So that was Faquo’s business—and a very hard and unpleasant business it is. Taita[12] Pedro should have provided for his family; but taita Pedro much preferred to lie around the great sugar plantation in the next valley beyond the arm of desert, and keep his swarthy hide full of the cheap rum which is the last and worst gift of the sugar cane. He never came home to the little cabin at Lurin—a hut of quincha, or wattled bamboos plastered with adobe—except to get money. Poor, fat Maria would have had a very rough time caring for her fat brood, if it had not been for Faquito. She worked in the cane fields of the nearer hacienda, and washed for the priest; but the few reales she could earn would not have been enough to put a cotton shirt on half the backs she was responsible for, after feeding all the mouths. Mariquita was a perfect little woman for ten years old; but she could only attend to the babies—which was indeed contract enough for a much older nurse. So it had been a great relief when Faquo got big enough to be a producer—with the equal good fortune that the sandy headland only two miles away was crowned by the mighty ruins of Pachacámac.
Every day, except Sundays and fiestas, Faquito was early trudging the dusty road to the ruins, his spade over his shoulder, his fat face screwed up sometimes to whistle a doleful yaraví (the only air he knew), or as often equally twisted with munching sugar cane. It was very convenient to have one’s candy growing by the roadside—particularly as there were no stores. All a boy had to do was to clamber over the adobe wall, cut a stalk of the caña dulce from amid its dense bristle of sword leaves, and clamber back to chew upon this pithy molasses candy at leisure. There was generally a culm in Faquito’s hand as he trudged across; and when he got tired of chewing the obstinate fiber, he would rest his jaws with whistling.
When he had crossed the flat, and waded the shallow brook of Lurin, there was a great scramble up the precipitous bluff which is the jumping-off place of the desert; and even Faquo was always puffing hard by the time he came to the top. An ancient wall was there; and under the long, morning shadow of this he used to sit down a moment—partly for a bit of a rest, and partly because he liked to gaze upon that strange vista in the hot, level light. Behind was the lovely valley, dense green with tropic cane-fields and bananas and palms; but in front was the great, gray desert, unspotted by one living blade. On the rolling sand hills close before him was a wild, mysterious huddle of mighty walls, tall and broken and gray in the sunlight, with black shadows lurking in their angles—walls and walls in a bewildering labyrinth. At his left was the huge castle on its tall headland, boxed about with tier after tier of walls thirty feet high; and in front of him the central hill, crowned with an enormous building. In a hollow at the foot of the castle, fifty acres were thick-dotted with dark, irregular holes, around which thousands of white specks gleamed in the sun. Momently, too, little puffs of dust flew up here and there. Castro and Juan and Pancho, the grown-up huaqueros from Lima, were already at work down there amid the bleaching skulls, each at the bottom of his dusty shaft, hoping at any moment to find a rich tomb—perhaps even the “Big Fish” of Peruvian folk lore. That is what Faquito was dreaming about, too. How many times he had heard of the hundreds of man-loads of gold that the Yuncas buried in Pachacámac when Hernando Pizarro came pricking down from the mountains, every horse of his cavalcade shod with silver!
If he could only find the Pez Grande! Or even the tail of it! He got up from under the wall with a sigh and started down the dusty trail toward where the men were at work. His “mine” was there too—where he had dug a week without finding any but the poorest graves.
Just then an owl—the little brown owl of the desert—flew up almost at his very feet and alighted upon a wall a few rods away. How Mariquita would like it for a pet! Faquo crept up behind the wall; but just as he was about to clap his hat over the bird it fluttered off a few rods farther.
It was so stupid with the sun that Faquo felt sure he would get it this time, and again he crept up. But stupid as the owl was, it was just too smart for Faquo. A dozen times it was almost in his hands; but a dozen times, too, it fluttered away again—until it had led him up the central hill, through the great ruined building there, and down the other side.
At the foot of an adobe wall sixty feet high it settled upon the edge of some deep-sunken rooms. Faquo scrambled down a gap and stole out along the parapet; and suddenly reaching up from this shelter caught the astonished bird by the wing. But he had forgotten the beak and claws, which the very field-mice know. As they hooked savagely into his brown fist he drew back sharply—and just too far. The ledge was very narrow; and overbalanced by his recoil, he fell sprawling twenty feet into the great cell below.
Luckily there was at the bottom nothing harder than the universal in-blown sand; and though sadly shaken up by the fall Faquo was not seriously hurt. For a few moments he lay there half stunned; then slowly gathered himself up and looked about in a dazed way.