CACHAPÉS, AND OTHER THINGS.
To a man coming from the Southern Camps to the forest belt of Santa Fé, the cachapé must appeal as something peculiar to the district, and most essentially local. He has had a surfeit of carts with two wheels, each 12 feet high, and dragged by anything from sixteen to twenty-eight horses; Russian carts, like Thames punts on four wheels, no longer amuse him, while American spring carts are much too European to warrant unslinging the Kodak. But the cachapé—here is something not to be lightly passed over. Lying idle it may not strike him at first sight as a cart, but rather as a remnant of some revolution, when, tired of waging light operatic war, the army disbanded, leaving their gun-carriages to serve more peaceful purposes.
Two pairs of short, squat, enormously powerful wheels; between, and joining them, a roughly hewn pole and various chains in an apparently hopeless tangle. Yet see them in work—every niche doing its work, every chain taking ten per cent, more strain than it was ever intended to take, creaking, groaning, crashing into holes, crawling laboriously over snaps and trunks to fall again with its load of four tons with a jerking, swaying, and straining as though struggling to free itself from its load, and you recognise the raison d'être of the queer little cart.
The capaché is not without its humorous moments. Supposing the cartmen find a log too heavy to load in the ordinary way; they do not return and inform the boss that the log must be hoisted by mechanical means or propose high-priced cranes. Seeing that obviously they can't put the log on the cart, they accept the alternative and put the cart on the log, chain it on securely, then haul everything right side up again with the bullocks and proceed to the unloading station. Once there, it might be supposed that they would tumble the cart over again, but here the intelligent foreigner is misled. The correct proceeding now is for the cartmen to lie on their backs and push with their feet, after the manner of the gentlemen in music halls, who, reclining on sawed-off sofas, twiddle gold-spangled spheres with their toes; only our cartmen lie in water and mud and the gold-spangled sphere is changed for a three-ton log. The force the men can exert in this position is little short of marvellous. Out one crawls, reviews the situation, then back again under, a creak, a combined push, and over the wheels comes the log, throwing up the mud and water for 50 feet around. Then back they go again for another load six miles through the forest. Wet through, their clothes hanging in ribbons from shoulders and belt, one day's mud caking on another's, and with a long sword stuck through their belt in front, they present a figure comical enough were it not that one knew the other side of the picture.
Reeking with inherited consumption, they live the one life which is certain to kill them before they are forty. Wet through and chilled, they are called upon again and again to suddenly exert enormous strength, since no man can desert his cart. He must "get there." He must get out of his trouble. He eats largely when and how he can, and when he has saved any money the merry "Taba" bone charms it from him in a way too universal perhaps to call for any remark. Sometimes he finishes his carting days through too decided opinions as to the other man's integrity in playing "Taba"; sometimes on his canvas bed in a hut of mud and branches, his browny yellow face and sunken eyes asking no pity, betraying no emotion; in either case he is rarely over thirty-five and often leaves a wife and children.
I say "wife and children," since it sounds the usual thing; but, as a matter of strict fact, the ceremony of getting married is deprecated among them, as it signifies "Putting on side," and is only resorted to when they are in a village and there is a chance that the presents that are given will more than compensate the tremendous expense they have to go to. Speaking to a gentleman of this kidney, I was informed that when the cross-eyed blacksmith Strike got married, it cost him three dollars and a-half (say 5s.) in fire crackers alone, and my informant went on to say that the only case he knew of where marriage had been really successful was that of the fair-haired carpenter, who was married and asked all the bosses on the place, who each gave something, with which he was able to buy a sewing machine for the eldest girl, then aged six.
But, mark you, lest you should judge them lightly, remember that their unwritten pact is just as binding to them as our formal marriage tie is to us, and that in their way they are probably better husbands and fathers than your Balham clerk. In their young days they may chop and change, which changes are generally marked by little iron crosses in the woods, but, once they have settled down, desertion is far rarer than in civilised countries. I have seen a native workman with his shoulder blade in his arm-pit, his face cut to ribbons, and with pieces of casting sticking to his back through the carrying away of a crane, cavil against the idea of being taken into the township where the doctor was, lest his old woman, unused to a town life, should find the surroundings uncongenial. This in a broken, muttered whisper, twelve hours after the accident had happened, during which time every new arrival had been called upon to witness the peculiar nature of his injuries.
Much has been said about the terrible wickedness of the lower-class native, his gambling, his immorality, his almost fanatical desire to murder everyone he sees; and for complete and detailed lists of crimes and monstrosities appeal to any newcomer, who will be delighted to hold forth on the subject; but when one has lived with them and worked with them under varying conditions, and has suffered in some degree what they suffer, one hesitates to condemn them offhand.
Blackguards they are—but manly, humorous blackguards. Immoral, one must confess them to be, according to our lights, but even in England "Custom from time immemorial" is held as law.
The vast majority will steal raw hide gear as a cat steals fish, but will not touch your money, much as in a community of young men property is common to all with the same exception. They will lie if scared, or rather will substitute for the truth something they think you would like to hear, and they will do as little work as you will let them.
But, have a bad case of sickness in the house and ask a man to go out at midnight with the carriage to get the doctor, or to go on horseback on his own horse twenty miles for medicine, and he goes as quietly and pleasantly as though he were going about the most commonplace work. He expects no tip, no extra wage, nor is he lauded as a hero. He may have come down, horse and all, in the dark, but is happy if he has not smashed the bottle of medicine, and he resumes his work on return, just as if he hadn't been up all night riding at a hard canter over broken ground full of holes and snags.
No, he is by no means an ideal worker, neither is he half so bad as he's painted, and I'd rather meet him in the next world than lots of men who boss him in this.