The quick-witted who had dealings with Quereno knew, therefore, by his name what manner of man this was, and dealt with him accordingly. Juan Quereno was himself a muleteer, and in even such a humble capacity as scrambling behind a beast of burden over a rocky range of mountains and through a stream or two, a man may make for himself a small reputation in his small world. Juan Quereno was, namely, a Government muleteer, and carried the mails over nineteen chaotic miles of rock and river. When the mails were delayed owing, it was officially announced, to heavy snow or rain in the mountains, the delay never occurred on Quereno's etapa.
For nine years, winter and summer, storm and shine, he got his mails through, backwards and forwards, sleeping one night at San Celoni, the next at Puente de Rey. Such was Juan Quereno, “a stupid enough fellow,” the democratic schoolmaster of San Celoni said, with a shrug of his shoulders and a wave of the cigarette which he always carried half-smoked and unlighted in his fingers.
The schoolmaster was, nevertheless, pleasant enough when the Mule, clean-shaven and shy, with a shrinking look in his steady, black eyes, asked one evening if he could speak to him alone.
“But yes—amigo!” he replied; “but yes.” And he drew aside on the bench that stands at the schoolhouse door. “Sit down.”
The Mule sat down, leant heavily against the wall, and thrust out first one heavy foot and then the other. Then he sat forward with his elbows on his knees, and looked at his dusty boots. His face was tanned a deep brown—a stolid face—not indicative of much intelligence perhaps, not spiritual, but not bad on the other hand, which is something in a world that abounds in bad faces. He glanced sideways at the schoolmaster, and moistened his lips with his tongue, openly, after the manner of the people.
“It is about Caterina, eh?” inquired the elder man.
“Yes,” replied the Mule, with a sort of gasp. If the Mule had ever been afraid in his life, it was at that moment—afraid, if you please, of a little democrat of a schoolmaster no bigger than the first-class boys, blinking through a pair of magnifying spectacles which must have made the world look very large, if one could judge from the effect that they had upon his eyes.
The schoolmaster looked up towards the mountains, to the goats poised there upon the broken ground, seeking a scanty herbage in the crannies.
“How many beasts is it that you have—four or five?” he inquired kindly enough, after a moment, and the Mule drew a deep breath.
“Five,” he replied; and added, after a minute's deep and honest thought, “and good ones, except Cristofero Colon, the big one. He eats much, and yet, when the moment comes”—he paused and looked towards the mountains, which rose like a wall to the south, a wall that the Mule must daily climb—“when the moment comes he will sometimes refuse—especially in an east wind.”