“I won’t say just now,” replied the señor, “but he knows that I am his enemy. So I am of Santa Anna, if he is to get back. He murdered my father and confiscated our property in Oaxaca. Do you know where that is?”
“No,” said Ned; “I don’t know anything about the States of Mexico. It’s hard enough to keep track of the United States. They make a new one every few weeks. They may have let in half a dozen while we’ve been at sea.”
“No,” said Zuroaga, “but they’ve tightened their grip on Texas, and I hope they’ll hold on hard, if only to keep Paredes and Santa Anna from murdering all the best men in it. Well, Oaxaca lies due south of the State of Vera Cruz, and I can escape into it if I have half a chance. I’d be safe then, for I have plenty of friends there. We have owned huge tracts of land in Oaxaca ever since the Spaniards conquered Mexico.”
“How did your folks get so much of it?” inquired Ned.
“I’ll tell you,” said the señor, proudly, and with a fiery flash in his coal-black eyes. “A man by the name of Hernando Cortes really conquered Mexico, without much help from the King of Spain. The king made a great deal of him for it, at first. He made him a marquis, which was a great thing in those days, whatever it is now. He also gave him a royal grant of some of the land he had won for Spain. This land was the valley of the Tehuantepec River, that empties into the Pacific Ocean near the eastern boundary of Oaxaca. So his title was Marquis del Valle, and his descendants hold a great deal of that land to this day. I am one of them,—one of the Marquisanas, as they call us. I am a direct descendant of Hernando Cortes, and that isn’t all. One of my ancestors married an Aztec princess, and so I am also descended from the Montezumas, who were emperors of Mexico before the Spaniards came. I’m an Indian on one side, and I’ve more than one good reason for hating a Spaniard and a tyrant.”
Ned Crawford had read the story of the conquest of Mexico, like a great many other American boys. That is, he had read it as if it had been a tip-top novel rather than a reality. He had admired Hernando Cortes, as a hero of fiction, but here he was, now, actually talking with one of the hero’s great-great-grandchildren, who was also, after a fashion, one of the Montezumas. It was like a short chapter out of some other novel, with the night race of the Goshawk thrown in by way of variation. He was thinking about it, however, rather than asking questions, and the señor went on:
“It’s a rich, beautiful country, all that eastern part of Oaxaca. There are splendid mountains and great forests of mahogany, rosewood, and pine. Through it runs the Coatzacoalcos River, northerly, to the gulf. Along the rivers and through the mountain passes, there is an old road that Cortes himself made to lead his little army across to the Pacific.”
“I’d like to go over on it!” exclaimed Ned. “I guess I will, some day. I want to know all about Mexico.”
He made up his mind, from what his companion went on to tell him, that there would be a great deal worth seeing, but at that time nobody was dreaming how many Americans, older and younger, were soon to travel over the old Cortes road. California was to be annexed, as well as Texas, and before Ned Crawford would be old enough to cast his first vote, there was to be a great tide of eager gold hunters pouring along what was called the Tehuantepec route to the placers and diggings.
The days of California gold mining had not yet come, and while Ned and the señor talked on about the terrible history of Mexico, with its factions, its bloody revenges, its pronunciamentos, and its fruitless revolutions, the Goshawk sailed swiftly along toward Vera Cruz and the powder-needing garrison of the castle of San Juan de Ulua.