Chata and Chinita: A Novel

by Laura Preston

Ruiz was the son of Tio Reyes, a life-long follower of Ramirez, for whom the chieftain had been sponsor, and toward whom he had with minute conscientiousness directed every worldly advantage which his means and position rendered possible. To Ramirez, Ruiz—who was known by the name of his mother (a not uncommon custom where her family renders the cognomen more honorable than that of the father)—owed the chance which had made him a soldier of fortune instead of a laborer in the village where his brothers and sisters plodded and toiled, in absolute ignorance of the father who had forsaken them.

Ruiz’s knowledge of this strengthened his resolution to ignore the past, and suffer no ill-timed revelations to interfere with his determination to win at one step love and fortune by gaining the hand of the protégée, of Doña Isabel,—a purpose he was certain Ramirez would oppose, for in a moment of confidence the General had intimated that it was to a daughter of his own, in accordance with a promise made long years before to Reyes, that the young man was to be united; it was for this destiny his future had been shaped, his fortunes moulded.

At any previous time the ambition of Ruiz would have been fully satisfied; his whole desire would have been to meet this promised bride, and by his marriage strengthen the interest which the caprice or affection of Ramirez alone caused to be centred upon him, and which, though often burdensome and tyrannous, was apparently the young man’s sole passport to success. Even when in pique and half-timorous defiance he took advantage of his separation from Ramirez to follow Rosario to Tres Hermanos, it was with no fixed resolution to tempt fortune alone. His short-lived passion and his independence and anger would have died together, had not his love for Chinita and the unexpected opportunities thrust upon him opened before him a prospect of advancement and triumph far above his wildest dreams, and completed his treason to his early patron, without teaching him the lesson of truth either to the new cause or to the mistress to which he was sworn.

In the eyes of Doña Isabel Ruiz was but the hireling whose faith was purchased for Gonzales; in those of Chinita, the devoted follower of Ramirez; in his own—well, time and circumstance would decide.

Like thousands of others who took part in the strife that rent and decimated Mexico, Ruiz had but little conception of the points at issue. He had simply followed the lead of the popular chieftain to whom circumstances had attached him. He had learned by observation that wealth flowed from the coffers of the clergy into the hands of Ramirez, who scattered it lavishly to all about him,—dissipating the greater part in luxurious living in cities, and the maintenance of hordes of followers in towns and cañons of the mountains, and with ready superstition returning much to the source whence it came, for never a follower of his kept child unchristened or burial Mass unsaid for want of means to purchase the services of a priest.

Ramirez had appeared to the young imagination of Ruiz absolute and ubiquitous. There were few daring deeds done that he had not shared in; scarce a town been seized and its merchants arrested until the forced loans demanded from them were paid, scarce a train of wagons laden with silver stopped, scarce a pronunciamiento with its excitement and rapid exchange of power and property effected, that he had taken no part in. He had been found wherever fighting or plunder were. He had taken a bloody part in the repulse of the Liberals at the City of Mexico, where the names of Zuloaga the President and of Miramon alike were made infamous. He had shared in the futile attacks upon Vera Cruz, where Juarez at the head of the Provisional Government maintained with stubborn tenacity, with a handful of followers, the most important stronghold upon the seaboard, promulgating those unprecedented resolutions and decrees which revealed to the minds of the people that of which they had never hitherto dreamed,—namely, the separation of Church and State; the suppression of the monasteries, which like vampires had for generations drained the resources and absorbed the intellect of the people; and the secularization of those immense treasures which, donated by the faithful to feed the hungry and the sick, train the orphans, maintain the glory and worship of God, had become the means of oppression and bloodshed, and were the thews and sinews of the civil war, in which the clergy strove to maintain the abuses of the past and forge fresh chains for the future.

In a country where the dogmas of Catholicism were as the oracles of God, where every heart was bound either by the truths or the superstitions of Rome, or in most cases by both inseparably, the magnitude of the task assumed by the astute and resolute Juarez was almost beyond the comprehension of those bred in the lands which have never groaned beneath the yoke of ecclesiastical tyranny. Any premature act, any unguarded word, might become the cause of offence; and yet it was no time for hesitation or timorous questioning.

Juarez knew the time and the temper of his countrymen; and environed though he was, virtually imprisoned in one small town upon the seashore, his influence reached to the most remote districts of the interior. And although the armies of the clergy swept the country from sea to sea, in obscure fastnesses rose daring bands in tens and twenties and hundreds, who promulgating the new promises of liberty sent forth by Juarez, maintained them with a tenacity of purpose that made defeat impossible. Worsted in one quarter, they arose in another, employing with unscrupulous daring every means that cunning or audacity could bring within their power,—claiming the excuse of necessity for those acts of rapine and cruelty in the satisfaction of personal enmities, the warfare upon the women and children, and the thousand barbarous deeds which make the history of that time a continual record of horrors. Had example been necessary, they would have found it in the career of the opposing forces; but in truth it was a time when the attributes of patriot and plunderer, soldier and bandit, became inextricably confused; so that, perhaps as completely to himself as to others, the average actor in that bloody drama became a baffling and unsatisfying enigma.

Such was the mental condition of Ruiz, though it did not occur to him to define it. Attached to the clerical party by long association, and by the uninterrupted prosperity which he had shared with Ramirez,—who since separating himself from Gonzales had followed an independent career, in which he had found the highest bidders for his services among the crafty leaders of the old régime (who to their rich gifts added the indulgences of the Church, to which no soul however blood-stained and conscienceless could remain indifferent),—when Ruiz declared himself to Don Rafael a convert to the Liberal cause, it was but as a precautionary measure recommended by Doña Rita; and it was only when he saw in Doña Isabel a patroness more powerful than the one he had abandoned, added to his resolution to make himself independent of the man who had hitherto controlled as well as defended him, that he in reality inclined to the faction which day by day seemed gathering strength, and likely to become the dominant power.

But though his political views thus shaped themselves to meet Doña Isabel’s, Ruiz was no more faithful to her purposes than to those of Chinita. To abandon Gonzales to his fate at El Toro,—for he did not doubt that Ramirez would return with overwhelming numbers to the destruction of its insufficient garrison,—and at the same time to win the confidence of Doña Isabel and that of the troops under his command, thereafter seizing the first opportunity of having himself proclaimed their permanent leader and marching to join Juarez, whose cause was becoming strengthened day by day by fresh accessions from the interior, became his dream. Thus he hoped to blind Chinita by an apparent inability rather than disinclination to further her designs, mislead Doña Isabel, and secure for himself a position which should render it not absurd or incredible that he should aspire to the hand of a protégée of the Garcias, and to the dower which he shrewdly suspected he might of right demand.