Chapter Five.
Los Guajalotes.
The phrase, “ojo de agua” (the water’s eye), is simply the Mexican name for a spring; which Henry Tresillian needs not to be told, being already acquainted with the pretty poetical appellation. And he now sees the thing itself but a few paces ahead, gurgling up in a little circular basin, and sending off the stream which supplies the lake below.
In an instant they are upon its edge, to find it clear as crystal, the gambusino saying, as he unslings his drinking-cup of cow’s horn,
“I can’t resist taking a swill of it, notwithstanding the gallons I had swallowed overnight. After such a long spell of short-water rations, one feels as though he could never again get enough.” Then filling the horn, and almost instantly emptying it, he concludes with the exclamation “Delicioso!”
His companion drinks also, but from a cup of solid silver; vessels of this metal, even of gold, being aught but rare among the master-miners of Sonora.
They are about to continue on, when lo! a flock of large birds by the edge of the open. On the ground these are—having just come out from among the bushes—moving leisurely along, with beaks now and then lowered to the earth; in short, feeding as turkeys in a pasture field. And turkeys they are, the Mexican saying in a whisper:
“Los guajalotes!”
So like are they to the domestic bird—only better shaped and every way more beautiful—that Henry Tresillian has no difficulty in identifying them as its wild progenitors. One of superior size, an old cock, is at their head, striding to and fro in all the pride of his glittering plumage, which, under the beams of the new-risen sun, shows hues vivid and varied as those of the rainbow. A very sultan he seems, followed by a train of sultanas and their attendants; for there are young birds in the flock, fledglings, that differ in appearance from the old ones.
Suddenly the grand satrap erects his head, and with neck craned out, utters a note of alarm. Too late. “Bang—bang!” from the double-barrel—the sharper crack of the rifle sounding simultaneously—and the old cock, with three of his satellites, lies prostrate upon the earth, the rest taking flight with terrified screeches, and a clatter of wings loud as the “whirr” of a threshing machine.