“Well, climb down. We got to rig up some grub into packs, hoof it to the nearest canoncito, and reach the Rio Grande. It’s less’n two mile in a straight line to water, but twenty ’fore we gets there, if we gets there a-tall. Come on, limber up!”
Thaddeus Roscius Shea groaned inaudibly—but limbered up.
CHAPTER III—CORAVEL TIO ENJOYS A BUSY MORNING
Coravel Tio sold curios in the old town of Santa Fé. He also sold antiques, real and fraudulent; he had a wholesale business in Indian wares that extended over the whole land.
Coravel Tio was one of the few Americans who could trace their ancestry in an unbroken line for three hundred years. It was almost exactly three hundred years since the ancestor of Coravel Tio had come to Santa Fé as a conquistador. Coravel Tio was wont to boast of this, an easily proven fact; and, boasting, he had sold the conquistador’s battered old armour at least fifty times.
When the boasts of Coravel Tio were questioned, he would admit with a chuckle that he was a philosopher; and do not all philosophers live by lying, señor? There was great truth in him when he was not selling his ancestor’s armour to tourists—and even then, if he happened to like the looks of the tourist, he would gently insinuate that as a business man he sold fraudulent wares and lied nobly about them, but that in private he was a philosopher. And the tourists, liking this quaintly naïve speech, bought the more.
It was a big, dark, quiet shop, full of Indian goods and weapons, antique furniture that would have made Chippendale’s eyes water, ivories, old paintings, manuscripts from ancient missions. A good half of Coravel Tio’s shop was not for sale at any price. Neither, said men, was Coravel Tio.
He was a soft-spoken little man, quiet, of strange smiles and strange silences. His was the art of making silence into a reproof, an assent, a curse. The world of Santa Fé moved about Uncle Coravel and heeded him not, shouldered him aside; and Coravel Tio, knowing his fathers to have been conquistadores, smiled gently at the world. His name was usually dismissed with a shrug—in effect, a huge tribute to him. Talleyrand would have given his soul to have been accorded such treatment from the diplomats of Europe; it would have rendered him invincible.
One of those rare men was Coravel Tio whose faculties, masked by childish gentleness, grow more terribly keen with every passing year. His brain was like a seething volcano—a volcano which seems to be extinct and cold and impotent, yet which holds unguessed fires somewhere deep within itself.
Upon a day, some time following the meeting of Mehitabel Crump with Thady Shea, this Coravel Tio was standing in talk with one Cota, a native member of the legislature then in session.