THE PATRONCITO’S CHRISTMAS.
Driven downwards by the storm which had raged incessantly for two days about the lofty red ramparts of the Sierra Roja, the black-tail deer, in broken bands, sought refuge in the lower foot hills. Here, also, a light “tracking snow” had fallen, and their trails lay fresh for hunters’ following.
Cherokee Sam had been early abroad, long rifle on shoulder, and lank deer hound at heels. Not all for pleasure did the gaunt half-breed slip like a shadow in his hunting moccasons through the cañons clad in pine. Meat was needed in the dirt-roofed cabin in the gulch. And for that matter, bread also, and this, too, despite the fact that the stubble sticking up through the snow in the bottom, marked the site of a harvested corn patch.
The swarthy hunter had indeed planted there; but other hands had gathered the harvest.
Mixed, like his blood, were the half-breed’s occupations, and his sinewy hands as often swung the pick and shook the pan, as pointed the rifle. When his company of gold-hunters from the Nacoochee had struck the Sierra, they had scattered through it to prospect for placer, and he had then first come upon the gulch, and though it had never panned out even “a color,” the charm of its virgin solitude had smitten the half-savage heart of this wanderer after the will-o-wisp of fortune. Too tangled for trail lay the storm-felled trees, and no man’s foot but his own ever trod the gramma grass or brushed the wild cypress bending by the stream. By this, just where the beavers had built their dam, Cherokee Sam had pitched his cabin. Standing by the margin of the silent pool, in close proximity to the uncouth beaver huts, at the first glance its mud-be-daubed exterior might have been taken for the mud palace of the king beaver himself, but for the thin smoke that slowly melting into air marked the abode of fire-making man. In the rich “bottom” near, the half-breed, with provident mind for “ash-cakes,” and “fatty bread,” had planted a corn patch, and at evening as he came over the hill above, returning from his day’s hunting, and saw the cabin, and the corn greenly waving, he hailed the spot as home.
But one day as he sat idly before his open door, a little gray burro came ambling agilely through the fallen trees, his rider, a dwarfish man of haughty aspect, whose cheeks were wrinkled, and beard grizzled, but whose eyes were as piercing and elf-locks as black as the half-breed’s own. Seated on his little long-eared palfrey, he accosted the half-breed and gravely inquired, in tolerable English, if he knew that he was trespassing on the lands of the patron, who lived at the plaza, on the plain below.
“No; I don’t know nothing about no patron,” said Cherokee Sam shortly, as he arose and stood towering in giant height above the dwarfish rider of the burro.