A LONE HAND
The sun was just rising above the mesas, or flat-topped hills that
formed the eastern horizon of the view from the village, as Felipe
knocked at the door in the row of mud-built houses. His knock was
answered by a fierce growl from a dog, and a loud "Come in" in Spanish
from a vigorous human voice. He opened the door, which was unlocked, and
stepped cautiously inside. From the brown blankets of a bed that stood
by the wall a brindled bulldog was emerging, and apparently proposed to
drive the intruder out.
"Dry up, Faro, will you?" said the same voice in English, addressing the
dog. "Can't you see it's only Felipe?"
The dog, who evidently had a general theory that all Indians would bear
watching, lay down again sulkily on the bed, and Felipe advanced to the
fireplace. The owner of the voice was seated on a low stool, bending
over the coals, with his back to the door.
"Good-morning, Don Estevan; how are you?" said Felipe in Spanish. The
Santiago people spoke an Indian dialect of their own amongst themselves,
but they used Spanish as a medium of communication with the rest of the
world.
Stephens, for that was the American's name, which in its Spanish form
had become Don Estevan, was busy cooking, and he answered without
looking round, "Good-morning, Felipe; how goes it?" A critic might have
said that his Spanish accent was by no means perfect, but no more was
the Indian's, and the pair were able to understand one another readily
enough, which was the main point.
How had this American come to be living here by himself in a remote
village community of the Pueblo Indians? During ten long years of search
for gold he had wandered from Colorado to California, from California to
Nevada, from Nevada to Montana, and from Montana back again to Colorado.
The silver boom in Colorado had just begun, and then silver mines were
all the talk there. Thereupon Stephens recollected a story he had heard
from an old prospector with whom he had once been camped in Nevada about
a deserted silver mine in New Mexico which had once been worked by the
Spaniards, with the forced labour of their Indian slaves, and had since
lain idle, untouched, and even unknown. When the Spanish power was
broken, and the Spaniards driven out, the Indians had covered up the
place and sworn never to disclose its existence. According to the story,
the sole possessors of the secret were the Pueblo Indians of Santiago.
To Santiago accordingly Stephens had made his way in the hope of solving
the mystery of the secret mine. This hope, however, was one which he
could not avow openly at the first meeting, and when he presented
himself before the chiefs of the pueblo it was of gold and not of silver
that he spoke. He told them of his past toils and adventures, and the
red men seemed to take a fancy to him on the spot. Hitherto these
Indians had persistently enforced their right to prevent any man not of
their own blood from taking up his abode within a league of their
village of Santiago, a right secured to them by special grant from the
kings of Old Spain. What was there about this man that melted their
obduracy? Some charm they must have found in the face of this lone
wanderer, for him alone among white men had they admitted as a permanent
guest to the hospitality of their most jealously guarded sanctuary.
Perhaps there was something of pure caprice in their choice; perhaps it
was in a way due to the effect of physical contrast. For in this case
the contrast between the white man and the red, always marked, was as
striking as it could possibly be. He was as fair as they were dark. With
his white skin, his grey-blue eyes, and his curling golden hair, worn
long in frontier fashion, he was as fair as any Norseman that ever
boasted his descent from the ancient Vikings.
"Gold," said Tostado, one of the chiefs, as Stephens sat in the midst of
them on the occasion of his first visit; "we ask you what sort of a life
you live, and you answer us that you live only to search for gold. Why,
here is the gold. You carry it with you"; and with a reverent grace the
fine old chief laid his dark fingers gently on the long yellow locks
that flowed down from under the prospector's wide sombrero.
The grey-blue eyes of the far-wandered man--one who like Ulysses of old
had withstood the buffets of capricious Fortune through many adventurous
years--found an expression of genuine friendliness in the dark orbs of
this redskin chief, who smiled gravely at his own jest, as if in
half-excuse of its familiarity. Tostado gazed into the white man's eyes
a moment longer, and then turned to the circle of his fellow-chiefs.
"See," he said, "the white man's eyes are the same colour as our
precious turquoise stones; they are the colour of our sacred jewel, the
Shiuamo, that I wear as the head man of the Turquoise family," and he
pointed to his breast where a large polished turquoise hung from a
circlet round his neck. "The white man has travelled far; he is weary;
he shall stay with us and rest a while; and we will give him an Indian
name, and he shall be as one of ourselves. Let him be called
'Sooshiuamo,' 'Turquoise-eyes.' My brothers, say, is it good?"
"Yes, it is good," they answered, "it is good. From henceforth
Sooshiuamo is one of us; he is our brother."
And in this fashion the roving gold-seeker had obtained amongst them the
acceptance he desired.
Felipe, with his striped blanket gracefully draped round him, came and
stood just behind his employer, but said nothing. On a rough table were
a tin cup and tin plate and an iron-handled knife; a small coffee-pot
was bubbling in the ashes on the hearth. Stephens held a frying-pan in
his left hand, and beside him on a tent-cloth on the floor lay a large
smooth boulder and a hammer, with which he had been pounding his tough
dried meat before cooking it. He now stood up to his full height, and
turning his face, flushed with the fire, to Felipe, pointed with the
steel fork held in his right hand to a great wooden chest against the
wall at one side of the room. "Go and take an almud of corn and give it
to the stock," said he. "Give Morgana her extra allowance."
"Yes, señor," said Felipe; and taking down three nosebags which hung on
a peg in the wall, he filled them, and went out to the corral in the
outskirts of the village where the American kept his beasts. The mare
Morgana was a beautiful bay, of pure Morgan stock, and the mules were
sturdy little pack animals of Mexican breed. By the time they had eaten
their corn, and the boy had returned to the house with the nosebags, his
employer had finished his meal and was washing up the dishes. Felipe
hung up the nosebags, and stood by the fire silent and thoughtful; it
never occurred to him to offer to help in what he looked upon as women's
work. Stephens took the wiping cloth and began to wipe up. Felipe at
last screwed up his courage to ask far the mare he needed so badly.
"Oh, Don Estevan!" he began suddenly.
"Well, what is it?" said Stephens sharply, rubbing away at his tin
plate. It always irritated him to see anyone else idle when he was busy.
Felipe's heart sank. He felt he should fail if he asked now. Perhaps his
master would be in a better humour later on.
"What shall I do with the beasts?" he said in his ordinary voice.
"Was that all you were going to say?" said Stephens, looking at him
keenly. "What's the matter with you? What's up?"
"Nothing, Don Estevan--it's nothing," said Felipe. "Shall I put them
into the meadow as usual?"
"Yes, certainly," replied Stephens. "I sha'n't ride. I shall walk up the
acequia to the rock I am going to blast. If I want them after, I'll come
down."
"Very well, señor," said the boy; and taking the lariats he went back to
the corral, caught the stock, and led them down the Indian road, through
the unfenced fields of springing crops, towards the river.
At the lower end of the plough-lands a steep bank of bare earth and
clay dropped sharply to the green flat fifteen or twenty feet below,
through which the river ran. The plough-lands lay on a sort of natural
terrace, and were all watered by numerous channels and runlets, which
had their sources in the great _acequia madre_, or main ditch. This
ditch was taken out of the river some miles above, where it was dammed
for the purpose, and was led along the side of the valley as high up as
possible; the pueblo was built beside the ditch more than a league below
the dam, nearly half a mile from the river in a direct line. The grassy
flat through which the river flowed remained unploughed, because it was
liable to be overflowed in flood time. It was a verdant meadow, the
common pasture-ground of the milch cows of the village, which were
herded here during the day by small boys and at night were shut up in
the corrals to keep them out of the unfenced crops. Felipe hobbled the
three animals in the meadow, and set to work weeding in the wheat land
above, where he could keep an eye upon them.
Some time after Felipe's departure, Stephens went to his powder-keg and
measured out three charges of blasting-powder.
"Curious, isn't it?" said he aloud to himself as he handled the coarse
black grains in which so much potential energy lay hid,--"curious how
these Indians, hard-working folk as ever I saw, have lived two or three
hundred years here under the Spanish Government, and been allowed by
those old Dons to go on, year after year, short of water for irrigating,
every time."
He closed up his powder-keg again securely, and locked it away in the
room that he used as a storeroom; it was the inner of the two rooms
that he rented in the block of dwellings inhabited by the Turquoise
family. Here he lived, alone and independent, simply paying Felipe a
trifle to do his chores and go up to the mesas and get his fire-wood.
Indoors the prospector distinctly preferred to keep himself free and
unbeholden to anybody; he continued to live exactly as he did in camp,
doing his own cooking and mending, and doing them thoroughly well too,
with a pioneer's pride in being sufficient to himself in all things.
"And now," said he, as he wrapped up the charges of powder, "I'll just
show my good friends of Santiago here a little trick those old Spanish
drones were too thick-headed or too lazy ever to work. This fossilised
Territory of New Mexico don't rightly know what's the matter with her.
She's got the best climate and some of the best land in America, and all
she's good for at present is to bask in the sun. If she only knew it,
she's waiting for a few live American men to come along and wake her
up."
Stephens had been so much alone in the mountains that he had got into
the solitary man's trick of talking to himself. Even among the Indians
he would sometimes comment aloud upon things in English, which they did
not understand; for in spite of their companionship he lived in a world
of his own.
He took down a coil of fuse from a shelf, cut off a piece, rolled it up,
and stowed it away along with the charges of blasting-powder in his
pockets, first feeling carefully for stray matches inside. "Yes," he
continued, as his fingers pried into every angle of each pocket
preparatory to filling it with explosive matter, "drones is the only
name for Spaniards when it comes to talking real work. They don't work,
and they never did. They've made this Territory into a Sleepy Hollow.
What she wants is a few genuine Western men, full of vim, vinegar, and
vitriol, just to make things hum for a change. New Mexico has got the
biggest kind of a future before her when the right sort of men come
along and turn to at developing her."
He stood in the middle of his outer room, patting himself gently in
various parts to make sure that he had got all his needful belongings
stowed away. "Now then, Faro," and he addressed the dog, who was still
curled upon the bed eyeing his master doubtfully, uncertain whether he
was to be left at home on guard or taken out for a spree; "what this
here benighted country needs is the right kind of men and the right kind
of dogs. Aint that the sort of way you'd put it if you were a human?
Come along then, and you and me'll take a little trot up along the ditch
and astonish their weak minds for 'em."
With yelps of joy, uttered in a bulldog's strangled whistle, Faro
bounded off the bed on to the earthen floor, and danced rapturously
round his master, who was still thoughtfully feeling his pockets from
the outside to make certain that when he reached his destination he
would not find that some quite indispensable requisite had been left
behind. Then he bounced out of the open door into the street, scattered
a pig and three scraggy chickens that were vainly hunting around after
stray grains of corn where the horses had been fed, and then halted to
await his master out by the corrals. Stephens, having at last assured
himself that he had really forgotten nothing, came out after the dog,
pulling to the door behind him, and the pair started off to walk up
alongside the acequia. There was no water in it to-day, as it had been
cut off up above to facilitate the work of blasting. Here and there in
the fields Indians were at work: some wielded their great heavy hoes,
with which they hacked away at the ground with astonishing vigour;
others were ploughing with pairs of oxen, which walked stiffly side by
side, their heads lashed firmly by the thick horns to the yoke, as they
dragged the curious old-fashioned wooden ploughs, just like those
described by Virgil in the _Georgics_ two thousand years ago. In the
peach orchards near the village women were at work, and little naked
brown children stopped their play to stare at the white man as he
passed, with the simplicity of Arcadia. After half an hour's walk he
reached his destination, a rocky promontory that jutted out from the
hills into the valley. The acequia ran round its base, and the Indians,
in order to bring as much of the valley as possible under irrigation,
had carried the line of the ditch as high as they could. They had
carried it so high that where it rounded the rocks a point projected
into it, and made it too narrow and too shallow to carry the amount of
water that it was easily capable of containing both above and below.
They had no saws to cut boards to make a flume for the ditch; and,
besides, such a piece of engineering was quite beyond the range of their
simple arts. This weak place had been a hindrance and a trial to them
from time immemorial. If they attempted to run their ditch more than
half full of water it brimmed over at this point, and then broke down
the bank. It had to be patched every year,--sometimes several times in
one year,--and this entailed much extra work on the members of the
village community, who were all bound by their laws to work on the ditch
when necessary, without pay. In fact, the repair of the ditch at the
point of rocks was one of the stock grievances of the pueblo, everyone
thinking that he was set to do more than his share of the work. Besides,
it naturally broke down when fullest, that is to say, when they needed
it most for irrigation, and everyone wanted water for his maize or his
wheat crop. No wonder, then, they were first incredulous and then
overjoyed when by a fortunate chance Stephens happened to hear of their
difficulty and went to examine the spot, saw at once that it was a
simple matter, and offered to lend them tools, to show them how to drill
the necessary holes, and then to blast away the obnoxious rocks for
them. These Indians were familiar with firearms and knew the force of
gunpowder, but were ignorant of its use for blasting purposes; nor were
their Mexican neighbours in this part of the country much more
enlightened. Accordingly they had accepted with joy Stephens's proffered
assistance, having learned by experience to set a high value on the
skill and resource of their American friend.