Fra Pedro Del Vacas, 1680.
“Can you beat it!” cried Sid, breathlessly. “Gorry, what a find!—Le’s see, John,” he went on excitedly, “1680 was the year of the big massacre, wasn’t it?”
“Search me!” said Big John whimsically. “All I know about them greasers is that you shore don’t have to oil yore bullets none to slip ’em through their feathers.”
“Sure it was 1680!” continued Sid, ignoring Big John’s observation upon our Mexican neighbors. “That year all the tribes rose against their Spanish friars. Most of them were murdered or martyred—especially those that the Apaches got hold of. This Fra came up here to the old shaman for refuge. Why did he write that inscription then? Because he was dying, of course! Escaped from the Apaches somehow, wounded perhaps, and was carried up here by the pueblo people. The Spanish missionaries did not carve their initials on every rock. He left his name for the next missionary to find, if ever one should visit this pueblo again. It means something, John. We’ll look for pueblo graves, next, and maybe get some more light on it.”
Sid’s idea of searching for graves might seem astounding to any one but an ethnologist. But the richest prehistoric relics are always obtained from exhumed graves, usually located near some shaman’s cave. The body was always mummied, and with it were buried most of the pueblo Indian’s possessions. Here the early cotton blankets, yucca sandals, baskets, pottery, and weapons are found in a tolerable state of preservation, and they all show that the prehistoric pueblo dwellers lived very much as their descendants do to-day.
Big John was used to Sid’s intense enthusiasms in ethnological matters and was accustomed to following him around—to see that he “didn’t break his fool neck an’ so cheat that rope that’s waitin’ fer him” as he always put it. He bent his tall frame in pursuit as Sid dodged out of the house and darted for a deep and dusty grotto that lay behind it. A huge horizontal fissure, not over four feet high, had been worn out here by the waters, undermining the cliffs above for a considerable distance. A stratum of mud, long since dried to dust, covered the floor of the fissure. Closely dotted over it were slabs of stone, under each of which one would find a small stone kiva or dry well. The mummy would be discovered sitting upright in it, swathed about with cotton blanketing made long before the first wool from the first sheep that gave it was stolen from the Spaniards by the Navaho. Generally also the mummy was covered with ceremonial basketry. But Sid passed them all by, for the present. What he was searching for now was a white man’s grave. And, far back under the rock he found it, a long mound with a rude cross set in the dust at its head. A single flat stone lay across the center of the mound.
Raising it, the persistent Indian burial customs proved to have been still adhered to. A long black robe, with a ghastly skull peeping from the cowl, lay flat on the bottom of the niche, which was a sort of stone coffin, its sides lined with stone slabs built in shallow walls precisely like the Indian rivas. The top was roofed over with stone, on which the earth had been mounded up as the white priest had evidently directed it should be. There was nothing else in the grave. Nothing, that is, but a flat slab of pottery, lying across the dead friar’s chest!
Its square shape at once attracted Sid as unusual and not Indian. He picked it up with queer thrills running all through him. A message from that white man of long ago! For there was writing graven on the clay, and the three letters “D. O. M.” stood at the head of the plaque.
“A Dominican friar, he was, John,” said Sid, reverently. He began to read aloud the sonorous Latin written on the plaque, conjuring up his forgotten Cæsar of high-school days.
“What’s that stuff, huh?” inquired Big John. “Sounds like spig talk, but ’tain’t. I’m a hundred per cent American, Sid, I am, an’ I don’t like it,” he growled, shaking his head sturdily.