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The Enchanted Burro

THE ENCHANTED BURRO

THE
ENCHANTED
BURRO

And Other Stories as I Have Known Them
From Maine to Chile and California

BY
CHARLES F. LUMMIS

AUTHOR OF
Strange Corners of Our Country, A Tramp Across the Continent,
Mexico Today, The Spanish Pioneers of America, My
Friend Will, The Gold Fish of Gran Chimú,
The Land of Poco Tiempo, Pueblo
Indian Folkstories,
etc., etc.

NEW EDITION
WITH MANY NEW STORIES AND ILLUSTRATIONS

CHICAGO
A. C. McCLURG & CO.
1912

Copyright, 1897, by Way & Williams

Copyright
A. C. McCLURG & CO.
1912

Published September, 1912

M. F. Hall Printing Company
Chicago

To
AMADO
and
AMADO

The name that stood for such a friend is tall enough for two—

My oldest on the old frontier, my newest on the new.

Nor is it on my heart to pray my baby’s feet be spared

So rugged paths (companioned so) as once his father fared.

Contents

Illustrations

Foreword

The Truly Clever know enough to make books of a country by a few days of Pullman and hotel—or even by skimming the public library at home, without the bother and expense of travel at all.

But the few Dullards now left can arrive in Knowledge only by plodding; not “as on wings of eagles” and Inspiration, but by the drudgery of learning.

It has taken more than twenty-five arduous years to beat into me what little I hope I know about the Frontiers of the Three Americas. To learn several new languages and digest innumerable old chronicles was but one side of the task: everywhere, and among many peoples, I had to win slow adoption from Stranger to Friend; to travel footsore or saddleweary; to share their beds, their feasts, their famine, their speech, their ideas, their pleasures and their hardships—in fact, to live their life. And it was Life—Human and warm, even at its rudest.

Part of these stories, under this same title, were published in 1897 by an amateur firm which very presently succumbed—post hoc, indeed, but I trust not propter. So the book has been out of print for a dozen years. It was very gently entreated by critics and public while its young godfathers lasted.

I now add five stories and 4,000 miles of geography—clear back to my venerable boyhood. Born and bred a Yankee, I Escaped In Time (at 23), and have become a much better Indian, New Mexican, Mexican, Peruvian, Californian and composite Paisano of the Frontier. It may be that other graduate New Englanders will find here some echo to memory of what they and I used to think we knew of the Stern and Rockbound, so long ago; and that the Unremoved will pardon my lapses, in view of my enduring Alibi.

As to anything this side of New England, I won’t “either apologize or fight.” This part is not remote and precarious memory of the only true Golden Age—the Age when we Haven’t Any—but the indelible autograph of thirty older years, scarred and wrinkled upon me inside and out. It can take care of itself.

Most of these stories, in both instances, are of episodes in which I had some part. Not all are “True Stories,” but all are truthful. I hope that makes them no duller than if they had been guessed out of whole cloth and innocence.

C. F. L.

Los Angeles, Cal.

The Enchanted Burro.

The Enchanted Burro.

Lelo dropped the point of his heavy irrigating hoe and stood with chin dented upon the rude handle, looking intently to the east. Around his bare ankles the rill from the acéquia[1] eddied a moment and then sucked through the gap in the little ridge of earth which bounded the irrigating bed. The early sun was yellow as gold upon the crags of the mesa[2]—that league-long front of ragged cliffs whose sandstones, black-capped by the lava of the immemorial Year of Fire, here wall the valley of the Rio Grande on the west. Where a spur of the frowning Kú-mai runs out is a little bay in the cliffs; and here the outermost fields of Isleta were turning green with spring. The young wheat swayed and whispered to the water, whose scouts stole about amid the stalks, and came back and called their fellows forward, and spread hither and yon, till every green blade was drinking and the tide began to creep up the low boundaries at either side. Up at the sluice gate a small but eager stream was tumbling from the big, placid ditch, and on it came till it struck the tiny dam which closed the furrow just beyond Lelo, and, turning, stole past him again to join the rest amid the wheat. The irrigating bed, twenty feet square, filled and filled, and suddenly the gathered puddle broke down a barrier and came romping into the next bed without so much as saying “By your leave.” And here it was not so friendly; for, forgetting that it had come only to bring a drink, it went stampeding about, knocking down the tender blades and half covering them with mud. At sound of this, Lelo seemed suddenly to waken, and lifting with his hoe the few clods which dammed the furrow, he dropped them into the first gap, and jumping into the second bed repaired its barrier also with a few strokes. Then he let in a gentler stream from the furrow.

“Poco, and I should have lost a bed,” he said to himself, goodnaturedly. Blas always took things easy, and I presume that is the reason no one ever called him anything but Lelo[3]—“Slow-poke”—for Indian boys are as given to nicknames as are any others, and the mote had stuck to him ever since its invention. He was rather slow—this big, powerful boy, with a round, heavy chin and a face less clear-cut than was common in the pueblo. Old ’Lipe had taken to wife a Navajo captive, and all could see that the boy carried upon his father’s strong frame the flatter, more stolid features of his mother’s nomad people.

But now the face seemed not quite so heavy; for again he was looking toward the pueblo and bending his head as one who listens for a far whisper. There it came again—a faint, faint air which not one of us could have heard, but to this Indian boy it told of shouts and mingled wails.

“What will be?” cried Lelo, stamping his hoe upon the barrier, and with unwonted fire in his eyes. “For surely I hear the voice of women lamenting, and there are men’s shouts as in anger. Something heavy it will be—and perhaps I am needed.” Splashing up to the ditch, he shut the gate and threw down his hoe, and a moment later was running toward Isleta with the long, heavy, tireless stride that was the jest of the other boys in the rabbit hunt, but left Lelo not so very far behind them after all.

In the pueblo was, indeed, excitement enough. Little knots of the swart people stood here and there, talking earnestly but low; in the broad, flat plaza were many hurrying to and fro; and in the street beyond was a great crowd about a house whence arose the long, wild wails of mourners.

“What is, tio Diego?” asked Lelo, stopping where a number of men stood in gloomy silence. “What has befallen? For even in the milpa[4] I heard the cries, and came running to see.”

“It is ill,” answered the old man he had addressed as uncle. “It seems that Those Above are angry with us! For this morning the captain of war finds himself dead in bed—and scalped! And no tracks of man were about his door.”

“Ay, all is ill!” groaned a short, heavy-set man, in a frayed blanket. “For yesterday, coming from the llano[5] with my burro,[6] I met a stranger—a bárbaro. And, blowing upon Paloma, he bewitched the poor beast so that it sprang off the trail and was killed at the bottom of the cliff. It lacked only that! Last month it was the raid of the Cumanche; and, though we followed and slew many of the robbers and got back many animals, yet mine were not found, and this was the very last that remained to me.”

“Pero, Don ’Colás!” cried Lelo, “your burro I saw this very morning as I went to the field before the sun. Paloma it was, with the white face and the white hind foot—for do I not know him well? He was passing through the bushes under the cliffs at the point, and turned to look at me as I crossed the fields below.”

“Vaya!” cried Nicolás, angrily. “Did I not see him, with these my eyes, jump the cliff of two hundred feet yesterday, and with these my hands feel him at the foot that he was dead? Go, with your stories of a stupid, for——”

But here the alguazil, who was one of the group, interrupted: “Lelo has no fool’s eyes, and this thing I shall look into. Since this morning, many things look suspicious. Come, show me where fell thy burro—for to me all these doings are cousins one to another.”

Nicolás, with angry confidence, accompanied the broad-shouldered Indian sheriff, and their companions followed silently. Across the adobe-walled gardens they trudged, and into the sandy “draw,” whose trail led along the cliff and up among the jumble of fallen crags at one side.

“Yonder he jumped off,” said ’Colás, “and fell——” But even then he rubbed his eyes and turned pale. For where he had left the limp, bleeding carcass of poor Paloma only twenty-four hours before, there was now nothing to be seen. Only, upon a rock, were a few red blotches.

“What is this!” demanded the alguazil, sternly. “Hast thou hidden him away? Claro that something fell here—for there is blood and a tuft of hair upon yon stone. But where is the burro?”

“How should I hide him, since he was dead as the rocks? It is witchcraft, I tell you—for see! There are no tracks of him going away, even where the earth is soft. And for the coyotes and wildcats—they would have left his bones. The Gentile I met—he is the witch. First he gave the evil eye to my poor beast, that it killed itself; and now he has flown away in its shape to do other ills.”

“It can be so,” mused the sheriff, gravely; “but in the meantime there is no remedy—I have to answer to the Fathers of Medicine for you who bring such stories of dead burros, but cannot show them. For, I tell you, this has something to say for the deed that was done in the pueblo this morning. Al calaboz!”

Half an hour later, poor Nicolás was squatted disconsolately upon the bare floor of the adobe jail—that simple prison from which no one of the simple prisoners ever thinks to dig out. It is not so much the clay wall that holds them, as the authority of law, which no Pueblo ever yet questioned.

“’Colás’s burro” was soon in every mouth. The strange story of its death and its reappearance to Lelo were not to be mocked at. So it used to be, that the animals were as people; and every one knew that there were witches still who took the forms of brutes and flew by night to work mischief. Perhaps it was some wizard of the Cumanche who thus, by the aid of the evil ones, was avenging the long-haired horse-thieves who had fallen at Tajique.[7] And now Pascual, returning from a ranch across the river, made known that, sitting upon his roof all night to think of the year, he had been aware of a burro that passed down the street even to the house of the war captain; after which he had noticed it no more. Clearly, then!

Some even thought that Lelo should be imprisoned, since he had seen the burro in the morning. And when, searching anew, they found in a splinter of the captain’s door a long, coarse, gray hair, every man looked about him suspiciously. But there was no other clew—save that Francisco, the cleverest of hunters, called the officials to a little corner of the street, where the people had not crowded, and pointed to some dim marks in the sand.

“Que importa?” said the gray haired governor, shrugging his shoulders, as he leaned on his staff of office and looked closely. “In Isleta there are two thousand burros, and their paths are everywhere.”

“But see!” persisted the trailer. “Are they like this? For this brute was lame in all the legs, so that his feet fell over to the inside a little, instead of coming flatly down. It will be the Enchanted Burro!”

“Ahu!” cried Lelo, who stood by. “And this morning when I passed the burro of Don ’Colás in the bushes, I saw that it was laming along as if its legs were stiff.”

By now no one doubted that there was witchcraft afoot, and the officials whose place it is were taking active measures to preserve the pueblo. The cacique sat in his closed house fasting and praying, with ashes upon his head. The Cum-pa-huit-la-wen were running here and there with their sacred bows and arrows, prying into every corner, if haply they might find a witch. In the house of mourning the Shamans were blinding the eyes of the ghosts, that none might follow the trail of the dead captain and do him harm before he should reach the safe other world. And in the medicine house the Father of All Medicine was blowing the slow smoke across the sacred bowl, to read in that magic mirror the secrets of the whole world.

But in spite of everything, a curse seemed to have fallen upon the peaceful town. Lucero, the third assistant war captain, did not return with his flock, and when searchers went to the llano, they found him lying by a chapparo bush dead, and his sheep gone. But worst of all, he was scalped, and all the wisdom of that cunning head had been carried away to enrich the mysterious foe—for the soul and talents of an Indian go with his hair, according to Indian belief. And in a day or two came running Antonio Peralta to the pueblo, gray as the dead and without his blanket. Herding his father’s horses back of the Accursed Hill, he sat upon a block of lava to watch them. As they grazed, a lame burro came around the hill grazing toward them. And when it was among them, they suddenly raised their heads in fear and snorted and turned to run; but the burro, rising like a mountain lion, sprang upon one of them and fastened on its neck, and all the herd stampeded to the west, the accursed burro still perched upon its victim and tearing it. Ay! a gray burro, jovero,[8] and with a white foot behind. Antonio had his musket, but he dared not fire after this witch beast. And here were twelve more good horses gone of what the Cumanche robbers had left.

By now the whole pueblo was wrought to the highest tension. That frightful doubt which seizes a people oppressed by supernatural fears brooded everywhere. No man but was sure that the man he hated was mixed up in the witchcraft; no man who was disliked by any one but felt the finger of suspicion pointing at him. People grew dumb and moody, and looked at each other from the corner of the eye as they passed without even a kindly “Hina-kú-p’wiu, neighbor.” As for work, that was almost forgotten, though the fields cried out for care. No one dared take a flock to the llano, and few went even to their gardens. There were medicine makings every night to exorcise the evil spirits, and the Shamans worked wonders, and the medicine guards prowled high and low for witches. The cacique sat always in his house, seeing no one, nor eating, but torturing his flesh for the safety of his people.

And still there was no salvation. Not a night went by but some new outrage befell. Now it was a swooping away of herds, now some man of the wisest and bravest was slain and scalped in his bed. And always there were no more tracks than those of a burro, stiff-kneed, whose hoofs did not strike squarely upon the ground. Many, also, caught glimpses of the Enchanted Burro as they peered at midnight from their dark windows. Sometimes he plodded mournfully along the uncertain streets, as burros do; but some vowed that he came down suddenly from the sky, as alighting from a long flight. Without a doubt, old Melo had seen the brute walk up the ladder of Ambrósio’s house the very night Ambrósio was found dead in the little lookout room upon his own roof. And a burro which could climb a ladder could certainly fly.

On the fourth day Lelo could stand it no longer. “I am going to the field,” he said, “before the wheat dies. For it is as well to be eaten by the witches now as that we should starve to death next winter, when there will be nothing to eat.”

“What folly is this?” cried the neighbors. “Does Lelo think he is stronger than the ghosts? Let him stay behind those who are more men.”

But Lelo had another trait, quite as marked as his slowness and good nature. When his deliberate mind was made up there was no turning him; and, though he was as terrified as anyone by the awful happenings of the week, he had decided to attend to his field. So he only answered the taunts with a stolid, respectful: “No, I do not put myself against the ghosts. But perhaps they will let me alone, knowing that my mother has now no one else to feed her.”

The flat-faced mother brought him two tortillas[9] for lunch; and putting her hands upon his shoulders, looked at him a moment from wet eyes, saying not a word. And slinging over his shoulder the bow-case and quiver, Lelo trudged away.

He plodded along the crooked meadow road, white-patched here and there with crystals of alkali; jumped the main irrigating ditch with a great bound, and took “across lots” over the adobe fences and through the vineyards and the orchards of apple, peach and apricot.

In the farther edge of the last orchard stood a tiny adobe house, where old Reyes had lived in the summer-time to guard her ripening fruits. Since her death it had been abandoned, with the garden, and next summer the Indian congress could allot it to any one who asked, since it would have been left untilled for five years. The house was half hidden from sight—overshadowed on one side by ancient pear trees and on the other by the black cliffs of an advance guard of the lava flow.

As he passed the ruined hut Lelo suddenly stooped and began looking anxiously at a footprint in the soft earth. “That was from no moccasin of the Tee-wahn,” he muttered to himself, “for the sole is flatter than ours. And it comes out of the house, where no one ever goes, now that Grandmother Reyes is dead. But this! For in three steps it is no more the foot of a man, but of a beast—going even to the bushes where I saw the Enchanted Burro that morning”—and all of a tremble, Lelo leaned up against the wall of the house. It was all he could do to keep from turning and bolting for home—and you need not laugh at him. The bow-case at his side was from the tawny mountain lion Lelo had slain with his own hands in the cañons of the Tetilla; and when Refúgio, the youngest medicine-man, fell wounded in the fore-front of the fight at Tajique, it was Lelo who had lumbered forward and brought him away in his arms, saving his life and hair from the Cumanche knife. But it takes a braver man to stand against his own superstitions than to face wild beast or wilder savage; and now, though Lelo did not flee, his knees smote together and the blood seemed to have left his head dry and over-light. He sat down, so weak was he; and, with back against the wall, he tried to gather his scattered thoughts.

At that very moment, if Lelo had turned his head a very little more to the left and looked at one particular rift in the thorny greasewoods that choked the foot of the cliff, he might have seen two dark, hungry eyes fixed upon him; but Lelo was not looking that way so much as to the corner of the cliff. There he would have to pass to the field; and it was just around that corner that he had seen the Enchanted Burro. “And there also I have seen the mouth of a cave, where they say the ogres used to live and where no one dares to enter”—and he shivered again, like one half frozen. Then he did look back to the left, but saw nothing, for the eyes were no longer there. Only, a few rods farther to the left, and where Lelo could not see for the wall at his back, the tall, white ears of a burro were moving quietly along in the bushes, which hid the rest of its body. Now and then the animal stopped and cocked up its ears, as if to listen; and its eyes rose over the bush, shining with a deep, strange light. Just beyond was the low adobe wall which separated Reyes’s garden from the next—running from the foot of the cliff down past the old house.

To go on to the field needed even more courage than to keep from fleeing for home; and stubborn as he was, Lelo was trying to muster up legs and heart to proceed. He even rose to his feet and drew back his elbows fiercely, straining the muscles of his chest, where there seemed to be such a weight. Just around the corner of the house, at that same moment, a burro’s head, with white ears and a blazed face, rose noiselessly above the adobe fence, and seeing nothing, a pair of black hoofs came up, and in a swift bound the animal was over the wall—so lightly that even the sharp Indian ears not fifteen feet away heard nothing of it.

But if Lelo did not notice, a sharper watcher did. “Kay-eé-w’yoo!” cried a complaining voice, and a brown bird with broad wings and a big, round head went fluttering from its perch on the roof. Lelo started violently, and then smiled at himself. “It is only tecolóte,” he muttered, “the little owl that lives with the túsas,[10] and they say he is very wise. To see where he went.”

The boy stole around the corner of the house, but the owl was nowhere to be seen, and he started back.

As he turned the angle again, he caught sight of a burro’s head just peeping from around the other corner; and Lelo felt the blood sinking from his face. The beast gave a little start and then dropped its head to a bunch of alfalfa that was green at the corner. But this did not relieve Lelo’s terror. It was Paloma—dead Paloma—now the Witch Burro. There was no mistaking that jovero face. And plain it was, too, that this was no longer burro-true, but one of the accursed spirits in burro shape. Those eyes! They seemed, in that swift flash in which they had met Lelo’s, to be sunk far, far into the skull; and he was sure that deep in them he saw a dull gleam of red. And the ears and head—they were touched with death, too! Their skin seemed hard and ridgy as a rawhide, instead of fitting as the skin does in life. So, also, was the neck; but no more was to be seen for the angle of the wall.

LELO

There are men who die at seventy without having lived so long or suffered so much as Lelo lived and suffered in those few seconds. His breath refused to come, and his muscles seemed paralyzed. This, then, was the Enchanted Burro—the witch that had slain the captain of war, and his lieutenants, and many more. And now he was come for Lelo—for though he nosed the alfalfa, one grim eye was always on the boy. So, no doubt, he had watched his other victims—but from behind, for not one of them had ever moved. And with that thought a sudden rush of blood came pricking like needles in Lelo’s head.

“No one of them saw him, else they had surely fought! And shall I give myself to him like a sheep? Not if he were ten witches!” And with the one swift motion of all his life, the lad dropped on one knee, even as hand and hand clapped notch to bowstring, and, in a mighty tug, drew the arrow to the head.

Lightning-like as was his move, the burro understood, and hastily reared back—but a hair too late. The agate-tipped shaft struck midway of its neck with a loud tap as upon a drum, and bored through and through till the feathers touched the skin. The animal sprang high in air, with so wild and hideous a scream as never came from burro’s throat before, and fell back amid the alfalfa, floundering and pawing at its neck.

But Lelo had waited for no more. Already he was over the wall and running like a scared mustang, the bow gripped in his left hand, his right clutching the bow-case, whose tawny tail leaped and fluttered behind him. One-Eyed Quico could have made it to the pueblo no faster than the town slow-poke, who burst into the plaza and the porch of the governor’s house, gasping:

“The Enchanted Burro! I have—killed—him!”

Fifteen minutes later the new war captain, the medicine men, the governor, and half the rest of the men of the pueblo were entering Reyes’s garden, and Lelo was allowed to walk with the principales. All were very grave, and some a little pale—for it was no laughing matter to meddle with the fiend, even after he was dead. There lay the burro, motionless. No pool of blood was around; but the white feathers of the arrow had turned red. Cautiously they approached till suddenly Francisco, the sharpest eyed of trailers, dashed forward and caught up the two hind legs from amid the alfalfa, crying:

“Said I not that he tipped the hoofs? With reason!”

For from each ankle five dark, naked toes projected through a slit in the hide.

“Ay, well bewitched!” exclaimed the war captain. “Pull me the other side!” And at their tug the belly of the burro parted lengthwise, showing only a stiff, dried skin, and inside the cavity a swart body stripped to the breech-clout. Alongside lay arrows and a strong bow of buffalo horn, with a light copper hatchet and a keen scalping knife.

“Sácalo!” ordered the war captain; but it was easier said than done. They bent the stubborn rawhide well apart; but not until one had run his knife up the neck of the skin and cut both ends of Lelo’s arrow could they haul out the masquerader. The shaft had passed through his throat from side to side, pinning it to the rawhide, and there he had died.

When the slippery form was at last dragged forth, and they saw its face, there was a startled murmur through the crowd; for even without the long scalp lock and the vermilion face-paint, there were many there who would have known the Cumanche medicine man, whose brother was the chief that fell at Tajique. He, too, had been taken prisoner, and had taunted his captors and promised to pay them, and in the night had escaped, leaving one sentinel dead and another wounded.

The Enchanted Burro was all very plain now. The plains conjurer, knowing well by habit how to play on superstitious fears, had used poor Paloma as the instrument of his revenge—hiding the carcass and drying the skin quickly on a frame with hot ashes, so that it stood perfectly in shape by itself. The bones of the fore legs he had left in, to be managed with his hands; and in the dark or amid grass, no one would have noticed the peculiarity of the hind legs. He had only to pry open the slit in the belly and crawl in, and the stiff hide closed after him. Thus he had wreaked the vengeance for which, uncompanioned, he had followed the Pueblos back to their village. In the cave behind the greasewoods were the scalps of his victims, drying on little willow hoops; but instead of going to deck a Cumanche lodge in the great plains, they were tenderly buried in the old church-yard, restored to their proper owners.

After all these years there still are in the pueblo many tales of the Enchanted Burro, nothing lost by the re-telling. As for the skin itself, it lies moth-eaten in the dark storeroom of the man who has been first assistant war captain for twenty years, beginning his novitiate the very day he finished a witch and a Cumanche with a single arrow.

The Mummy Miner.

The Mummy Miner.

There was certainly nothing suggestive of antiquity about Faquito’s appearance. His droll, brown face, his thickset boyish figure and the alarming tatters of his scant apparel were all undignified as his name—which had got to the most disrespectful distance possible from the stately Francisco of the baptismal font. There could be no worthier name for a boy of Peru than that worn by the great conquistador Pizarro. But it is hard to live up to the dignity of the christening, and Francisco degenerates into Francisquito, which is fond; and then to Franco, which is familiar; and finally to Faquito, which is positively rude. Probably it never occurred to the lad to be comforted with thinking that the greatest conqueror of the Americas was called Faquito, too, when he was herding his pigs in Truxillo; and that if one Faquo could grow up to be Don Francisco, so might another. These consolations of philosophy never do come to us until we are too old to need them so much.

But perhaps you are thinking: “Well, why should a twelve-year-old cholo boy look antiquated? Are lads of that age in Peru expected to be ancient, any more than in New York or Boston?”

N-no, not exactly that—though in the quick tropics a boy is older at twelve than is one of the same years in the temperate zone; bigger and more mature. But it was Faquito’s occupation rather than his age which made me think of him as rather paradoxical. You will admit that to find this irresponsible, twinkling face set in one of the most century-worn frames on earth might well seem incongruous, not to say startling. The sight of this half Spanish, half Indian[11] boy of to-day, playing with lives and thoughts that were forgotten five hundred years ago—aye, and some of them, perhaps, that long before the Old World dreamed there was a New—was enough to make any explorer rub his eyes.

Doubtless we shall understand each other better by a little translation. Huaco is a word not found in the Spanish dictionaries, for it belongs only to Peru. It is from the Quichua, or speech of the Incas, of whom you have heard so many remarkable (and not very accurate) stories; and as adopted into the Spanish of Peru means specifically a relic of the ancient Indian “civilizations” which occupied this strange land before the coming of Europeans. Huaquero is the Spanish derivative to mean a digger of these antiquities—in other words, a mummy miner. This is a regular profession in Peru, just as much as gold mining. A competent huaquero commands as good wages as a skilled laborer in the marvelous silver mountain of Cerro de Pasco; and, if he works “on his own hook,” may earn much more. Peru is dotted everywhere with the ruins of large towns of the Incas and other tribes—some of them that we have so long been taught to regard as “kings” and the like, while in fact they were tribes very much like the Pueblo Indians of New Mexico; remarkably advanced in some things, but still entirely Indians socially, politically and mentally. Some of these ruins have been deserted for uncounted centuries, and no man can say who built them nor when they were abandoned. In fact, Peru is the American Egypt in antiquity; and a more than Egypt in richness. It was in its time the richest country in the world. Even before Europeans came to tap its peaks of silver and valleys of gold, the ancient Peruvians had discovered a way to treat the precious metals, and used them to adorn themselves and their temples. Like the Indians they were, they had the invariable Indian idea of the next world; and always buried with their dead the best clothing and other property, to give the wanderer a handsome start beyond the grave—precisely as our aborigines do still. And as the dryness of the Peruvian desert preserves mummies indefinitely through the ages, you will begin to see how mummy mining has become one of the important industries of Peru. There are mummies everywhere; and each mummy has still what was its wealth in life. The gold and silver trinkets, the exquisite cloths and potteries of these strange folk of old, and all the other relics of their handiwork, fetch high prices from museums and collectors.

So that was Faquo’s business—and a very hard and unpleasant business it is. Taita[12] Pedro should have provided for his family; but taita Pedro much preferred to lie around the great sugar plantation in the next valley beyond the arm of desert, and keep his swarthy hide full of the cheap rum which is the last and worst gift of the sugar cane. He never came home to the little cabin at Lurin—a hut of quincha, or wattled bamboos plastered with adobe—except to get money. Poor, fat Maria would have had a very rough time caring for her fat brood, if it had not been for Faquito. She worked in the cane fields of the nearer hacienda, and washed for the priest; but the few reales she could earn would not have been enough to put a cotton shirt on half the backs she was responsible for, after feeding all the mouths. Mariquita was a perfect little woman for ten years old; but she could only attend to the babies—which was indeed contract enough for a much older nurse. So it had been a great relief when Faquo got big enough to be a producer—with the equal good fortune that the sandy headland only two miles away was crowned by the mighty ruins of Pachacámac.

Every day, except Sundays and fiestas, Faquito was early trudging the dusty road to the ruins, his spade over his shoulder, his fat face screwed up sometimes to whistle a doleful yaraví (the only air he knew), or as often equally twisted with munching sugar cane. It was very convenient to have one’s candy growing by the roadside—particularly as there were no stores. All a boy had to do was to clamber over the adobe wall, cut a stalk of the caña dulce from amid its dense bristle of sword leaves, and clamber back to chew upon this pithy molasses candy at leisure. There was generally a culm in Faquito’s hand as he trudged across; and when he got tired of chewing the obstinate fiber, he would rest his jaws with whistling.

When he had crossed the flat, and waded the shallow brook of Lurin, there was a great scramble up the precipitous bluff which is the jumping-off place of the desert; and even Faquo was always puffing hard by the time he came to the top. An ancient wall was there; and under the long, morning shadow of this he used to sit down a moment—partly for a bit of a rest, and partly because he liked to gaze upon that strange vista in the hot, level light. Behind was the lovely valley, dense green with tropic cane-fields and bananas and palms; but in front was the great, gray desert, unspotted by one living blade. On the rolling sand hills close before him was a wild, mysterious huddle of mighty walls, tall and broken and gray in the sunlight, with black shadows lurking in their angles—walls and walls in a bewildering labyrinth. At his left was the huge castle on its tall headland, boxed about with tier after tier of walls thirty feet high; and in front of him the central hill, crowned with an enormous building. In a hollow at the foot of the castle, fifty acres were thick-dotted with dark, irregular holes, around which thousands of white specks gleamed in the sun. Momently, too, little puffs of dust flew up here and there. Castro and Juan and Pancho, the grown-up huaqueros from Lima, were already at work down there amid the bleaching skulls, each at the bottom of his dusty shaft, hoping at any moment to find a rich tomb—perhaps even the “Big Fish” of Peruvian folk lore. That is what Faquito was dreaming about, too. How many times he had heard of the hundreds of man-loads of gold that the Yuncas buried in Pachacámac when Hernando Pizarro came pricking down from the mountains, every horse of his cavalcade shod with silver!

If he could only find the Pez Grande! Or even the tail of it! He got up from under the wall with a sigh and started down the dusty trail toward where the men were at work. His “mine” was there too—where he had dug a week without finding any but the poorest graves.

Just then an owl—the little brown owl of the desert—flew up almost at his very feet and alighted upon a wall a few rods away. How Mariquita would like it for a pet! Faquo crept up behind the wall; but just as he was about to clap his hat over the bird it fluttered off a few rods farther.

It was so stupid with the sun that Faquo felt sure he would get it this time, and again he crept up. But stupid as the owl was, it was just too smart for Faquo. A dozen times it was almost in his hands; but a dozen times, too, it fluttered away again—until it had led him up the central hill, through the great ruined building there, and down the other side.

At the foot of an adobe wall sixty feet high it settled upon the edge of some deep-sunken rooms. Faquo scrambled down a gap and stole out along the parapet; and suddenly reaching up from this shelter caught the astonished bird by the wing. But he had forgotten the beak and claws, which the very field-mice know. As they hooked savagely into his brown fist he drew back sharply—and just too far. The ledge was very narrow; and overbalanced by his recoil, he fell sprawling twenty feet into the great cell below.

Luckily there was at the bottom nothing harder than the universal in-blown sand; and though sadly shaken up by the fall Faquo was not seriously hurt. For a few moments he lay there half stunned; then slowly gathered himself up and looked about in a dazed way.

The owl was still in his hand—less by his grasp than by the obstinate clenching of its own curved claws, which now began to hurt again. He unhooked them painfully, one by one, tore a tatter from his shirt and tied it about those mischievous feet. A rather stubborn boy, Faquo. It was very hard to turn his attention from anything upon which he had once started, until it was finished.

At last, when his prize was safely anchored to a clod of adobe, he was free to think of more important matters. Pues! He had walked into a bad trap. There were no doors nor windows down here—clearly the ancients had descended into these cellar-like rooms by ladders, which had long ago disappeared. And how was he to get up that twenty feet? In this adobe he could cut steps to the top; or even, in time, burrow through the base of that eight-foot wall—but his spade stood away up there on the ledge, leaning against the parapet where he had left it.

“Castro! Cas-tro-o!” he screamed at the top of his lungs—but it seemed that his voice did not rise at all out of the sunken chamber. How buried and pent it was! He shouted until he was hoarse; but knew as well that the huaqueros did not hear him, as if he could have seen them still digging stolidly away, far down the other side of the hill.

The place grew terrible to him. In such a maze of ruins they might not find him until too late. Maria would come to look, surely, if he were not home by dark; but how could she expect to find him so far from where he always worked?

He knew well, this boy of the edge of the desert, that one does not last long on such a gridiron of the tropics. Without food one may do for several days; but without water, under that sun——! Already his mouth was parched.

And that maldito owl—that was to blame for it all! He started up angrily with a clod of adobe to throw at it. But his arm dropped suddenly. “No! Nana says always that the birds, too, are children of Taita Diós, and that He loves best those who are good to them. So perhaps I am punished for catching it. Pobrecito! For now we both are caught.”

The owl did not seem to mind so much. It sat bunched upon its tethered feet, blinking back at Faquo. It looked so very grave, so very wise! Quiza it knew very much about the ruins; for here it had lived, and its people, very long now. Perhaps it even knew where was the Big Fish!

Even as Faquo looked at it with these thoughts, the owl turned its head down on one side, and looked at him soberly along its shoulder. Some might have laughed at this proceeding, but not so Faquito. He was too good an Indian to despise the wisdom of them that talk not; and suddenly he asked with great earnestness: “In truth that thou dost know, friend owl! No?”

At this direct question the owl turned its head down upon the other shoulder, and looked wiser than ever. Surely, he knew!

“But where?” cried the boy. “Tell me, owl friend!”

But the bird said not a word. Only it gazed at Faquo very seriously; and then, turning its head as upon a pivot, began to spruce up the feathers upon its back, as much as to say: “Oh, that you must find out for yourself, as I did.”

Such a wise bird, but so unspoken! Really, how convenient it must be to be able to turn one’s head square around that way, and look straight back! It must be that he can even see that spot on the wall just behind him and above his head—that round place where the adobe is yellower than the rest. Probably the plaster was broken there, and they patched it.

Faquo got up idly, and set the owl carefully to one side, and passed his hand over the spot. It was somewhat larger than his head—just a round patch of adobe plaster, centuries old, yet evidently newer than the rest of the wall.

He picked aimlessly at its edge. A pebble came out under his fingers, and showed, behind, a small crevice—as if a deep hole had been filled up, instead of a little break in the wall plaster. Instantly the boy’s eyes waked up, and a queer, professional look settled upon his face.

“It will be a wall niche,” he said gravely. “And sometimes they filled them up to change the wall; but why did the owl sit by this one, if that was all?”

He pried and pulled until his fingers were sore, and pounded with his fist upon the yellow patch; but the adobe was very stubborn. How aggravating to have the spade perched away up there, when he wanted to open this niche! For by now he had quite forgotten about getting out of his prison. The strange fascination that all miners know was upon him.

Plague take the spade! He picked up again the strong lump of adobe which had fallen with him from the upper wall, and flung it at the offending spade. It struck the sandy shelf, and a little stream of sand fell down with the missile. That gave him a thought; and he picked up his clod and threw it again and again and again.

Each time it fell back a little smaller, but each time a little more sand sifted down. Then the sand, thus started, began frittering down of its own accord, and the undermined shovel began to creep, stopped, slid a little, and at last pitched down and fell at Faquo’s feet.

He jabbed at the adobe with the corner of his spade, and the hard lumps showered down upon his bare toes. In a few moments a smooth-rimmed opening was revealed, and he thrust in his arm.

It was not like any of the niches he knew—the ones that have never been closed, but remain as they were 500 years ago, when the people of Pachacámac kept on these odd shelves their ornaments and trinkets. This one was like a nest of the “God-give-you” bird—with a small opening, but large inside. In the big hollow was something soft; and Faquo drew out his hand full of beautiful yellow floss.

“The wool of the vicuña, only,” he mumbled, disappointedly, but with the expert’s air. “But why should they ceil that up? Perhaps there is also cloth.”

In went the brown fist again; and rummaging down through the silken fleece, his fingers met something firmer. In a moment he had it out—a long bundle of that matchless weaving of old Peru; of cloth as soft and strong as silk, woven with strange figures of men and gods and beasts; such fabrics as never unthinking loom has woven, nor any machine less wondrous than the fingers of a man.

“Ay! It will be worth twenty soles!” cried Faquo softly. “But it is so heavy! Perhaps they have wound it on a stone.”

Very tenderly he unrolled it, that none of those bright threads—stronger than all the centuries, but brittle to a careless touch—might be broken. But when the last fold came off, this very stupid Indian boy fell down on his knees in the sand, and cried and cried. For it was not a stone at all.

If you will go to the Exposicion in Lima, among the bewildering collections of Peruvian antiquities, you can see two priceless idols, each big as a large doll. They are like human figures, excellently sculptured; and the strangest thing about them is that they are made of alternate zones of gold and silver from feet to head, so that they remind one of that great image we read of in Revelations.

That is the nearest Faquito ever came to finding the Pez Grande—and quite near enough for one poor boy. And that is what took my breath away when I had wakened and hauled up with my reata the little, ragged cholo I accidentally spied in the trap where he had cried himself to sleep over something hugged in his arms.

When he had laid the precious images and the spade on the broad top of the wall, and told me all about it, he insisted on being lowered again on the rope to get the owl, which he loosed and let go, saying, in the tone of an old man:

“Taita Diós—God our Father—sends us friends we know not. For the owl brought me here and showed me the place, so that now we are very rich. And even so, I could have died there without the help of you. So I think your grace may be even as wise as the owl, which knows where is the Pez Grande.”

A Boy of the Andes.

A Boy of the Andes.

Probably they would not have seen Ramon Ynga at all, but for the llamas. There was enough else to look at. The overpowering walls of the mountains on both sides seemed to turn the eyes, even as they turned the foaming Rimac, into a channel from which there was no escape. Up at the end of the cleft was such a sight as no man can long hold his eyes from—the black peak of Chin-chán, bent down with its load of eternal winter. There is something awful about the snow that never melts—the great blank fields, the wrinkled glaciers, the savage ice cornices, the black rocks that peer out hopelessly here and there. It is so different from the friendly white we know and welcome for its sleigh rides and coastings, its snow men and snow-ballings.

It was far up the summit of the Peruvian cordillera, at the very foot of the last wild peaks that stand 18,000 feet in the sky. Where the panting mules trudged, 3,000 feet below the peaks, was low, green herbage; and 500 feet lower yet the little torrent, white as its mother snows, roared and chuckled alternately to the uneven wind. But up yonder all was so white and still; their eyes kept lifting up to it, forgetful of the dangerous trail—the mules could take care of that. They, poor brutes, seemed ill at ease. They breathed in short, loud gasps; and every forty feet or so they stopped and rested for a few moments, unmindful of the spur. Then, when they were ready, they started up again of their own accord, sighing heavily. They would not last much longer, at this rate.

“I think I’ll get off and walk awhile,” said the younger of the two, a bronzed, sinewy man of twenty-five. “It spoils even this scenery for me, to see the suffering of the mules. One wouldn’t think they’d play out so, on such a good trail.”

“It is not the grade,” remarked the Professor, quietly, “as perhaps you will learn. I am sorry for the mules, too; but it is better to risk them than something more important.”

“Why, you speak as though there were some danger about it!” said the younger man, who was now striding sturdily along, leaving his animal to follow. Many a time he had climbed Pike’s Peak and its brother giants of Colorado, and once had stood on the cone of Popocatépetl. A peak was nothing to him; and as for this excellent path—pooh! It was mere child’s play.

The Professor watched him without a word, but with an expression half quizzical, half grave. After a hundred yards he spoke:

“You don’t seem quite so springy, Barton. I never saw you heavy-footed before.”

“Well, the truth is, Professor,” gasped Barton, rather shamefacedly, “I feel most remarkably queer. My knees ache as they never did before—though I wouldn’t mind that so much. But I cannot seem to breathe well. Here my heart and lungs are pounding away, as if I’d been sprinting for the 220-yard record! It’s enough to make a man ashamed of himself.”

“No cause at all for shame, my dear boy; you are simply learning what everyone has to learn who tempts great altitudes. Now get on your mule.”

“No, I’ll wear this thing off!” cried the athlete, impatiently. “I’m no puny boy, to give up just because I feel a little wrong. I’ll just keep at it, and beat it yet!”

“Barton,” said the older man, in a tone his companion had never heard him use before, “you get on that mule, and let us have no more nonsense. I like your pluck; and it is because you have more real ‘sand’ (as they say in our West) than any young man I know, that I picked you out for this journey. But courage is a dangerous thing unless you mix it with brains. You must learn that there are some things pluck cannot overcome—and this is one of them. Mount, then!”

Barton obeyed with rather an ill grace, and promptly got angrier with himself at realizing what a relief it was to be perched again in the ridiculously comfortable Peruvian saddle. He could not get over a feeling of shame that the muscles which had borne the cruelest tests of the frontier should now have “played the baby,” as he put it; and he rode on somewhat sulkily.

It was here that Ramon Ynga stumbled into their lives; and, as I have said, all by the doing of the llamas. As the travelers rounded a sharp turn in the trail the mules stopped suddenly almost face to face with the two strangest animals that Barton had ever seen. Shabby, grotesque figures they were, with splay feet, long, awkward legs, and bodies looking like long tussocks of dry grass. But their necks were the worst—tall and ungainly as stovepipes covered with hair. Their backs were hardly so high as those of the under-sized mules; but on these unspeakable necks their heads were quite on a level with Barton’s. And such heads! They were disproportionately small and ludicrously narrow, with pointed ears, malignant little faces, and lips wickedly drawn back.

“Why, I never saw anything, except a rattlesnake, look so vindictive!” cried Barton. “What on earth are they?”

“That is the national bird of Peru,” replied the Professor roguishly. “We are apt to see many up here. In fact, if we had had any daylight in Casapalca you would have noticed many hundreds of them; for they bring all the ore to the stamp mills, and do most of the freighting besides. Lower than 10,000 feet you will hardly ever find them; the llama[13] is a mountain animal, and soon dies if taken to the coast.”

“So that is the llama! But I thought that was called the ‘Peruvian sheep;’ and these look no more like sheep than my mule does.”

“It got that foolish name from the closet naturalists. No one who ever saw a llama could fail to recognize it for a camel—smaller and longer-haired than the Eastern beast, and without a hump; but a true camel.”

“It’s a funny-looking brute,” laughed Barton. “It seems to put in its time thinking what a grudge it has against everybody. Hi! Get out of the way, you standing grievances!”

The Professor and the young frontiersman had thus far enjoyed the pause of the mules; but now the need of pushing on recurred to their minds, and Barton’s exclamation was meant as a signal for advance. But the llamas stood stolidly, blocking the trail. He drummed his spurs against his mule; whereat the animal took two steps forward and stopped, bracing back, unmindful of the rowels. The llamas did not take a step. Only they seemed to drop their bodies a little, upon those long legs.

“Why, they’re not such fools as they look!” cried Barton, whose sharp eye understood the trifling motion. “See! They are going to give us the edge!”

The trail was two feet wide—an endless thread of a shelf hewn along the mountain wall. On the right, the great, dark slope ran up to the very clouds; on the left, one could snap a pebble into the white torrent, 500 feet below.

“I have heard that they always take the wall,” the Professor rejoined, “and that when two llama trains meet on one of these trails it is almost impossible to make a passing. Sometimes they even shove each other off the cliff.”

“I guess we’d better not force the right of way—a tumble into the Rimac there is more than I care for!” And Barton jumped from his mule and advanced upon the blockaders, waving his arms threateningly.

“Look out!” cried the Professor; but before the words were fairly off his tongue, the foremost llama opened its ugly mouth and spat at Barton in fury. At this unpleasant salutation he retreated hastily.

“That is their weapon of defense,” said the Professor. “And their saliva is wonderfully acrid. It’s as well you didn’t get it in the face. But I wish they would get out of the way—we have no time to spare.”

Just then there was another surprise. A figure hardly less remarkable than the camels slid down from the overhanging hillside, and stood in the path, looking at the startled travelers. It was a dwarfish creature, not four feet tall, with a large, round head, a broad, strong body, and very short legs, peculiarly bundled up in unfamiliar clothes. A boy—what in the world was he doing on that impossible slope? What a goat he must be!

“Hulloa!” cried Barton, as soon as he could find a voice.

“God give you good day, sirs,” answered the lad gravely, in thick Spanish. “Wait me so-little, and I will get you by.”

With this he called “U-pa!” to the llamas, lifting his finger as if to point them up the trail. Ordinarily they would have obeyed; but the aggressive manner of Barton had roused their obstinacy, and they did not budge. The boy put his shoulder to the ribs of one, and heaved hard, but the brute stood its ground.

“Well, it is to wait!” said he; and ran about the path, gathering up very small pebbles until his shabby hat was full. Then he sat down on a boulder that jutted from the bank, settling himself as if for a long rest, and threw a mild and measured pebble at each llama. They turned their heads a little and wrinkled their disagreeable noses. He waited a moment and then pitched two more pebbles—which had the same effect. So he sat, slowly and mechanically tossing his harmless missiles upon the dense hair of his charges. Evidently he was in no hurry; and the two travelers, impatient as they were, had too much wisdom of experience to try to push him. They sat quietly in their saddles, watching the droll scene. It was very ridiculous to need deliverance from two stupid beasts, and to get it from such an owlish little tatterdemalion. His ragged clothing was of very thick, coarse cloth; and upon his feet were the clumsy yanquis, or rawhide sandals of mountain Peru, and he wore thick stockings rising to his knees. Over his trousers was a curious garment, half apron and half leggings; and oversleeves of the same material, hung with a cord about his neck, came up over the elbows of his coat. These two garments were knit in very strange patterns, amid which were square, brown llamas wandering up and down a gray background. Around his waist was a woven belt, now very old, but of beautiful colors and workmanship. And his face—what a brown, round riddle!

“How do you call yourself, friend?” asked the Professor in Spanish. “And have you ten years or a hundred?”

“Ramon Ynga, señor. And the other I do not know. I have been here a long time—ever since they built the mill at Casapalca.”

“You must be about fifteen, then. And where do you live?”

“There, above,” answered Ramon, tossing another pebble.

“A curious habit of the mountaineers,” said the Professor. “These Indians, instead of living in the valleys, climb to the very tops of these peaks, and build there their squalid stone hovels. They seem to think nothing of the eternal clambering up and down.”

An hour crawled by, and the stones in Ramon’s hat were running low. Suddenly the brown llama turned with a snort of disgust, and strode off up the trail. The white one hesitated a moment, snorted, and followed. “That way they get tired, sirs,” said the boy, emptying his hat and pulling it down upon his thatch of black hair.

“I’d take a good club to them!” growled Barton, who had great confidence in the Saxon way of forcing things.

“No, the boy is quite right. It is another case wherein you must not try to be smarter than nature. The llama is the stubbornest brute alive—a mule is vacillating compared to him. If you put a pound too much on his load, he will lie down, and you might beat him to death or build a fire beside him, but he would not get up. Nobody but a Peruvian Indian can do anything with a Peruvian camel, and Ramon has just shown us the proper tactics. Hurt the animal, and he only grows more sullen; but the pebbles merely tease him until he can bear it no longer. And really he repays patience; for he is the only animal that can work effectively at these altitudes, where horses and mules are practically useless. But adelante! (forward!)”

“Is your Excellency going to Cerro de Pasco?” asked the little Peruvian, running alongside the mule and looking up at the Professor with unusual animation in his non-committal face. He had never spoken with “Yankees” before, and indeed for any stranger to notice him kindly was a new experience. He liked these pale men; and a dim little wish to please them warmed in his heart. That big young man—why, he was taller than any Serrano in the cordillera!—was good. Ramon had seen money a few times; but that round, shiny sol,[14] which the stranger had tossed him when the llamas moved, was the first he had ever held in his hand; and it was almost a worry to be so rich! But the other man, with a little gray above his ears, who only looked at him so, and spoke as if he knew him—he, surely, was very great; and it was to him that the ragged boy had said “Exceléncia.” His face was kindly; and there were little smiles at the edges of his mouth, though he did not laugh.

“No, hijito (little son),” he answered, “we are not bound to the mines. We are going to climb the Chin-chán, to look at the ice cornices and to measure them.”

Even Ramon looked astonished at this. If a Serrano had said it, every one would know he was crazy. Or if it were the young man—well, what could you expect of one who would give away a whole sol? But this one—whatever he did, it must be right. He certainly was not crazy. Still——

“But the Soroche, your Excellency,” ventured the boy. “For all strangers have it; and many die, even in crossing the slope. Only we who were born here can go so high.”

“We have to go, my boy; for I must look at the snow fields and the cliffs of ice, and measure them,” said the Professor, kindly. “I know well of the mountain sickness, and we will be very careful. Besides, we are both very strong.”

THE HOME OF THE SOROCHE

“It is not always of the strong,” persisted Ramon. “Sometimes the sick cross in safety, and those who are very large and red—even larger than your Excellency’s friend—fall suddenly and never rise again; for the Soroche is stronger than any.”

“You are quite right, my wise friend. It is terrible. But all do not fall victims, and we must brave it.”

“At the least, Excellency, let me go also! For I know these hills very well, and perhaps I could help. As for the llamas, my brother Sancho comes even yonder, and he will herd them.”

“You won’t really take the little rat up there, will you, Professor?” broke in Barton. “It would be the death of him.”

“M-m! I only hope we may be as safe as I know he will be! Está bien, my boy! Vamos!”[15]

At nine the next morning the three were entering the edge of the snow fields. They had camped for the night in a deserted hovel at the head of the valley; and there the mules could be seen grazing, pulling as far down bill as their ropes would allow. The hut was not a mile behind; but the travelers had been ever since daylight coming thus far. The Professor looked old; and Barton’s big chest was heaving violently. As for Ramon, he clambered along steadily and soberly, stopping only when he saw the others had stopped.

By noon they were at the foot of the last ridge, in a great rounding bay flanked by two spurs of the upper peak. The curving rim far overhead was a savage cliff of eternal ice—a cliff of 1,500 feet sheer. At the top a great white brow projected many yards, overhanging the bluish precipice.

“It is—a—noble—cornice,” gasped the Professor, as they sank upon the snow to rest for the hundredth time since morning. “But I fear—we—made—a mistake. We—should—not have—tried this—without—waiting a—few weeks—in Casa—palca—to get—acclimated.”

“It’s awful!” groaned Barton. “My head—feels—as if—it would—burst. But I’ll be hanged—if I—give up!” And the resolute young man fairly snatched himself to erectness, and started toward the spur. But with the third step his tall form swung half around, and swayed an instant, and fell as a dead pine falls in the wind, and lay heavily upon the snow. His face was black; and a bright red stream trickled from each nostril as the Professor sank on his knees beside him, crying huskily, “My—poor boy! I have—killed—you!”

The Professor’s face had a strange look, too. His eyes were very red and swollen—but that was from the merciless glare of the snow—and in his cheeks a gray shadow seemed to be struggling with the unnatural purple. And he was so unlike the Professor of yesterday. He seemed so dull; even stupid!

“Come, Excellency!” Ramon was shouting in his ear. “It is the Soroche, the mountain sickness, and none can fight it. We must be gone from here, else very soon you are both dead. Come!” The small brown fist was tugging at the old man’s shoulder, and in the quaint, boyish voice was a strange thrill. The Professor understood. Dazed as he was, the way in which Ramon said that one word “Come” roused and cheered him like the far bugle call which tells of reinforcements to the besieged. He was not alone. Here was help—the help of a dwarfed Indian boy of fifteen! But that is often the very sort we need—not muscle so much as the elbow-touch of a staunch heart.

“But—Barton?” said the Professor. He could no longer think clearly; and instinctively he turned to Ramon as superior. “Barton? We—cannot—leave—Barton!” The Serrano lad looked at the prostrate figure and then at the Professor.

But even in those bloodshot eyes Ramon read something that decided him. It was very hard, and it was more dangerous so; but the Friend-man loved the other. The other must be tried for too!

Ramon unwound his long woven belt and passed it under Barton’s back. The ends he drew up under the armpits and crossed them at the back of the neck, giving one end to the Professor and keeping one himself. Then, when they pulled apart, the crossing of the belt supported Barton’s head. “Now!” cried Ramon; and pulling strongly the two dragged the heavy form along the snow to the edge of the steep slope. The Professor’s face was purple, and drops of blood beaded his finger tips.

“Let me, señor!” said the boy; and taking both ends of the belt over his shoulder, he went plunging down the declivity, Barton’s limp head bumping against his legs, and Barton’s body and heels dragging in the soft snow just enough to act as a brake. As for the Professor, he stumbled after as best he could, with vague eyes and bursting veins and treacherous legs. Sometimes he fell forward and plowed a rod in the snow, and once he was beginning to roll, but Ramon leaped and stopped him just in time.

And so at last they came to the end of the snow. The boy laid his burden upon the matted grass, with head up-hill, and piled a little drift of snow about the head. “Put it so, also, to your head,” said he, “and I will bring the mules.”

With that he was racing off down the hill in knowing zigzags, though it looked too steep for a goat.

In half an hour a very tired boy was getting two helpless men upon two almost helpless mules. Perhaps if the latter had been able to object, he could not have succeeded. But by the help of the slope, and hauling with his belt over the saddle from the down-hill side, he presently had both up. Barton’s feet he tied together under the mule, and Barton’s hands around its neck. The Professor could sit up, in a stupid way, and Ramon tied only his feet. “Hold well!” he cried loudly and sternly, but with the same little quiver in his voice; and taking both bridle reins in one hand, he plunged down the hill, his weight thrown forward upon the hard bits, so that the reluctant mules had no choice but to follow.

The only one who remembers much of that grim journey is Ramon, and as he is not much given to talking, no one knows just what he does think of it. The Professor’s clear recollection begins with finding himself on board the train at Casapalca—a train of that most wonderful railroad in the world, the railroad above the clouds, that clambers up and burrows through the cordillera of Peru. Before that are only hazy memories of a vast mountain wall leaning over to crush him; a winding path in the air; a queer, boy’s voice, coming from nowhere, with little Spanish words of cheer. And now a round, brown face from the opposite seat was watching him seriously—even tenderly, the Professor fancied—while the burly conductor was saying:

“I never seen it come any closer! How ever the boy got you in, beats my time. And I saw he hated to leave you, so I says to him, says I, ‘Just get in, sonny, ’n’ go down to Lima with us, ’n’ I’ll fetch you back if I lose my job!’ He’s the right sort, he is! An’ you’ll be all right, as soon as you get down there—that’s the only medicine for the S’rochy.”

All right they were next day in the capital. Even Barton was able to sit up; and he nodded weakly as the Professor said to Ramon:

“My boy, I would like you to go with us. We have to travel much in Peru; and if you will accompany us you will earn good wages. And you shall be as my son. For neither of us would be alive now if we had not had a little hero with us. Will you come?”

Joy flashed over Ramon’s face. But then it faded, and tears started in his eyes as he said simply:

“You are good, Excellency! I would go anywhere with you. But in the Chin-chán is my mother, with the babies; and since father died, I must be the man, for Sancho is too young. Adios!”

And he ran out, so that they should not see him crying.

A Daughter of the Misti.

A Daughter of the Misti.

Not the elder daughter, whom all the world knows where she sits, white upon her little green patch against the hopeless desert, looking up with now and then a shiver at the white-headed giant, her father. No, the one I mean now is something like three hundred and fifty years younger than the Misti’s first born and favorite, and not white at all, nor over-dignified, nor even given to much thought as to when taita[16] shall shrug again those mighty shoulders and rattle the walls about her ears. In fact, to look at the two—the fat, brown, clumsy cholo girl and the shining city—I dare say you would never take Tránsita and Arequipa[17] for sisters at all. But as both are daughters of the Misti, I see no other way out of it.

What! You don’t know either of them? Hm! Of course it could hardly be expected that you should be acquainted with Tránsita, for she lives on a back street on the other side of the river and comes very seldom to the plaza. And probably you could not talk with her, anyhow, since her speech is only Spanish and Quichua. But not to know Arequipa—why that is to count out the prettiest city in Peru, and one of the oldest in America. And if you do not know the daughter you have missed the father, too, which is an even greater pity—for he is one of the handsomest giants on earth, though a baby in his own family. Well, well—the sooner I give you an introduction the better, then.

The Misti is an inactive but living volcano, a hundred miles from the sea, in southern Peru. As I have said, it ranks small at home, being only 19,300 feet tall, while some of its brother Andes tower to 26,000 feet. But few of them are so handsome. It stands alone and erect, with head up and shoulders squared, while some of them look as if the nurse had dropped them in their babyhood and they had never got their spines straight again. It is a huge and very perfect cone, symmetrical as the sacred peak of Japan, but vastly higher. So steep is it that the thick blanket of volcanic cinders would surely slip down from its shoulders, except for the long brooches of dead lava that pin it up. As for its head, that is old with eternal snow.

For time unknown—since long before history—the Misti has been the best known mountain in Peru; and I do not much wonder. It has a nobility of its own, such as its mightier brethren do not all possess. Just to its right vast Charchani climbs 20,000 feet into the sky, and a most majestic peak it is. Just to its left towers the grand wall of Pichu-pichu, itself taller than the greatest mountain in the United States. But it is always the lone, solemn Misti, to which every one looks, of which every one speaks—with a strange mixture of love and awe. Meeting an Arequipeño abroad, you might very likely fancy there were no other mountains in sight of his home; but you will not be left long in ignorance that there is a Misti. Even before Europeans knew of America, the remarkable Indians of Peru half worshiped the Misti; and so Arequipa gets its name, an Aymará word which means “with the peak behind it.” Far up its deadly sides they toiled to make their sacrifices to Those Above; and even in the elder crater I have counted the ruins of aboriginal shrines. It is so isolated, so individual, so majestic in its awful stature; and above all, while its neighbor brothers are just mountains, it has a soul—the wondrous fire-soul of the volcano.

A stern father is the Misti. His daughter is surely not undutiful, but many a time he has punished her sorely. Many a time he has sent her sprawling in the dust, and turned her smiling whiteness to a generation of mourning. So, even as late as 1868 over half the buildings of Arequipa went down in a mortal chaos of stone, killing as many people as fall in an ordinary battle.

One might fancy that such a parent would get himself disliked; but his severity does not seem to be laid up against him. Arequipa loves the Misti—and as for Tránsita, she loved him even more than she did Arequipa. Their house faced south, but the first thing in the morning Tránsita used to climb to the stone-arched roof to look at the peak black against the rising sun; and the last thing at evening to watch the rosy west-glow upon that venerable head. And always she wondered the more, for now as she grew taller, and the untaught soul had room to swell, she saw more and more in that great dark one with his elephant-wrinkled hide and the lava scars on his white head, and now and then, of a hushed dawn, the ghost of a cloud floating plume-like from his brow. Perhaps it was because he is so incomprehensible a giant that she comprehended him—in that child way which is more at home in some mysteries than we older stupids are. At all events, she turned to him for companionship and confidences, and had a way of talking with him ever so softly, that no one else should hear.

“Now, taita,” she was whispering this morning, “hast thou heard what is to be? For they say that the Tuerto, the cross-eyed, who oppressed us before, is to make new revolution, that he may be president again and rob himself still richer. And it has always been in Arequipa that they begin. Dost thou think it? And would they kill Eugénio? For he is very loyal, and is one of importance, being a corporal. Do not let them hurt my brother—wilt thou, taita?”

To all these questions and the adjuration the giant answered never a word. His face was grave with the morning shadows. To look at him no one but Tránsita would have dreamed he knew anything about it.

Nor do I really know that he did, though he had the best of opportunities. From that lookout in the sky, so overtopping the town, he could see right into the high-walled court of Don Telesfor’s mansion. It was a flat old courtyard, paved with tipsy blocks of stone and framed four-square with long shadowy verandas of the white sillar.[18] In the center was a long-forgotten fountain, and at the middle of each side a quaint staircase of the same white tufa ran up to the cracked and precarious sillar roof. No one was to be seen about the court. Only, along the eastern portal[19] was a long ridge of fresh earth.

Don Telesfor was making repairs. A great many people in Arequipa had long been free to say that he ought to mend his ways, and the old place might certainly count as a way that should be mended. His career as prefect, years before, had been by no means free from charges of extortion and thievery, and it was notorious that he would be glad to see again in the presidential chair the unscrupulous usurper who had grown from pauper soldier to many-times millionaire in one term. For this reason Don Telesfor was as little beloved as his old patron; and poor cholos, with better love than understanding of freedom, took malicious pleasure in laying the scourge to their two backs jointly. “Look at the Cacerist!” they would growl audibly when Don Telesfor thundered down the reeling cobblestones on his silver trapped horse. As for his house, I fancy not one of them ever passed it after nightfall, with a bit of chalk in his pocket (and chalk is the last thing to be without in Peru during a campaign), but he stopped and scrawled in elastic Spanish upon the outer wall: “Death to the tyrant and his leeches! Down with the cross-eyed!”

But though he was unpopular in person and politics, no one thought of taking Don Telesfor very seriously. Like his patron, he had turned tail when the Chilean wolves came down on the fold; and unlike him, his caution was greater than his greed. Every one knew him for timorous. The unhappy republic was torn and pale with fear of a new usurpation; but in all the whisperings and the glances over the shoulder, Don Telesfor was quite forgotten. Since the downfall of the pretender he had been quietly cultivating his pretty chacra at Yura, and now even thought to patch up the old mansion in Arequipa, long tousled and neglected since the terrible temblor of ’68. This was praiseworthy and reassuring, too. In those troublous times to think rather of beautifying and restoring the home was clearly a pledge of peace.

Sober burros, each laden with two big white blocks of sillar, had been trudging down from the lofty quarries, and the tottering arches of the courtyard had been rebuilt. Now, Don Telesfor was hauling rich soil all the way from his plantation to make flower beds in the patio.[20] Some felt that the soil of Arequipa ought to be good enough for any flower; but if he chose to haul dirt twelve miles instead of one, that was his lookout. So the crazy wagons creaked across the ancient stone bridge every afternoon and bumped into the courtyard, and were relieved of their mules. Don Telesfor was always on hand in person to attend to the unloading—he and his nephew, Don Beltran, and two old peons—while the drivers took their animals to the acéquia. One would have thought that loam sacred, by the care he took of it.

Just now the big gates were shut. The wagons would not be in from Yura for some time yet. Along the east side of the patio was the long mound of soil, paling in the hot sun; aside from that, one might have thought the place abandoned.

But if one could have peered through the heavy doors of the middle room of the north portal one would have seen Don Telesfor and Don Beltran and half a dozen strangers talking low and earnestly. The windows and even the skylight were shuttered, and the one candle sent strange shadows sprawling over a formidable row of long, shallow, iron-bound boxes stained with fresh earth.

“To-morrow night, then,” said one of the strangers, laying his hand on Don Telesfor’s shoulder. “Even so it will begin in Lima on the eve of the new congress, and all is set that the revolution burst in the same hour in Truxillo, Cuzco, here and all Peru. And carrying it off well here in the south, who knows but Don Telesfor shall earn a place in the new cabinet?”

“Ójala!” sighed Don Telesfor, his mouth twitching greedily. “At all events, this end is safe. I promise you no one so much as suspects us, and with the two hundred men that will sleep here to-night hidden, we can easily put down any resistance. The guárdias are the only danger; for, being cholos[21] they all worship Piérola, and it avails not the trying to buy them. The only argument with such stupids is to rap them the back of the head—and for that, thirty secure men are appointed to hide upon the beat and silence each his policeman. By midnight that should all be settled without noise, and then we will fall upon the barracks. A hundred soldiers, asleep, have nothing to say with us; and in the morning Arequipa will waken to find herself in our ranks.”

“Nothing lacks, then?”

“Nothing. All is understood. Forty rifles are still to come, but they will be here in an hour, or maybe two, for the carts move slowly.”

“And then the flower beds will be done, no?” chuckled the other with a wink.

“Aye, and ready to bloom,” answered Don Telesfor, smiling grimly at the jest.

“And, methinks, with enough thorns—ay diós! What?”

For a deep, far roar crept through the closed shutters; a Babel of howling curs and crowing cocks and the jangle of church bells. Before one could fairly turn to look at his neighbor it was as if that whole room of stone had suddenly been dropped twenty feet, as one might drop a bird cage to the floor. The heavy boxes and the standing men and the massive furniture were tossed as feathers in a gust of air. The wide stone vault overhead yawned and let in a foot of sky, and shivered as if to fall, and then as swiftly clapped its ragged teeth shut again, while a great dust filled the room to choking. Then all was still as the grave, and for a few seconds nothing moved. At last the men scrambled to their feet, pale and hushed, and stood looking blankly at one another.

“Ea! But I like not your Arequipa temperament,” faltered the tallest of the strangers. “It is too impulsive. Not if you gave me three Arequipas would I dwell here!”

“Pues, it is nothing,” answered Don Telesfor, coolly. “Only in the being accustomed. These temblores are fearsome, but we think little of them. To the street, when the shock comes, lest the walls thump us on the heads; and then back into the house, as if there had been nothing. As for this one, it is a good omen. El Misti gives us the hand that he is with us for an overturning.”

Tránsita, sitting upon the stone coping of her own roof, had a clearer view of the earthquake, and her opinion certainly did not coincide with that of Don Telesfor. It was a perfect day, as most days in Arequipa are, but something in the air made her nervous and ill at ease, and all the morning she had been perched up there confiding her fears to the great peak. Below, the street was still echoing the rumble of clumsy carts high heaped with earth. She had paid little attention to them or their clamor. Her thoughts were for Eugénio, and her anxiety about him seemed to grow. So groundlessly, too. The national unrest was everywhere, but vague and undefined. No one knew any specific cause for alarm, and she least of all. Now, if her ears had been sharp enough to hark across to that barred room a mile away, where Don Telesfor was at that very moment saying: “The only argument with such stupids is to rap them the back of the head.” And “such stupids” meant precisely Eugénio and his fellow-soldiers, the military police of the city.

Six wagons had already turned the corner toward the bridge and were out of sight. As the straggling seventh and last trundled past the house the teamster, seeing that squat figure up there, tossed at it a pebble from his load. Tránsita only shrugged her shoulder at the tap. She was too busy with her thoughts to so much as turn around. “Much care of Eugénio,” she murmured. “And if truly there be of these Cacerists here, confound them, taita!”

As she raised her eyes to the great peak a swift chill ran through her. She was sure the Misti nodded, as if he had heard her words. Surely the giant moved! Far spurts of dust rose from his shoulders, and dark masses came leaping down, and the great profile seemed to lose its sharpness. She winked hard to be sure of her eyes, and now the Misti moved no more. But from the corrals roundabout rose a bedlam; and Chopo ran out, barking frantically, and the ancient cottonwoods up by the mill suddenly bowed their heads as to a hurricane. The acéquia bank split and the stream came panicking out. The tall wall back of Eusébio’s house was rent from top to bottom, and two-foot blocks of sillar flew all about. The very roof on which she sat—a massive arch of stone, as are nearly all the roofs of Arequipa—went up and down as if a heavy wave had passed under it. The coping spilled into the street; and Tránsita was left clinging on the broken edge, her face hanging over. There were wild screams, and every one stood, as by magic, in the middle of the street, looking up at the tottering walls. And in the self-same breath it was all done, and no sign was left save the shattered blocks of stone, the truant acéquia and a tall cloud of yellow dust that went bellying off toward Charchani.

Yes, one thing more. Tránsita lay bewildered a moment, and then began to look about, still without moving. Every one was going back into the houses, laughing nervously, a few children crying. In another moment the street was deserted. It was as if that thousand people had been a return-ball, to pop one instant into sight, and in another back with the recoil of the elastic. But down by the empty hovels over the way was a cart, broken across in halves. Two dazed mules were trying clumsily to right themselves with the forward end of the wreck, while the rear half was tossed up on the narrow sidewalk against the ruined walls. The load of earth had been unceremoniously dumped into the gutter, and the cholo driver, half overwhelmed by it, lay motionless along the curb.

At that, Tránsita was upon her feet at once, nor paused until she was tugging at the teamster’s arms. The dirt was heaped upon his legs, and he had fainted with the pain, and such a dead weight she could not budge. She dropped the limp shoulders and began to claw the loose earth away. In a moment the left foot was free; but as she dragged it out, the dirt slipped down and revealed the corner of an iron-bound box resting upon the other leg. A sudden impulse led her to sweep back the soil until the end of the case was uncovered. The funny black marks there meant nothing to Tránsita—indeed, if any one had spelled out for her the “M-a-double-n-l-i-c-h-e-r,” I seriously doubt if that grewsome German name would have made her any the wiser. But if she did not know letters from ten-penny nails, and was equally ignorant of the inventions and the existence of Germany, Tránsita was no fool. For a moment her brown face looked more than usually dull. Then a slow grayness crept into it, and there was a hitch in her breath.

She looked up at the Misti appealingly, and then down at the box, staring as if fascinated. Presently the rather heavy jaw set stubbornly. She lifted the corner of the box an inch, by a violent effort, pried her shin against the sharp edge to hold it, and laboriously dragged out the imprisoned foot. Then she scraped the earth over until the box was well hidden again, and leaving the liberated but unconscious teamster where he lay, went racing down the street like one gone daft.

“This is a pretty story to bring to the cuartel, daughterling,” said Captain Yrribarri, fifteen minutes later. Corporal Eugénio had no sooner heard his sister’s breathless message than he brought her before the commanding officer, and there she had rehearsed it all, unshaken by questionings and banter. “It has to be true,” she declared, over and over, “else mi taita Misti never would have showed me.”

“A girl’s nonsense,” the grave officer repeated. “And still—what do any boxes, thus hidden in loads of earth, and in these times? I mind me, now, that Don Telesfor has been hauling earth all the way from Yura these many weeks, when there is better at Carmen Alto. It is fit to be looked into, and by the saints, if thy guess is true, little one, thou shalt be corporal, or thy brother sergeant! Oyez, Eugénio! With a squad of thirty men surround Don Telesfor’s house and hold it tight that it leak not, while Pedro goes with five to verify the cart and the box. If that is nothing, they will report to you and you will return to quarters with the tongue behind the teeth; but if they shall find arms in the cart, keep the house and warn me.”

For my own part, I do not overly love the soldier-police of Arequipa, and have sometimes been angry enough to want to choke them for murdering my sleep with their abominable midnight whistles. But after all, I am glad that they were not all knocked on the head the night after the earthquake; for in spite of their ignorance and their skin and their ear-piercing way of announcing “All’s well,” they are a kindly, honest, well meaning set, who could be much better utilized than by clubbing. And particularly Eugénio, who is a very good boy and likes to talk with me, calling me “your grace.” He has told me many interesting things, and often sent a cholo to “tote” my heavy camera around. Sergeant Eugénio now, please—for Tránsita declined to be a corporal when the search revealed not only the one case of Mannlicher rifles in the dirt under the wrecked cart, but thirty cases more in Don Telesfor’s house, along with papers which left no doubt of his treason. Some fellow-conspirator must have warned him in time of the wayside accident, for though Eugénio and his men kept the house fully surrounded until a report came from the cart, when they broke in there was not a soul to be found.

None of the other plotters were known, and Don Telesfor eluded pursuit. It may or may not be true, as, I have been told, that he took asylum in Bolivia and was afterward drowned in trying to ford the Choqueyapu during a freshet; but, at all events, he never came back to revive his nipped revolution.

As for Tránsita, you might just as well try to tell her that the Misti is not there at all as that “He” did not specially and intentionally interpose to save the peace of his daughters and the head of Eugénio. I half believe her brother is secretly of the same opinion, for the superstition of the peak is very strong in Arequipa; though he shrugs his shoulders in a deprecatory way when put the direct question, and says evasively:

“Pues, who knows? So the women declare. For me it is enough that he did it, and in time, the same as if he knew.”

The Witch Deer.

The Witch Deer.

“Tchu! ’stá-te!” cried Josefa,[22] straightening up from her work and looking severely at a small brown rogue who had climbed up to the little shelf over the corner fireplace. The adobe floor was spattered with big drops of water, to lay the dust; and Josefa, bent half double to reach it with the short wisp of broom corn which serves in New Mexican homes, was sweeping toward the door the fine gray powder that works up daily from the compact clay.

“Give me that little stone, nana,” begged the boy. “The one tata carries in his pouch when he goes to hunt.”

“Get away, quick, for that is the charm of the Magic Deer! Much care! For if ever thou touch that, thy grandfather will see to thee!”

Anastácio clambered down reluctantly from the old chair, and went outside to play with the burro. But the stone weighed on his mind. It was a very ordinary-looking pebble, gray, light, porous, and without any particular shape—looking, in fact, like one of the pieces of pumice which were so common in the mountains. But somehow it had a fascination for Anastácio. And that evening, when we all sat by the crackling fire, he climbed on his grandfather’s knee and said: