THE WORK OF THE NORTHER
During the rest of that day and the earlier part of the next the weather continued fairly good, and the unloading went steadily on. In the many intervals of his duties, Ned tried hard to drive his mental fever away, and amused himself as best he might. The city itself was worth looking at, with its tiers of streets rising one above another from the shore. He saw several churches, and some of them were large, with massive towers and steeples.
“The Mexicans must have been richer than they are now,” he said to himself, “when those things were built. They cost piles of money.”
He had no idea how rich a country it is, or how much richer it might be, if its wonderful natural resources were to be made the most of. As for the city, he had heard that Vera Cruz contained about seven or eight thousand people, besides its military garrison, its foreigners, and a continually varying mob of transient visitors from the interior. Zuroaga had told him, moreover, that it was from the latter that any gringo like himself would be in danger of violence. They were a vindictive, bloodthirsty class of men, most of them, for they retained undiminished the peculiar characteristics of their Indian ancestors.
“I don’t care to run against any of them,” thought Ned. “I don’t like this tierra caliente country, anyhow. It’s too hot to live in.”
Then he thought a great deal of the wonderful land of forests and mountains which lay beyond the fever-haunted lowlands, and he longed more and more for a good look at the empire which Hernando Cortes won from the old Montezumas and their bloody war-god, Huitzilopochtli.
In the afternoon of the second day the sky was manifestly putting on a threatening aspect. The wind began to rise and the sea began to roughen. The men discharging the cargo hastened their work, and it was evident that the last of the lighter barges would soon be setting out for the shore. Ned was staring at them and recalling all the yarns he had heard concerning the destructive power of a gulf “norther,” when Captain Kemp came walking slowly toward him, with a face which appeared to express no sort of unusual concern for anything in the world. Nevertheless, he said:
“Get ready now, Ned, as sharp as you can. There comes your boat. I shall send some papers by the colonel. Señor Zuroaga’s luggage all went on shore yesterday. I think some other men will have to be looking out for themselves before long. If the Goshawk should drag her anchors and go ashore, I hope there won’t be too much sea running for good boats to live in.”
“I’m all ready now!” exclaimed Ned, as he sprang away, but he went with a curious question rising in his mind: “What if a cable were more’n half cut through? Wouldn’t it be likely to break and let go of an anchor, if it were pulled at too hard by a gale of wind? I don’t really know anything about it, but Señor Zuroaga thinks that Captain Kemp is a curious man to deal with. Father thinks that he is a good sailor, too.”
All the wardrobe that Ned had on board was easily contained in a waterproof satchel of moderate size, and he was half-glad now that there was no more of it, it went so quickly over into the large yawl that was waiting alongside when he returned on deck. It was a four-oared boat, and Colonel Tassara, at the stern, beckoned to him without speaking, as if he might have reasons for silence as well as haste.
“In with you, Ned,” said Captain Kemp. “I’ll try to see you within a day or two. Take good care of yourself. Good day, colonel.”
The Mexican officer only bowed, and in a moment more the yawl was fighting her difficult way over the rapidly increasing waves, for the first strength of the norther had really come, and there might soon be a great deal more of it,—for the benefit of the Goshawk.
“There!” muttered Captain Kemp, as he saw them depart, “I haven’t more than a good boat’s crew left on board. We’ll take to the life-boat as soon as the cable parts. There isn’t any use in trying to save this bark under all the circumstances. I’ve done my duty. I couldn’t have calculated on heavy shot first, and then for a whole gang of cruisers watching for me off the coast. This ’ere norther, too! Well, I didn’t make the war, and I don’t see that I ought to lose any money by it. I won’t, either.”
Whatever was his exact meaning, the mate and four other men who remained evidently agreed with him, from what they were shortly saying to one another. It might also have been taken note of by a careful observer that the mate was a Scotchman, and that the four others were all from Liverpool. Whoever had put so much contraband of war on board the Goshawk had not entrusted it entirely to the eccentricities of a lot of out-and-out American sailors, with peculiar notions concerning their flag.
On went Colonel Tassara’s yawl, and it was not likely to meet any other boat that evening. As the rollers increased in size momentarily, Ned began to have doubts as to whether such a boat had any reasonable hope of reaching the shore. It was now pitch-dark also, and he could but feel that his adventures in Mexico were beginning in a remarkably unpleasant manner. The landing could not have been made at any place along the beach, where the surf was breaking so dangerously, and it looked almost as perilous to approach the piers and wharves.
“How on earth are we to do it?” exclaimed Ned, in English, but no answer came from the hard-breathing rowers.
Colonel Tassara seemed now to be steering a southerly course, instead of directly landward, and Ned calculated that this would carry them past all of the usual landing-places. It also gave them narrow escapes from rolling over and over in the troughs between several high waves. On the whole, therefore, it was a pretty rough boating excursion, but it was not a long one. It did take them almost past the city front, and at last Ned thought he saw a long, black shadow reaching out at the boat. It was better than a shadow, for it was a long wooden pier, old enough to have been built by Cortes himself. The waves were breaking clean over it, but, at the same time, it was breaking them, so that around in the lee of it the water was less boisterous, and the yawl might reach the beach in safety. There was no wharf, but all Ned cared for was that he saw no surf, and he felt better than he had at any moment since leaving the Goshawk. It was the same, for they said so, emphatically, with the boatmen and Colonel Tassara.
“One of the men will take your bag,” said the colonel to Ned, as soon as they were out on shore. “We will go right along to my house, and we shall hardly meet anybody just now. I’m glad of that. Santa Maria, how dark it is getting! This will be the worst kind of norther.”
A couple of lanterns had been taken from the boat. They had previously been lighted by the colonel with much difficulty, and without them it would have been impossible to follow the stony, grassy pathway by which Ned Crawford made his first invasion of the Mexican territory. He did not now feel like annexing any of it, although Mexican patriots asserted that their title to Vera Cruz or the city of Mexico itself was no better than their right to Texas. His gloomy march was a short one, and only a few shadowy, unrecognized human beings passed him on the way.
The party came to a halt before a one-story stone dwelling, with a long piazza in front of it, close to the weedy sidewalk of a crooked and straggling street. It was apparent that this was not in the aristocratic quarter of the city, if it had one. A door in the middle of the house swung open as they arrived, and the boatman who carried Ned’s bag put it down on the threshold. The lanterns went away with him and his fellow rowers, but other lights made their appearance quickly,—after the door had closed behind Ned and Colonel Tassara. Not one of the boat’s crew had obtained a peep into the house, or had seen any of its occupants. Ned was now aware that he had entered a broad hall-like passageway, which appeared to run through the house, and to have several doors on each side. One of these doors had opened to let the new light in, and through it also came Señor Zuroaga, two other men, and a young girl, who at once threw her arms around the neck of Colonel Tassara.
“O father!” she exclaimed, “I am so glad! Mother and I were so frightened! We were afraid you would be drowned.”
“My dear little daughter,” he responded, sadly, “I fear there will be more than one lot of poor fellows drowned to-night. This storm is fearful!”
It seemed, in fact, to be getting worse every minute, and Ned was thinking of the Goshawk and the state of her cable, even while he was being introduced to the pretty Señorita Felicia Tassara, and then to her mother, a stately woman, who came to meet her husband without condescending to say how badly she had been alarmed on his account.
“She’s just about the proudest-looking woman I ever saw,” thought Ned, for, although she welcomed him politely, she at once made him aware that she did not consider him of any importance whatever. He was only a young gringo, from nobody knew where, and she was a Mexican lady of high rank, who hated Americans of all sorts.
Ned’s only really hearty greeting came from Señor Zuroaga, who seemed to him, under the circumstances, like an old friend.
“Carfora, my dear fellow,” he said, “you and the colonel must come in to your supper——”
“Why, señor,” expostulated Ned, “I’m wet through, and so is he.”
“I declare!” exclaimed Zuroaga. “What’s in my head that I should overlook that? You must change your rig. Come this way with me.”
Ned followed him, bag in hand, through a narrow passage which opened at the right, and they went on almost to the end of it. The room which they then entered was only seven feet wide, but it was three times as long, and it was oddly furnished. Instead of a bedstead, a handsome hammock, with blankets, sheets, and a pillow in it, hung at one side, and the high window was provided with mosquito nettings. There was no carpet on the floor, but this was clean, and a good enough dressing-bureau stood at the further end of the room. Before the mirror of this, the señor set down the lamp he had been carrying, and said to Ned:
“My dear Carfora, I have explained to the haughty señora that you are the son of an American merchant, and of a good family, so that she will not really treat you like a common person. She is descended from the oldest families of Spain, and there is no republicanism in her. The sooner you are ready, the better. I will be back in five minutes.”
Open came the bag, but the best Ned could do in the way of style was a very neat blue suit. What he would have called the swallow-tails, which Señora Tassara might have expected as the dinner dress of a more important guest, could hardly be required of a young fellow just escaped from a norther. As soon as he felt that he had done his best, he turned toward the door, but it opened to let in Señor Zuroaga in full regulation dinner costume. How he could have put it on so quickly puzzled Ned, but he asked no questions. It was quite possible, however, that even the descendant of Cortes and the Montezumas was a little bit in awe of the matronly descendant of the ancient Spanish grandees. She might be a powerful personage in more ways than one. At all events, Ned was led out to the central hall and across it, to where an uncommonly wide door stood open, letting out a flood of illumination.
“Walk in, señors,” said Colonel Tassara, from just inside this portal, and the next moment Ned was altogether astonished.
He had been impressed, on reaching this house, that it was an old and even dingy affair, of no considerable size, but he did not yet know that the older Spanish mansions were often built with only one story and around a central courtyard. Moreover, at least in Mexico, they were apt to show few windows in front, and to be well calculated for use as a kind of small forts, if revolutionary or similar occasions should ask for thick walls, with embrasures for musketry. One glance around Señora Tassara’s dining-room was enough to work a revolution in Ned’s ideas relating to that establishment. It was large, high-ceilinged, and its carpetless floor was of polished mahogany. The walls and ceiling were of brilliant white stucco. Upon the former were hung several trophies of weapons and antlers of deer. In the centre, at the right, in a kind of ornamental shrine, was an ivory and ebony crucifix, which was itself a priceless work of art. The long dining-table had no cloth to conceal the fact that it was of the richest mahogany, dark with age and polished like a mirror. On the table was an abundance of fine china ware, none of it of modern manufacture, but all the more valuable for that reason. At the end nearest Ned stood a massive silver coffee-urn, beautifully molded, and it was not wonderful that he stood still a moment to stare at it, for it had taken him altogether by surprise.
Almost instantly a change came over the dark, handsome features of Señora Tassara. She smiled brightly, for Ned’s undisguised admiration of that mass of silver had touched her upon a tender spot, and she now spoke to him with at least four times as much cordiality as she had shown him in the hall.
“Ah, my young friend,” she said, turning gracefully toward him, “so you are pleased with my coffee-urn? No table in your city of New York can show anything like it. It is of the oldest Seville workmanship, and there are not many such remaining in all the world. It is an heirloom.”
“Señor Carfora,” at that moment interrupted Colonel Tassara, “I will show you something else that is worth more than any kind of silver ware. Take a good look at this!”
He stepped to a trophy of arms which hung upon the wall near him, and took from it a long, heavy sword, with a worn-looking but deeply chased gold hilt. He drew it from the sheath, gazing with evident pride at its curving blade of dull blue steel.
“I think you have never before seen a sword like that,” he said. “It may have been made at Toledo, for all I know, but it is centuries old. It was won from a Moor by an ancestor of mine, at the taking of Granada, when the Moorish power was broken forever by the heroes of Spain. Who can tell? It may have come down from the days of the Cid Campeador himself.”
Whoever that military gentleman may have been, Ned had no idea, but he determined to find out some day, and just now he was glad to grasp the golden hilt, and remember all that he had ever heard about the Moors. He had not at all expected to hear of them again, just after escaping from a norther in the Gulf of Mexico, but, without being aware of it, he was learning a great deal about the old Spanish-Mexican aristocracy, and why it could not easily become truly republican, even in the New World, which is beginning to grow old on its own account.
Dinner was now ready, and Ned voted it a prime good one, for it consisted mainly of chicken, with capital corn-cakes and coffee. It was a tremendous improvement upon the dinners he had been eating at sea, cooked in the peculiar style of the caboose of the Goshawk.
One large idea was becoming firmly fixed in the acute mind of the young adventurer, and it tended to make him both watchful and silent. Not only was he in a country which was at war with his own, but he was in a land where men were apt to be more or less suspicious of each other. It was also quite the correct thing in good manners for him to say but little, and he was the better able to hear what the others were saying. Therefore, he could hardly help taking note that none of the party at the dinner-table said anything about the powder on the Goshawk, or concerning a possible trip to be made to Oaxaca by any one there. They all appeared ready, on the other hand, to praise the patriotism, statesmanship, and military genius of that truly great man, President Paredes. They made no mention whatever of General Santa Anna, but they spoke confidently of the certainty with which Generals Ampudia and Arista were about to crush the invading gringos at the north, under Taylor. They also were sure that these first victories were to be followed by greater ones, which would be gained by the President himself, as soon as he should be able to take command of the Mexican armies in person. If any friend of his, a servant, for instance, of the Tassara family, had been listening, he would have had nothing to report which would have made any other man suppose that the rulers of Mexico had bitter, revengeful foes under that hospitable roof.
The dinner ended, and Ned was once more in his room, glad enough to get into his hammock and go to sleep. If the norther did any howling around that house, he did not hear it, but he may have missed the swing motion which a hammock obtains on board a ship at sea. His eyes closed just as he was thinking:
“This is great, but I wonder what on earth is going to happen to me to-morrow.”