“How far would we get, Padre? Have you money?”
No, Josè had nothing. He lapsed into silence-shrouded despair.
The sun dropped below the wooded hills, and Cantar-las-horas had sung his weird vesper song. Dusk was thickening into night, though upon the distant Sierras a mellow glow still illumined the frosted peaks. Moments crept slowly through the enveloping silence.
Then the mental gloom parted, and through it arose the great soul of the black-faced man sitting beside the despairing priest.
“Padre”––Rosendo spoke slowly and with deep emotion. Tears trickled down his swart cheeks––“I am no longer young. More than sixty years of hardship and heavy toil rest upon me. My parents––I have not told you this––were slaves. They worked in the mines of Guamocó, under hard masters. They lived in bamboo huts, and slept on the damp ground. At four each morning, year after year, they were driven from their hard beds and sent out to toil under the lash fourteen hours a day, washing gold from the streams. The gold went to the building of Cartagena’s walls, and to her Bishop, to buy idleness and luxury for him and his fat priests. When the war came it lasted thirteen years; but we drove the Christian Spaniards into the sea! Then my father and mother went back to Guamocó; and there I was born. When I was old enough to use a batea I, too, washed gold in the Tiguí, and in the little streams so numerous in that region. But they had been pretty well washed out under the Spaniards; and so my father came down here and made a little hacienda on the hills across the lake from Simití. Then he and my poor mother lay down and died, worn out with their long years of toil for their cruel masters.”
He brushed the tears from his eyes; then resumed: “The district of Guamocó gradually became deserted. Revolution after revolution broke out in this unhappy country, sometimes stirred up by the priests, sometimes by political agitators who tried to get control of the Government. The men and boys went to the wars, and were killed off. Guamocó was again swallowed up by the forest––”
He stopped abruptly, and sat some moments silent.
“I have been back there many times since, and often I have washed gold again along the beautiful Tiguí,” he continued. “But the awful loneliness of the jungle, and the memories of those gloomy days when I toiled there as a boy, and the thoughts of my poor parents’ sufferings under the Spaniards, made me so sad that I could not stay. And then I got too old for that 54 kind of work, standing bent over in the cold mountain water all day long, swinging a batea heavy with gravel.”
He paused again, and seemed to lose himself in the memory of those dark days.