the shiftless had little
but beans and chili, and night had brought him only to such places
heretofore. Here was melon such as he had never known surpassed, soup of
strange herbs and greens, filled with balls of finely ground meat rich
with chili and mutton fat. There were squashes baked in the outdoor
_estufas_, rich and mealy, and little cakes made of corn flour and
covered with white honey and chopped piñon nuts.
Fray Bartolomeo ate with a smacking of lips; he leaned over his deep
plate and scooped the food untidily into his mouth with wisps of
tortilla, although Don José, his host, had two silver spoons set at the
plate of each guest. Don José owned a silver bowl and pitcher, and for
the rest the reddish earthenware of Mexico. The Madonna-faced girl who
ate silently with them rose during the meal and brought in a bowl of
luscious grapes, both small and large. Fray Bartolomeo spat the skins on
the bare earthen floor, which, though uncarpeted, was scrupulously swept
and clean, as was indeed the entire room, with its whitewashed walls and
sturdy hand-built furniture.
Don José sent for wine, and poured from the bulging kidskin that was
brought in a silver pitcher full. They quaffed it from gourd cups. The
fraile grew red with content and, draining his _copa_ at a gulp, passed
it back for more. The pitcher was filled again and again, and while the
fraile consumed an incredible quantity of wine and the girl carried away
the remains of the supper, Don José, his son, and Steven listened to
talk of gaming birds, of the virtues of good cooking, and the skill of
the Indians at gaming and as silversmiths.
Strange talk from a fraile for pious ears. The lean features of Don José
contracted with disapproval, and after the candles had been lit he arose
and withdrew. The son remained, held by a gloomy fascination with the
conversation, and as the evening wore on Steven himself listened with
delight and amazement. Low, unclean, cunning as the fraile showed
himself to be, growing less and less careful as he bibbed at the wine,
nevertheless he was a man whose knowledge was wide, whose tastes were
cosmopolitan.
He was a Cachupin, a Spanish-born resident of old Mexico, and for that
reason was being recalled along with the other Spanish born who were to
be expelled from the land. He did not make mention of the fact that
there were certain charges which he would be compelled to face before
his superiors of the Church.
“Yet what difference does it make,” he shrugged, “whether I am in Spain
or here? One would scarcely know the difference. The same mountains, the
same faces, same types. I think the wine of Spain is better, yet the
grapes are not so good, so rich.” He sighed. “Spain has little gold or
silver. No jewels, much as she craves them. Her rubies come from the
Orient, her sapphires from France. Mexico has gold and silver, opals and
aquamarines, and for precious gems pearls from the Gulf on the western
coast.
“But Spain, ah Spain,” the fraile sighed with genuine rapture. “There is
a finished life. What paintings! Did you know that last year the great
Goya died? Never has there been a greater depicter of Spain. For one of
his canvases I would give----” His voice died away. But he had been
lucky, the fraile said, always lucky. Lucky at cards, lucky in love. To
the horrified ears of the two youths he roared of his conquests and
spoke of matters beyond their comprehension. And now his luck still
held, the babbling tongue went on, for had he not won at cards, from a
youth of the Villa, a thousand times the amount of the boy’s losses,
payment, by an old painting, a priceless canvas which should have gone
to the Church, anyway, but which he would sell when he got to Mexico
City, or to Spain. The proceeds would make him rich beyond avarice.
The impious bragging of the prelate, imposing thus on the respect and
hospitality due his garb from faithful Catholics, had broken the spell
of his speech, and without ceremony the two youths left him, bowed
soddenly over the table. Yet the next morning Fray Bartolomeo was brisk
and fresh and ready to start forth upon his way. Steven declined his
invitation to be a partner on the road as far as El Paso del Norte,
where the Cachupin was to join a caravan for safety down the
Cordilleras. Steven preferred traveling alone, and made excuse that he
was saddle-sore and would remain for a matter of weeks right here.
So the friar rode off and Steven spent a quiet day, resting, getting his
linen washed, chatting with the pretty child, winning the sober
friendliness of the youth. Don José was gone all day and did not appear
until sundown. He had been away looking after his sheep, he said, and
brought back a lamb for stewing. With dawn the next morning Steven was
on his way. He rode along briskly and uneventfully, mile after mile,
passing the laborious oxen and their clumsy carts, and tiny burros laden
with vast burdens like moving haystacks. He had received a map from Don
Tiburcio and was making toward the pass of the north, where he would
leave the Rio Grande behind and follow the mountains down to Chihuahua.
A well-traveled road lay before him, stretching smooth and hard between
rolling dunes where stunted palms and Spanish dagger pricked the desert.
Suddenly between the ruts he came upon a body prone, lying with arms
outflung beneath its black cassock--the fraile, dead, his glazed eyes
staring into the sun. One tale too many the night before. Here was
unexpected reprisal far from the scene of some forgotten injury.
Shrinking from the unwelcome office of giving the fraile decent burial,
Steven nevertheless pulled at the heavy body that lay as it fell with a
knife in the heart. He dragged it to the side of the road, intending to
cover it with stones in a sandy grave so that neither coyotes nor wolves
could scratch it forth. He owed the fraile that much for what
entertainment and information he had yielded him two nights before.
The movement disclosed a long, rolled-up piece of canvas protruding from
beneath the cassock of the dead fraile. Steven drew it forth and,
loosing the deerskin thongs with which it was bound, unrolled a
painting, cracked, old, yet to his eyes undoubtedly beautiful and
perhaps of value. Then in a flash he recognized the painting of the
“Madonna and Child” which he had seen upon the wall of the sala in Don
Anabel Lopez’s house upon his first night in Santa Fe. The talk of the
fraile came rushing back to him and he recalled it with new
significance. Why had it not occurred to him at the time that this
coveted treasure had been dishonestly secured from Santa Fe?
Steven stood in the road for some time, gazing at the painting, putting
the story together. Then he rolled the canvas up again, replacing the
thong that had bound it. The fraile’s care that so valuable a thing
should not leave his person had saved the painting, for his mules had
either been driven off or had run away by themselves, all his
possessions upon them, while this most priceless article had remained
concealed beneath his long robes. Whoever had made an end of Fray
Bartolomeo had not stopped to touch him or to look for gold or silver
upon his person.
Steven tied the roll upon the side of his mare, fastening it to the
wrought-leather saddle securely. Then he turned to the fraile. An hour
later a fresh heap of stones marked a spot by the roadside and two
buzzards appeared high in the sky. Steven straightened up, heaved a
thoughtful sigh, and brushed the sweat from his temples. Mounting his
mare, he turned her head about and, pressing his spurs upon her flanks,
set off at a canter toward Santa Fe.
It was the only thing to do. He was secretly relieved to have the matter
of decision taken out of his hands. There was obviously no one to whom
he could safely intrust the return of the canvas. He must take it
himself, just as Don Tiburcio de Garcia had taken Doren back to his
sister.
Steven returned that night to the house which he had left in the early
morning. His reception was gentle and cordial. He told Don José that he
had changed his mind and why he was returning to Santa Fe. Don José
exchanged a swift look with his son, and nodded to his guest in
acknowledgment without changing expression. Steven brought in the roll
of canvas, opened and spread it before their gaze. They knelt before its
beauty, crossing themselves.
“I am taking it back where it came from,” Steven said, simply. Don José
gazed at him with a deep, searching look, and the two clasped hands
after the manner of the country, left hands upon the other’s arm.
Steven thought, “Perhaps they think it was I who stabbed the fraile.”
But neither would have told whatever he thought or whoever had done the
deed.
Steven came after many weeks to the ford above Albuquerque. “I will not
cross here,” he thought, “but above, nearest the Sandia Mountains.” To
the north he could faintly see the tips of the snow-capped peaks that
towered above Santa Fe. It was late winter and the giant cottonwoods
were turned to copper and polished brass. The nights were cold. Steven
was weary of travel alone; he longed once more to be with friends.
Adventuring was hard business and he was glad that he was not a trapper,
yet the wilderness had forged a claim that he could never forget, upon
him, too, a claim that he could never shake off.
He rode along the river bank, thinking of these things, and before he
realized it came upon a large hacienda before which lay a garden of at
least two _varas_, surrounded by a stout wall, well fortified, and with
many outbuildings behind. He was surprised to see so expansive a
dwelling here, for there were fewer _ricos_ near the town named after
the famous Spanish duke than there were at Santa Fe. By rising in his
stirrups he could peer over the wall, and in the garden he saw a boy
playing, shooting at a target with bow and arrows. It was Doren Bragdon!
Steven hallooed, and in a few moments the heavy gate was opened and he
rode through to alight before Don Tiburcio and the Señora Garcia.
This was an occasion of great rejoicing. The hacienda was set aflutter
with preparations of an honored guest. Don Tiburcio apologized for the
meanness of his furnishings; he had been able to procure little there in
the territory fit to set up an establishment with. They had built on to
an already old and seasoned house, and were still building; Don Tiburcio
had already sent a messenger to Mexico for silver and robes and
furniture and brocade and the finest tapestries to be procured in the
capital. As soon as he and Hope had been married they had come down
here. They wished to stay in New Mexico so that Hope would be near to
some Americanos.
Hope smiled shyly at Steven. She wore a sapphire that would ransom a
General of Mexico; her gown was ridiculously rich to be trailing about
in the dust. “But Don Tiburcio will not let me wear gingham,” she
protested, not pridefully, but in real distress. “Even when I am working
I must be dressed in fine clothes.”
Don Tiburcio took Steven to a workroom where he had a cabinet-maker
carving furniture, and he had engaged an Indian silversmith who was
melting up silver to make plates and forks and spoons and other service
worthy of his wife’s table.
“Come,” said Hope, drawing Steven to one side, “sit here in the garden
with me, for I want to tell you something.” She was silent for a moment
and her eyes were moist. “I owe you everything--all this
happiness--Doren, my husband, everything. They have told me, Don
Tiburcio, and Doren, too, how you went after my father and how you found
them at last. But it is not of that I want to speak, for I can never
thank you. I want to talk to you about Consuelo. I know that she sent
you to save Doren. She told me when I was ill and so worried. She wanted
to give me courage. And it did. To know you had gone after him, it kept
me alive. And I cannot forget Consuelo. She loved you, Steven Mercer,
when she sent you away; but she thought you didn’t care about her.
“Steven, why didn’t you go back to her? Why don’t you go now, right
away? She has been waiting there, eating her heart out, worrying about
you, and she feels so badly, Steven, that she sent you away and didn’t
say she loved you. For she does love you, Steven. She told me so.” It
embarrassed Hope to speak about love, but she did it with painful
honesty.
“I’m going back as fast as I can travel,” Steven assured her smilingly.
“Come,” said Don Tiburcio, “I see you two Americanos have much to talk
about, but I want to show Señor Estevan my store, my warehouse. Did I
not tell you,” he asked with evident pleasure, as he led the way to the
bodegas, “that it would be less than six months and not so far away as
Mexico that we should meet? I felt that this would somehow come about.”
He showed Steven the grains and wheats, the pelts and hides, with which
the bodega was stored. “What do you say, _amigo_, to going into
partnership with me here? I will handle whatever goods you wish to
import from New Orleans and to pass on to me here, and I will supply you
with as much Spanish merchandise from Mexico, with silver ore and gold
bullion, as you need to carry on your end of the trade in Santa Fe.
There is a great future. Don Anabel Chavez is our greatest competitor;
but when he is gone there will be little opposition from Luis, for he is
both lazy and incompetent. You can buy as you see fit from incoming
traders. You can collect furs. The fur business has definitely been
transferred from the Northeast to the Southwest and for a number of
years the Rocky Mountain Company will be the richest field for hunter
and trapper. There is room for many here. Let us, too, build up a
business in this country. What do you say, my friend?”
Steven was radiantly pleased. Here was the opportunity to trade in a big
way. He could show his father that capital was available without asking
a dollar from Mercer & Co. He could trade, buying his own cargo and
paying for it. He could build up a great business. His dreams soared,
all before he had answered Don Tiburcio de Garcia.
“That I’ll do, señor,” he responded.
“Let us strike hands on the bargain, then,” the Mexican proposed. “You
are going on to Santa Fe? Good. I shall follow you there within a week
or so and we will complete the details. I shall finance the caravan
loads that come from St. Louis each year.”
Steven slept in a wide fresh room, with linen sheets upon a hair
mattress, such luxury as he had not known in months. He left shortly
after his breakfast and departed right merrily, while Doren and Hope
would not say good-by, but _hasta la vista_ (till we meet again).
CHAPTER XI
TREASURE TROVE
Doña Gertrudis sat before a great log fire, drawing the threads in a new
altar cloth. The work was to be like lace and gossamer and would be
weighted with silver thread. Tilted back against the wall in his chair,
Manuel strummed a _guitarro_, lightly, oh, very lightly, and essayed his
new _copleta_--two such pretty stanzas. Was Consuelo going to object to
this?
He darted an eye in her direction, but she sat quietly on her bench,
slowly sipping her chocolate; in fact, she was even tapping slightly
with her toe in time to the tinka-tink, atink-atink. Relieved, Manuel
threw back his head, closed his eyes, and abandoned himself to the soul
of music that burned within him. Ah, it was delightful to sing of love.
Especially now that Consuelo did not interrupt him all the time. Really,
he was becoming quite fond of his cousin, and coming to enjoy being with
her. Whereas before, when he loved her, _Dios_, what torment; and no
musical expression at all.
As for Consuelo, she was glad to be allowed to concentrate upon her own
thoughts. In reality life was not at all the simple and boring thing she
had once thought it. Safe and sheltered this valley had always been in
their lifetime. Tales of Indian massacre beyond the mountains, or over
the deserts lying between them and far Chihuahua--they had never touched
her. Like wars far away. She had thrilled with horror to hear of them,
but they did not touch her life. Yet tragedies were going on all around
them all the time.
What was Ess-tevan suffering now? Lightly she had sent would-be suitors
off on the long march to Chihuahua through which a lover proved his
mettle, and although Steven had not been lightly sent, she had not
realized to the full what such a journey might mean. Now she could
picture all the hardships and tortures of which she had heard. Perhaps
he would never come back and they would never again have word of him or
know what had been his end. This thought was too much for her and she
wept into her chocolate, so that the spoonful which she took to cover
her emotion was very salty. This made her smile. Even upon the verge of
one’s seventeenth birthday one cannot be forever repenting, forever
gloomy. There are moments in between remorse and an aching heart when
coral earrings, a new shawl, the gossip of one’s girl friends, no longer
torture, but give relief.
So, although her cheeks were flushed and her eyes unusually bright, both
were dry when Consuelo jumped up to welcome Anita de Guevara. She
greeted her warmly with a kiss on either cheek. Had Consuelo heard,
Anita began at once, of the magnificent new establishment that Don
Tiburcio had built on the Rio Grande for the Americana he had married?
No? They said it was to be furnished with naught but carved woods from
Spain, and every bit of the table silver was to be made in Salamanca and
imported!
“Oof! I do not believe that!” protested Doña Gertrudis.
Anita leaned closer to Consuelo. “Is it true what they are telling of
Luis?” she whispered.
“What are they telling?” demanded Consuelo, hotly, a trifle faintly.
“That he has turned Penitente. That he no longer games or diverts
himself.”
Consuelo was saved from making any reply to this question by the
entrance at that moment of Don Anabel, who came in, as always, with a
manner of distinction and ceremony, bowing carefully to each of the
ladies, maintaining the traditions of that chivalry of the land of
Cervantes brought to New Spain by his forefathers.
“What have you learned of the painting?” asked Anita of Don Anabel, the
business of saluting all the company in the room being concluded. Anita
always asked the most unfortunate questions. Don Anabel became obsessed
whenever the painting was mentioned. “Nothing that can give me hope for
its recovery,” he replied. “Rather to the contrary. You may remember,”
he turned to Doña Gertrudis, “that of the suspects among those who had
left Santa Fe during the week when Murillo disappeared (he always
referred to the picture as the Murillo), suspicion pointed to the
Americano who accompanied the last caravan and who remained here after
it returned (as though everyone present did not know Steven perfectly
without such careful identification).
“Today I learned that this young man departed the Villa at night. And
furthermore that he was seen to vault the wall of our lower garden
earlier on that same night, to remain inside the space of twenty minutes
or so.” A clatter of amazement and discussion pro and con broke forth.
Presently Consuelo made herself heard, almost timidly. (“What a change
has come over _la gattita_,” thought Anita, “the little cat who was
always throwing out sparks.”)
“But papa, the Americano was seen by Don Tiburcio way south _en route_
to Chihuahua. It was he who saved Doren, the Yanqui’s boy. He would not
be likely to be guilty of stealing then, would he?” Consuelo looked
about the room for confirmation.
“That is another matter,” Don Anabel decided. “Of course he would succor
his countryman. But to take a valuable painting is another thing. Yes, I
think he might well do both.” As Don Anabel finished speaking, old Angel
appeared in the door with a letter for _el padron_. He brought it to Don
Anabel and there was a moment’s silence while it was read. Don Anabel
rose to his feet, his lean brown cheeks alternately flushing and paling,
and informed the startled company, “Quite apropos of our conversation
comes this letter, from the gentleman himself--Señor Ess-tevan Mercer.”
(Don Anabel almost hissed the name.) “He has at this moment returned to
Santa Fe, brought by his conscience or his need, who can say, and he
brings me back my canvas.”
“Tst, tst, tst! _figure-se_; imagine,” clucked Doña Gertrudis. “What
does he say, then?”
“This.” Don Anabel opened the sheet which he still held in his hand and
read aloud: “My Very Dear Sir: I have but just returned to Santa Fe, and
bear with me your lost painting. At least, if I mistake not, it belongs
to you,” (“The impudence of the rascal! Belongs to me indeed!”) “I am
changing my clothes and refreshing myself somewhat from the fatigue and
dust of the journey, but immediately thereafter I shall personally
restore the picture to your house, if that is your wish.”
“_Por los santos!_” Don Anabel exclaimed, “but this fellow has
assurance. I’ll go fetch it myself, if this is not but a ruse. He is at
Doña Katarina’s house.” Don Anabel threw on his black cloak, and
stopping for a moment in his office, went forth from the front door.
Consuelo was trembling; her hands and feet were like ice, her face
flaming. She could scarcely maintain her composure. In the general
chatter and excitement which followed Don Anabel’s astounding message
she slipped unnoticed to her room, where Felicita was building up her
mistress’s fire.
“Felicita, he has returned! Ess-tevan. And he brings my father’s
picture. How he found it I do not know. But here he is, and my father is
again accusing him of the theft of it. He has gone off in haste to get
his painting, his treasure. I should have told him at once, but I could
not there before them all. That would have been worse for my father than
never to have regained the picture. I must go tell him now. Quick; come
with me. Perhaps we can overtake him.” She threw a black reboso over her
head, and with Felicita close upon her heels fled through the garden and
out the side gate.
But it was already too late. By the time she reached Doña Katarina’s
house, on foot, she saw her father emerging from the door. Felicita
pulled her back. Instinctively they drew out of sight. She would have to
tell Don Anabel when he returned home. Alas, poor Steven! what had her
father said? Then a new thought struck her with cold terror. “Alas!
_pobre de mi_, what will Ess-tevan think of me that I did not at least
defend him? Does he know?” They crept back through the little lanes.
* * * * *
Steven had just stepped from the vast copper kettle which the good Doña
Katarina supplied him for the bath and was joyously rubbing himself dry
after his first hot scrub in a month, when there came a knock upon his
door. The _criada_, a slovenly girl, called through the door that it was
Don Anabel and his attendant without. If they would please sit down,
Steven called back. With glad anticipation he hurried into his clothes.
The painting was then as valuable as he had thought it might be, and
here was Don Anabel himself come to thank him! Good.
Shortly the door of Steven’s chamber opened and Don Anabel was
confronted with a stalwart young man, ruddy with health, his skin golden
with the varnish of sun and desert, his hair still damp and wavy. He was
smiling with assurance, the unconscionable rogue, apologizing for his
lack of jacket or coat, and bowing as though in anticipation of warm
greetings. Don Anabel arose and stood stiffly erect, his hand on his
hip.
“Do I understand you rightly that you have with you my Murillo, my
sacred painting?” His nostrils dilated with nervous tension as he hung
on Steven’s affirmation.
“Yes, señor, I have it.”
Don Anabel glared coldly at the baffled young man. “What, may I ask, is
your price for the safe restoral of the painting?”
“What do you mean? I do not understand you,” Steven stammered.
“Your price?” the Don repeated. “Whatever it is I shall deliver it in
consideration of the safe restoral.” The young man made no answer and
Don Anabel continued, coldly and deliberately, “If the canvas is
returned unharmed you will be permitted to leave Santa Fe without
question or arrest. On the condition that you never attempt to return
here,” quoth Don Anabel.
With a lofty disregard that matched the New Mexican’s own, Steven
ignored the imputation carried by the words--though indeed he had been
actually arrested before on suspicion of espionage--and faced the wily
older man with wits sharpened by his struggle with the desert these last
months.
“Señor”--he looked squarely at Don Anabel--“I expect to be returning to
Santa Fe every year, perhaps twice a year, with a caravan of goods. I do
not intend to be bullied out of a business field that is extended to
others. Is it possible that you are afraid of the advent of Americans?
“In my country gentlemen do not ask requital for the return of property.
But as that seems to be the custom here I shall make my demands, too. I
must exact the right of unmolested commerce here or I shall not answer
for the safe delivery of the painting.” Steven’s voice trembled with
anger. Only rage at the treatment he had received from the autocrat
before him, overlord of lands that were equal to a kingdom, spurred him
to use the painting as a club over Don Anabel’s head. The threat was
effective.
Don Anabel would take no chances with the loss or mutilation of his
treasure. He credited Steven with a faculty for plotting that he did not
possess. If it were himself, he would have arranged that the painting be
out of reach of its owner; he could not have believed that it lay on a
chest in the adjoining room. He inclined his head in consent.
“_Muy bien_, since you put it that way. I myself will not oppose your
trade here further, and I fancy the _jefe politico_ will not of his own
accord. The painting?”
Steven called the _criada_, who brought in from his bedchamber a roll of
deerskin. Don Anabel seized it, unfastened the wrappings with trembling
fingers, and unrolled the canvas, stretching it out before the candles
that burned on the mantle.
“The Murillo. Unharmed. _Gracias a Dios!_” Without another word Don
Anabel, gesturing to his servant, rolled up the picture again, thrust it
beneath his arm, and pulling his cloak tight about him, turned his back
upon Steven and strode toward the door. The _moso_ threw upon the floor
at Steven’s feet a sack that struck the boards with the unmistakable
clink of _moneda_, Spanish duros, sesterces, and reales.
Then Steven’s gorge rose and he shouted, “Stop!” with such suddenness
and passion that Don Anabel paused in his tracks. Steven kicked the sack
with a rage that shot it straight after the servant and hit him
amidships in the rear with such violence that he staggered and plunged
forward against the wall.
“Hold!” yelled Steven. “Take your filthy silver out of here, Señor Don
Anabel Lopez! I turned back on my way to Chihuahua, retracing my steps
over mountain passes and through deserts, to return to you this
painting, which I recognized as having seen in your house. I found the
canvas on the dead body of a prelate, late of Albuquerque, where, señor,
he told me, a night or so before his demise, he had acquired the canvas.
“Believe this tale or not, as you like, but, by the saints, you shall
make apology for the accusation of theft. Look nearer home for your
crime. If you do not take back your words, I shall spread a tale in
Santa Fe that will somewhat tarnish the luster of your honored name.”
Steven stopped abruptly. He had not intended to say that. He had no
proof that Luis was responsible for Bragdon’s death, though it was
tacitly understood between Juan and himself that it was he who had
dispatched the murderers on the Yankee’s trail. He had no proof that it
was Luis who had stolen his father’s painting and gambled it away. A
terrible silence had fallen upon the room. Don Anabel’s face grew old
and drawn. He looked gaunt and thin and sick, as he stood there in his
dark cloak, the candlelight throwing a heroic black silhouette against
the whitewashed wall. Terrible suspicions had entered his mind. To what
did the American refer? He was not sure.
Then the face of the boy before him broke into a disarming smile.
“Señor, I am sorry. I did not mean that. Here, shall we not both retract
what we have said? Surely you owe me something for having restored your
treasure to you? And, after all, why should I have come back if theft
were my purpose?”
But Don Anabel was already convinced--forced, in spite of himself, to
recognize the _caballero_ in another. A younger man of a hated race, he
could not let the youth outdo him in courtesy. He capitulated with the
grace of which he was master. “Señor Mercer,” he replied with an
inclination of his head, “it is as you say. I have the honor, señor, to
request that you will give us the pleasure of dining with us tomorrow
night? It is too late for our kitchen this evening, I fear.”
That would be a great pleasure, Steven replied with an imperturbability
that belied the excitement he felt. He accepted the long-coveted
invitation not with the unalloyed pleasure which he had thought would be
his, but with a burning desire to see Consuelo and to find out for
himself whether she, too, had suspected him--whether she had had faith
in him. Don Anabel took his departure and Steven sat down to his supper
and to thoughts of Consuelo. When he saw her again it would be with a
knowledge that he had not had before, if what Hope had told him was
still true. He burned to make sure that Consuelo had trusted him, for,
after all, he told himself, she knew very little of him.
Doña Katarina knocked and entered, bearing a fowl still sizzling from
the spit. Steven had been much pleased to find his good landlady
returned from Taos, and they chatted now of all that happened during
Steven’s absence. Steven told Doña Katarina what had passed between
himself and Don Anabel, inquiring if there had been talk in Santa Fe of
the loss of the painting. “But yes”--she spread her hands--“of course.
What would you? Don Anabel has been near frantic, and all Santa Fe has
been busy with the mystery of the theft of the holy painting. Some think
that it served the don right for not having presented the painting to
the Church long since.
“After you left--the latest massacre would have been as nothing. They
talked of nothing but the Madonna and the news that the Yankees had
packed their wagon wheels with the silver they gained in trading in
Santa Fe. Think of that, to escape the _impuestas_, the duties!” Doña
Katarina threw back her head and laughed the rich husky laugh of the
full-throated Mexican matron.
Steven grinned unabashedly with her. “But how was it found out? I am
curious to know. It was well done. I know, for I helped them do it!”
“Hu!” Doña Katarina laughed till she must hold her sides, and the tears
streamed down her cheeks. “Hu-hu! They were held up by Santa Feans, just
beyond Raton Pass.” Between her gusts of mirth he learned that as the
wagons went bounding over the ruts the axle of one of them broke, and
the rim of a wheel came off, disclosing cavities within rim and hub that
were filled with silver. No! the Santa Feans did not get it. The Yankees
got away, after all.
Steve heaved a sigh of satisfaction and returned to his own matters.
“But about the painting? And my departure? Did they, did anyone----?”
“But yes, I tell you.” Doña Katarina nodded vigorously. “It was the talk
of the town. Of course I knew, and Consuelo without a doubt knew, that
you had nothing to do with its disappearance.”
Steven sat thoughtfully before the fire that night, too tired to go out
in search of company, and gave himself over to thought. It was more than
a year since the tall, hatchet-faced refugee from Mexico’s perilous
presidential chair had walked into his father’s office and commissioned
him with an errand which had started him on a twelvemonth of perilous
adventuring. What was it, he mused, that should make him stray from the
great business in New Orleans that was his by inheritance, to set his
heart upon a pioneer undertaking so far from his people? What held
Pierre Lafitte and brought him back to his trapping after a lifetime,
almost, of solitude, and labor for which he was illy repaid? All the
pioneers who dared the desert, the enmity of the Indians, the freezing
passage of the Rockies in winter, were not landless and penniless when
they started forth.
“One might as well ask the buffalo why they migrate, or the birds of
passage,” St. Vrain had said. “It’s instinct. Mankind has it almost as
strong as the four-footed or the birds. They want land, room to breathe.
It’s only the daring and the brave who blaze trails, who strike out for
new business where there’s room and they won’t be crowded out. Only the
red-blooded can survive against the odds on the frontier.”
These words came back to Steven with force as he thought about the
agreement he had made with Don Tiburcio de Garcia. Well, he felt fit to
tackle the Trail and survive, and he would not be forced from the
territory as long as others could hold their own in this New World, held
by a handful of haughty Spanish and a horde of red men.
No, he would stay, and--and marry, and bring up a family in this land.
Mexico? What line across the mountain said that here the
English-speaking should stop and forever keep to the other side? The
land should belong to those who would build it. And so Steven fell
asleep, dreaming of empire and of a piquante face peering over a tipsy
balcony in the moonlight.
* * * * *
At that precise moment Consuelo was facing her father in his study. Don
Anabel’s voice was shaken. “You mean, Consuelo, that you actually saw
Luis hand a long object like this”--he held up the rolled canvas which
he had not yet had time to restore to its frame--“out the window to some
other waiting there?”
“Precisely, papa. I would swear it was that. I have told you exactly. In
justice to Señor Estevan. I think Luis has been protected long enough.”
“It is as I feared,” Don Anabel muttered. “But I did not think, I really
did not think, that Luis would have stooped to such an act; that he
could be led to this. _Ingrato!_ It is fortunate indeed that no word of
this has gotten through Santa Fe.” He felt peculiarly humbled, and at
the mercy of this young American who might so easily put his son to
public shame. Don Anabel lashed himself into a proud fury. Consuelo drew
herself up on tiptoe with her hands on his shoulders and kissed him
tenderly. “See, papa, you have the Murillo back again now. And it is
Ess-tevan who has thus served you, even after he had been thrown in the
_carcel_ and attacked. It is done and over. Let us forget. Luis will
have learned his lesson.”
“I could never forget.” Don Anabel shook his head angrily. “My son!”
* * * * *
Supper had been brilliant. Lupe had done herself proud with the dishes.
Everyone was in sparkling humor. Don Anabel because the Murillo once
more glowed richly from its frame against the whitewashed wall, Doña
Gertrudis because Don Anabel was pleased. It was Sunday, a feast day,
and the Lenten fast was therefore broken for the week with several kinds
of meat and game, with sweets, fresh water cress, and coffee that caused
Doña Gertrudis to sigh in ecstasy.
Consuelo was _echando rayos_, (throwing out sparks), as the saying went.
Steven was likewise in glowing humor. He was the lion of the occasion.
He had been pressed until he had told and retold the adventures of his
trip south and what befell him on the road back. But of the fraile and
his story of the painting not a word was said; Don Anabel had heard all
that the evening before, and had told his family, presumably, for the
subject was tacitly and widely avoided by all. Luis alone was not one
with the merry company about the table. He was quite different from his
old, teasing, swaggering self. Preoccupied, self-centered still, he
nevertheless hung nervously upon his father’s words. He gave a grave
attention to Steven’s talk, was courteously, cooly attentive. He ate
little, and drank not at all. Consuelo herself wondered what had come
over Luis.
Could it be true what Anita de Guevara had whispered to her yesterday
afternoon? Had Luis reformed and turned Penitente? She shuddered at the
thought of that stern brotherhood, unrecognized child of the Church,
whose members inflicted torturous penance upon themselves in imitation
of the sufferings of Christ and the martyrs. She searched Luis’s face
earnestly; but behind his unlined youthful features she could read
nothing. He had been away a great deal of late, but he would tell her
nothing. She had yearned over Luis, prayed for his salvation, worried
over his comings and goings.
But tonight Ess-tevan commanded her full attention. Here he was seated
at her father’s table, a thing she had thought would never come to pass.
She would tell him afterwards how she repented her proud and hasty words
that night in the garden. How wicked she had been to have kept silence
about the painting all the time he was away. Surely Ess-tevan would
understand how terrible it would have been to have had her father know
all the time that it was Luis who had stolen his picture. Especially
while it was still missing. What he would have done with Luis she did
not know. And had she not given her solemn word to Luis not to betray
him? At the time it had seemed the only thing to do.
Whenever Steven could do so without anyone else observing, his eyes
questioned Consuelo. She became nervous. Thereafter the meal passed as
in a haze. She could scarcely wait until it was over and she might have
the opportunity to talk with Señor Ess-tevan. At length Don Anabel
arose. He passed around the table to assist his wife, a deference he
always practiced when company of any distinction was present. As he
waited behind her chair he rested his hand upon his son’s shoulder, as
though in a return to his old affection. Luis winced involuntarily, but
so slight was the movement that none but an expectant eye would have
noted it. As Don Anabel’s hand was withdrawn from his son’s shoulder a
crimson stain showed faintly where it had rested. The stain spread ever
so slightly on his cloth bolero and a tiny vivid streak appeared on the
white linen shirt showing beneath.
Consuelo, sitting opposite Luis and next to Steven, watched the spot,
fascinated, unconscious horror in her face. She recovered as Don Anabel
drew out his wife’s chair and followed her from the room. Had he noticed
Luis’s shirt? Had anyone else noticed? Luis rose and, throwing his
poncho over his shoulder, followed the guest of the evening out of the
dining room. He did not join the family in the sala, excusing himself at
the doorway. After taking coffee with the others before the fire, Don
Anabel had retired to his _despacho_, where the business of the
haciendas was attended to, and still sipping another cup of the coffee,
Doña Gertrudis, who had long since passed the point of stimulation with
the cup, dozed off into a comfortably drugged state.
Consuelo sat opposite Steven, alone; chaperoned, but not too well. She
looked timidly at the big fellow standing astride the buffalo rug before
the fire. He had grown taller since she last saw him and had filled out
with muscle. Consuelo felt no longer that sense of power which always
had made her mistress of a situation. She was trembling.
Steven came over to her bench and stood beside it, looking down upon
her. “May I sit beside you, señorita?”
She made room for him and they looked into the fire for a space.
“I have come, as you know, from Don Tiburcio and the Señora Garcia,” he
began at length, awkwardly. “My countrywoman told me how kind you were
to her while she was ill.”
“We did very little,” Consuelo murmured. “We owed her a great deal
more.”
Neither of them spoke, embarrassment tying their tongues, then Consuelo
echoed softly, “And we owe you still more.”
They both looked up to where above the mantel Don Anabel’s prized
painting hung. The old master stood forth with great beauty against the
austere whiteness of the wall. This brought Steven to the point.
“Señorita”--he looked directly at her--“you did not think, after I left,
that I had anything to do with the disappearance of your father’s
painting?”
“No, no, Señor, Ess-tevan. How could I? Had I not known you in the least
I could not have thought such a thing, when you were going off so
magnificently to save the Americans.”
“Nor when I came back with the painting and your father thought I had
surely got possession of it somehow and taken it away?” He leaned toward
her, his eyes eager, his whole attitude one of waiting to hear her
defense of him. He laid a hand over hers. Happiness swam before him.
Dared he take her in his arms, here?
“No, no, if you had not taken it you had not. Because you brought it
back proved nothing but your generous service. I would never have
believed such a thing. Besides, I _knew_, Ess-tevan, that _you_ could
not have taken it, for I saw another do that, though at the time I did
not know what was being taken.”
“You saw--another?” Steven faltered, in surprise. “But you did not tell
your father, when there was all this talk, after I left, that I was the
thief?”
The words fell in complete silence. Consuelo looked away, her face
burning. No words came to her, now that the fearful moment had come.
This was not going as she had dreamed, this meeting. For months she had
prayed just to have the chance to ask forgiveness of Steven for her
proud manner on the night that she had sent Steven off on his journey.
And not a word of his love had he mentioned. Did he not care any more
whether or no she loved him? He was looking at her now with hurt
surprise.
“You saw some one else take the picture,” he was repeating,
incredulously; a dull red mantled his forehead, his boyish face was
stubborn and hurt. “You knew who did it, and yet you let your father and
all this town, where I expected to build up a business in trade, you let
them believe that I was a common thief?”
Consuelo looked wildly at him. Tears started in her eyes, but her tongue
clove to the roof of her mouth as he stammered mercilessly on: “And I
can say nothing. I can imagine who took your painting. The fraile told
me how he got it. And you, señorita, on the very night that you sent me
to risk my life in the desert, not because of the poor little lad or a
hated Yank, nor for the sake of the girl, but to save your brother’s
soul--after that you kept silence about why I entered your garden. You
did not tell who took the painting?”
All the pent up thoughts of his months alone on horse, riding with only
thoughts for company, came out in the deluge of unaccustomed speech.
“Oh, Ess-tevan, I could not tell,” Consuelo implored, forcing her words
as he stopped talking. “It would have broken my father’s heart. I--I had
promised not to tell. I--I did not know you would come back this way,
even. I prayed, I thought, something would happen meanwhile.”
“It has,” Steven answered, coldly, bowing and reaching for his hat.
“Señorita, I have the honor to bid you good night. Will you extend my
thanks and farewell to your so generous parents?” He found himself
walking out through the door into the chill of the night air. His
emotions were at a white heat of rage, or was it that he was stone cold?
He did not seem to know exactly what he was doing. Only he felt an alien
chill against all that had drawn him back to the Villa. He strode down
the dark narrow street, feeling his way by familiar walls and posts,
till he came to Doña Katarina’s house.
“Juan,” he called, for the man had returned to him the night before,
“get the horses and the mules, ready to leave for Taos the first thing
in the morning.” He went into his room and proceeded to pack everything
he owned. When all was strapped and ready he laid out his buckskin
clothes and went to bed. Strangely he slept. His body and his emotions
were tired, and he was young. But he had shut his mind in a coldly
determined way.
Consuelo did not sleep till toward dawn. When Steven had seized his hat
and stalked out of the room she could scarcely credit it. She stood
before the fireplace, clenching and unclenching her hands, raging after
her old fashion. Gradually she quieted and utter misery engulfed her.
Doña Gertrudis awakened. With forced calm Consuelo delivered Steven’s
message and then bade her mother good night.
When she reached her room a storm of tears broke and she wept for hours.
Felicita stayed with her, and at length, when she had spent her
strength, she sent the tired woman to bed, but Felicita lay down upon
the floor at her side and would not leave her. Reason began to function
in the early hours of the morning and Consuelo realized that the
Americano, too, had his pride.
“Because he was always so amiable I did not realize how it would hurt
and anger him to be suspected and to know that I could have stopped it,”
she told herself, finding her only consolation in justifying him. “I
will go to him myself in the morning,” she decided at last, as light was
beginning to break in the east, and fell asleep.
The sun was already well up when Consuelo awoke. She dressed hurriedly
and, leaving her chocolate untasted, hastened out through garden and
toward the cathedral, which she would pass on her way to Doña Katarina’s
house. She entered the church for a moment’s prayer, and as her black
reboso disappeared within the door a horseman stopped outside the
cathedral, hesitated for a moment at the foot of the steps. Then, with a
quick gesture of determination he slapped his mare’s flank and rode on
through the town, followed by his Indian attendant.
When Consuelo came out a few minutes later there was no one to be seen
on the street, and when she arrived at Doña Katarina’s she learned that
it was too late.
CHAPTER XII
SILVER CARAVANS
Juan and Steven stood upon a desolate hillside, and from behind the
stunted cedar and pines looked down upon a strange scene. Juan had
ridden somewhat out of the way on the trail to Taos, and had led Señor
Estevan up to this mount from which he could see in a small valley below
them a group of people clustering about a small adobe building.
“Look!” pointed Juan. “Listen! It is the _pito_ (the flute).”
On the cold clear air a thin, sweet, flute-like piping arose to them. A
little man down in the valley emerged from the house, carrying a book,
which he held open before him, and from which he read aloud as he walked
along. He was followed by one who played the flute, and behind him came
a small procession, not more than five or six men, who wore masks, but
who were bare to the waist, wearing nothing but white trunks. The men
were striking themselves rhythmically across their backs with great
whips, which were wetted from time to time in a bucket of brine carried
alongside by another man. In a moment blood began to flow down their
backs and the cotton trunks turned red. Steven looked away, shuddering,
but in a low voice Juan once more called his attention to the religious
ceremony below them.
“Señor, but look, Señor!”
Steven again looked down. The procession was winding along a rocky
thorn-strewn trail beneath them, quite near, and following those that
smote themselves with the thorny whips came another, bearing upon his
back a heavy wooden cross. He lifted his face, and Steven recognized
Luis Lopez. Juan pulled Steven back out of sight. They retraced their
path and came out upon a main road where they had left their pack mules
hobbled. Juan pulled and rode beside Steven.
“It is the Penitentes, señor, Los Hermanos De Luz, the Brothers of
Light. I wanted you to see with your own eyes. Don Luis is of them; he
has turned Penitente. This is the Holy Week, you know.”
“It was very old, this custom,” Juan continued. It had come with the
first Spaniards; sometimes an Indian had been Penitente, but rarely.
Long ago the Pecos Indians, of the ruined pueblo one passed on the Trail
to Santa Fe,--did he remember?--had made sacrifices, it was said. But
they were Aztecan; they worshiped differently. Still the Pecos tribes
kept a sacred fire burning in the mountains, while the other Pueblos did
not. Juan said no more and they rode on in silence.
A queer land, thought Steven. Luis could kill a man, steal, murder, and
then atone by repenting in secret, whipping himself hideously. Oh, well,
what did it matter now to him whether Luis repented or not? Steven could
not understand this land. It was old, mysterious, and unfriendly. Yet in
spite of his depression his whole nature responded to the mountains.
They had lingered for four days among the hills, hunting. Spring was
faintly burgeoning. The trees were ready to burst into bud, the air that
blew down from the snow-capped peaks to the north carried that rare
headiness that comes from beyond the timber line.
They shot a huge lobo (wolf) on the way and Steve turned it over to Juan
for a robe. At the end of the fifth day they rode up through the deep
arroyo that lies in the plain this side of Taos Valley, and trotted
along through fertile farms into the tiny town. They made straight to
the house where Colonel Ceran St. Vrain and Charles Bent lived, and
there found young John Smith, Kit Carson, and a dozen long-haired
trappers, guides, and hunters, among them his old friend Pierre Lafitte,
who welcomed Steven right joyously. They sat up half the night, smoking,
talking of the winter’s kill, and what promise the spring held.
“What have you been doing all these winter months, since last I saw
you?” asked Ceran St. Vrain.
Steven told him of the trip south and its object. Ceran nodded.
“You could have done nothing else--nothing better, for that matter.”
“What was that southern country like and how did the streams run?” asked
Kit. He had been down there once, in the Black Mountains, and he drew a
map in the dust with his finger nail. Now what he wanted to know was,
did this here river dreen down into this here valley, and from where did
that thar small stream take its course?
Steven blushed. He had not located himself very well as he went. He was
afraid he had not fixed the lay of the land in his mind, except for the
valley of the Rio Grande.
“Pshaw!” said Kit. “You will never make a good scout if you don’t learn
the mountains and the valleys, and the waterways especial. You’ve got to
fix them all in your mind’s eye; then you never get lost. How did you
ever get out of them White Sands you tell about, I wonder.”
“I didn’t,” Steve admitted, shamefacedly. “I went round and round after
I reached right to the edge, so they told me, till finally de Garcia saw
me and came up after us. I thought all the time that this white desert
kept right on going, as I remember.”
The trappers nodded sympathetically. “That’s the desert for you. Mirage.
In the mountains, now, you know where you’re at. Somethin’ to go by.”
There was talk of traps and furs and how the Hudson Bay Company had lost
out since the Rocky Mountain Fur Company had taken hold, and there was
wonder what that country was like, way to the northwest, that the folks
who had taken the Oregon Trail had struck out for.
John Smith said he met a French hunter in the mountains by the Red
River, who said that there was an inland sea up north that was as briny
as the Atlantic. “Well, you’d have to swallow that with a little salt,”
spoke up Steven. There was a hearty guffaw, and St. Vrain silenced them
with the withering retort that he not only believed it, but that he knew
a man who had come across the hull of a Dutch ship, big as Columbus had
used, stranded right in the midst of the desert, a hundred miles above
the Gulf. Now what did they make of _that_?
“Nuthin’,” meditated John Smith. “No more’n a stranger could make of the
millions of tons of buffalo bones what you see bleachin’ on the
prairies.”
Someone burned a hole with a hot coal, with which he was lighting a
pipe, and St. Vrain turned to Steven. “That reminds me, lad, when you
return with your first caravan, bring a lot of those amusing little fire
sticks, like the Yankees had. Matches. Some of them were no good at all,
but the first lot set fire at the first scratch, and burned finely.
They’re a great thing, I think, and I wouldn’t be surprised if some day
no one would be without ’em.”
“I’ll send you back some,” Steven replied. “I’ll ship them from New York
if New Orleans hasn’t got any yet. But I’ve decided not to come back
myself.”
“What?” said St. Vrain, in astonishment, “Why, I thought it was all
settled. Surely you don’t mean it, lad. I shall be very sorry.”
“But I do,” said Steven. “I have not seen my father and mother for a
year, nor heard from them. After all, my father has built up a business,
which he wishes his son to carry on. My place is there, where a great
house known by the name I bear is already established.”
“That’s just it,” said St. Vrain, sagely. “It’s all ready made. You had
no hand in it. Here is something you can do yourself. Your father has a
partner, hasn’t he? And you can see him from time to time? Many have
made their pile in the fur business and then retired. But they’ve helped
to build up the country and the trade meanwhile. Trade, my lad, is the
life of any country. Why hasn’t this land of New Spain grown any more in
the three hundred odd years since the Spanish Conquistadores found it
and settled it? No trade with outside countries. That’s why. That’s what
builds any country up. Trade brings in new life.”
But Steven was determined. He would have to go north the day after the
next, then, St. Vrain told him. He could go with Kit there, and join the
party setting out from Bent’s Fort next month. They were going out to
Leavenworth and another return caravan would follow back on the Trail in
June. Steven said he would be ready to go with Kit.
Twenty-four hours later he was still of the same mind. And yet there was
a strange ache in his breast. He sat with St. Vrain before the big
fireplace. Tall Indians from the near-by pueblo which he had passed on
his first trip to Taos in the fall stood around the wall, stately men,
wearing their white deerskin robes, almost as an Arab wears his
burnoose. One of them came over to Steven and showed him a tiny wagon
which he had wrought out of silver--a little covered wagon. Steven gave
the Taos artificer twice its weight in silver for the piece; the Indian
was delighted.
“A silver wagon,” said St. Vrain. “That’s just a sample, silver
caravans, one after another, that’s what that represents. Not only the
hub and the linings of the wheels silver, but the goods inside.” He
nudged Steven in an aside, for there was in the room a mixed company of
Taos Indians, Mexicans from San Fernando de Taos, French trappers in the
employ of the Bents, all eating, drinking, smoking.
“Had you heard about the hold-up of the Yankee caravan?”
Steven told him he had through Doña Katarina, upon her return from
seeing her husband off on his spring round of the traps.
“That’s going to make it harder for the traders this next year. We need
a friend in Santa Fe, Steven, my friend.”
“There’s Don Tiburcio just below,” Steven reminded him. “He wants to
establish himself at Albuquerque. He has gold to invest. I have two
sacks of his money for the trade.... Ah, here’s Kit.”
Young Carson had come in with a swarthy Frenchman, a lean, flashing
hunter who might have been one of the Indians themselves except for his
gayety and his mustachios. He laughed and sang as he flung down his pack
and soon was tearing at his meat with gleaming teeth, half starved from
the long trail just covered.
“Thou, Etienne,” said St. Vrain in French, “when will you have tired of
living the life of the _engagé_, hunting, trapping? For three winters
now, is it not?”
Etienne smiled back in perfect good nature, “Never, I think, my friend,
though some day duty may recall me. I think your mountains have got hold
of me. Their clutch is stronger than that of the vigilants of the French
Republic.”
Steven looked sharply at him. The man had indeed the look of the French
noble house of Napoleonic sympathies.
“Etienne was a French colonel of the Guards,” explained St. Vrain.
“Something happened in his life. He came to this country, as you see,
down the Mississippi, over the plains, and he cannot break himself
away.”
A great weight was on Steven’s chest. He thought perhaps he was going to
be ill. Never did he remember having had such a feeling of depression.
This was the last night he should spend with this company. These daring,
free, wild, fearless men, rich and uncouth, sharing a common love for
the grandeur of the mountains, speaking the same tongue, understanding
the silence of the timber-line heights--was he never to mingle with them
again? Had he lived and dared throughout the past twelvemonth just to go
away, now that he had become one with the life? St. Vrain broke in on
his thoughts.
“This Steven has grown two inches this year, I swear,” said he, “and see
how thick through the chest the man is.” He no longer called him lad,
thought Steven, “This life has made a man of him. Here’s where he
belongs.”
Unable to bear his heavy chest in company any more, Steven got up and
went out. He paced up and down in the moonlight, and his thoughts were
of the girl he had left standing before her hearth but a few nights
before. Why had she ever warned him, in the first place? Why had she
come to let him out the _carcel_? That debt angered him. And why had she
sent him away on an errand of life and death only to treat him like a
felon while he was gone? The more he thought of it the heavier became
his chest and the tightness about his heart caused an acute pain. The
chill indifference that had brought him north had melted away. But this
hurt that followed his indifference was worse than anything else could
have been.
He strode back and forth in the road in an unconscious effort to work
off the pain that had accumulated and become dammed up during the past
few days, the burning sense of injustice. No, he could not stay in this
country, much as he loved it. The very name of Santa Fe would always be
connected with Consuelo. Her lovely face was the first he had seen as he
entered the Villa, and the last. If he did not put her sharply out of
his mind now it would be the last that he carried out of the West.
She had played fast and loose with so fine a gentleman as Tiburcio de
Garcia, he told himself, not asking why. Her family meant more to her
than anything else could--her family pride. Who were these dons of New
Mexico, anyway, that did not look down on trade as did the old French
aristocrats of New Orleans? They had no scruples about trade. But he,
Steven Mercer, came from a line of traders who had scoured the Seven
Seas; from Caracas to Cuba, from China to Bombay, from Leavenworth to
New Mexico.
In a rage he strode down the street and turned in at a brightly lighted
little place whence came the sounds of music and dancing. Doña Magdalena
de Archibec knew how to entertain. Always there was music in her place,
a bright-eyed _muchacha_ or two to dance or to be merry with, tables for
cards and lotto. The place was merry tonight indeed. There were more
than the usual number of trappers and pleasure-loving youths, who
frolicked on the eve of Easter, now that Good Friday had passed. A
solitary fiddler with but one leg, who sat with his chair tilted back
against the wall, threw back his head, closed his eyes, and played all
that he saw in his soul. A girl called Rosita slipped smilingly into a
chair beside Steven, where he sat at the end of the room. She smiled
close into his face and laid a very soft hand over his, humming gay
little airs that followed the fiddle like a happy soul singing with a
sad one.
“You are too sad, señor,” Rosita laughed in a sweet, hoarse voice.
She soothed him, reminded him vaguely of some one else. Other men came
up to dance with her, but she waved them away. “No, no; he is sad. I
must to cheer him.... Why are you sad?” she begged. “Girl, no?”
Steven made as if to rise from the table, but her expression showed that
she was hurt, that her face was that of a tender child. He sat down
again.
“What would you do,” he asked, “if you had done everything that some one
asked of you, and then after you had risked life and all, asking
nothing, found that she had let you be blamed for something you did not
do, something--well, a thief, a low common thief? It was a lie, even
though a silent lie.”
“Perhaps there was a reason,” offered Rosita, sympathetically. “I do not
always tell the truth. My papa he does not know that I dance here. He
would be most unhappy that I dance to make money, and sing for strange
men. Yet it is very nice. I make silver money. I take it to my mamma, my
papa--he is crippled, can never walk--and to the eight _niños_. I tell
the lie to my parents. Why make them sad? Alas! they must think the
streets of Taos are paved with gold or silver that I can find so much
money sweeping and washing the dishes for the _padrona_!” She smiled a
trifle sadly, and then both of them laughed. A fat, pock-marked Mexican
boy came for her and she rose to whirl in solemn circles with him.
A hand touched Steven upon the shoulder. It was Pierre. “Some one asks
for you outside,” he said, “a lady. She waits before the house of Ceran
St. Vrain, seated upon a white horse.”
Steven stared at him almost uncomprehendingly; but he rose to his feet
and followed Pierre out into the moonlight. Consuelo sat atop her white
horse, saddled bravely with the chair saddle of red Spanish leather. She
gazed down at him anxiously. Her face looked very small and white
beneath her dark reboso. As Steven advanced and stood at her stirrup, an
Indian guide who had been waiting beside her touched heels to his horse
and rode on up the road.
“Ess-tevan,” she whispered, “I have come after you--to tell you--what in
Santa Fe you would not hear. I am so, so sorry for all. It was wrong of
me, I see, to be thinking of Luis, but I did not think of him only. I
thought--that you loved the Americana, ’Ope Bragdon, and that you would
for her sake be glad to go into the desert, as well as for the child.
And about the--the picture. I could not tell my father.” Her voice
broke, stopped. There was no word from Steven. She found a sobbing
breath and hurried on. “You do not know how he would take such things.
He is too proud. I could only wait and pray. Father Filemon Hubert said
that it was right, that all would come right. How I have wept.
“Even now, that the painting is back again, my father has had a stroke.
He could not bear it, to know about Luis. And Luis--he has gone away
from home. We have not seen him since the night you were with us.” It
was too much. She had said bravely all that there was to say, with no
help from Steven. He was standing with bowed head at her side.
Then he lifted his face and spoke, wonderingly and ashamed: “And you
came all this way across the mountains just to tell me, worthless and
hasty as I have been, about it all, when I would not even stay to
listen.” He raised his arms, lifted her down from the saddle, and
carried her like a child into St. Vrain’s house, and did not stop till
he had set her down before the fire in the brightly lighted room. He
asked for a room and food for the lady, and while people flew in all
directions to bring hot coffee and broth, Steven with eyes for nothing
else leaned above her and whispered, “Consuelo, Consuelo.”
All the trappers and rough hunters in their shaggy sheepskins, their
coon caps, their fringed and soiled buckskins, arose and filed quietly
out and down the street to Magdalena de Archibec’s.
Steven knew now that the thing he most wanted was to stay in the
mountains, to trade with New Mexico and to mingle in the company of
Indians and fighters, of traders and exploring trappers. Not to
Chihuahua would his pilgrimage be, to buy brocades and bracelets of
garnets for his sweetheart, as the young swains of New Spain were wont,
to show their valor, braving Indians and deserts--but to New Orleans,
where one day he would take his bride to the home of his parents. He
hung about her neck a riband from which dangled the tiny silver wagon of
the caravans.
“Next year we shall travel with them, _verdad_?”
While they waited for the fraile to come over from his house, whither
Ceran St. Vrain had sent to fetch him, Consuelo lifted a radiant face,
dewy with tears. “And our house shall be furnished not from Chihuahua,
not from Spain, but from America, and the bodegas of Mercer & Son.”
_De Despedida_
And so Steven and Consuelo lived in the land of the Red Trail’s end and
built for the coming empire from the East. Though the Trail was
crimsoned for a quarter of a century afterward with the blood of
pioneers, and the prairies encarnadined with the dying buffalo, still
the silver caravans came. Over the Red Trail Consuelo and Steven
traveled in their youth, again in middle life, to find upon their return
a Santa Fe which was now within the borders of the United States, an
American territory. When civil war divided North and South and the house
of Mercer & Co. came to ruin, Steven in his maturity knew why he had
left home, and his father and mother, to found a new fortune.
Steven did not live to see the snorting iron horse steam along the banks
of the Arkansas. And the city which was first to be founded, three
centuries before, by the Conquistadores of Old Spain was the last to be
relinquished by Spanish-speaking rulers, to learn the tongue of new
conquerors and become one of the United States. Yet had it not been for
Bent, St. Vrain, Hope and Don Tiburcio, Consuelo and Steven, the Villa
de Santa Fe would never have rendered herself peacefully over to the
Americans.
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