THE OLD, OLD FRIENDS.
Between seven and eight o'clock in the evening the two guardsmen of La Perla Purísima were still riding with her in a somewhat melancholy mood. They had even feared her indications were wrong, particularly as they had met none of their native woodcutters, employed by the Mission of San Fernando, or of the hacienda of the young lady's father, at the magnificent remuneration of half a dozen dollars per month, the insignificant rations in supplement being not worth considering. As a consequence the loan of an ounce, which vast amount they never dream of repaying, constitutes them serfs for life. Whatever the causes, not one of these slaves appeared in the land, where a carrion crow or two, that evidence of a settled county, now and then was visible, having perceived even so far away the battlefield contested by border ruffians and the Indian raiders.
"Queer," remarked Oliver, shaking his head, and redoubling his precautions, whilst relaxing the pace for the same reasons, though they stood in need of food and rest at the earliest moment.
Their horses, too, which the Indians had ridden with that recklessness to their manner born, were suffering from thirst and enforced fast.
It came on dark, too, "a nigger of a night," grumbled the hunter, and not a star in the sky. Thick clouds, charged with electricity, coursed overhead like antelopes in fright, urged by a gale that increased continually, and the rumble of far-off thunder warned them that a storm was imminent and shelter needful.
Still they rode on, doggedly, step by step, or rather, paso entre paso which is the Spanish for intermingling steps, taken, indeed, by the horses shrinking together hoof locked and trying to "hump up" their backs in alarm, when suddenly the pioneer's mount, lifting its hanging head and wagging its ears briskly, uttered a derisive neigh. So does the noble animal often express his lordly contempt for the humble by-brother, the mule.
Indeed, not far aside on the northeast or left, they heard the quick amble of some quadruped. In a few instants there appeared a shadow, which approached with a daring or simplicity which perplexed the hunter, already grasping his gun.
The hail of the oncomer was in Spanish, a religious greeting appropriate to the vesper hour, to which, involuntarily and through well-schooled habit, the sweet fresh voice of the Mexican maiden straightway responded.
"It is Father Serafino," she added in explanation. "Our Lady of Guadalupe be thanked!" The name vaguely struck the Englishman as familiar, once upon a time, and he extended his hand to check the movement of Oliver, despite the recognition, to be wholly in readiness to fire.
Meanwhile the priest, for it was one, bestriding a fine Spanish mule of unusual size and docility, had come up.
As well as the murkiness would allow one to discern, he was a man of about fifty, but his broad brow was smooth as a youth's; sweet intelligence dwelt in the blue eyes which were shaded by long lashes under brown brows regularly traced. His face was perfectly cleanly shaven, and his long hair, only slightly threaded with silver, came down on his shoulders, and framed an oval visage. His voice was melodious, but not devoid of manliness. Altogether, the attractive and sterling man was a worthy successor of the brothers who accompanied the mailclad knights in their inroads from Mexico to San Francisco. His simple costume was composed of a black gown buttoned all the way and gathered in by a broad band; his sombrero had been lost in his ride, made in haste.
This same precipitation impelled him to be brief in his story and in his congratulations to the señorita for having been saved from the spoilers.
"Though there will be great joy at the house," he said, "there will still remain mourning, my daughter."
"My father! My mother!"
"All these are well, and so your brother, but he and his wife and they all in grief—an arrow, at random, entered an upper window and slew the babe in its cradle. The will of heaven be done in all things! The little angel, at least, will not be exposed to the horrors which I fear still are poised ere soon descending."
He closed his sentence with so sad an air that all gazed at him, afraid to question.
"Yea, terrible events are in preparation, of which the swoop of the Apaches on the farm and the taking away of the heiress form no adequate examples. At least, when they strike, they fly, and are gone like the hawk. But a danger on the very hearth is arising. In short, friends of my little daughter here, listen; the Yaqui Indians, the Christians, the converts, the semi-civilised, whom we employ throughout Sonora as peons, field hands or labourers, have seen in the too often successful raids of the wild brethren active slurs on their tameness. The ease with which this last band of Apaches overcame the servants of don Benito has set them plotting, I know, to revolt against him, and against other masters, alas, not so kind, fair and punctual in payment of their pittance as your father, my poor child."
"Of them, who is going to be uneasy, father?" responded La Perla, with the confident, arrogant smile of the daughter of the ruling race. "Have not these poor dogs many a time in my young life, brooded, ay, and yelped of an attack, but between the menace and its execution, what a distance!"
"That is the saying of a child, gentlemen," continued Father Serafino. "She mistakes this time. Acknowledging the good Indians to have been treated badly of late, they are out of patience. They are in active rebellion. All the Indians who were on our Mission have disappeared. Last night," he added in a whisper, "of my two brothers who went over to the farms of Bella Vista and the Palmero, to inquire news, one only returned," this in a still lower tone so that the girl could not possibly overhear, "the outbreakers had carried them by storm—massacred every living creature and danced round the blazing buildings, one of those pagan dances whose memories I had hoped we had banished from their darkened brains. The surviving brother, hiding in the thicket till he could secure a stray horse, heard their council swear to destroy the white man and all his works throughout Sonora and retreat to the Northern Deserts to live free and wild in the abominable practices of their ancestors. They talked even of attacking Ures, and said all the Indians in the pueblos would join them. What will the hundred soldiers at Ures do? I tell you, gentlemen, such is the general situation."
"It's a tight nip," agreed Oliver.
"Terrible!" added the Englishman, shuddering to think of the poor father, his friend, ignorant still of the happy fate of his child, and exposed to the overwhelming storm of the revolted serfs.
"It is good and bad, too," resumed the priest, "that the neighbours and kinsmen of don Benito will be flocking there to celebrate the ascension to heaven of his grandchild. Good, that so many heads of family should be under one roof, but bad that their own homes should be without commanders at such an emergency."
"The Indians," said Oliver authoritatively, "will move in a mass, for they have not been trained as individual warriors; hence they will attack this house, which contains all they hate, their masters. My vote is: on to don Benito's!"
The priest bowed at this utterance of a man of warfare. The English gentleman approved, if only out of eagerness to place doña Perla in her mother's arms.
"I'll show you the way!" said Father Serafino, smiting his mule with his slipper. "On to the Hacienda of Monte Tesoro, then."
"The Treasure Hill!" Don Benito had erected his chief farmhouse as a memorial of the haul in the Gulf of California.
They tailed away at once in a new order; the mule leading at a good pace, spite of the obscurity which little impeded one very familiar with the ground, bringing up the rear, ever and anon looking steadily behind him.
It was the middle of the night, amid falling raindrops of great size, that the little troop beheld the loopholed walls of an enclosure round the grounds of an imposing mansion rise up into view. All the gates and doors were wide open, and every window blazed with light. A number of peons, brandishing torches, rushed out to welcome those they took to be belated guests. But as soon as the illumination fell upon the beauteous face of the daughter of the proprietor, they sent up a ringing shout which revealed how deeply endeared was that master and all his kith and kin.
The farmhouse itself was engirt, and all its approaches encumbered by at least a hundred shanties (chozas) and mud brick cabins, of miserable aspect, scattered at haphazard, and used for the abodes of the house servants and farm labourers. At the present juncture, though, the misery was gilded, since every hut glowed with light, and out of the doorways poured the jingling of tambourines, the banging of tambores or drums, and laughter; songs and shouts mingled with the tinkling and strumming of stringed instruments, in wild, thrilling native waltzes.
Though there were women and children squatting and sprawling in the clear space between the cabins, mounted peons, swinging flambeaux, were racing to and fro, at the risk of trampling on them.
On triumphantly and joyously entering the courtyard (patio), the strangers beheld a no less singular and picturesque spectacle.
Around great piles of burning wood, which would have roasted mastodons, whole trees being required to feed them, a multitude were revelling, swilling, and cramming, whilst a few in tatters, Indians as their complexion showed, were pacing the ancient steps, which so scandalised Father Serafino, and which were the ceremonial performances of the Yaquis, perhaps as old as the creed he so sturdily supported.
Through this carousing throng, spite of the spell which the announcement of the recovery of the maiden by the reverend father exercised tolerably potently, the horsemen made but new progress.
By the time they arrived at the wide portals, these were choked up by a party of gentlemen, in the front of whom, even had he not called out his daughter's name with indescribable joy, the Englishman recognised his former shipmate.
Yes, truly, the well-preserved gentleman who embraced La Perla was none other than our don Benito Vázquez de Bustamente, son of the General-President of Mexico, now proprietor of Monte Tesoro and many another estate as rich, the pearl diver of old.
When the hacendero looked on the group behind his daughter, glancing affectionately at the padre who was so close and old an acquaintance, and curiously and not very kindly at the American whose position he recognised, and whose buckskin frock was stained with blood from the fresh lank scalp thrust into his belt until he should have time to cure it, and comb out the clotted hair into fringe for ornament, he finally rested his gaze as if spellbound on the fair complexioned European.
"Papa," said the Purest of Pearls, suddenly remembering that she stood in the place of a mistress of ceremonies, "I have the happiness to present to you the oldest of your friends, to whom I owe, as you have often told me, the bliss of being rich, with my mama. I now present him, too, as having reappeared in our world after many years—mine own lifetime, in faith, in order to save my life!"
"Don Jorge!" shouted the Mexican, rushing forward and, not to be repelled by an attempt only to clasp his hand, enfolding the bashful Briton in a powerful embrace.
"My dear old Benito!" and the Englishman could say not a word in surplus.
"Gentlemen," said the hacendero, turning to his countrymen, without caring to conceal the tears of delight upon his black moustache and beard, "I have the signal honour to introduce to you the noblest heart that ever beat in the breast of a man! My friend of friends, don Jorge Federico Gladsden."
Every head was politely bent.
"The honour falls on me," observed Gladsden. "As for the rescue of your child, it was a providential casualty that brought her across my path—the rest is all the work of this keen, resolute, prompt and fearless American whom I, too, call my friend in the same full sense in which don Benito uses it towards your humble servant."
So saying, he caught hold of the hand of the hunter and squeezed it so heartily that the latter quite forgot a little rising pain at having been rather unjustly omitted in the young lady's presentation.
"And now," said the master, "let me lead you to my wife, and my son and daughter, whom, unfortunately, we cannot relieve of grief at their loss as you have done of his parents, by the restoration of our treasured one."
"Your son! How time flies!" murmured Gladsden, "Though, for the matter of that, I have a couple of torments of my own. Only, less fortunate than you, my friend, I lost their mother long ago."
They had entered the house, where a silence ran before them and seemed gradually to begin to diminish the merrymaking clamour.
"Yes," said the priest, with a sigh, "time is fleeting and death cometh as swiftly, and who of us can be certain of having ample opportunity to accomplish his duty—the task which heaven sets unto him?"
The solemnity of the accent deepened a gloom already befalling the guests.
"The padre is right," broke in Oregon Oliver, whose impatience at the loss of time in ceremony was augmenting, "jest let out that you are coming to save the house from the scalper and pison hatchets! What you've had was the blazing (marking a tree with a chop to denote it chosen for felling), the next call, the murderous minded Apaches mean to fell the trunk from the topmost switch to the lowest bough."
All the gentlemen withdrew into a side room, where the priest imparted his tragic intelligence. There was terrible anxiety, since the farming gentlemen had left their homesteads at the mercy of their peons thus denounced as treacherous.
"Well, Señores caballeros," said Benito, "since you look to me, I say with our norteamericano (Oliver) that, under such circumstances, the determination we are driven into is the best, I have four hundred peons on this farm. Of the lot, I can rely on three hundred, for one reason and another. I know the bulk of them as I do my own children. Against the hundred, or near a hundred and fifty, since some off strange plantations have flocked here, ostensibly for the junketing, we can pit my gentlemen friends, our relations. Each of them is the value of five or six wild Indians. You see, gentlemen, I rate you very low! Now you require rest, a change of dress—."
"No, no," said the Englishman and his guide with one breath.
"Pardon me, a short rest is requisite. By that time I shall have made my preparation, and then we may put the finishing touches on our plan of battle."
"And doña Dolores?" queried Mr. Gladsden.
"My daughter has gone to inform her that we have the honour and pleasure, at last," he said, reproachfully, "to see under the roof always bound to shelter him, our foremost of friends and benefactors. After your repose, doña Dolores will have the honour to receive you."
The Englishman and his companion were led away separately by servants bearing silver lamps. The former was conducted through several corridors into a chamber, where the steward ordered another massive silver lamp on a table to be lit. Whilst a third peon held the lamp up on high, the other two noiselessly and rapidly prepared a bath of rosewater in the next room. During their preparations, two others arrived in haste with a choice of clothes, the underlinen very fine, and from the first Paris houses.
Meanwhile Gladsden looked about him.
The room was quite large, having two small windows and one glazed door -opening into a garden. On the whitened walls were pictures in gold frames, such as are painted in a mechanical way for Northern dealers to send in quantity to New Orleans, Santa Fe, and Mexico, for sale by torchlight. They represented, after good and popular masters, scenes of religion, battle, hunting, history, &c., and were hung without order. At all events, they regaled the sight by their vivid colour. In one corner was a folding sleeping chair, on which were thrown splendid skins and furs and fine blankets, to be arranged as the sleeper fancied. The furniture was completed by a massive mahogany centre table, a square table against the wall near the chairbed, two openwork armchairs, and some Indian wickerwork footstools. There was a pedestal of marble for a religious image, but the statue had been removed to figure in the hall devoted to the ceremony of the Angelito.
Whatever the English guest had said against his need for repose when danger threatened, he had no sooner returned from his bath in fresh habiliments, to find on the table a tasteful spread of preserved fruit, smoking chocolate of fine savour and much thickness, and light pastry, to say nothing of some cold turkey and ham with golden hued corn bread, then he did not blame his host for the insistence on overruling him. Lighting a cigarette, he reclined on the couch-chair, and soon sank into a blessed state of physical enjoyment less and less appreciated, of course, as his overtasked brain and frame lent themselves gratefully to slumber.
When he awoke, a couple of hours only thence, he saw the table again covered with eatables, but a great deal more substantial. It was laid for three. A couple of superior servants were just finishing the decoration with vases of spring flowers, and so deftly doing their work, that it was not any noisy blunder on their part that had aroused him. He did not like to inquire of them who were going to be his guests. Luckily, he was not long left on tenterhooks.
The door opened, and don Benito, showing himself, made way courteously for Oliver to precede him. The American was clad in a Mexican dress, jingling and shining with silver buttons, and really would have made many a black-eyed damsel's heartache at a dance in his new but not altogether unaccustomed array.
With fine forethought, Benito had arranged to take supper—or whatever name this midnight meal deserved—with his old friend and the other deliverer of his beloved daughter.
After appeasing hunger—for Gladsden's had revived, and Oregon Ol. never seemed at a loss to eat when anything was on the board—they conferred seriously.
The hacendero had made his servants and the Indians who were truly converts kiss the cross and swear to die for their master—about the only binding oath to impose on such gentry. A hundred of the least dubious were to be clad in a kind of uniform so as to look like soldiers.
"Your friend, our friend, will lead them. These North Americans have persuasive methods and a spirit which converts the timid into guerreadores—heroes even, which we do not possess, or we should not be the yearly prey of the Comanches."
"As to leading them," said Oliver, eating a tortilla smeared with marmalade with the gusto of a schoolboy, "I shall rather git on behind them; and how they will charge when they know I shall shoot the first that turns back on my toes!"
"If this is North American persuasion," began Gladsden, laughing.
"Jest another time. In brief, don Olivero will take his five score sham soldiers out of the secret gate in the corral which, by the way, you may not know, every rich landed proprietor has in order in a country of revolution; and he will go and ambush a quarter of a league away. Meanwhile, we shall establish our watches so as not to be taken by surprise. If the ambuscade be discovered, don Olivero will signal me by two rockets—red and white. If we, however, as is more likely, are first attacked, we shall notify him, in await, by sending up two rockets—white and red. Then will he lead, or follow his chivalry, and take the red rabble in the rear as they envelope my farm. They will imagine the lancers and dragoons have come from Ures or Hermosillo, and recoil on our enclosure. We will rally out, and we'll mince them up into bits as fine as that poor Matasiete was chewed by the sharks of the Gulf of California; eh, you remember him, don Jorge?"
"Decidedly! He lives in my remembrance all the more lively, because I cannot have been mistaken in my impression that I saw him only this early morning."
"Saw don Aníbal, as he called himself? Saw the gallant of my late aunt, Josefa Maria—and only this morning! Impossible! You are still dreaming!"
"My friend! As truly as your bullet creased that hooknose, I saw it at the wicket in the door of the Green Ranch Tavern. Don Matasiete, whose garland of names I cannot recall in full, was not entombed in the maw of the tintoreras, but escaped with the loss of a limb. In pleasant allusion to that disaster he is called 'The Dismembered' even now, and he is that One-leg Peter, or Pedrillo el Manco, who, it appears, revives on this frontier all the old tales of rascally doing for which, in former days, he was so famous. What's bred in the blood won't come out with the loss of a limb, you see."
"An enemy like that! So near me, and often! How, then, is it that I have never been injured by him or his band?"
"Really," answered Mr. Gladsden, perplexed, "I am at a loss to enter into the mind of such rascals. Mayhap he is reserving you for a top off to his career of scoundrelism."
The repast being ended, don Benito conducted his old and his new friend to present them to his wife and family.
Neither they nor the other ladies had been informed of the terrible disaster in suspense; and, as far as they were concerned, as well even as some of the younger gentlemen from the neighbourhood, the festival of the Angelito was still proceeding.