“Big George” arranged that we should spend the first Sunday after our arrival in the most typical Dominican style of celebration,—the partaking of lechón asado. His choice of scene for the celebration, too, was particularly happy. An hour’s easy jog from town—easy because the saddle-horses of Santo Domingo, like those of Cuba, are all “gaited,” that is, gifted with a singlefoot pace that makes them as comfortable seats as any rocking-chair—brought us to the estate of Jaragua, the exact site of the first founding of Santiago by the Castilian hidalgos. It was the first earthquake that caused them to transfer it from this heart of the valley to the bluff overlooking the Yaque. The ruins of an old brick-and-stone church, of a water reservoir or community bath, and long lines of stones embedded in the ground marking the remnants of cobbled streets and house walls, are half covered with the brush and jungle-grass of a modern hog farm. Magnificent royal palms rise from what were once private family nooks; immense tropical trees spread over former parlors more charming roofs than their original coverings of thatch; the pigs frequently root up ancient coins that may long ago have jingled in Columbus’ own pocket.
Under the dense, capacious shade of a fatherly old mango-tree sat a negro peon, slowly turning round and round over a fire of specially chosen, aromatic fagots a suckling pig, or lechón, spitted on a long bamboo pole. In the outdoor kitchen of the rambling, one-story, tile-roofed, delightful old Spanish country house a group of ebony servants of both sexes and all ages were preparing a dozen other native dishes the mere aroma of which made a hungry man withdraw to leeward and await the summons with what patience he could muster. Our host and his family, with just enough African tinge to their ancestry to make their hair curl, hurried hither and yon, striving to minister to our already perfect comfort. There is no more genuine hospitality than that of the higher class hacendados of rural Latin-America, once they have cast aside the mixture of shyness and rather oppressive dignity in which they commonly wrap themselves before strangers.
In due leisurely season the chief victim of the day’s feast, his mahogany skin crackling from the recent ordeal, bathed in his own tender juices, was slid down the bamboo pole to a giant platter and given the place of honor on the family board. Flanked on all sides by the results of the kitchen industry,—heaping plates of steamed yuca, mashed yams bristling with native peppers, boiled calabash, plump boniatos, golden Spanish chick-peas, even a Brobdingnagian beefsteak—and these in turn by the now thoroughly congenial hosts and guests, a barefoot, wide-eyed servant behind every other chair, the celebration began. Spanish wines which one would never have credited with finding their way to this far-off corner of the New World turned the big bucolic tumblers red and golden in perhaps too rapid succession. Dominican tales of the olden times, American pleasantries reclothed in rattling Castilian, reminiscences of Haitian occupation from the still bright-eyed grandmother, all rose in a babel of hilarity that floated away through the immense open doorways on the delightful trade winds that sweep constantly over the West Indies. But alas for the brevity of human appetite! Long before the center of attraction had lost his resemblance to the eager little rooter of the day before, while the Gargantuan beefsteak still sat intact, eyeing the circle with a neglected air, one after another of the sated convivialists was beckoning away with a scornful gesture of disinterest the candied and spiced papaya which the servants were bent on setting before him. What, too, shall I say of the dastardly conduct of “Big George?” For with his help the lechón, nay, even the neglected beefsteak, might have been reduced to more seemly proportions before they were abandoned to the eager fingers of the gleaming-toothed denizens of the kitchen. The painful truth is that the defelonizer of Porto Rico, the erstwhile dread of Canal Zone criminals, the man who had so often given a “summary” to a hapless member of the 17th Infantry for being a moment late at reveille, was absent without leave. Even “Mac,” with his whole family of little Mackites, their chubby faces giving a touch of old Erin to this Dominican landscape, had arrived on the scene at the crucial moment. What excuse, then, can one fabricate for an unhampered bachelor whose seven-league legs might have covered the paltry distance between new and old Santiago in a twinkling, yet who had chosen to desert his bidden guests in the heart of a bandit-infested island? Can even poetic license pardon a man, particularly a man who dents the lintels of half the doors he passes through, who remains at home to write sonnets when he might be partaking of lechón asado? Certainly the admission of such irrelevant testimony as the fact that the horse furnished him by an unobserving Dominican was not capable of lifting clear of the ground the seven-league legs already stigmatized cannot rank even as extenuating circumstances.
CHAPTER IX
TRAVELS IN THE CIBAO
There are two railroads in Santo Domingo, confined to the Cibao, or northern half of the Republic, which by their united efforts connect Santiago with the sea in both directions. The more diminutive of them is the Ferrocarril Central Dominicano, covering the hundred kilometers between Moca and Puerto Plata, on the north coast, with the ancient city of the Gentlemen about two thirds of the way inland. It is government owned, but takes its orders from an American manager. It burns soft coal, as the traveler will soon discover to his regret, and, unlike most lines south of the Rio Grande, it has only one class. The result is that the single little passenger train which makes the round trip three times a week and keeps the Sabbath contains a motley throng of voyagers. I say “contains” with hesitation, for that is somewhat straining the truth. The bare statement that its gauge is six inches short of a yard should be sufficient hint to the imaginative reader to indicate the disparity between travelers and cars. In fact, any but the shortest knees are prone to become hopelessly entangled with those of one’s companion or in the rattan seat-back ahead, and the fully developed man who would view the passing landscape must needs force his head down somewhere near the pit of his stomach. The train has its virtues, however, for all that. The more than indefinite periods it tarries at each succeeding station give the seeker after local color ample opportunity to make the thorough acquaintance of every town and its inhabitants, particularly as it is the custom of the latter to gather en masse along the platforms.
We made up a party of four for the journey. “Big George,” his sonnets safely despatched to his clamoring publisher, was sadly needed to stifle a feud between his two native subordinates in the northern port; the rumor of an illicit still in the same locality had been enough to send “Mac” racing to the station. We wormed our way into one of the two passenger coaches with mixed feelings. For Rachel it was commodious enough. After years of experience with the cramped and weak-jointed furniture of Latin-America I should naturally not be so lacking in foresight as to choose—or be chosen by—a wife who required an undue amount of space. “Mac” and I, too, had been booted about this celestial footstool long enough to accept a certain degree of packing without protest. But if “Big George” stuck doggedly to the platform and gazed pensively along the roofs of the cars ahead to where the wool-pated fireman and engineer were struggling to contain themselves within the same cab, it was not for the sole purpose of gathering inspiration for new sonnets from the fronds of the passing palm trees.
However, I was near forgetting to bring “Mac” in for his formal introduction, and there is no better time to redeem my promise than while we are tearing along at eight miles an hour over a region we have already viewed by Ford. Top sergeant of a troop of American cavalry that won laurels in the Spanish-American war, he had chosen to remain behind in Porto Rico when his “hitch” was ended. There he helped to set our new possession to rights and took unto himself the foundation of a family. With the establishment of American control of customs in Santo Domingo in 1907 he was the first of our fellow-countrymen to accept the dangerous task of patrolling the Haitian-Dominican frontier. Many a party of smugglers did he rout single-handed; times without number he was surrounded by bandits, or threatened with such fate as only the outlaws of savage Haiti and their Dominican confederates can inflict upon helpless white men falling into their hands. “Mac” made it his business never to be helpless. His trusty rifle lost none of the accuracy it had learned on the target-range; the tactics of self-preservation and the will to command he had gained in his long military schooling stood him in increasing good stead. Even when he was shot from ambush and marked for life with two great spreading scars beneath his shirt, he did not lose his soldierly poise, but wreaked a memorable vengeance on his foes before he dragged himself back to safety. “Mac” does not boast of these things; indeed, he rarely speaks of them, except as a background of his witty stories of border control in the old days. But his colleagues of those merry by-gone times still tell of his fearless exploits.
Gen. Deciderio Arias, now a cigar maker, whose revolution finally caused American intervention in Santo Domingo
