This outline of the plan of action that the Council had determined upon was exhibited to us by Tizoc during our passage down the lake; and I was glad to find that Rayburn—for whose judgment I had much respect in such matters—was disposed to think well of it.
"If I expected to stay here, Professor, after the row was over," he said, "I mightn't be quite as well satisfied with this plan of theirs for running things. The war part of the programme is all right. They won't have any difficulty in getting their Tlahuicos to fight anything in the way of an army that the Priest Captain shows up with. Fighting is just what will please them more than anything else. Where the trouble is going to come in is when the fighting is over and they go in for reconstruction. It's one thing to make fighters out of this sort of stuff, but it's quite another thing to make respectable citizens out of it. That's where the hitch will be. But as we don't intend to settle down in this valley—unless we find that there's no way out of it—we needn't bother about that part of the performance at all. That's their funeral, not ours. So, for my part, the sooner they get their army in shape, and get the fighting part settled, the better I'll be satisfied."
To do the members of the Council justice, they seemed to be even more eager than Rayburn was to forward the work that they had in hand. From the pier they went directly to the enclosure in the centre of the town, within which was the building ordinarily occupied by the commandant of the post and by the officials of the civil government; and in this place, Tizoc informed us, they intended immediately to organize the new government, and then to proceed with all possible despatch to make arrangements for placing an army in the field.
In Tizoc's company, but more leisurely, we also went on to the Citadel—as we found the enclosure about the smelting-works was called—where comfortable quarters had been provided for us in the same building wherein the Council was housed. Here we waited, in somewhat strained idleness, while the Council carried on, in a chamber not far removed from us, its exciting work of destroying a government that had endured for more than a thousand years; and we were mightily surprised, knowing how prodigious was the change that then was being wrought in ancient institutions, by observing how quietly it all went on. The murmur of talk that came to us, unchecked by any intervening doors, had no sound of excitement or of anger or of violent emotion of any sort; and I could not but hold in admiration the calm, self-contained natures of these men who thus equably and rationally could deal with such vastly weighty affairs.
While this great matter—which could end only in wild commotion and fierce battling—went forward in this quiet way, Tizoc opened to us much that was of curious interest touching the near-by gold-mine and they who mined the gold. Of the existence of the mine, he said, the Aztlanecas had remained ignorant for many generations after their coming into the valley; and for many more generations but little gold had been taken from it, because the metal was of no value to his people save for the making of ornaments. But when the process had been discovered by which this metal could be hardened, and so made serviceable for all manner of useful purposes—and this the more because, by the manufacture that then ensued of tools wherewith the rock could be easily worked, mining in a large way became possible—the development of the mine upon a great scale had been begun, and had been continued upon a constantly increasing scale from that time onward. All the earth beneath where we then were, he said, was honey-combed with passages which followed the several veins; and of these there seemed to be no end at all, for ever as each vein was exhausted another not less rich was found—and thus it seemed as though all the substructure of that great mountain range were one huge mass of gold.
What the measures of weight were with which he estimated the annual output of the mine, I could not clearly understand, but the matter was made approximately plain to us by his statement that the daily product of the mine never was less than one of the great bars of gold that we had seen upon the pier in process of carriage to the Treasure-house; and that sometimes, when veins of extraordinary richness were encountered, even so much as four of these bars had been smelted from the ore that the mine yielded in a single day.
"Those bars don't weigh an ounce less than two hundred pounds apiece," Rayburn said, when I had translated to him what Tizoc had told me. "That makes the output of the mine not less than three tons a month, and, in a rough way, a ton of gold is worth just about half a million of dollars. If the Colonel isn't mixed in his figures, and if you've translated him straight, Professor, these fellows are taking out somewheres in the neighborhood of twenty millions a year."
Young gave a long whistle. "Great Scott!" he exclaimed, "that just is an all-fired big pile of money t' be wasted on a lot of barelegged heathen critters like these, who don't know th' Ten Commandments by sight, an' who've never even heard of a cocktail! D' you know what I'm goin' t' do, Rayburn, when I realize on this investment? I'm goin' t' buy th' Old Colony Railroad, just for th' sake of bein' able t' bounce th' Superintendent. He bounced me after that freight smash-up—and it wasn't my fault that th' operator got mixed an' gave me th' wrong orders—and I'll give him a taste o' th' same kind. Won't it just paralyze him when he gets his orders t' quit, signed 'Seth Young, President,' an' finds out it's th' same old Seth Young who used t' run Thirty-two on th' Fall River division?"
"Hadn't you better let him down easy by telegraphing him right now to begin to look out for a new place?" Rayburn asked. "We'll wait for you here, while you step over to the Western Union office"—which cool comment upon Young's enthusiastic discounting of a bright future brought the gloomy present so clearly before his mind that his castle-building ended suddenly, and he lapsed into silence.
But great though our wonder was at the prodigious quantity of precious metal that this mine yielded in each year, and amazed though we were by thought of the vast store of treasure that the valley now must hold, I, for my part, felt a far deeper interest in what Tizoc went on to tell us concerning the men by whose toil the treasure had been accumulated. And, truly, so bitter and so dreary was the life of the Tlahuicos who were forced to labor here unceasingly, and through so long a period had they been thus cruelly dealt with, that it seemed to me there must rest upon all the Valley of Aztlan a heavy curse that only some signal act of expiation could remove. And the coincidence struck me as most curious that here among the Aztecs, wrought by themselves upon the men of their own race, should be found identically the same cruelties which the Spaniards practised upon the Indians whom they enslaved as miners in New Mexico: whereof came that fierce outburst of revolt two hundred years ago, when the Pueblos ravaged with sword and flame the whole valley of the Rio Grande from Taos to the Pass of the North.