“Impossible! Ye are mad! Anselmo, thou art drunk, raving!” stammered forth the gate-keeper. “Don Juan is is at the reduction-works!”
“Thou liest!” cried an excited villager; “he is in purgatory. God help him! Holy angels and all saints pray for him!”
“Ave Maria! Mother of Sorrows, by the five wounds of thy Son, intercede for him!” cried a chorus of women, wringing their hands and gesticulating distractedly.
“Open the gate, Pedro!” demanded the throng without, by this time almost equalled by that within, through which the administrador, Don Rafael Sanchez, was seen forcing his way, holding high the great keys of the main door. He was a small man, with a pale but determined face, before whom the crowd fell back, ceasing for a moment their incoherent lamentations, while he assisted Pedro to unlock and throw open the doors.
“Good heavens, man, are you mad?” he exclaimed, as Pedro darted from his side and rushed toward the group of rancheros, who, bearing between them a recumbent form, were slowly approaching the hacienda. “Ah! ah, that is right,” as he saw that Pedro, with imperative gestures and a few expressive words, had induced the bearers to turn and proceed with the body toward the reduction-works; “better there than here. What could have induced him to roam about at night? I have told him a score of times his foolhardiness would be the death of him;” and with these and similar ejaculations Don Rafael hastened to join the throng which were soon pouring into the gates of the reduction-works.
Meanwhile from within the great house came the cries of women, above which rose one piercing shriek; but few were there to hear it, for in wild excitement men, women, and children followed the corpse across the valley and thronged the gates of the works which were closed in their faces, or surrounded with gaping looks, wild gesticulations, and meaningless inquiries, the tree beneath which the murdered man had been found, thus completely obliterating the signs of the struggle and flight of the murderer even while most eagerly seeking them.
John Ashley had been an alien and a heretic. No longer ago than yesterday there had been many a lip to murmur at his foreign ways. In all the history of the mining works never had there been known a master so exacting with the laborer, so rigorous with the dishonest, so harsh with the careless; yet he had been withal as generous and just as he was severe. The people had been ready to murmur, yet in their secret hearts they had respected and even loved the young Americano, who knew how to govern them, and to gain from them a fair amount of work for a fair and promptly paid wage; and who, from a half ruinous, ill-managed source of vexation and loss, was surely but slowly evolving order and the promise of prosperity.
The bearers and the crowd of laborers belonging to the reduction-works were admitted with their burden, and as they passed into the large and scantily-furnished room which John Ashley had called his own, they reverently pulled off their wide, ragged straw hats, and many a lip moved in prayer as the people, for a moment awed into silence, crowded around to view the corpse, which had been laid upon a low narrow bed with the striped blanket of a laborer thrown over it. As the coarse covering was thrown back, a woful sight was seen. The form of a man scarce past boyhood, drenched from breast to feet in blood, yet still beautiful in its perfect symmetry. The tall lithe figure, the straight features, the downy beard shading cheeks and lips of adolescent softness, the long lashes of the eyelids now closed forever, and the fair curls resting upon the marble brow, all showed how comely he had been. The women burst into fresh lamentations, the men muttered threats of vengeance. But who was the murderer? Ay, there was the mystery.
“He has a mother far off across the sea,” said a woman, brokenly.
“Ay, and sisters,” added another; “he bade us remember them when we drank to his health on his saint’s day. ‘In my country we keep birthdays,’ he said (I suppose, poor gentleman, he meant the saints had never learned his barbarous tongue); and then he laughed. ‘But saint’s day or birthday, it is all the same; I’m twenty-three to-day.’”