“She keeps a chicha-shop in Andahuaylas,” answered the boy. “She used to love Don Faustino.”
For hours we rose steadily, the valley of Pincos and the little river, frothing over the stones at its bottom, sinking lower and lower beneath us, a damp mountain-top coolness tempering our toil and somewhat offsetting the absence of drinkingwater. Our shadows crawled from under our feet and grew to erectness before us, and still the rather well-kept roadway looped upward.
“Why do you go to Cuzco?” I asked, breaking in upon the story of some boyish prank; for, once I had won his confidence, the child was garrulous, after the manner of his race.
“One of my relatives lives there,” he muttered. The answer was too exactly in the tone of the same reply in another tongue I had so often heard from the lips of “hoboing” youngsters in my own land to be taken for more than a subterfuge. I hold it any man’s privilege to keep his own counsel, however, even though he has not yet reached the four-foot mark, and he was soon prattling on again as unbrokenly as if the steep slopes of his native mountains were level plain.
A crude cross, surrounded by an irregular heap of stones tossed there one by one by passing Indians, marked the wind-blown summit. On the bit of pampa that preceded another stony descent stood the ruin of what may have been an Inca fortress or lookout, with another crazy cross atop. From it spread a vast view, with the morrow’s road plainly in sight, squirming out of a half-concealed valley and panting away over another of the countless Andean ridges that divide this region as with a series of mighty walls. But it was long afterward that we came in sight of Huancarama, wedged in the throat of the gorge and extremely inviting, at a distance, to three famished and choking roadsters.
Our reception there was so typical that I am minded to describe it, for all its similarity to other experiences. We had explored the place rather thoroughly before we located the dwelling of Ezequiel Palomino, the gobernador. It is a common ruse of the rural “authorities” of Peru not only to hide from an arriving stranger, but to swear the rest of the town to secrecy. Small wonder, since they hold their positions on compulsion and without emoluments. Moreover, their inability to visualize that which is absent gives these isolated rural officials a contempt for the government and its orders, unless it is actually there in person, and well armed. The doors of Don Ezequiel’s shop, facing the grazing-ground plaza, were closed, and his Indian women in the patio as stupid in their indifference, and as clumsy as usual at covering up their lies. The set answer to any inquiry for the head of such a household is a mumbled, “No ’stá ’cá,” or its Quichua equivalent. Yet if one answer, “I did not ask where he was not, you wooden-headed daughter of a father without understanding; I asked, where is he?” one is considered rude and unsimpático. A long struggle brought only the information that the gobernador was in some indefinite place somewhere far-away or near at hand, and that he might or might not return in the natural course of events.
But this time there was a loophole in the defenses of the besieged. A shopkeeper—keeping it, as well as all its accumulated stock, seemed to be the extent of his activities—across the plaza turned out to be the alcalde, who evidently was privately disgruntled with his fellow-official. For when my questions grew pressing, he swore me to secrecy and whispered:
“The gobernador is at home asleep in his own house, because he is seasick to-day”; and he winked ever so faintly at the generous display of bottles on the shelves beside us.
Far be it from me to blame any man for whiling away an Andean existence in the only available fashion. But poor, uncomplaining Chusquito had already stood a long hour unfed and unwatered, his burden still upon him and twenty-five steep and stony miles in his slender legs. I lost no time in returning to the patio. The Indian women, seeing no way out of it, admitted that their lord and master was “sick in bed, but ya no más ha de venir”—which may mean, “he is coming at once,” or that he may come the day after to-morrow. I strode up the outside stairs to the second-story veranda and, throwing open the several doors, discovered at last the elusive official, a bleary-eyed half-breed of the most disgusting type. I slapped him in the face, figuratively at least, with my government order, and with a savage leer and an unhuman growl he ordered a servant to open for us a mud den facing the street. As to alfalfa, that, he mumbled, was “far away.” I thrust a coin upon him, piled our junk in the bare dungeon with the little fatherless one to watch over it, and set out to forage food for ourselves. When I returned, the gobernador had carried out the legal requirements of his office by causing an Indian to toss before Chusquito a small handful of last year’s corn-stalks. This time he had hidden himself effectually. I began a systematic search of the premises. In a back-yard, behind the patio wall, I found a half-dozen of the gobernador’s fat horses stuffing themselves to bursting from an enormous heap of fresh, green alfalfa! The Indian whom I caught by the slack of the garment and drove before me under all the load he could carry, pocketed a real with a promise to watch over the fodder, and to repeat the dose at dawn. But I also hovered for some time in the shadow near at hand, in the hope of catching some one attempting to snatch away Chusquito’s hard-won meal, that I might fittingly express my feelings with the toe of a boot. No victim offered himself, however, and the little love-token and I rolled up together in my ponchos on the dirt floor, to spend a night during which the rain poured as it seldom does in the upper Andes.
