Produced by Robert Cicconetti, Mary Meehan and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
file was produced from images generously made available
by The Internet Archive)
MARIQUITA
A Novel
BY JOHN AYSCOUGH
NEW YORK, CINCINNATI, CHICAGO
BENZIGER BROTHERS
COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY BENZIGER BROTHERS
Printed in the United States of America
* * * * *
TO
SENORITA MARIQUITA GUTIERREZ
SENORITA,
It is, indeed, kind of you to condone, by your acceptance of the
dedication of this small book, the theft of your name, perpetrated
without your knowledge, in its title. And in thanking you for that
acceptance I seize another opportunity of apologizing for that theft.
I need not tell you that in drawing Mariquita's portrait I have not been
guilty of the further liberty of attempting your own, since we have
never met, except on paper, and you belong to that numerous party of my
friends known to me only by welcome and kind letters. But I hope there
may be a nearer likelihood of my meeting you than there now can be of my
seeing your namesake.
That you and some others may like her I earnestly trust: if not it must
be the fault of my portrait, drawn perhaps with less skill than
respectful affection.
JOHN AYSCOUGH.
MARIQUITA
CHAPTER I.
A whole state, as big as England and Wales, and then half as big again,
tilting smoothly upward towards, but never reaching, the Great Divide:
the tilt so gradual that miles of land seem level; a vast sun-swept,
breeze-swept upland always high above the level of the far, far-off sea,
here in the western skirts of the state a mile above it. Its sky-scape
always equal to its landscape, and dominant--as the sky can never be
imagined in shut lands of close valleys, where trees are forever at war
with the air and with the light.
Here light and life seeming twin and inseparable: and the wind itself
but the breathing of the light. What is called, by the foolish, a
featureless country, that is with huge, fine features, not to be sought
for but insistent, regnant, everywhere: space, tangible and palpable,
height inevitably perceptible and recognizable in all the unviolated
light, in the winds' smash, and the sun's, in the dancing sense of
freedom: yet that dancing not frivolous, but gladly solemn.
As to _little_ features they are slurred (to the slight glance) in the
vast unity: but look for them, and they are myriad. The riverbanks hold
them, between prairie-lip and water. The prairie-waves hold them. Life
is innumerably present, though to the hasty sight it seems primarily and
distinctly absent. There are myriads of God's little live preachers,
doing each, from untold ages to untold ages, the unnoted things set them
by Him to do, as their big brothers the sun and the wind, the rain and
the soil do.
Of the greater beasts fewer but plenty--fox, and timber-wolf, and
coyote, and still to-day an antelope here and there.
Of men few. Their dwellings parted by wide distances. Their voices
scarce heard where no dwelling is at hand. But the dwellings, being
solitary and rare, singularly home-stamped.