The great water-wheel was trundling as fast as ever the white impulse from the old stone aqueduct could kick it along. The wheel, indeed, grumbled at so much hard work; but the water only laughed and danced as the big iron jaws of the trapiche[24] chewed up the yellow culms of sugar cane and spat to one side the useless pith, while the sweet, dark sap crept sluggishly down the iron conduit toward the sugar-house. In front was a very mountain of cane brought from the fields by bullock carts; and half a dozen sinewy negroes were feeding it, an armful at a time, between the rolls of the mill. Behind it others with wooden forks were spreading the crushed cane to dry for a day, after which it would be used as fuel to boil its own plundered juice. Off beyond the sugar building gleamed the white Moorish walls of the tile-roofed chapel and manor house, built three hundred years ago, when Peru was the richest crown jewel of Spain. Everywhere else stretched the great fields of cane—to the very foot of the sandhills of the encroaching desert, to the very rim of the blue Pacific. What an immensity of sugar it all meant!
The same thought struck the grizzled administrador[25] this morning as he stood on a pier of the aqueduct—just where its stream pounced upon the lazy wheel—and swept the scene with those watchful old eyes. “Of a truth,” he was saying to himself, “the world must be very large, as they say, and many must eat nothing else, for here we make every day forty thousand pounds of sugar, three hundred days of the year, and there are many other sugar haciendas in Peru, though maybe none so big as Villa. Truly, I know not where it all goes. Hola! Always that fellow!” and, springing to the ground as lightly as a boy, in two bounds he was at the mill.
There four of the negro laborers were in sudden struggle with a newcomer from the quarters—a huge black fellow, whose brutish face was now distorted by drunken rage. He was naked to the waist, and his dark hide bulged with tremendous muscles, as he swayed his four grapplers to and fro, trying to free his right hand, which clasped a heavy machete. This murderous combination of sword and cleaver, which lopped the stubborn cane at a blow, had found worse employment now, for a red stain ran down its broad blade, and on the ground lay a man clenching a stump of arm. Old Melito paused for no questions, but, plucking up a heavy bar of algarroba, smote so strongly upon the desperado’s woolly pate that the ironwood broke. The black giant reeled and fell, and one of the men wrenched away the machete and flung it into the pool below the wheel.
“He came very drunk, and only because Roque brushed against him with an armful of cane he wanted to kill him,” said the men as they knotted their grimy handkerchiefs upon the wrists and ankles of the stunned black.
“You did well to hold him,” replied the admimistrador. “Bring now the irons and we will put him in the calaboz till to-morrow. Then he shall go to Lima to the prison, for we can have no fighting here, nor men of trouble.”
A slender, big-eyed Spanish boy coming out a few moments later from the great castle arch of the manor house saw four peons lugging away between them the long bulk of the prisoner, and stopped to ask the trouble.
“Ah! That bad Coco. That he may never come back from Lima,” said the young Spaniard earnestly. “He is a terror to all, and now I fear he will kill Don Melito, for Coco never forgets. I shall ask my father to see the prefect, that they keep him away. And the sugar?”
Felipe never tired of following all the processes with a grave air, as if it all rested upon his small shoulders. A boy who never felt that he was “helping”—if such a very helpless boy ever existed—has lost one of the best things in all boyhood, and Felipe could not have understood such a boy at all. He went on now and joined Don Melito, and the two stood together watching the vat with professional eyes while two negroes plied their plashing hoes. It was very hot work even to watch it, but a good administrador would never trust this to the laborers.
“Now you watch it a little,” said Don Melito suddenly, with roguish gravity, looking at the boy’s preoccupied face. “As for me, I must see how are the pailas,” and he climbed the steps to the platform where the caldrons were hissing with their new supply of sap.