This masquerade might have continued indefinitely,—for Ruiz wearied no sooner of changing fine clothes than of descanting to Ashley of his sudden but undying passion for the young Chinita, whose fortunes he conceived, as the favored of Doña Isabel Garcia, would be as brilliant as her charms,—but that first, one by one, then in twos and threes, in tens and dozens, men flocked into the adjacent villages; and though reluctant to be torn from gentler pursuits, yet proud to form and command a regiment, the young adventurer was set the task of bringing order out of the wild and discordant elements,—a task for which the training of his life, and his peculiar knowledge of the material with which he had to work, more fitted him than any especial talent, however brilliant, in the conduct of ordinary military affairs would have done.
The young officer’s vanity was flattered, for in some occult way the responsibility of the spontaneous rally was thrown upon his shoulders, and he became the central figure in a movement which within a few days assumed a picturesque and imposing character. He himself assumed that the magic of his name had called from their rocky lairs these mountain banditti, these sturdy vaqueros, these apathetic but resolute rancheros who trooped in, bringing with them rusty carbines and shotguns, and sometimes polished Henry and Sharp’s rifles, which the enterprise of speculative Americans had introduced into the country. There was no choice of weapons, but every one brought something,—a silver-mounted pistol, worthless as pretentious, or a strong and formidable short-sword, or glittering curved sabre, forged in some mountain or village smithy.
It seemed too that by mere force of will money came into the captain’s hands, and that clothing, horses, and provisions were thus brought forth from the stores and fields of Tres Hermanos; that plans were laid, and adverse possibilities provided against, a way marked out and guides provided; and that he suddenly found himself at the head of a force more fully equipped than any he had before beheld,—men eager for adventure and battle, and clamorous to be led to join the forces of Gonzales, who while the cause with which he sympathized was meeting bloody reverses around the City of Mexico in which the Clerical forces were concentrated, was daily attracting in the interior formidable additions to the numbers of the Liberals. The tales of Conservative despotism and barbarity, which later investigations proved to have been well founded, aided much in influencing the masses to seek a change of evils, even where hopeless of any lasting benefit from the new condition of affairs which it was proposed to inaugurate.
A people who had for generations found in changes of government simply fresh despotisms and encroachments were not likely to be as enthusiastic in discussion as mad for action,—for crushing and destroying the old, and seizing upon all available booty, not as necessary to the success of their cause, but as a despoilment of the enemy. And upon this principle it within a few days happened that Tres Hermanos presented more the appearance of a forced than a voluntary contributor to the military necessities of the time. Not only the common soldiers but those who were to lead them,—most of them men as skilled in ordering the sacking of a hacienda as in defending a mountain pass or assaulting some unwary town,—had poured in and filled every vacant nook in the village huts, and occupied the long-deserted reduction-works and the ruinous huts along the watercourse, and overran the courts and yards of the great house itself.
The great conical storehouses of small grains and corn were opened and the mill invaded by the soldiers, who under the half-reluctant directions of the skilled workmen kept the somewhat primitive machinery in constant motion,—varying their employment by breaking the half-wild horses brought in from the wide pastures and talking love to the village girls, who in all their lives had never before beheld a holiday-making half so delightful.
The long-closed church too was thrown open, and a priest from the next village was busied all day long shriving the sins of those whom he shrewdly suspected were ready to raise the standard of revolt against the temporal rule of the Church, whose ghostly powers had overshadowed earth with the terrors of its supernatural dominion.
Ruiz had gained a certain fame, more as a reflection from that of the man with whom he had been associated than from any daring episodes in his own career; and he actually possessed a military training that ordinarily well filled the place of innate genius, and at other times counterfeited it. He had impressed Don Rafael as a man well suited, if hedged with precautions, to lead the forces that his representations induced Doña Isabel to send to the relief of her favorite Gonzales. A leader of more positive aspirations and declared opinions than Ruiz manifested, would not so happily have welded and moulded men of such diverse and conflicting elements,—men who, accustomed to the freedom of guerilla warfare, were more ready to be led by the glitter than the substance of authority. A man of straw, who though answering a purpose for the time could create no diversion of devotion to his own person in detriment to the supremacy of Gonzales, was sought and found in Ruiz. He was indeed the simple tool of Doña Isabel Garcia, manipulated by her administrador, yet so skilfully that he came to think himself the moving power which from an isolated farmhouse had within a few days changed Los Tres Hermanos into a military camp.
In proportion with the importance of the position into which Ruiz was forced his love and daring grew, and he remembered that many men of family as obscure, and certainly of less tact and talent than he, had crowned their fortunes by marriage with beautiful daughters of rich houses; and he even began to reflect with some dissatisfaction upon Chinita’s doubtful status, although a few days before he had despaired of rising to a height where he might dare so much as touch the hand of Doña Isabel’s favored protégée.
These changes of feeling were watched from day to day with amusement by Ashley Ward, and with rage by Pepé, as with despair he saw himself fading completely from the horizon of Chinita’s life, and a new and dazzling star rising upon her view. More than once Ashley Ward saw him nervously fingering the knife in his belt, as the unconscious Ruiz stood by the fountain in the moonlight and strummed the strings of a bandoline, and in the shrill tenor which seems the natural vehicle of such weird strains sang the paloma, “the Dove,” or Te amo, “I love thee,”—sounds pleasing in any female ear, though doubtless, thought Doña Isabel, intended to reach the heart of one particular fair one; at which she smiled as she imagined this to be the pretty brown Rosario, while the tender notes in reality appealed not quite in vain to the girl who with a remarkable semblance of patience shared the seclusion of her own life.
Once only had Chinita rebelled, and that was when, instead of her usual ramble in the garden with Feliz or Doña Isabel herself, she had asked to be driven through the village, past the reduction-works, that she might see the preparations of which the distant sounds reached her. She would not be appeased at Doña Isabel’s refusal, even by the suggestion that she should stand upon the balcony of the central window, whence she could overlook the scene for miles; and so contrary was her humor that Doña Isabel was glad to agree to her sudden fancy that her old playfellow Pepé should be allowed to describe to her what he had seen. “Men see more than women,” the wilful girl exclaimed; “he will tell me something more than of the chickens that are stolen, and the number of tortillas that are eaten. Ay, Dios! I would I were a man myself, to be a soldier!”