The river, forgetful of its past turbulence, smiled and glanced and beckoned as it slipped tranquilly onward, but Agueda did not answer the summons. She turned abruptly to the right and crossed the well-known potrero path. This led her for a quarter of a mile through the mellow pasture-land, where horses were browsing. The grey was not there—sure sign of his master's absence, but the little chestnut was in evidence, and farther along, beyond the wire fence, were the great bulls, which had not been driven afield with the suckers. There stood Cæsar, the big brown bull with the great, irregular white spots. Agueda went close to the fence, and picked a handful of sweet herbs, such as Cæsar loved.
"Cæsar," she called, "Cæsar, it is I that have the sweet things for you."
Cæsar threw up his head quickly, tossing long strings of saliva into the air. He stood for a moment with hesitant look, then perceiving that it was Agueda, trotted, tail held stiff, to where she waited, her hand held out to him. He extended his thick neck, holding his wet, pink nostrils just over the barrier, wound his dripping tongue round the dainty, and then withdrew his head that he might eat with ease.
"Too bad, poor Cæsar, that the horses get all the sweets, and you none." With awkward arm held high, that she might not catch her sleeve upon the topmost wire, she patted the animal's nose; then thrust one more bunch of grass into the ready cavity, and turning, ran along toward the rise.
When Agueda had closed the rickety potrero gate, she started up the elevation which confronted her. Here the young bananas were just showing above the ground. She had deplored the fact that this pretty hill-forest had been sacrificed to banana culture, and had hated to see the great giants which she had known from childhood cut and slashed. At the fall of each one of them she had felt as if she had lost a friend. "I shall never sit under the gri-gri again," she had thought, "and eat my guavas as I look down on the river"; or, "I shall never again play house beneath the old mahogany that stood up there at the edge of the meadow." The face of nature was changed for her in this particular. It was the only thing that she had to make her unhappy. Who among us would think the world a sadder place because of the felling of a tree! The stumps stood even with Agueda's shoulder, for Natalio, that African giant, was the axe-man of the hacienda. His ringing strokes struck hip high. It was less work to cut through the trunk some distance above its spreading roots. There was no clearing up nor carrying away of branches or limbs. With all their massive foliage, the branches were hacked from the parent stem, and left to dry in the tropic sun. They were then placed in great piles about the mother tree, lighted, and left to burn. Sometimes these fallen denizens of the wood, whose life had seen generations of puny men fade and wither, and other generations spring up and die while they stood splendid and vigourous, refused to be annihilated. The fallen trunk remained for years, proof of the vandalism of man. More often, a long line of ashes marked the spot where the giant had blazed, then smouldered sullenly, to become wind-blown, intangible. This great woodland crematory having been made ready by death for the life that was to spring up through its vanquishment, the peons came with their machetes and dug the graves in which the bulbs, teeming with quiescent life, were to be planted, each sucker twelve feet from any one of its neighbors, there to be warmed and nurtured in the bosom of Mother Earth. Because exposed upon a windy hillside, the bulbs had been placed in their graves head and sprouting end downward, and at the depth of ten inches. This was a provision against hurricanes, which, with all their power, find it difficult to uproot so securely planted a stalk.
And now the field which she had helped to "avita"—for one gives in when the tide of circumstances flows too strong—the waste whose seed-graves she had seen dug, whose bulbs she had seen buried from sight, had suddenly become a field of life once more. Pale green spears were springing up in every direction—a light, wonderful green with a tinge of yellow. The spatulated leaves were handsomest, Agueda thought, when spotted or marked with brown, or a rich chocolate shade. In their tender infancy they were the loveliest things on earth, she thought, as she ran about the damp, hot hillside, comparing one with another; and as she again returned to the path, she nearly stumbled against the ebony giant, who, standing just at the edge of the field, was watching her.
"It is wonderful, Natalio," she said, "how quickly they have sprouted." She smiled upward.
"Si, Señorit'," said Natalio, smiling down. "It is the early rains that bring the life. Perhaps the good God may be thanked a little, too, but it is the good soil, and the rains most of all."
He stooped his great height, and took some of the earth in his fingers. "It is the caliche so the Señor says." He rubbed the disintegrated gravelly mass between his fingers. Some of it powdered away. The fine bits of stone that it contained dropped in a faint patter upon his feet.